11426	----	THE CALL OF THE NORTH Beyond the butternut, beyond the maple, beyond the white pine and the red, beyond the oak, the cedar, and the beech, beyond even the white and yellow birches lies a Land, and in that Land the shadows fall crimson across the snow. THE CALL OF THE NORTH Being a Dramatized Version of CONJURORS HOUSE A Romance of the Free Forest BY Stewart Edward White AUTHOR OF THE WESTERNERS, THE BLAZED TRAIL, ETC. THE CALL OF THE NORTH Chapter One The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in interminable journey, day after day, league on league into remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band of red-sashed _voyageurs_ forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all. Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very pathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the Indians to trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts to rest, came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or ornament she had ordered a full year before. Within a short time all were gone, into the wilderness, into the great unknown world. The snow fell; the river and the bay froze. Strange men from the North glided silently to the Factor's door, bearing the meat and pelts of the seal. Bitter iron cold shackled the northland, the abode of desolation. Armies of caribou drifted by, ghostly under the aurora, moose, lordly and scornful, stalked majestically along the shore; wolves howled invisible, or trotted dog-like in organized packs along the river banks. Day and night the ice artillery thundered. Night and day the fireplaces roared defiance to a frost they could not subdue, while the people of desolation crouched beneath the tyranny of winter. Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, the Moose roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot by foot to the very dooryard of her father's house. Strange spirits were abroad at night, howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning in voices of ice and flood. Her Indian nurse told her of them all--of Mannabosho, the good; of Nenaubosho the evil--in her lisping Ojibway dialect that sounded like the softer voices of the forest. At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eager blossoming of the land into new leaves, lush grasses, an abandon of sweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, a thousand singing birds sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph. Overhead shone the hot sun of the Northern summer. From the wilderness came the _brigades_ bearing their pelts, the hardy traders of the winter posts, striking hot the imagination through the mysterious and lonely allurement of their callings. For a brief season, transient as the flash of a loon's wing on the shadow of a lake, the post was bright with the thronging of many people. The Indians pitched their wigwams on the broad meadows below the bend; the half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it might concern; the traders gazed stolidily over their little black pipes, and uttered brief sentences through their thick black beards. Everywhere was gay sound--the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay color--the red sashes of the _voyageurs_, the beaded moccasins and leggings of the _metis_, the capotes of the _brigade_, the variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways. Like the wild roses around the edge of the muskegs, this brief flowering of the year passed. Again the nights were long, again the frost crept down from the eternal snow, again the wolves howled across barren wastes. Just now the girl stood ankle-deep in green grasses, a bath of sunlight falling about her, a tingle of salt wind humming up the river from the bay's offing. She was clad in gray wool, and wore no hat. Her soft hair, the color of ripe wheat, blew about her temples, shadowing eyes of fathomless black. The wind had brought to the light and delicate brown of her complexion a trace of color to match her lips whose scarlet did not fade after the ordinary and imperceptible manner into the tinge of her skin, but continued vivid to the very edge; her eyes were wide and unseeing. One hand rested idly on the breech of an ornamented bronze field-gun. McDonald, the chief trader, passed from the house to the store where his bartering with the Indians was daily carried on; the other Scotchman in the Post, Galen Albret, her father, and the head Factor of all this region, paced back and forth across the veranda of the factory, caressing his white beard; up by the stockade, young Achille Picard tuned his whistle to the note of the curlew; across the meadow from the church wandered Crane, the little Church of England missionary, peering from short-sighted pale blue eyes; beyond the coulee, Sarnier and his Indians _chock-chock-chocked_ away at the seams of the long coast-trading bateau. The girl saw nothing, heard nothing. She was dreaming, she was trying to remember. In the lines of her slight figure, in its pose there by the old gun over the old, old river, was the grace of gentle blood, the pride of caste. Of all this region her father was the absolute lord, feared, loved, obeyed by all its human creatures. When he went abroad, he travelled in a state almost mediaeval in its magnificence; when he stopped at home, men came to him from the Albany, the Kenogami, the Missinaibe, the Mattagami, the Abitibi--from all the rivers of the North--to receive his commands. Way was made for him, his lightest word was attended. In his house dwelt ceremony, and of his house she was the princess. Unconsciously she bad taken the gracious habit of command. She had come to value her smile, her word; to value herself. The lady of a realm greater than the countries of Europe, she moved serene, pure, lofty amid dependants. And as the lady of this realm she did honor to her father's guests--sitting stately behind the beautiful silver service, below the portrait of the Company's greatest explorer, Sir George Simpson, dispensing crude fare in gracious manner, listening silently to the conversation, finally withdrawing at the last with a sweeping courtesy to play soft, melancholy, and world-forgotten airs on the old piano, brought over years before by the _Lady Head_, while the guests made merry with the mellow port and ripe Manila cigars which the Company supplied its servants. Then coffee, still with her natural Old World charm of the _grande dame_. Such guests were not many, nor came often. There was McTavish of Rupert's House, a three days' journey to the northeast; Rand of Fort Albany, a week's travel to the northwest; Mault of Fort George, ten days beyond either, all grizzled in the Company's service. With them came their clerks, mostly English and Scotch younger sons, with a vast respect for the Company, and a vaster for their Factors daughter. Once in two or three years appeared the inspectors from Winnipeg, true lords of the North, with their six-fathom canoes, their luxurious furs, their red banners trailing like gonfalons in the water. Then this post of Conjuror's House feasted and danced, undertook gay excursions, discussed in public or private conclave weighty matters, grave and reverend advices, cautions, and commands. They went. Desolation again crept in. The girl dreamed. She was trying to remember. Far-off, half-forgotten visions of brave, courtly men, of gracious, beautiful women, peopled the clouds of her imaginings. She heard them again, as voices beneath the roar of rapids, like far-away bells tinkling faintly through a wind, pitying her, exclaiming over her; she saw them dim and changing, as wraiths of a fog, as shadow pictures in a mist beneath the moon, leaning to her with bright, shining eyes full of compassion for the little girl who was to go so far away into an unknown land; she felt them, as the touch of a breeze when the night is still, fondling her, clasping her, tossing her aloft in farewell. One she felt plainly--a gallant youth who held her up for all to see. One she saw clearly--a dewy-eyed, lovely woman who murmured loving, broken words. One she heard distinctly--a gentle voice that said, "God's love be with you, little one, for you have far to go, and many days to pass before you see Quebec again." And the girl's eyes suddenly swam bright, for the northland was very dreary. She threw her palms out in a gesture of weariness. Then her arms dropped, her eyes widened, her head bent forward in the attitude of listening. "Achille!" she called. "Achille! Come here!" The young fellow approached respectfully. "Mademoiselle?" he asked. "Don't you hear?" she said. Faint, between intermittent silences, came the singing of men's voices from the south. "_Grace a Dieu_!" cried Achille. "Eet is so. Eet is dat _brigade_!" He ran shouting toward the factory. Chapter Two Men, women, dogs, children sprang into sight from nowhere, and ran pell-mell to the two cannon. Galen Albret, reappearing from the factory, began to issue orders. Two men set about hoisting on the tall flag-staff the blood-red banner of the Company. Speculation, excited and earnest, arose among the men as to which of the branches of the Moose this _brigade_ had hunted--the Abitibi, the Mattagami, or the Missinaibie. The half-breed women shaded their eyes. Mrs. Cockburn, the doctor's wife, and the only other white woman in the settlement, came and stood by Virginia Albret's side. Wishkobun, the Ojibway woman from the south country, and Virginia's devoted familiar, took her half-jealous stand on the other. "It is the same every year. We always like to see them come," said Mrs. Cockburn, in her monotonous low voice of resignation. "Yes," replied Virginia, moving a little impatiently, for she anticipated eagerly the picturesque coming of these men of the Silent Places, and wished to savor the pleasure undistracted. "Mi-di-mo-yay ka'-win-ni-shi-shin," said Wishkobun, quietly. "Ae," replied Virginia, with a little laugh, patting the woman's brown hand. A shout arose. Around the bend shot a canoe. At once every paddle in it was raised to a perpendicular salute, then all together dashed into the water with the full strength of the _voyageurs_ wielding them. The canoe fairly leaped through the cloud of spray. Another rounded the bend, another double row of paddles flashed in the sunlight, another crew broke into a tumult of rapid exertion as they raced the last quarter mile of the long journey. A third burst into view, a fourth, a fifth. The silent river was alive with motion, glittering with color. The canoes swept onward, like race-horses straining against the rider. Now the spectators could make out plainly the boatmen. It could be seen that they had decked themselves out for the occasion. Their heads were bound with bright-colored fillets, their necks with gay scarves. The paddles were adorned with gaudy woollen streamers. New leggings, of holiday pattern, were intermittently visible on the bowsmen and steersmen as they half rose to give added force to their efforts. At first the men sang their canoe songs, but as the swift rush of the birch-barks brought them almost to their journey's end, they burst into wild shrieks and whoops of delight. All at once they were close to hand. The steersman rose to throw his entire weight on the paddle. The canoe swung abruptly for the shore. Those in it did not relax their exertions, but continued their vigorous strokes until within a few yards of apparent destruction. "Hola! hola!" they cried, thrusting their paddles straight down into the water with a strong backward twist. The stout wood bent and cracked. The canoe stopped short and the _voyageurs_ leaped ashore to be swallowed up in the crowd that swarmed down upon them. The races were about equally divided, and each acted after its instincts--the Indian greeting his people quietly, and stalking away to the privacy of his wigwam; the more volatile white catching his wife or his sweetheart or his child to his arms. A swarm of Indian women and half-grown children set about unloading the canoes. Virginia's eyes ran over the crews of the various craft. She recognized them all, of course, to the last Indian packer, for in so small a community the personality and doings of even the humblest members are well known to everyone. Long since she had identified the _brigade_. It was of the Missinaibie, the great river whose head-waters rise a scant hundred feet from those that flow as many miles south into Lake Superior. It drains a wild and rugged country whose forests cling to bowlder hills, whose streams issue from deep-riven gorges, where for many years the big gray wolves had gathered in unusual abundance. She knew by heart the winter posts, although she had never seen them. She could imagine the isolation of such a place, and the intense loneliness of the solitary man condemned to live through the dark Northern winters, seeing no one but the rare Indians who might come in to trade with him for their pelts. She could appreciate the wild joy of a return for a brief season to the company of fellow-men. When her glance fell upon the last of the canoes, it rested with a flash of surprise. The craft was still floating idly, its bow barely caught against the bank. The crew had deserted, but amidships, among the packages of pelts and duffel, sat a stranger, The canoe was that of the post at Kettle Portage. She saw the stranger to be a young man with a clean-cut face, a trim athletic figure dressed in the complete costume of the _voyageurs_, and thin brown and muscular hands. When the canoe touched the bank he had taken no part in the scramble to shore, and so had sat forgotten and unnoticed save by the girl, his figure erect with something of the Indian's stoical indifference. Then when, for a moment, he imagined himself free from observation, his expression abruptly changed. His hands clenched tense between his buckskin knees, his eyes glanced here and there restlessly, and an indefinable shadow of something which Virginia felt herself obtuse in labelling desperation, and yet to which she discovered it impossible to fit a name, descended on his features, darkening them. Twice he glanced away to the south. Twice he ran his eye over the vociferating crowd on the narrow beach. Absorbed in the silent drama of a man's unguarded expression, Virginia leaned forward eagerly. In some vague manner it was borne in on her that once before she had experienced the same emotion, had come into contact with someone, something, that had affected her emotionally just as this man did now. But she could not place it. Over and over again she forced her mind to the very point of recollection, but always it slipped back again from the verge of attainment. Then a little movement, some thrust forward of the head, some nervous, rapid shifting of the hands or feet, some unconscious poise of the shoulders, brought the scene flashing before her--the white snow, the still forest, the little square pen trap, the wolverine, desperate but cool, thrusting its blunt nose quickly here and there in baffled hope of an orifice of escape. Somehow the man reminded her of the animal, the fierce little woods marauder, trapped and hopeless, but scorning to cower as would the gentler creatures of the forest. Abruptly his expression changed again. His figure stiffened, the muscles of his face turned iron. Virginia saw that someone on the beach had pointed toward him. His mask was on. The first burst of greeting was over. Here and there one or another of the _brigade_ members jerked their heads in the stranger's direction, explaining low-voiced to their companions. Soon all eyes turned curiously toward the canoe. A hum of low-voiced comment took the place of louder delight. The stranger, finding himself generally observed, rose slowly to his feet, picked his way with a certain exaggerated deliberation of movement over the duffel lying in the bottom of the canoe, until he reached the bow, where he paused, one foot lifted to the gunwale just above the emblem of the painted star. Immediately a dead silence fell. Groups shifted, drew apart, and together again, like the slow agglomeration of sawdust on the surface of water, until at last they formed in a semicircle of staring, whose centre was the bow of the canoe and the stranger from Kettle Portage. The men scowled, the women regarded him with a half-fearful curiosity. Virginia Albret shivered in the shock of this sudden electric polarity. The man seemed alone against a sullen, unexplained hostility. The desperation she had thought to read but a moment before had vanished utterly, leaving in its place a scornful indifference and perhaps more than a trace of recklessness. He was ripe for an outbreak. She did not in the least understand, but she knew it from the depths of her woman's instinct, and unconsciously her sympathies flowed out to this man, alone without a greeting where all others came to their own. For perhaps a full sixty seconds the newcomer stood uncertain what he should do, or perhaps waiting for some word or act to tip the balance of his decision. One after another those on shore felt the insolence of his stare, and shifted uneasily. Then his deliberate scrutiny rose to the group by the cannon. Virginia caught her breath sharply. In spite of herself she could not turn away. The stranger's eye crossed her own. She saw the hard look fade into pleased surprise. Instantly his hat swept the gunwale of the canoe. He stepped magnificently ashore. The crisis was over. Not a word had been spoken. Chapter Three Galen Albret sat in his rough-hewn armchair at the head of the table, receiving the reports of his captains. The long, narrow room opened before him, heavy raftered, massive, white, with a cavernous fireplace at either end. Above him frowned Sir George's portrait, at his right hand and his left stretched the row of home-made heavy chairs, finished smooth and dull by two centuries of use. His arms were laid along the arms of his seat; his shaggy head was sunk forward until his beard swept the curve of his big chest; the heavy tufts of hair above his eyes were drawn steadily together in a frown of attention. One after another the men arose and spoke. He made no movement, gave no sign, his short, powerful form blotted against the lighter silhouette of his chair, only his eyes and the white of his beard gleaming out of the dusk. Kern of Old Brunswick House, Achard of New; Ki-wa-nee, the Indian of Flying Post--these and others told briefly of many things, each in his own language. To all Galen Albret listened in silence. Finally Louis Placide from the post at Kettle Portage got to his feet. He too reported of the trade,--so many "beaver" of tobacco, of powder, of lead, of pork, of flour, of tea, given in exchange; so many mink, otter, beaver, ermine, marten, and fisher pelts taken in return. Then he paused and went on at greater length in regard to the stranger, speaking evenly but with emphasis. When he had finished. Galen Albret struck a bell at his elbow. Me-en-gan, the bowsman of the factor's canoe, entered, followed closely by the young man who had that afternoon arrived. He was dressed still in his costume of the _voyageur_--the loose blouse shirt, the buckskin leggings and moccasins, the long tasselled red sash. His head was as high and his glance as free, but now the steel blue of his eye had become steady and wary, and two faint lines had traced themselves between his brows. At his entrance a hush of expectation fell. Galen Albret did not stir, but the others hitched nearer the long, narrow table, and two or three leaned both elbows on it the better to catch what should ensue. Me-en-gan stopped by the door, but the stranger walked steadily the length of the room until he faced the Factor. Then he paused and waited collectedly for the other to speak. This the Factor did not at once begin to do, but sat impassive--apparently without thought--while the heavy breathing of the men in the room marked off the seconds of time. Finally abruptly Galen Albret's cavernous voice boomed forth. Something there was strangely mysterious, cryptic, in the virile tones issuing from a bulk so massive and inert. Galen Albret did not move, did not even raise the heavy-lidded, dull stare of his eyes to the young man who stood before him; hardly did his broad arched chest seem to rise and fall with the respiration of speech; and yet each separate word leaped forth alive, instinct with authority. "Once at Leftfoot Lake, two Indians caught you asleep," he pronounced. "They took your pelts and arms, and escorted you to Sudbury. They were my Indians. Once on the upper Abitibi you were stopped by a man named Herbert, who warned you from the country, after relieving you of your entire outfit. He told you on parting what you might expect if you should repeat the attempt--severe measures, the severest. Herbert was my man. Now Louis Placide surprises you in a rapids near Kettle Portage and brings you here." During the slow delivering of these accurately spaced words, the attitude of the men about the long, narrow table gradually changed. Their curiosity had been great before, but now their intellectual interest was awakened, for these were facts of which Louis Placide's statement had given no inkling. Before them, for the dealing, was a problem of the sort whose solution had earned for Galen Albret a reputation in the north country. They glanced at one another to obtain the sympathy of attention, then back toward their chief in anxious expectation of his next words. The stranger, however, remained unmoved. A faint smile had sketched the outline of his lips when first the Factor began to speak. This smile he maintained to the end. As the older man paused, he shrugged his shoulders. "All of that is quite true." he admitted. Even the unimaginative men of the Silent Places started at these simple words, and vouchsafed to their speaker a more sympathetic attention. For the tones in which they were delivered possessed that deep, rich throat timbre which so often means power--personal magnetism--deep, from the chest, with vibrant throat tones suggesting a volume of sound which may in fact be only hinted by the loudness the man at the moment sees fit to employ. Such a voice is a responsive instrument on which emotion and mood play wonderfully seductive strains. "All of that is quite true," he repeated after a second's pause; "but what has it to do with me? Why am I stopped and sent out from the free forest? I am really curious to know your excuse." "This," replied Galen Albret, weightily, "is my domain. I tolerate no rivalry here." "Your right?" demanded the young man, briefly. "I have made the trade, and I intend to keep it." "In other words, the strength of your good right arm," supplemented the stranger, with the faintest hint of a sneer. "That is neither here nor there," rejoined Galen Albret, "the point is that I intend to keep it. I've had you sent out, but you have been too stupid or too obstinate to take the hint. Now I have to warn you in person. I shall send you out once more, but this time you must promise me not to meddle with the trade again." He paused for a response. The young man's smile merely became accentuated, "I have means of making my wishes felt," warned the Factor. "Quite so," replied the young man, deliberately, "_La Longue Traverse_." At this unexpected pronouncement of that dread name two of the men swore violently; the others thrust back their chairs and sat, their arms rigidly braced against the table's edge, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the speaker. Only Galen Albret remained unmoved. "What do you mean by that?" he asked, calmly. "It amuses you to be ignorant," replied the stranger, with some contempt. "Don't you think this farce is about played out? I do. If you think you're deceiving me any with this show of formality, you're mightily mistaken. Don't you suppose I knew what I was about when I came into this country? Don't you suppose I had weighed the risks and had made up my mind to take my medicine if I should be caught? Your methods are not quite so secret as you imagine. I know perfectly well what happens to Free Traders in Rupert's Land." "You seem very certain of your information." "Your men seem equally so," pointed out the stranger. Galen Albret, at the beginning of the young man's longer speech, had sunk almost immediately into his passive calm--the calm of great elemental bodies, the calm of a force so vast as to rest motionless by the very static power of its mass. When he spoke again, it was in the tentative manner of his earlier interrogatory, committing himself not at all, seeking to plumb his opponent's knowledge. "Why, if you have realized the gravity of your situation have you persisted after having been twice warned?" he inquired. "Because you're not the boss of creation," replied the young man, bluntly. Galen Albret merely raised his eyebrows. "I've got as much business in this country as you have," continued the young man, his tone becoming more incisive. "You don't seem to realize that your charter of monopoly has expired. If the government was worth a damn it would see to you fellows. You have no more right to order me out of here than I would have to order you out. Suppose some old Husky up on Whale River should send you word that you weren't to trap in the Whale River district next winter. I'll bet you'd be there. You Hudson Bay men tried the same game out west It didn't work. You ask your western men if they ever heard of Ned Trent." "Your success does not seem to have followed you here," suggested the Factor, ironically. The young man smiled. "This _Longue Traverse_," went on Albret, "what is your idea there? I have heard something of it. What is your information?" Ned Trent laughed outright. "You don't imagine there is any secret about that!" he marvelled. "Why, every child north of the Line knows that. You will send me away without arms, and with but a handful of provisions. If the wilderness and starvation fail, your runners will not. I shall never reach the Temiscamingues alive." "The same old legend," commented Galen Albret in apparent amusement, "I heard it when I first came to this country. You'll find a dozen such in every Indian camp." "Jo Bagneau, Morris Proctor, John May, William Jarvis," checked off the young man on his fingers. "Personal enmity," replied the Factor. He glanced up to meet the young man's steady, sceptical smile. "You do not believe me?" "Oh, if it amuses you." conceded the stranger. "The thing is not even worth discussion." "Remarkable sensation among our friends here for so idle a tale." Galen Albret considered. "You will remember that throughout you have forced this interview," he pointed out. "Now I must ask your definite promise to get out of this country and to stay out." "No," replied Ned Trent. "Then a means shall be found to make you!" threatened the Factor, his anger blazing at last. "Ah," said the stranger softly. Galen Albret raised his hand and let it fall. The bronzed and gaudily bedecked men filed out. Chapter Four In the open air the men separated in quest of their various families or friends. The stranger lingered undecided for a moment on the top step of the veranda, and then wandered down the little street, if street it could be called where horses there were none. On the left ranged the square white-washed houses with their dooryards, the old church, the workshop. To the right was a broad grass-plot, and then the Moose, slipping by to the distant offing. Over a little bridge the stranger idled, looking curiously about him. The great trading-house attracted his attention, with its narrow picket lane leading to the door; the storehouse surrounded by a protective log fence; the fort itself, a medley of heavy-timbered stockades and square block-houses. After a moment he resumed his strolling. Everywhere he went the people looked at him, ceasing their varied occupations. No one spoke to him, no one hindered him. To all intents and purposes he was as free as the air. But all about the island flowed the barrier of the Moose, and beyond frowned the wilderness--strong as iron bars to an unarmed man. Brooding on his imprisonment the Free Trader forgot his surroundings. The post, the river, the forest, the distant bay faded from his sight, and he fell into deep reflection. There remained nothing of physical consciousness but a sense of the grateful spring warmth from the declining sun. At length he became vaguely aware of something else. He glanced up. Right by him he saw a handsome French half-breed sprawled out in the sun against a building, looking him straight in the face and flashing up at him a friendly smile. "Hullo," said Achille Picard, "you mus' been 'sleep. I call you two t'ree tam." The prisoner seemed to find something grateful in the greeting even from the enemy's camp. Perhaps it merely happened upon the psychological moment for a response. "Hullo," he returned, and seated himself by the man's side, lazily stretching himself in enjoyment of the reflected heat. "You is come off Kettle Portage, eh," said Achille, "I t'ink so. You is come trade dose fur? Eet is bad beez-ness, dis Conjur' House. Ole' man he no lak' dat you trade dose fur. He's very hard, dat ole man." "Yes," replied the stranger, "he has got to be, I suppose. This is the country of _la Longue Traverse_." "I beleef you," responded Achille, cheerfully; "w'at you call heem your nam'?" "Ned Trent." "Me Achille--Achille Picard. I capitaine of dose dogs on dat winter _brigade_." "It is a hard post. The winter travel is pretty tough." "I beleef you." "Better to take _la Longue Traverse_ in summer, eh?" "_La Longue Traverse_--hees not mattaire w'en yo tak heem." "Right you are. Have there been men sent out since you came here?" "_Ba oui_. Wan, two, t'ree. I don' remember. I t'ink Jo Bagneau. Nobodee he don' know, but dat ole man an' hees _coureurs du bois_. He ees wan ver' great man. Nobodee is know w'at he will do." "I'm due to hit that trail myself, I suppose," said Ned Trent. "I have t'ink so," acknowledged Achille, still with a tone of most engaging cheerfulness. "Shall I be sent out at once, do you think?" "I don' know. Sometam' dat ole man ver' queek. Sometam' he ver' slow. One day Injun mak' heem ver' mad; he let heem go, and shot dat Injun right off. Noder tam he get mad on one _voyageur_, but he don' keel heem queek; he bring heem here, mak' heem stay in dose warm room, feed heem dose plaintee grub. Purty soon dose _voyageur_ is get fat, is go sof'; he no good for dose trail. Ole man he mak' heem go ver' far off, mos' to Whale Reever. Eet is plaintee cole. Dat _voyageur_, he freeze to hees inside. Dey tell me he feex heem like dat." "Achille, you haven't anything against me--do you want me to die?" The half-breed flashed his white teeth. "Ba non," he replied, carelessly. "For w'at I want dat you die? I t'ink you bus' up bad; _vous avez la mauvaise fortune." "Listen. I have nothing with me; but out at the front I am very rich. I will give you a hundred dollars, if you will help me to get away." "I can' do eet," smiled Picard. "Why not?" "Ole man he fin' dat out. He is wan devil, dat ole man. I lak firs'-rate help you; I lak' dat hundred dollar. On Ojibway countree dey make hees nam' _Wagosh_--dat mean fox. He know everything." "I'll make it two hundred--three hundred--five hundred." "Wat you wan' me do?" hesitated Achille Picard at the last figure. "Get me a rifle and some cartridges." The half-breed rolled a cigarette, lighted it, and inhaled a deep breath. "I can' do eet," he declared. "I can' do eet for t'ousand dollar--ten t'ousand. I don't t'ink you fin' anywan on dis settlement w'at can dare do eet. He is wan devil. He's count all de carabine on dis pos', an' w'en he is mees wan, he fin' out purty queek who is tak' heem." "Steal one from someone else," suggested Trent. "He fin' out jess sam'," objected the half-breed, obstinately. "You don' know heem. He mak' you geev yourself away, when he lak' do dat." The smile had left the man's face. This was evidently too serious a matter to be taken lightly. "Well, come with me, then," urged Ned Trent, with some impatience. "A thousand dollars I'll give you. With that you can be rich somewhere else." But the man was becoming more and more uneasy, glancing furtively from left to right and back again, in an evident panic lest the conversation be overheard, although the nearest dwelling-house was a score of yards distant. "Hush," he whispered. "You mustn't talk lak' dat. Dose ole man fin' you out. You can' hide away from heem. Ole tam long ago, Pierre Cadotte is stole feefteen skin of de otter--de sea-otter--and he is sol' dem on Winnipeg. He is get 'bout thousand beaver--five hunder' dollar. Den he is mak' dose longue voyage wes'--ver' far wes'--_on dit_ Peace Reever. He is mak' heem dose cabane, w'ere he is leev long tam wid wan man of Mackenzie. He is call it hees nam' Dick Henderson. I is meet Dick Henderson on Winnipeg las' year, w'en I mak' paddle on dem Factor Brigade, an' dose High Commissionaire. He is tol' me wan night pret' late he wake up all de queeck he can w'en he is hear wan noise in dose cabane, an' he is see wan Injun, lak' phantome 'gainst de moon to de door. Dick Henderson he is 'sleep, he don' know w'at he mus' do. Does Injun is step ver' sof' an' go on bunk of Pierre Cadotte. Pierre Cadotte is mak' de beeg cry. Dick Henderson say he no see dose Injun no more, an' he fin' de door shut' _Ba_ Pierre Cadotte, she's go dead. He is mak' wan beeg hole in hees ches'." "Some enemy, some robber frightened Away because the Henderson man woke up, probably," suggested Ned Trent. The half-breed laid his hand impressively on the other's arm and leaned forward until his bright black eyes were within a foot of the other's face. "Wen dose Injun is stan' heem in de moonlight, Dick Henderson is see hees face. Dick Henderson is know all dose Injun. He is tole me dat Injun is not Peace Reever Injun. Dick Henderson is say dose Injun is Ojibway Injun--Ojibway Injun two t'ousand mile wes'--on Peace Reever! Dat's curi's!" "I was tell you nodder story--" went on Achille, after a moment. "Never mind," interrupted the Trader. "I believe you." "Maybee," said Achille cheerfully, "you stan' some show--not moche--eef he sen' you out pret' queeck. Does small _perdrix_ is yonge, an' dose duck. Maybee you is catch dem, maybee you is keel dem wit' bow an' arrow. Dat's not beeg chance. You mus' geev dose _coureurs de bois_ de sleep w'en you arrive. _Voila_, I geev you my knife!" He glanced rapidly to right and left, then slipped a small object into the stranger's hand. "_Ba_, I t'ink does ole man is know dat. I t'ink he kip you here till tam w'en dose _perdrix_ and duck is all grow up beeg' nuff so he can fly." "I'm not watched," said the young man in eager tones: "I'll slip away to-night." "Dat no good," objected Picard. "Wat you do? S'pose you do dat, dose _coureurs_ keel you _toute suite_. Dey is have good excuse, an' you is have nothing to mak' de fight. You sleep away, and dose ole man is sen' out plaintee Injun. Dey is fine you sure. _Ba_, eef he sen' you out, den he sen' onlee two Injun. Maybee you fight dem; I don' know. _Non, mon ami_, eef you is wan' get away w'en dose ole man he don' know eet, you mus' have dose carabine. Den you is have wan leetle chance. _Ba, eef you is not have heem dose carabine, you mus' need dose leetle grub he geev you, and not plaintee Injun follow you, onlee two." "And I cannot get the rifle." "An' dose ole man is don' sen' you out till eet is too late for mak' de grub on de fores'. Dat's w'at I t'ink. Dat ees not fonny for you." Ned Trent's eyes were almost black with thought. Suddenly he threw his head up. "I'll make him send me out now," he asserted confidently. "How you mak' eet him?" "I'll talk turkey to him till he's so mad he can't see straight. Then maybe he'll send me out right away." "How you mak' eet him so mad? inquired Picard, with mild curiosity. "Never you mind--I'll do it" "_Ba oui_," ruminated Picard, "He is get mad pret' queeck. I t'ink p'raps dat plan he go all right. You was get heem mad plaintee easy. Den maybee he is sen' you out toute suite--maybee he is shoot you." "I'll take the chances--my friend." "_Ba oui_," shrugged Achille Picard, "eet is wan chance." He commenced to roll another cigarette. Chapter Five Having sat buried in thought for a full five minutes after the traders of the winter posts had left him, Galen Albret thrust back his chair and walked into a room, long, low, and heavily raftered, strikingly unlike the Council Room. Its floor was overlaid with dark rugs; a piano of ancient model filled one corner; pictures and books broke the wall; the lamps and the windows were shaded, a woman's work-basket and a tea-set occupied a large table. Only a certain barbaric profusion of furs, the huge fireplace, and the rough rafters of the ceiling differentiated the place from the drawing-room of a well-to-do family anywhere. Galen Albret sank heavily into a chair and struck a bell. A tall, slightly stooped English servant, with correct side whiskers and incompetent, watery blue eyes, answered. To him said the Factor: "I wish to see Miss Albret." A moment later Virginia entered the room. "Let us have some tea, O-mi-mi," requested her father. The girl moved gently about, preparing and lighting the lamp, measuring the tea, her fair head bowed gracefully over her task, her dark eyes pensive and but half following what she did. Finally with a certain air of decision she seated herself on the arm of a chair. "Father," said she. "Yes." "A stranger came to-day with Louis Placide of Kettle Portage." "Well?" "He was treated strangely by our people, and he treated them strangely in return. Why is that?" "Who can tell?" "What is his station? Is he a common trader? He does not look it." "He is a man of intelligence and daring." "Then why is he not our guest?" Galen Albret did not answer. After a moment's pause he asked again for his tea. The girl turned away impatiently. Here was a puzzle, neither the _voyageurs_, nor Wishkobun her nurse, nor her father would explain to her. The first had grinned stupidly; the second had drawn her shawl across her face, the third asked for tea! She handed her father the cup, hesitated, then ventured to inquire whether she was forbidden to greet the stranger should the occasion arise. "He is a gentleman," replied her father. She sipped her tea thoughtfully, her imagination stirring. Again her recollection lingered over the clear bronze lines of the stranger's face. Something vaguely familiar seemed to touch her consciousness with ghostly fingers. She closed her eyes and tried to clutch them. At once they were withdrawn. And then again, when her attention wandered, they stole back, plucking appealingly at the hem of her recollections. The room was heavy-curtained, deep embrasured, for the house, beneath its clap-boards, was of logs. Although out of doors the clear spring sunshine still flooded the valley of the Moose; within, the shadows had begun with velvet fingers to extinguish the brighter lights. Virginia threw herself back on a chair in the corner. "Virginia," said Galen Albret, suddenly, "Yes, father." "You are no longer a child, but a woman. Would you like to go to Quebec?" She did not answer him at once, but pondered beneath close-knit brows. "Do you wish me to go, father?" she asked at length. "You are eighteen. It is time you saw the world, time you learned the ways of other people. But the journey is hard. I may not see you again for some years. You go among strangers." He fell silent again. Motionless he had been, except for the mumbling of his lips beneath his beard. "It shall be just as you wish," he added a moment later. At once a conflict arose in the girl's mind between her restless dreams and her affections. But beneath all the glitter of the question there was really nothing to take her out. Here was her father, here were the things she loved; yonder was novelty--and loneliness. Her existence at Conjuror's House was perhaps a little complex, but it was familiar. She knew the people, and she took a daily and unwearying delight in the kindness and simplicity of their bearing toward herself. Each detail of life came to her in the round of habit, wearing the garment of accustomed use. But of the world she knew nothing except what she had been able to body forth from her reading, and that had merely given her imagination something tangible with which to feed her self-distrust. "Must I decide at once?" she asked. "If you go this year, it must be with the Abitibi _brigade_. You have until then." "Thank you, father." said the girl, sweetly. The shadows stole their surroundings one by one, until only the bright silver of the tea-service, and the glitter of polished wood, and the square of the open door remained. Galen Albret became an inert dark mass. Virginia's gray was lost in that of the twilight. Time passed. The clock ticked on. Faintly sounds penetrated from the kitchen, and still more faintly from out of doors. Then the rectangle of the door-way was darkened by a man peering uncertainly. The man wore his hat, from which slanted a slender heron's plume; his shoulders were square; his thighs slim and graceful. Against the light, one caught the outline of the sash's tassel and the fringe of his leggings. "Are you there, Galen Albret?" he challenged. The spell of twilight mystery broke. It seemed as if suddenly the air had become surcharged with the vitality of opposition. "What then?" countered the Factor's heavy, deliberate tones. "True, I see you now," rejoined the visitor carelessly, as he flung himself across the arm of a chair and swung one foot. "I do not doubt you are convinced by this time of my intention." "My recollection does not tell me what messenger I sent to ask this interview." "Correct," laughed the young man a little hardly. "You _didn't_ ask it. I attended to that myself. What you want doesn't concern me in the least. What do you suppose I care what, or what not, any of this crew wants? I'm master of my own ideas, anyway, thank God. If you don't like what I do, you can always stop me." In the tone of his voice was a distinct challenge. Galen Albret, it seemed, chose to pass it by. "True," he replied sombrely, after a barely perceptible pause to mark his tacit displeasure. "It is your hour. Say on." "I should like to know the date at which I take _la Longue Traverse_." "You persist in that nonsense?" "Call my departure whatever you want to--I have the name for it. When do I leave?" "I have not decided." "And in the meantime?" "Do as you please." "Ah, thanks for this generosity," cried the young man, in a tone of declamatory sarcasm so artificial as fairly to scent the elocutionary. "To do as I please--here--now there's a blessed privilege! I may walk around where I want to, talk to such as have a good word for me, punish those who have not! But do I err in concluding that the state of your game law is such that it would be useless to reclaim my rifle from the engaging Placide?" "You have a fine instinct," approved the Factor. "It is one of my valued possessions," rejoined the young man, insolently. He struck a match, and by its light selected a cigarette. "I do not myself use tobacco in this room," suggested the older speaker. "I am curious to learn the limits of your forbearance," replied the younger, proceeding to smoke. He threw back his head and regarded his opponent with an open challenge, daring him to become angry. The match went out. Virginia, who had listened in growing anger and astonishment, unable longer to refrain from defending the dignity of her usually autocratic father, although he seemed little disposed to defend himself, now intervened from her dark corner on the divan. "Is the journey then so long, sir," she asked composedly, "that it at once inspires such anticipations--and such bitterness?" In an instant the man was on his feet, hat in hand, and the cigarette had described a fiery curve into the empty hearth. "I beg your pardon, sincerely," he cried, "I did not know you were here!" "You might better apologize to my father," replied Virginia. The young man stepped forward and without asking permission, lighted one of the tall lamps. "The lady of the guns!" he marvelled softly to himself. He moved across the room, looking down on her inscrutably, while she looked up at him in composed expectation of an apology--and Galen Albret sat motionless, in the shadow of his great arm-chair. But after a moment her calm attention broke down. Something there was about this man that stirred her emotions--whether of curiosity, pity, indignation, or a slight defensive fear she was not introspective enough to care to inquire. And yet the sensation was not altogether unpleasant, and, as at the guns that afternoon, a certain portion of her consciousness remained in sympathy with whatever it was of mysterious attraction he represented to her. In him she felt the dominant, as a wild creature of the woods instinctively senses the master and drops its eyes. Resentment did not leave her, but over it spread a film of confusion that robbed it of its potency. In him, in his mood, in his words, in his manner, was something that called out in direct appeal the more primitive instincts hitherto dormant beneath her sense of maidenhood, so that even at this vexed moment of conscious opposition, her heart was ranging itself on his side. Overpoweringly the feeling swept her that she was not acting in accordance with her sense of fitness. She knew she should strike, but was unable to give due force to the blow. In the confusion of such a discovery, her eyelids fluttered and fell. And he saw, and, understanding his power, dropped swiftly beside her on the broad divan. "You must pardon me, mademoiselle," he begun, his voice sinking to a depth of rich music singularly caressing. "To you I may seem to have small excuses, but when a man is vouchsafed a glimpse of heaven only to be cast out the next instant into hell, he is not always particular in the choice of words." All the time his eyes sought hers, which avoided the challenge, and the strong masculine charm of magnetism which he possessed in such vital abundance overwhelmed her unaccustomed consciousness. Galen Albret shifted uneasily, and shot a glance in their direction. The stranger, perceiving this, lowered his voice in register and tone, and went on with almost exaggerated earnestness. "Surely you can forgive me, a desperate man, almost anything?" "I do not understand," said Virginia, with a palpable effort. Ned Trent leaned forward until his eager face was almost at her shoulder. "Perhaps not," he urged; "I cannot ask you to try. But suppose, mademoiselle, you were in my case. Suppose your eyes--like mine--have rested on nothing but a howling wilderness for dear heaven knows how long; you come at last in sight of real houses, real grass, real door-yard gardens just ready to blossom in the spring, real food, real beds, real books, real men with whom to exchange the sensible word, and something more, mademoiselle--a woman such as one dreams of in the long forest nights under the stars. And you know that while others, the lucky ones, may stay to enjoy it all, you, the unfortunate, are condemned to leave it at any moment for _la Longue Traverse_. Would not you, too, be bitter, mademoiselle? Would not you too mock and sneer? Think, mademoiselle, I have not even the little satisfaction of rousing men's anger. I can insult them as I will, but they turn aside in pity, saying one to another: 'Let us pleasure him in this, poor fellow, for he is about to take _la Longue Traverse_.' That is why your father accepts calmly from me what he would not from another." Virginia sat bolt upright on the divan, her hands clasped in her lap, her wonderful black eyes looking straight out before her, trying to avoid her companion's insistent gaze. His attention was fixed on her mobile and changing countenance, but he marked with evident satisfaction Galen Albret's growing uneasiness. This was evidenced only by a shifting of the feet, a tapping of the fingers, a turning of the shaggy head--in such a man slight tokens are significant. The silence deepened with the shadows drawing about the single lamp, while Virginia attempted to maintain a breathing advantage above the flood of strange emotions which the personality of this man had swept down upon her. "It does not seem--" objected the girl in bewilderment, "I do not know--men are often out in this country for years at a time. Long journeys are not unknown among us, We are used to undertaking them." "But not _la Longue Traverse_," insisted the young man, sombrely. "_La Longue Traverse_." she repeated in sweet perplexity. "Sometimes called the Journey of Death," he explained. She turned to look him in the eyes, a vague expression of puzzled fear on her face. "She has never heard of it," said Ned Trent to himself, and aloud: "Men who undertake it leave comfort behind. They embrace hunger and weariness, cold and disease. At the last they embrace death, and are glad of his coming." Something in his tone compelled belief; something in his face told her that he was a man by whom the inevitable hardships of winter and summer travel, fearful as they are, would be lightly endured. She shuddered. "This dreadful thing is necessary?" she asked. "Alas, yes." "I do not understand----" "In the North few of us understand," agreed the young man with a hint of bitterness seeping through his voice. "The mighty order, and so we obey. But that is beside the point. I have not told you these things to harrow you; I have tried to excuse myself for my actions. Does it touch you a little? Am I forgiven?" "I do not understand how such things can be," she objected in some confusion, "why such journeys must exist. My mind cannot comprehend your explanations." The stranger leaned forward abruptly, his eyes blazing with the magnetic personality of the man. "But your heart?" he breathed. It was the moment. "My heart--" she repeated, as though bewildered by the intensity of his eyes, "my heart--ah--yes!" Immediately the blood rushed over her face and throat in a torrent. She snatched her eyes away, and cowered back in the corner, going red and white by turns, now angry, now frightened, now bewildered, until his gaze, half masterful, half pleading, again conquered hers. Galen Albret had ceased tapping his chair. In the dim light he sat, staring straight before him, massive, inert, grim. "I believe you--" she murmured hurriedly at last. "I pity you!" She rose. Quick as light he barred her passage. "Don't! don't!" she pleaded. "I must go--you have shaken me--I--I do not understand myself----" "I must see you again," he whispered eagerly. "To-night--by the guns." "No, no!" "To-night," he insisted. She raised her eyes to his, this time naked of defence, so that the man saw down through their depths into her very soul. "Oh," she begged, quivering, "let me pass. Don't you see--I'm going to cry!" Chapter Six For a moment Ned Trent stared through the darkness into which Virginia had disappeared. Then he turned a troubled face to the task he had set himself, for the unexpectedly pathetic results of his fantastic attempt had shaken him. Twice he half turned as though to follow her. Then shaking his shoulders he bent his attention to the old man in the shadow of the chair. He was given no opportunity for further speech, however, for at the sound of the closing door Galen Albret's impassivity had fallen from him. He sprang to his feet. The whole aspect of the man suddenly became electric, terrible. His eyes blazed; his heavy brows drew spasmodically toward each other; his jaws worked, twisting his beard into strange contortions; his massive frame straightened formidably; and his voice rumbled from the arch of his deep chest in a torrent of passionate sound. "By God, young man!" he thundered, "you go too far! Take heed! I will not stand this! Do not you presume to make love to my daughter before my eyes!" And Ned Trent, just within the dusky circle of lamplight, where the bold, sneering lines of Ins face stood out in relief against the twilight of the room, threw back his head and laughed. It was a clear laugh, but low, and in it were all the devils of triumph, and of insolence. Where the studied insult of words had failed, this single cachinnation succeeded. The Trade saw his opponent's eyes narrow. For a moment he thought the Factor was about to spring on him. Then, with an effort that blackened his face with blood, Galen Albret controlled himself, and fell to striking the call-bell violently and repeatedly with the palm of his hand. After a moment Matthews, the English servant, came running in. To him the Factor was at first physically unable to utter a syllable. Then finally he managed to ejaculate the name of his bowsman with such violence of gesture that the frightened servant comprehended by sheer force of terror and ran out again in search of Me-en-gan. This supreme effort seemed to clear the way for speech. Galen Albret began to address his opponent hoarsely in quick, disjointed sentences, a gasp for breath between each. "You revived an old legend--_la Longue Traverse_--the myth. It shall be real--to--you--I will make it so. By God, you shall not defy me----" Ned Trent smiled. "You do not deceive me," he rejoined, coolly. "Silence!" cried the Factor. "Silence!--You shall speak no more!--You have said enough----" Me-en-gan glided into the room. Galen Albret at once addressed him in the Ojibway language, gaining control of himself as he went on. "Listen to me well," he commanded. "You shall make a count of all rifles in this place--at once. Let no one furnish this man with food or arms. You know the story of _la Longue Traverse_. This man shall take it. So inform my people, I, the Factor, decree it so. Prepare all things at once--understand, at once!" Ned Trent waited to hear no more, but sauntered from the room whistling gayly a boatman's song. His point was gained. Outside, the long Northern twilight with its beautiful shadows of crimson was descending from the upper regions of the east A light wind breathed up-river from the bay. The Free Trader drew his lungs full of the evening air. "Just the same, I think she will come," said he to himself. "_La Longue Traverse_, even at once, is a pretty slim chance. But this second string to my bow is better. I believe I'll get the rifle--if she comes!" Chapter Seven Virginia ran quickly up the narrow stairs to her own room, where she threw herself on the bed and buried her face in the pillows. As she had said, she was very much shaken. And, too, she way afraid. She could not understand. Heretofore she had moved among the men around her, pure, lofty, serene. Now at one blow all this crumbled. The stranger had outraged her finer feelings. He had insulted her father in her very presence;--for this she was angry. He had insulted herself;--for this she was afraid. He had demanded that she meet him again; but this--at least in the manner he had suggested--should not happen. And yet she confessed to herself a delicious wonder as to what he would do next, and a vague desire to see him again in order to find out. That she could not successfully combat this feeling made her angry at herself. And so in mingled fear, pride, anger, and longing she remained until Wishkobun, the Indian woman, glided in to dress her for the dinner whose formality she and her father consistently maintained. She fell to talking the soft Ojibway dialect, and in the conversation forgot some of her emotion and regained some of her calm. Her surface thoughts, at least, were compelled for the moment to occupy themselves with other things. The Indian woman had to tell her of the silver fox brought in by Mu-hi-ken, an Indian of her own tribe; of the retort Achille Picard had made when MacLane had taunted him; of the forest fire that had declared itself far to the east, and of the theories to account for it where no campers had been. Yet underneath the rambling chatter Virginia was aware of something new in her consciousness, something delicious but as yet vague. In the gayest moment of her half-jesting, half-affectionate gossip with the Indian woman, she felt its uplift catching her breath from beneath, so that for the tiniest instant she would pause as though in readiness for some message which nevertheless delayed. A fresh delight in the present moment held her, a fresh anticipation of the immediate future, though both delight and anticipation were based on something without her knowledge. That would come later. The sound of rapid footsteps echoed across the lower hall, a whistle ran into an air, sung gayly, with spirit; "J'ai perdu ma maitresse, Sans l'avoir merite, Pour un bouquet de roses Que je lui refusai. Li ya longtemps que je t'aime, Jamais je ne t'oublierai!" She fell abruptly silent, and spoke no more until she descended to the council-room where the table was now spread for dinner. Two silver candlesticks lit the place. The men were waiting for her when she entered, and at once took their seats in the worn, rude chairs. White linen and glittering silver adorned the service. Galen Albret occupied one end of the table, Virginia the other. On either side were Doctor and Mrs. Cockburn; McDonald, the Chief Trader; Richardson, the clerk, and Crane, the missionary of the Church of England. Matthews served with rigid precision in the order of importance, first the Factor, then Virginia, then the doctor, his wife, McDonald, the clerk, and Crane in due order. On entering a room the same precedence would have held good. Thus these people, six hundred miles as the crow flies from the nearest settlement, maintained their shadowy hold on civilization. The glass was fine, the silver massive, the linen dainty, Matthews waited faultlessly: but overhead hung the rough timbers of the wilderness post, across the river faintly could be heard the howling of wolves. The fare was rice, curry, salt pork, potatoes, and beans; for at this season the game was poor, and the fish hardly yet running with regularity. Throughout the meal Virginia sat in a singular abstraction. No conscious thoughts took shape in her mind, but nevertheless she seemed to herself to be occupied in considering weighty matters. When directly addressed, she answered sweetly. Much of the time she studied her father's face. She found it old. Those lines were already evident which, when first noted, bring a stab of surprised pain to the breast of a child--the droop of the mouth, the wrinkling of the temples, the patient weariness of the eyes. Virginia's own eyes filled with tears. The subjective passive state into which a newly born but not yet recognized love had cast her, inclined her to gentleness. She accepted facts as they came to her. For the moment she forgot the mere happenings of the day, and lived only in the resulting mood of them all. The new-comer inspired her no longer with anger nor sorrow, attraction nor fear. Her active emotions in abeyance, she floated dreamily on the clouds of a new estate. This very aloofness of spirit disinclined her for the company of the others after the meal was finished. The Factor closeted himself with Richardson. The doctor, lighting a cheroot, took his way across to his infirmary. McDonald, Crane, and Mrs. Cockburn entered the drawing-room and seated themselves near the piano. Virginia hesitated, then threw a shawl over her head and stepped out on the broad veranda. At once the vast, splendid beauty of the Northern night broke over her soul. Straight before her gleamed and flashed and ebbed and palpitated the aurora. One moment its long arms shot beyond the zenith; the next it had broken and rippled back like a brook of light to its arch over the Great Bear. Never for an instant was it still. Its restlessness stole away the quiet of the evening; but left it magnificent. In comparison with this coruscating dome of the infinite the earth had shrunken to a narrow black band of velvet, in which was nothing distinguishable until suddenly the sky-line broke in calm silhouettes of spruce and firs. And always the mighty River of the Moose, gleaming, jewelled, barbaric in its reflections, slipped by to the sea. So rapid and bewildering was the motion of these two great powers--the river and the sky--that the imagination could not believe in silence. It was as though the earth were full of shoutings and of tumults. And yet in reality the night was as still as a tropical evening. The wolves and the sledge-dogs answered each other undisturbed; the beautiful songs of the white-throats stole from the forest as divinely instinct as ever with the spirit of peace. Virginia leaned against the railing and looked upon it all. Her heart was big with emotions, many of which she could not name; her eyes were full of tears. Something had changed in her since yesterday, but she did not know what it was. The faint wise stars, the pale moon just sinking, the gentle south breeze could have told her, for they are old, old in the world's affairs. Occasionally a flash more than ordinarily brilliant would glint one of the bronze guns beneath the flag-staff. Then Virginia's heart would glint too. She imagined the reflection startled her. She stretched her arms out to the night, embracing its glories, sighing in sympathy with its meaning, which she did not know. She felt the desire of restlessness; yet she could not bear to go. But no thought of the stranger touched her, for you see as yet she did not understand. Then, quite naturally, she heard his voice in the darkness close to her knee. It seemed inevitable that he should be there; part of the restless, glorious night, part of her mood. She gave no start of surprise, but half closed her eyes and leaned her fair head against a pillar of the veranda. He sang in a sweet undertone an old chanson of voyage. "Par derrier ches man pere, Vole, mon coeur, vole! Par derrier' chez mon pere Li-ya-t-un, pommier doux." "Ah lady, lady mine," broke in the voice softly, "the night too is sweet, soft as thine eyes. Will you not greet me?" The girl made no sign. After a moment the song went on, "Trois filles d'un prince, Vole, mon coeur, vole! Trois filles d'un prince Sont endormies dessous." "Will not the princess leave her sisters of dreams?" whispered the voice, fantastically, "Will she not come?" Virginia shivered, and half-opened her eyes, but did not stir. It seemed that the darkness sighed, then became musical again. "La plus jeun' se reveille, Vole, mon coeur, vole! La plus jeun' se reveille --Ma Soeur, voila le jour! The song broke this time without a word of pleading. The girl opened her eyes wide and stared breathlessly straight before her at the singer. "--Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile, Vole, mon coeur, vole! Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile Qu' eclaire nos amours!" The last word rolled out through its passionate throat tones and died into silence. "Come!" repeated the man again, this time almost in the accents of command. She turned slowly and went to him, her eyes childlike and frightened, her lips wide, her face pale. When she stood face to face with him she swayed and almost fell. "What do you want with me?" she faltered, with a little sob. The man looked at her keenly, laughed, and exclaimed in an every-day, matter-of-fact voice: "Why, I really believe my song frightened you. It is only a boating song. Come, let us go and sit on the gun-carriages and talk." "Oh!" she gasped, a trifle hysterically. "Don't do that again! Please don't. I do not understand it! You must not!" He laughed again, but with a note of tenderness in his voice, and took her hand to lead her away, humming in an undertone the last couplet of his song: "Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile, Qu'eclaire nos amours!" Chapter Eight Virginia went with this man passively--to an appointment which, but an hour ago, she had promised herself she would not keep. Her inmost soul was stirred, just as before. Then it had been few words, now it was a little common song. But the strange power of the man held her close, so she realized that for the moment at least she would do as he desired. In the amazement and consternation of this thought she found time to offer up a little prayer, "Dear God, make him kind to me." They leaned against the old bronze guns, facing the river. He pulled her shawl about her, masterfully yet with gentleness, and then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, he drew her to him until she rested against his shoulder. And she remained there, trembling, in suspense, glancing at him quickly, in birdlike, pleading glances, as though praying him to be kind. He took no notice after that, so the act seemed less like a caress than a matter of course. He began to talk, half-humorously, and little by little, as he went on, she forgot her fears, even her feeling of strangeness, and fell completely under the spell of his power. "My name is Ned Trent," he told her, "and I am from Quebec. I am a woods runner. I have journeyed far. I have been to the uttermost ends of the North even up beyond the Hills of Silence." And then, in his gay, half-mocking, yet musical voice he touched lightly on vast and distant things. He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh. He spoke of life with the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer. Before her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys by canoe and sledge, its frozen barrens, its mighty forests, its solemn charm. All at once this post of Conjurors House, a month in the wilderness as it was, seemed very small and tame and civilized for the simple reason that Death did not always compass it about. "It was very cold then," said Ned Trent "and very hard. _Le grand frete_ [froid--cold] of winter had come. At night we had no other shelter than our blankets, and we could not keep a fire because the spruce burned too fast and threw too many coals. For a long time we shivered, curled up on our snowshoes; then fell heavily asleep, so that even the dogs fighting over us did not awaken us. Two or three times in the night we boiled tea. We had to thaw our moccasins each morning by thrusting them inside our shirts. Even the Indians were shivering and saying, 'Ed-sa, yazzi ed-sa'--'it is cold, very cold.' And when we came to Rae it was not much better. A roaring fire in the fireplace could not prevent the ink from freezing on the pen. This went on for five months." Thus he spoke, as one who says common things. He said little of himself, but as he went on in short, curt sentences the picture grew more distinct, and to Virginia the man became more and more prominent in it. She saw the dying and exhausted dogs, the frost-rimed, weary men; she heard the quick _crunch, crunch, crunch_ of the snow-shoes hurrying ahead to break the trail; she felt the cruel torture of the _mal de raquette_, the shrivelling bite of the frost, the pain of snow blindness, the hunger that yet could not stomach the frozen fish nor the hairy, black caribou meat. One thing she could not conceive--the indomitable spirit of the men. She glanced timidly up at her companion's face. "The Company is a cruel master," she sighed at last, standing upright, then leaning against the carriage of the gun. He let her go without protest, almost without thought, it seemed. "But not mine," said he. She exclaimed, in astonishment, "Are you not of the Company?" "I am no man's man but my own," he answered, simply. "Then why do you stay in this dreadful North?" she asked. "Because I love it. It is my life. I want to go where no man has set foot before me; I want to stand alone under the sky; I want to show myself that nothing is too big for me--no difficulty, no hardship--nothing!" "Why did you come here, then? Here at least are forests so that you can keep warm. This is not so dreadful as the Coppermine, and the country of the Yellow Knives. Did you come here to try _la Longue Traverse_ of which you spoke to-day?" He fell suddenly sombre, biting in reflection at his lip. "No--yes--why not?" he said, at length. "I know you will come out of it safely," said she; "I feel it. You are brave and used to travel. Won't you tell me about it?" He did not reply. After a moment she looked up in surprise. His brows were knit in reflection. He turned to her again, his eyes glowing into hers. Once more the fascination of the man grew big, overwhelmed her. She felt her heart flutter, her consciousness swim, her old terror returning. "Listen," said he. "I may come to you to-morrow and ask you to choose between your divine pity and what you might think to be your duty. Then I will tell you all there is to know of _la Longue Traverse_. Now it is a secret of the Company. You are a Factor's daughter; you know what that means." He dropped his head. "Ah, I am tired--tired with it all!" he cried, in a voice strangely unhappy. "But yesterday I played the game with all my old spirit; to-day the zest is gone! I no longer care." He felt the pressure of her hand. "Are you just a little sorry for me?" he asked. "Sorry for a weakness you do not understand? You must think me a fool." "I know you are unhappy," replied Virginia, gently. "I am truly sorry for that." "Are you? Are you, indeed?" he cried. "Unhappiness is worth such pity as yours." He brooded for a moment, then threw his hands out with what might have been a gesture of desperate indifference. Suddenly his mood changed in the whimsical, bewildering fashion of the man. "Ah, a star shoots!" he exclaimed, gayly. "That means a kiss!" Still laughing, he attempted to draw her to him. Angry, mortified, outraged, she fought herself free and leaped to her feet. "Oh!" she cried, in insulted anger. "Oh!" she cried, in a red shame. "_Oh!_" she cried, in sorrow. Her calm broke. She burst into the violent sobbing of a child, and turned and ran hurriedly to the factory. Ned Trent stared after her a minute from beneath scowling brows. He stamped his moccasined foot impatiently. "Like a rat in a trap!" he jeered at himself. "Like a rat in a trap, Ned Trent! The fates are drawing around you close. You need just one little thing, and you cannot get it. Bribery is useless! Force is useless! Craft is useless! This afternoon I thought I saw another way. What I could get no other way I might get from this little girl. She is only a child. I believe I could touch her pity--ah, Ned Trent, Ned Trent, can you ever forget her frightened, white face begging you to be kind?" He paced back and forth between the two bronze guns with long, straight strides, like a panther in a cage. "Her aid is mine for the asking--but she makes it impossible to ask! I could not do it. Better try _la Longue Traverse_ than take advantage of her pity--she'd surely get into trouble. What wonderful eyes she has. She thinks I am a brute--how she sobbed, as though her little heart had broken. Well, it was the only way to destroy her interest in me. I had to do it. Now she will despise me and forget me. It is better that she should think me a brute than that I should be always haunted by those pleading eyes." The door of the distant church house opened and closed. He smiled bitterly. "To be sure, I haven't tried that." he acknowledged. "Their teachings are singularly apropos to my case--mercy, justice, humanity--yes, and love of man. I'll try it. I'll call for help on the love of man, since I cannot on the love of woman. The love of woman--ah----yes." He set his feet reflectively toward the chapel. Chapter Nine After a moment he pushed open the door without ceremony, and entered. He bent his brows, studying the Reverend Archibald Crane, while the latter, looking up startled, turned pink. He was a pink little man, anyway, the Reverend Archibald Crane, and why, in the inscrutability of its wisdom, the Church had sent him out to influence strong, grim men, the Church in its inscrutable wisdom only knows. He wore at the moment a cambric English boating-hat to protect his bald head from the draught, a full clerical costume as far as the trousers, which were of lavender, and a pair of beaded moccasins faced with red. His weak little face was pink, and two tufts of side-whiskers were nearly so. A heavy gold-headed cane stood at his hand. When he heard the door open he exclaimed, before raising his head, "My, these first flies of the season do bother me so!" and then looked startled. "Good-evening," greeted Ned Trent, stopping squarely in the centre of the room. The clergyman spread his arms along the desk's edge in embarrassment. "Good-evening," he returned, reluctantly. "Is there anything I can do for you?" The visitor puzzled him, but was dressed as a _voyageur_. The Reverend Archibald immediately resolved to treat him as such. "I wish to introduce myself as Ned Trent," went on the Free Trader with composure, "and I have broken in on your privacy this evening only because I need your ministrations cruelly." "I am rejoiced that in your difficulties you turn to the consolations of the Church," replied the other in the cordial tones of the man who is always ready. "Pray be seated. He whose soul thirsteth need offer no apology to the keeper of the spiritual fountains." "Quite so," replied the stranger dryly, seating himself as suggested, "only in this case my wants are temporal rather than spiritual. They, however, seem to me fully within the province of the Church.^ "The Church attempts within limits to aid those who are materially in want," assured Crane, with official dignity. "Our resources are small, but to the truly deserving we are always ready to give in the spirit of true giving." "I am rejoiced to hear it," returned the young man, grimly; "you will then have no difficulty in getting me so small a matter as a rifle and about forty or fifty rounds of ammunition." A pause of astonishment ensued. "Why, really," ejaculated Crane, "I fail to see how that falls within my jurisdiction in the slightest. You should see our Trader, Mr. McDonald, in regard to all such things. Your request addressed to me becomes extraordinary." "Not so much so when you know who I am. I told you my name is Ned Trent, but I neglected to inform you further that I am a captured Free Trader, condemned to _la Longue Traverse_, and that I have in vain tried to procure elsewhere the means of escape." Then the clergyman understood. The full significance of the intruder's presence flashed over his little pink face in a trouble of uneasiness. The probable consequences of such a bit of charity as his visitor proposed almost turned him sick with excitement. "You expect to have them of me!" he cried, getting his voice at last. "Certainly," assured his interlocutor, crossing his legs comfortably. "Don't you see the logic of events forces me to think so? What other course is open to you? I am in this country entirely within my legal rights as a citizen of the Canadian Commonwealth. Unjustly, I am seized by a stronger power and condemned unjustly to death. Surely you admit the injustice?" "Well, of course you know--the customs of the country--it is hardly an abstract question--" stammered Crane, still without grasp on the logic of his argument "But as an abstract question the injustice is plain," resumed the Free Trader, imperturbably. "And against plain injustice it strikes me there is but one course open to an acknowledged institution of abstract--and concrete--morality. The Church must set itself against immorality, and you, as the Church's representative, must get me a rifle." "You forget one thing," rejoined Crane. "What is that?" "Such an aid would be a direct act of rebellion against authority on my part, which would be severely punished. Of course," he asserted, with conscious righteousness, "I should not consider that for a moment as far ay my own personal safety is concerned. But my cause would suffer. You forget, sir, that we are doing here a great and good work. We have in our weekly congregational singing over forty regular attendants from the aborigines; next year I hope to build a church at Whale River, thus reaching the benighted inhabitants of that distant region. All of this is a vital matter in the service of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. You suggest that I endanger all this in order to right a single instance of injustice. Of course we are told to love one another, but--" he paused. "You have to compromise," finished the stranger for him. "Exactly." said the Reverend Crane. "Thank you; it is exactly that. In order to accomplish what little good the Lord vouchsafes to our poor efforts, we are obliged to overlook many things. Otherwise we should not be allowed to stay here at all." "That is most interesting," agreed Ned Trent, with a rather biting calm. "But is it not a little calculating? My slight familiarity with religious history and literature has always led me to believe that you are taught to embrace the right at any cost whatsoever--that, if you give yourself unreservedly to justice, the Lord will sustain you through all trials. I think at a pinch I could even quote a text to that effect." "My dear fellow," objected the Reverend Archibald in gentle protest, "you evidently do not understand the situation at all. I feel I should be most untrue to my trust if I were to endanger in any way the life-long labor of my predecessor. You must be able to see that for yourself. It would destroy utterly my usefulness here. They'd send me away. I couldn't go on with the work, I have to think what is for the best." "There is some justice in what you say," admitted the stranger, "if you persist in looking on this thing as a business proposition. But it seems to my confessedly untrained mind that you missed the point. 'Trust in the Lord,' saith the prophet. In fact, certain rivals in your own field hold the doctrine you expound, and you consider them wrong. 'To do evil that good may come' I seem to recognize as a tenet of the Church of the Jesuits." "I protest. I really do protest," objected the clergyman, scandalized. "All right," agreed Ned Trent, with good-natured contempt. "That is not the point. Do you refuse?" "Can't you see?" begged the other. "I'm sure you are reasonable enough to take the case on its broader side." "You refuse?" insisted Ned Trent. "It is not always easy to walk straightly before the Lord, and my way is not always clear before me, but----" "You refuse!" cried Ned Trent, rising impatiently. The reverend Archibald Crane looked at his catechiser with a trace of alarm. "I'm sorry; I'm afraid I must," he apologized. The stranger advanced until he touched the desk on the other side of which the Reverend Archibald was sitting, where he stood for some moments looking down on his opponent with an almost amused expression of contempt. "You are an interesting little beast," he drawled, "and I've seen a lot of your kind in my time. Here you preach every Sunday, to whomever will listen to you, certain cut-and-dried doctrines you don't believe practically in the least. Here for the first time you have had a chance to apply them literally, and you hide behind a lot of words. And while you're about it you may as well hear what I have to say about your kind. I've had a pretty wide experience in the North, and I know what I'm talking about. Your work here among the Indians is rot, and every sensible man knows it. You coop them up in your log-built houses, you force on them clothes to which they are unaccustomed until they die of consumption. Under your little tin-steepled imitation of civilization, for which they are not fitted, they learn to beg, to steal, to lie. I have travelled far, but I have yet to discover what your kind are allowed on earth for. You are narrow-minded, bigoted, intolerant, and without a scrap of real humanity to ornament your mock religion. When you find you can't meddle with other people's affairs enough at home you get sent where you can get right in the business--and earn salvation for doing it. I don't know just why I should say this to you, but it sort of does me good to tell it. Once I heard one of your kind tell a sorrowing mother that her little child had gone to hell because it had died before he--the smug hypocrite--had sprinkled its little body with a handful of water. There's humanity for you! It may interest you to know that I thrashed that man then and there. You are all alike; I know the breed. When there is found a real man among you--and there are such--he is so different in everything, including his religion, as to be really of another race. I came here without the slightest expectation of getting what I asked for. As I said before, I know your breed, and I know just how well your two-thousand-year-old doctrines apply to practical cases. There is another way, but I hated to use it. You'd take it quick enough, I dare say. Here is where I should receive aid. I may have to get it where I should not. You a man of God! Why, you poor little insect, I can't even get angry at you!" He stood for a moment looking at the confused and troubled clergyman. Then he went out. Chapter Ten Almost immediately the door opened again, "You, Miss Albret!" cried Crane. "What does this mean?" demanded Virginia, imperiously. "Who is that man? In what danger does he stand? What does he want a rifle for? I insist on knowing." She stood straight and tall in the low room, her eyes flashing, her head thrown back in the assured power of command. The Reverend Crane tried to temporize, hesitating over his words. She cut him short. "That is nonsense. Everybody seems to know but myself. I am no child. I came to consult you--my spiritual adviser--in regard to this very case. Accidentally I overheard enough to justify me in knowing more." The clergyman murmured something about the Company's secrets. Again she cut him short. "Company's secrets! Since when has the Company confided in Andrew Laviolette, in Wishkobun, in _you_?" "Possibly you would better ask your father," said Crane, with some return of dignity. "It does not suit me to do so," replied she. "I insist that you answer my questions. Who is this man?" "Ned Trent, he says." "I will not be put off in this way. _Who_ is he? _What_ is he?" "He is a Free Trader," replied the Reverend Crane with the air of a man who throws down a bomb and is afraid of the consequences. To his astonishment the bomb did not explode. "What is that?" she asked, simply. The man's jaw dropped and his eyes opened in astonishment. Here was a density of ignorance in regard to the ordinary affairs of the Post which could by no stretch of the imagination be ascribed to chance. If Virginia Albret did not know the meaning of the term, and all the tragic consequences it entailed, there could be but one conclusion: Galen Albret had not intended that she should know. She had purposely been left in ignorance, and a politic man would hesitate long before daring to enlighten her. The Reverend Crane, in sheer terror, became sullen. "A Free Trader is a man who trades in opposition to the Company," said he, cautiously. "What great danger is he in?" the girl persisted with her catechism. "None that I am aware of," replied Crane, suavely. "He is a very ill-balanced and excitable young man." Virginia's quick instincts recognized again the same barrier which, with the people, with Wishkobun, with her father, had shut her so effectively from the truth. Her power of femininity and position had to give way before the man's fear for himself and of Galen Albret's unexpressed wish. She asked a few more questions, received a few more evasive replies, and left the little clergyman to recover as best he might from a very trying evening. Out in the night the girl hesitated in two minds as to what to do next. She was excited, and resolved to finish the affair, but she could not bring her courage to the point of questioning her father. That the stranger was in antagonism to the Company, that he believed himself to be in danger on that account, that he wanted succor, she saw clearly enough. But the whole affair was vague, disquieting. She wanted to see it plainly, know its reasons. And beneath her excitement she recognized, with a catch of the breath, that she was afraid for him. She had not time now to ask herself what it might mean; she only realized the presence of the fact. She turned instinctively in the direction of Doctor Cockburn's house. Mrs. Cockburn was a plain little middle-aged woman with parted gray hair and sweet, faded eyes. In the life of the place she was a nonentity, and her tastes were homely and commonplace, but Virginia liked her. She proved to be at home, the Doctor still at his dispensary, which was well. Virginia entered a small log room, passed through it immediately to a larger papered room, and sat down in a musty red armchair. The building was one of the old regime, which meant that its floor was of wide and rather uneven painted boards, its ceiling low, its windows small, and its general lines of an irregular and sagging rule-of-thumb tendency. The white wall-paper evidently concealed squared logs. The present inhabitants, being possessed at once of rather homely tastes and limited facilities, had over-furnished the place with an infinitude of little things--little rugs, little tables, little knit doilies, little racks of photographs, little china ornaments, little spidery what-nots, and shelves for books. Virginia seated herself, and went directly to the topic. "Mrs. Cockburn," she said, "you have always been very good to me, always, ever since I came here as a little girl. I have not always appreciated it, I am afraid, but I am in great trouble, and I want your help." "What is it, dearie," asked the older woman, softly. "Of course I will do anything I can." "I want you to tell me what all this mystery is--about the man who to-day arrived from Kettle Portage, I mean. I have asked everybody: I have tried by all means in my power to get somebody somewhere to tell me. It is maddening--and I have a special reason for wanting to know." The older woman was already gazing at her through troubled eyes. "It is a shame and a mistake to keep you so in ignorance!" she broke out, "and I have said so always. There are many things you have the right to know, although some of them would make you very unhappy--as they do all of us poor women who have to live in this land of dread. But in this I cannot, dearie." Virginia felt again the impalpable shadow of truth escaping her. Baffled, confused, she began to lose her self-control. A dozen times to-day she had reached after this thing, and always her fingers had closed on empty air. She felt that she could not stand the suspense of bewilderment a single instant longer. The tears overflowed and rolled down her cheeks unheeded. "Oh, Mrs. Cockburn!" she cried. "Please! You do not know how dreadful this thing has come to be to me just because it is made so mysterious. Why has it been kept from me alone? It must have something to do with me, and I can't stand this mystery, this double-dealing, another minute. If you won't tell me, nobody will, and I shall go on imagining--Oh, please have pity on me! I feel the shadow of a tragedy. It comes out in everything, in everybody to whom I turn. I see it in Wishkobun's avoidance of me, in my father's silence, in Mr. Crane's confusion, in your reluctance--yes, in the very reckless insolence of Mr. Trent himself!"--her voice broke slightly. "If you will not tell me, I shall go direct to my father," she ended, with more firmness. Mrs. Cockburn examined the girl's flushed face through kindly but shrewd and experienced eyes. Then, with a caressing little murmur of pity, she arose and seated herself on the arm of the red chair, taking the girl's hand in hers. "I believe you mean it," she said, "and I am going to tell you myself. There is much sorrow in it for you; but if you go to your father it will only make it worse. I am doing what I should not. It is shameful that such things happen in this nineteenth century, but happen they do. The long and short of it is that the Factors of this Post tolerate no competition in the country, and when a man enters it for the purpose of trading with the Indians, he is stopped and sent out." "There is nothing very bad about that." said Virginia, relieved. "No, my dear, not in that. But they say his arms and supplies are taken from him, and he is given a bare handful of provisions. He has to make a quick journey, and to starve at that. Once when I was visiting out at the front, not many years ago, I saw one of those men--they called him Jo Bagneau--and his condition was pitiable--pitiable!" "But hardships can be endured. A man can escape." "Yes," almost whispered Mrs. Cockburn, looking about her apprehensively, "but the story goes that there are some cases--when the man is an old offender, or especially determined, or so prominent as to be able to interest the law--no one breathes of these cases here--but--_he never gets out_!" "What do you mean?" cried Virginia, harshly. "One dares not mean such things; but they are so. The hardships of the wilderness are many, the dangers terrible--what more natural than that a man should die of them in the forest? It is no one's fault." "What do you mean?" repeated Virginia; "for God's sake speak plainly!" "I dare not speak plainer than I know; and no one ever really _knows_ anything about it--excepting the Indian who fires the shot, or who watches the man until he dies of starvation." whispered Mrs. Cockburn. "But--but!" cried the girl, grasping her companion's arm. "My father! Does _he_ give such orders? _He_?" "No orders are given. The thing is understood. Certain runners, whose turn it is, shadow the Free Trader. Your father is not responsible; no one is responsible. It is the policy." "And this man----" "It has gone about that he is to take _la Longue Traverse_. He knows it himself." "It is barbaric, horrible; it is murder." "My dear, it is all that; but this is the country of dread. You have known the soft, bright side always--the picturesque men, the laugh, the song. If you had seen as much of the harshness of wilderness life as a doctor's wife must you would know that when the storms of their great passions rage it is well to sit quiet at your prayers." The girl's eyes were wide-fixed, staring at this first reality of life. A thousand new thoughts jostled for recognition. Suddenly her world had been swept from beneath her. The ancient patriarchal, kindly rule had passed away, and in its place she was forced to see a grim iron bond of death laid over her domain. And her father--no longer the grave, kindly old man--had become the ruthless tyrant. All these bright, laughing _voyageurs_, playmates of her childhood, were in reality executioners of a savage blood-law. She could not adjust herself to it. She got to her feet with an effort. "Thank you, Mrs. Cockburn," she said, in a low voice. "I--I do not quite understand. But I must go now. I must--I must see that my father's room is ready for him." she finished, with the proud defensive instinct of the woman who has been deeply touched. "You know I always do that myself." "Good-night, dearie," replied the older woman, understanding well the girl's desire to shelter behind the commonplace. She leaned forward and kissed her. "God keep and guide you. I hope I have done right." "Yes," cried Virginia, with unexpected fire. "Yes, you did just right! I ought to have been told long ago! They've kept me a perfect child to whom everything has been bright and care-free and simple. I--I feel that until this moment I have lacked my real womanhood!" She bowed her head and passed through the log room into the outer air. Her father, _her_ father, had willed this man's death, and so he was to die! That explained many things--the young fellow's insolence, his care-free recklessness, his passionate denunciation of the Reverend Crane and the Reverend Crane's religion. He wanted one little thing--the gift of a rifle wherewith to assure his subsistence should he escape into the forest--and of all those at Conjuror's House to whom he might turn for help, some were too hard to give it to him, and some too afraid! He should have it! She, the daughter of her father, would see to it that in this one instance her father's sin should fail! Suddenly, in the white heat of her emotion, she realized why these matters stirred her so profoundly, and she stopped short and gasped with the shock of it. It did not matter that she thwarted her father's will; it would not matter if she should be discovered and punished as only these harsh characters could punish. For the brave bearing, the brave jest, the jaunty facing of death, the tender, low voice, the gay song, the aurora-lit moment of his summons--all these had at last their triumph. She knew that she loved him; and that if he were to die, she would surely die too. And, oh, it must be that he loved her! Had she not heard it in the music of his voice from the first?--the passion of his tones? the dreamy, lyrical swing of his talk by the old bronze guns? Then she staggered sharply, and choked back a cry. For out of her recollections leaped two sentences of his--the first careless, imprudent, unforgivable; the second pregnant with meaning. "_Ah, a star shoots_!" he had said. "_That means a kiss_!" and again, to the clergyman, "_I came here without the slightest expectation of getting what I asked for. There is another way, but I hate to use it_." She was the other way! She saw it plainly. He did not love her, but he saw that he could fascinate her, and he hoped to use her as an aid to his escape. She threw her head up proudly. Then a man swung into view across the Northern Lights. Virginia pressed back against the palings among the bushes until he should have passed. It was Ned Trent, returning from a walk to the end of the island. He was alone and unfollowed, and the girl realized with a sudden grip at the heart that the wilderness itself was sufficient safeguard against a man unarmed and unequipped. It was not considered worth while even to watch him. Should he escape, unarmed as he was, sure death by starvation awaited him in the land of dread. As he entered the settlement he struck up an air. "Le fils du roi s'en va chassant, En roulant ma boule, Avec son grand fusil d'argent, Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant." Almost immediately a window slid back, and an exasperated voice cried out: "_Hola_ dere, w'at one time dam fool you for mak' de sing so late!" The voice went on imperturbably: "Avec son grand fusil d'argent, En roulant ma boule, Visa le noir, tua le blanc, Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant." "_Sacre_!" shrieked the habitant. "Hello, Johnny Frenchman!" called Ned Trent, in his acid tones. "That you? Be more polite, or I'll stand here and sing you the whole of it." The window slammed shut. Ned Trent took up his walk again toward some designated sleeping-place of his own, his song dying into the distance. "Visa le noir, tua le blanc, En roulant ma boule, O fils du roi, tu es mechant! Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant." "And he can _sing_!" cried the girl bitterly to herself. "At such a time! Oh, my dear God, help me, help me! I am the unhappiest girl alive!" Chapter Eleven Virginia did not sleep at all that night. She was reaching toward her new self. Heretofore she had ruled those about her proudly, secure in her power and influence. Now she saw that all along her influence had in not one jot exceeded that of the winsome girl. She had no real power at all. They went mercilessly on in the grim way of their fathers, dealing justice even-handed according to their own crude conceptions of it, without thought of God or man. She turned hot all over as she saw herself in this new light--as she saw those about her indulgently smiling at her airs of the mistress of it. It angered her--though the smile might be good-humored, even affectionate. And she shrank into herself with utter loathing when she remembered Ned Trent. There indeed her woman's pride was hard stricken. She recalled with burning cheeks how his intense voice had stirred her; how his wishes had compelled her; she shivered pitifully as she remembered the warmth of his shoulder touching carelessly her own. If he had come to her honestly and asked her aid, she would have given it; but this underhand pretence at love! It was unworthy of him; and it was certainly most unworthy of her. What must he think of her? How he must be laughing at her--and hoping that his spell was working, so that he could get the coveted rifle and the forty cartridges. "I hate him!" she cried to herself, the backs of her long, slender hands pressed against her eyes. She meant that she loved him, but for the purposes in hand one would do as well as the other. At earliest daylight she was up. Bathing her face and throat in cold water, and hastily catching her beautiful light hair under a cap, she slipped down stairs and out past the stockade to the point. There she seated herself, a heavy shawl about her, and gave herself up to reflection. She had approached silently, her moccasins giving no sound. Presently she became aware that someone was there before her. Looking toward the river she saw on the next level below her a man, seated on a bowlder, and gazing to the south. His very soul was in his eyes. Virginia gasped at the change in him since last she had seen him. The gay, mocking demeanor which had seemed an essential part of his very flesh and blood had fallen away from him, leaving a sad and lofty dignity that ennobled his countenance. The lines of his face were stern, of his mouth pathetic; his eyes yearned. He stared toward the south with an almost mesmeric intensity, as though he hoped by sheer longing to materialize a vision. Tears sprang to the girl's eyes at the subtle pathos of his attitude. He stretched his arms wearily over his head, and sighed deeply and looked up. His eyes rested on the girl without surprise; the expression of his features did not change. "Pardon me," he said, simply. "To-day is my last of plenty. I am up enjoying it." Virginia had anticipated the usual instantaneous transformation of his manner when he should catch sight of her. Her resentment was dispelled. In face of the vaster tragedies little considerations gave way. "Do you leave--to-day?" she asked, in a low voice. "To-morrow morning, early," he corrected. "To-day I found my provisions packed and laid at my door. It is a hint I know how to take." "You have everything you need?" asked the girl, with an assumption of indifference. He looked her in the eyes for a moment. "Everything," he lied, calmly. Virginia perceived that he lied, and her heart stood still with a sudden hope that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, he might have repented of his unworthy intentions toward herself. She leaned to him over the edge of the little rise. "Have you a rifle--for _la Longue Traverse_?" she inquired, with meaning. He stared at her a little the harder. "Why--why, surely," he replied, in a tone less confident. "Nobody travels without a rifle in the North." She dropped swiftly down the slope and stood face to face with him. "Listen," she began, in her superb manner. "I know all there is to know. You are a Free Trader, and you are to be sent to your death. It is murder, and it is done by my father." She held her head proudly, but the notes of her voice were straining. "I knew nothing of this yesterday. I was a foolish girl who thought all men were good and just, and that all those whom I knew were noble. My eyes are open now. I see injustice being done by my own household, and "--tears were trembling near her lashes, but she blinked them back--"and I am no longer a foolish girl! You need not try to deceive me. You must tell me what I can do, for I cannot permit so great a wrong to be done by my father without attempting to set it right." This was not what she had intended to say, but suddenly the course was clear to her. The influence of the man had again swept over her, drowning her will, filling her with the old fear, which was now for the moment turned to pride by the character of the situation. But to her surprise the man was thinking of something else. "Who told you?" he demanded, harshly. Then, without waiting for a reply, "It was that little preacher; I'll have an interview with him!" "No, no!" protested the girl. "It was not he. It was a friend. I had the right to know." "You had no right!" he cried, vehemently. "You and life should have nothing to do with each other. There is a look in your eyes that was not in them yesterday, and the one who put it there is not your friend." He stood staring at her intently, as one who ponders what is best to do. Then very quietly he took her hands and drew her to a place beside him on the bowlder. "I am going to tell you something, little girl," said he, "and you must listen quietly to the end. Perhaps at the last you may see more clearly than you do now. "This old Company of yours has been established for a great many years. Back in old days, over two centuries ago, it pushed up into this wilderness to trade for its furs. That you know. And then it explored ever farther to the west and the north, until its servants stood on the shores of the Pacific and the stretches of the Arctic Ocean. And its servants loved it. Enduring immense hardships, cut off from their kind, outlining dimly with the eye of faith the structure of a mighty power, they loved it always. Thousands of men were in its employ, and so loyal were they that its secrets were safe and its prestige was defended, often to a lonely death. I have known the Company and its servants for a long time, and if I had leisure I could instance a hundred examples of devotion and sacrifice beside which mere patriotism, would seem a little thing. Men who had no country cleaved to her desolate posts, her lakes and rivers and forests; men who had no home ties felt the tug of her wild life at their hearts; men who had no God bowed in awe before her power and grandeur. The Company was a living thing. "Rivals attempted her supremacy, and were defeated by the steadfastness of the men who received her meagre wages and looked to her as their one ideal. Her explorers were the bravest, her traders the most enterprising and single-minded, her factors and partners the most capable and potent in all the world. No country, no leader, no State ever received half the worship her sons gave her. The fierce Nor'westers, the traders of Montreal, the Company of the X Y, Astor himself, had to give way. For, although they were bold or reckless or crafty or able, they had not the ideal which raises such qualities to invincibility. "And, little girl, nothing is wrong to men who have such an ideal before them. They see but one thing, and all means are good that help them to assure that one thing. They front the dangers, they overcome the hardships, they crush the rivals. Bloody wars have taken place in these forests, ruthless deeds have been done, but the men who accomplished them held the deeds good. So for two hundred years, aided by the charter from the king, they have made good their undisputed right. "Then the railroad entered the west. The charter of monopoly ran out. Through the Nipissing, the Athabasca, the Edmonton, came the Free Traders--men who traded independently. These the Company could not control, so it competed--and to its credit its competition has held its own. Even far into the Northwest, where the trails are long, the Free Traders have established their chains of supplies, entering into rivalry with the Company for a barter it has always considered its right. The medicine has been bitter, but the servants of the Company have adjusted themselves to the new conditions, and are holding their own. "But one region still remains cut off from the outside world by a broad band of unexplored waste. The life here at Hudson's Bay--although you may not know it--is exactly the same to-day that it was two hundred years ago. And here the Company makes its stand for a monopoly. "At first it worked openly. But in the case of Guillaume Sayer, a daring and pugnacious _metis_, it got into trouble with the law. Since that time it has wrapped itself in secrecy and mystery, carrying on its affairs behind the screen of five hundred miles of forest. Here it has still the power; no man can establish himself here, can even travel here, without its consent, for it controls the food and the Indians. The Free Trader enters, but he does not stay for long. The Company's servants are mindful of their old fanatical ideal. Nothing is ever known, no orders are ever given, but something happens, find the man never ventures again. "If he is an ordinary _metis_ or Canadian, he emerges from the forest starved, frightened, thankful. If his story is likely to be believed in high places, he never emerges at all. The dangers of wilderness travel are many: he succumbs to them. That is the whole story. Nothing definite is known; no instances can be proved; your father denies the legend and calls it a myth. The Company claims to be ignorant of it, perhaps its greater officers really are, but the legend holds so good that the journey has its name--_la Longue Traverse_. "But remember this, no man is to blame--unless it is he who of knowledge takes the chances. It is a policy, a growth of centuries, an idea unchangeable to which the long services of many fierce and loyal men have given substance. A Factor cannot change it. If he did, the thing would be outside of nature, something not to be understood. "I am here. I am to take _la Longue Traverse_. But no man is to blame. If the scheme of the thing is wrong, it has been so from the very beginning, from the time when King Charles set his signature to the charter of unlimited authority. The history of a thousand men gives the tradition power, gives it insistence. It is bigger than any one individual. It is as inevitable as that water should flow down hill." He had spoken quietly, but very earnestly, still holding her two hands, and she had sat looking at him unblinking from eyes behind which passed many thoughts. When he had finished, a short pause followed, at the end of which she asked unexpectedly, "Last evening you told me that you might come to me and ask me to choose between my pity and what I might think to be my duty. What are you going to ask of me?" "Nothing. I spoke idle words." "Last evening I overheard you demand something of Mr. Crane," she pursued, without commenting on his answer. "When he refused you I heard you say these words 'Here is where I should have received aid; I may have to get it where I should not.' What was the aid you asked of him? and where else did you expect to get it?" "The aid was something impossible to accord, and I did not expect to get it elsewhere. I said that in order to induce him to help me." A wonderful light sprang to the girl's eyes, but still she maintained her level voice. "You asked him for a rifle with which to escape. You expected to get it of me. Deny it if you can." Ned Trent looked at her keenly a moment, then dropped his eyes. "It is true," said he. "And the pity was to give you this weapon; and the duty was my duty to my father's house." "It is true," he repeated, dejectedly. "And you lied to me when you said you had a rifle with which to journey _la Longue Traverse_." "That too is true," he acknowledged. When next she spoke her voice was not quite so well controlled. "Why did you not ask me, as you intended? Why did you tell me these lies?" The young man hesitated, looked her in the face, turned away, and murmured, "I could not." "Why?" persisted the girl. "Why? You must tell me." "Because," said Ned Trent--"because it could not be done. Every rifle in the place is known. Because you would be found out in this, and I do not know what your punishment might not be." "You knew this before?" insisted Virginia, stonily. "Yes." "Then why did you change your mind?" "When first I saw you by the gun," began Ned Trent, in a low voice, "I was a desperate man, clutching at the slightest chance. The thought crossed my mind then that I might use you. Then later I saw that I had some influence over you, and I made my plan. But last night----" "Yes, last night?" urged Virginia, softly. "Last night I paced the island, and I found out many things. One of them was that I could not." "Even though this dreadful journey----" "I would rather take my chances." Again there was silence between them. "It was a good lie," then said Virginia, gently--"a noble lie. And what you have told me to comfort me about my father has been nobly said. And I believe you, for I have known the truth about your fate." He shut his lips grimly. "Why--why did you come?" she cried, passionately. "Is the trade so good, are your needs then so great, that you must run these perils?" "My needs," he replied. "No; I have enough." "Then why?" she insisted. "Because that old charter has long since expired, and now this country is as free for me as for the Company," he explained. "We are in a civilized century, and no man has a right to tell me where I shall or shall not go. Does the Company own the Indians and the creatures of the woods?" Something in the tone of his voice brought her eyes steadily to his for a moment. "Is that all?" she asked at length. He hesitated, looked away, looked back again. "No, it is not," he confessed, in a low voice. "It is a thing I do not speak of. My father was a servant of this Company, a good, true servant. No man was more honest, more zealous, more loyal." "I am sure of it," said Virginia, softly. "But in some way that he never knew himself he made enemies in high places. The cowards did not meet him man to man, and so he never knew who they were. If he had, he would have killed them. But they worked against him always. He was given hard posts, inadequate supplies, scant help, and then he was held to account for what he could not do. Finally he left the company in disgrace--undeserved disgrace. He became a Free Trader in the days when to become a Free Trader was worse than attacking a grizzly with cubs. In three years he was killed. But when I grew to be a man "--he clenched his teeth--"by God! how I have prayed to know who did it." He brooded for a moment, then went on. "Still, I have accomplished something. I have traded in spite of your factors in many districts. One summer I pushed to the Coppermine in the teeth of them, and traded with the Yellow Knives for the robes of the musk-ox. And they knew me and feared my rivalry, these traders of the Company. No district of the far North but has felt the influence of my bartering. The traders of all districts--Fort au Liard, Lapierre's House, Fort Rae, Ile a la Crosse, Portage la Loche, Lac la Biche, Jasper's House, the House of the Touchwood Hills--all these, and many more, have heard of Ned Trent." "Your father--you knew him well?" "No, but I remember him--a tall, dark man, with a smile always in his eyes and a laugh on his lips. I was brought up at a school in Winnipeg under a priest. Two or three times in the year my father used to appear for a few days. I remember well the last time I saw him. I was about thirteen years old. 'You are growing to be a man,' said he; 'next year we will go out on the trail.' I never saw him again." "What happened?" "Oh, he was just killed," replied Ned Trent, bitterly. The girl laid her hand on his arm with an appealing little gesture. "I am so sorry," said she. "I have no portrait of him," continued the Free Trader, after an instant. "No gift from his hands; nothing at all of his but this." He showed her an ordinary little silver match-safe such as men use in the North country. "They brought that to me at the last--the Indians who came to tell my priest the news, and the priest, who was a good man, gave it to me. I have carried it ever since." Virginia took it reverently. To her it had all the largeness that envelops the symbol of a great passion. After a moment she looked up in surprise. "Why!" she exclaimed, "this has a name carved on it!" "Yes," he replied. "But the name is Graehme Stewart." "Of course I could not bear my father's name in a country where it was well known," he explained. "Of course," she agreed. Impulsively she raised her face to his, her eyes shining. "To me all this is very fine," said she. He smiled a little sadly. "At least you know why I came." "Yes." she repeated, "I know why you came. But you are in trouble." "The chances of war." "And they have defeated you after all." "I shall start on _la Longue Traverse_ singing 'Rouli roulant.' It's a small defeat, that.' "Listen," said she, rapidly. "When I was quite a small girl Mr. McTavish, of Rupert's House, gave me a little rifle. I have never used it, because I do not care to shoot. That rifle has never been counted, and my father has long since forgotten all about it. You must take that, and escape to-night. I will let you have it on one condition--that you give me your solemn promise never to venture into this country again." "Yes," he agreed, without enthusiasm nor surprise. She smiled happily at his gloomy face and listless attitude. "But I do not want to give up the little rifle entirely," she went on, with dainty preciosity, watching him closely. "As I said, it was a present, given to me when I was quite a small girl. You must return it to me at Quebec, in August. Will you promise to do that?" He wheeled on her swift as light, the eagerness flashing back into his face. "You are going to Quebec?" he cried. "My father wishes me to. I have decided to do so. I shall start with the Abitibi _brigade_ in July." He leaped to his feet. "I promise!" he exulted, "I promise! To-night, then! Bring the rifle and the cartridges, and some matches, and a little salt. You must take me across the river in a canoe, for I want them to guess at where I strike the woods. I shall cover my trail. And with ten hours' start, let them catch Ned Trent who can!" She laughed happily. "To-night, then. At the south of the island there is a trail, and at the end of the trail a beach----" "I know!" he cried. "Meet me there as soon after dark as you can do so without danger." He threw his hat into the air and caught it, his face boyishly upturned. Again that something, so vaguely familiar, plucked at her with its ghostly, appealing fingers. She turned swiftly, and seized them, and so found herself in possession of a memory out of her far-off childhood. "I know you!" she cried. "I have seen you before this!" He bent his puzzled gaze upon her. "I was a very little girl," she explained, "and you but a lad. It was at a party, I think, a great and brilliant party, for I remember many beautiful women and fine men. You held me up in your arms for people to see, because I was going on a long journey." "I remember, of course I do!" he exclaimed. A bell clanged, turning over and over, calling the Company's men to their day. "Farewell." she said, hurriedly. "To-night." "To-night," he repeated. She glided rapidly through the grass, noiseless in her moccasined feet. And as she went she heard his voice humming soft and low, "Isabeau s'y promene Le long de son jardin, Le long de son jardin, Sur le bord de l'ile, Le long de son jardin." "How could he _help_ singing," murmured Virginia, fondly. "Ah, dear Heaven, but I am the happiest girl alive!" Such a difference can one night bring about. Chapter Twelve The day rose and flooded the land with its fuller life. All through the settlement the Post Indians and half-breeds set about their tasks. Some aided Sarnier with his calking of the bateaux; some worked in the fields; some mended or constructed in the different shops. At eight o'clock the bell rang again, and they ate breakfast. Then a group of seven, armed with muzzle-loading "trade-guns" bound in brass, set out for the marshes in hopes of geese. For the flight was arriving, and the Hudson Bay man knows very well the flavor of goose-flesh, smoked, salted, and barrelled. Now the _voyageurs_ began to stroll into the sun. They were men of leisure. Picturesque, handsome, careless, debonair, they wandered back and forth, smoking their cigarettes, exhibiting their finery. Indian women, wrinkled and careworn, plodded patiently about on various businesses. Indian girls, full of fun and mischief, drifted here and there in arm-locked groups of a dozen, smiling, whispering among themselves, ready to collapse toward a common centre of giggles if addressed by one of the numerous woods-dandies. Indian men stalked singly, indifferent, stolid. Indian children of all sizes and degrees of nakedness darted back and forth, playing strange games. The sound of many voices rose across the air. Once the voices moderated, when McDonald, the Chief Trader, walked rapidly from the barracks building to the trading store; once they died entirely into a hush of respect, when Galen Albret himself appeared on the broad veranda of the factory. He stood for a moment--bulked broad and black against the whitewash--his hands clasped behind him, gazing abstractedly toward the distant bay. Then he turned into the house to some mysterious and weighty business of his own. The hubbub at once broke out again. Now about the mouth of the long picketed lane leading to the massive trading store gathered a silent group, bearing packs. These were Indians from the more immediate vicinity, desirous of trading their skins. After a moment McDonald appeared in the doorway, a hundred feet away, and raised his hand. Two of the savages, and two only, trotted down the narrow picket lane, their packs on their shoulders. McDonald ushered them into a big square room, where the bales were undone and spread abroad. Deftly, silently the Trader sorted the furs, placing to one side or the other the "primes," "seconds," and "thirds" of each species. For a moment he calculated. Then he stepped to a post whereon hung long strings of pierced wooden counters, worn smooth by use. Swiftly he told the strings over. To one of the Indians he gave one with these words: "Mu-hi-kun, my brother, here be pelts to the value of two hundred 'beaver.' Behold a string, then, of two hundred 'castors,' and in addition I give my brother one fathom of tobacco." The Indian calculated rapidly, his eye abstracted. He had known exactly the value of his catch, and what he would receive for it in "castors," but had hoped for a larger "present," by which the premium on the standard price is measured. "Ah hah," he exclaimed, finally, and stepped to one side. "Sak-we-su, my brother," went on McDonald, "here be pelts to the value of three hundred 'beaver.' Behold a string, then, of three hundred 'castors,' and because you have brought so fine a skin of the otter, behold also a fathom of tobacco and a half sack of flour." "Good!" ejaculated the Indian. The Trader then led them to stairs, up which they clambered to where Davis, the Assistant Trader, kept store. There, barred by a heavy wooden grill from the airy loft filled with bright calicoes, sashes, pails, guns, blankets, clothes, and other ornamental and useful things, Sak-we-su and Mu-hi-kun made their choice, trading in the worn wooden "castors" on the string. So much flour, so much tea, so much sugar and powder and lead, so much in clothing. Thus were their simple needs supplied for the year to come. Then the remainder they squandered on all sorts of useless things--beads, silks, sashes, bright handkerchiefs, mirrors. And when the last wooden "castor" was in they went down stairs and out the picket lane, carrying their lighter purchases, but leaving the larger as "debt," to be called for when needed. Two of their companions mounted the stairs as they descended; and two more passed them in the narrow picket lane. So the trade went on. At once Sak-we-su and Mu-hi-kun were surrounded. In detail they told what they had done. Then in greater detail their friends told what _they_ would have done, until after five minutes of bewildering advice the disconsolate pair would have been only too glad to have exchanged everything--if that had been allowed. Now the bell rang again. It was "smoke time." Everyone quit work for a half-hour. The sun climbed higher in the heavens. The laughing crews of idlers sprawled in the warmth, gambling, telling stories, singing. Then one might have heard all the picturesque songs of the Far North--"A la claire Fontaine"; "Ma Boule Roulant"; "Par derrier' chez-mon Pere"; "Isabeau s'y promene"; "P'tite Jeanneton"; "Luron, Lurette"; "Chante, Rossignol, chante"; the ever-popular "Malbrouck"; "C'est la belle Francoise"; "Alouette"; or the beautiful and tender "La Violette Dandine." They had good voices, these _voyageurs_, with the French artistic instinct, and it was fine to hear them. At noon the squaws set out to gather canoe gum on the mainland. They sat huddled in the bottom of their old and leaky canoe, reaching far over the sides to dip their paddles, irregularly placed, silent, mysterious. They did not paddle with the unison of the men, but each jabbed a little short stroke as the time suited her, so that always some paddles were rising and some falling. Into the distance thus they flapped like wounded birds; then rounded a bend, and were gone. The sun swung over and down the slope, Dinner time had passed; "smoke time" had come again. Squaws brought the first white-fish of the season to the kitchen door of the factory, and Matthews raised the hand of horror at the price they asked. Finally he bought six of about three pounds each, giving in exchange tea to the approximate value of twelve cents. The Indian women went away, secretly pleased over their bargain. Down by the Indian camp suddenly broke the roar of a dog-fight. Two of the sledge _giddes_ had come to teeth, and the friends of both were assisting the cause. The idlers went to see, laughing, shouting, running impromptu races. They sat on their haunches and cheered ironically, and made small bets, and encouraged the frantic old squaw hags who, at imminent risk, were trying to disintegrate the snarling, rolling mass. Over in the high log stockade wherein the Company's sledge animals were confined, other wolf-dogs howled mournfully, desolated at missing the fun. And always the sun swung lower and lower toward the west, until finally the long northern twilight fell, and the girl in the little white bedroom at the factory bathed her face and whispered for the hundredth time to her beating heart: "Night has come!" Chapter Thirteen That evening at dinner Virginia studied her father's face again. She saw the square settled line of the jaw under the beard, the unwavering frown of the heavy eyebrows, the unblinking purpose of the cavernous, mysterious eyes. Never had she felt herself very close to this silent, inscrutable man, even in his moments of more affectionate expansion. Now a gulf divided them. And yet, strangely enough, she experienced no revulsion, no horror, no recoil even. He had merely become more aloof, more incomprehensible; his purposes vaster, less susceptible to the grasp of such as she. There may have been some basis for this feeling, or it may have been merely the reflex glow of a joy that made all other things seem insignificant. As soon as might be after the meal Virginia slipped away, carrying the rifle, the cartridges, the matches, and the salt. She was cruelly frightened. The night was providentially dark. No aurora threw its splendor across the dome, and only a few rare stars peeped between the light cirrus clouds. Virginia left behind her the buildings of the Post, she passed in safety the tin-steepled chapel and the church house; there remained only the Indian camp between her and the woods trail. At once the dogs began to bark and howl, the fierce _giddes_ lifting their pointed noses to the sky. The girl hurried on, twinging far to the right through the grass. To her relief the camp did not respond to the summons. An old crone or so appeared in the flap of a teepee, eyes dazzled, to throw uselessly a billet of wood or a volley of Cree abuse at the animals nearest. In a moment Virginia entered the trail. Here was no light at all. She had to proceed warily, feeling with her moccasins for the beaten pathway, to which she returned with infinite caution whenever she trod on grass or leaves. Though her sight was dulled, her hearing was not. A thousand scurrying noises swirled about her; a multitude of squeaks, whistles, snorts, and whines attested that she disturbed the forest creatures at their varied businesses; and underneath spoke an apparent dozen of terrifying voices which were in reality only the winds and the trees. Virginia knew that these things were not dangerous--that day light would show them to be only deer-mice, hares, weasels, bats, and owls--nevertheless, they had their effect. For about her was cloying velvet blackness--not the closed-in blackness of a room, where one feels the embrace of the four walls, but the blackness of infinite space through which sweep mysterious currents of air. After a long time she turned sharp to the left. After a long time more she perceived a faint, opalescent glimmer in the distance ahead. This she knew to be the river. She felt her way onward, still cautiously, then she choked back a scream and dropped her burden with a clatter to the ground. A dark figure seemed to have risen mysteriously at her side. "I didn't mean to frighten you," said Ned Trent, in guarded tones. "I heard you coming. I thought you could hear me." He picked up the fallen articles, running his hands over them rapidly. "Good," he whispered. "I got some moccasins to-day--traded a few things I had in my pockets for them. I'm fixed." "Have you a canoe?" she asked. "Yes--here on the beach." He preceded her down the few remaining yards of the trail. She followed, already desolated at the thought of parting, for the wilderness was very big. The bulk of the man partly blotted out the lucent spot where the river was--now his arm, now his head, now the breadth of his shoulders. This silhouette of him was dear to her, the sound of his movements, the faint stir of his breathing borne to her on the light breeze. Virginia's tender heart almost overflowed with longing and fear for him. They emerged on a little slope and at once pushed the canoe into the current. She accepted the aid of his hand for a moment, and sank to her place, facing him He spurned lightly the shore, and so they were adrift. In a moment they seemed to be floating on a vast vapor of night, infinitely remote from anywhere, surrounded by the silence that might have been before the world's beginning. A faint splash could have been a muskrat near at hand or a caribou far away. The paddle rose and dipped with a faint _swish_, _swish_, and the steersman's twist of it was taken up by the man's strong wrist so it did not click against the gunwale; the bow of the craft divided the waters with a murmuring so faint as to seem but the echo of a silence. Neither spoke. Virginia watched him, her heart too full for words; watched the full swing of his strong shoulders, the balance of his body at the hips, the poise of his head against the dull sky. In a moment more the parting would have to come. She dreaded it, and yet she looked forward to it with a hungry joy. Then he would say what she had seen in his eyes; then he would speak; then she would hear the words that should comfort her in the days of waiting. For a woman lives much for the present, and the moment's word is an important thing. The man swung his paddle steadily, throwing into the strokes a wanton exuberance that showed how high his spirits ran. After a time, when they were well out from the shore, he took a deep breath of delight. "Ah, you don't know how happy I am," he exulted, "you don't know! To be free, to play the game, to match my wits against their--ah, that is life!" "I am sorry to see you go," she murmured, "very sorry. The days will be full of terror until I know you are safe." "Oh, yes," he answered: "but I'll get there, and I shall tell it all to you at Quebec--at Quebec in August. It will he a brave tale! You will be there--surely?" "Yes," said the girl, softly; "I will be there--surely." "Good! Feel the wind on your cheek? It is from the Southland, where I am going. I have ventured--and I have not lost! It is something not to lose, when one has ventured against many. They have my goods--but I----" "You?" repeated Virginia, as he hesitated. "Ah, I don't go back empty-handed!" he tried. Her heart stood still, then leaped in anticipation of what he would say. Her soul hungered for the words, the words that should not only comfort her, but should be to her the excuse for many things. She saw him--shadowy, graceful against the dim gray of the river and sky--lean ever so slightly toward her. But then he straightened again to his paddle, and contented himself with repeating merely: "Quebec--in August, then." The canoe grated. Ned Trent with an exclamation drove his paddle into the clay. "Lucky the bottom is soft here," said he; "I did not realize we were so close ashore." He drew the canoe up on the shelving beach, helped Virginia out, took his rifle, and so stood ready to depart. "Leave the canoe just where we got in," he advised; "it is around the point, you see, and that may fool them a. little." "You are going." she said, dully. Then she came close to him and looked up at him with her wonderful eyes. "Good-by." "Good-by," said he. Was this to be all? Had he nothing more to tell her? Was the word to lack, the word she needed so much? She had given herself unreservedly into this man's hands, and at parting he had no more to say to her than "Good-by." Virginia's eyes were tearful, but she would not let him know that. She felt that her heart would break. "Well, good-by," he said again after a moment, which he had spent inspecting the heavens. "Ah, you don't know what it is to be free! By to-morrow morning I shall be half-way to the Mattagami. I can hardly wait to see it, for then I am safe! And then nex; day--why, next day they won't know which of a dozen ways I've gone!" He was full of the future, man fashion. He took her hands, leaned over, and lightly kissed her on the mouth. Instantly Virginia became wildly and unreasonably angry. She could not have told herself why, but it was the lack of the word she had wanted so much, the pain of feeling that he could go like that, the thwarted bitterness of a longing that had grown stronger than she had even yet realized. Instinctively she leaped into the canoe, sending it spinning from the bank. "Ah, you had no _right_ to do that!" she cried. "I gave you no _right_!" Then, heedless of what he was saying, she began to paddle straight from the shore, weeping bitterly, her face upraised, her hair in her eyes, and the tears coursing unheeded down her cheeks. Chapter Fourteen Slower and slower her paddle dipped, lower and lower hung her head, faster and faster flowed her tears. The instinctive recoil, the passionate resentment had gone. In the bitterness of her spirit she knew not what she thought except that she would give her soul to see him again, to feel the touch of his lips once more. For she could not make herself believe that this would ever come to pass. He had gone like a phantom, like a dream, and the mists of life had closed about him, showing no sign. He had vanished, and at once she seemed to know that the episode was finished. The canoe whispered against the soft clay bottom. She had arrived, though how the crossing had been made she could not have told. Slowly and sorrowfully she disembarked. Languidly she drew the light craft beyond the stream's eager fingers. Then, her forces at an end, she huddled down on the ground and gave herself up to sorrow. The life of the forest went on as though she were not there. A big owl far off said hurriedly his _whoo-whoo-whoo_, as though he had the message to deliver and wanted to finish the task. A smaller owl near at hand cried _ko-ko-ko-oh_ with the intonation of a tin horn. Across the river a lynx screamed, and was answered at once by the ululations of wolves. On the island the _giddes_ howled defiance. Then from above, clear, spiritual, floated the whistle of shore birds arriving from the south. Close by sounded a rustle of leaves, a sharp squeak; a tragedy had been consummated, and the fierce little mink stared malevolently across the body of his victim at the motionless figure on the beach. Virginia, drowned in grief, knew of none of these things. She was seeing again the clear brown face of the stranger, his curly brown hair, his steel eyes, and the swing of his graceful figure. Now he fronted the wondering _voyageurs_, one foot raised against the bow of the _brigade_ canoe; now he stood straight and tall against the light of the sitting-room door; now he emptied the vials of his wrath and contempt on Archibald Crane's reverend head; now he passed in the darkness, singing gayly the _chanson de canot_. But more fondly she saw him as he swept his hat to the ground on discovering her by the guns, as he bent his impassioned eyes on her in the dim lamplight of their first interview, as he tossed his hat aloft in the air when he had understood that she would be in Quebec. She hugged the visions to her, and wept over them softly, for she was now sure she would never see him again. And she heard his voice, now laughing, now scornful, now mocking, now indignant, now rich and solemn with feeling. He flouted the people, he turned the shafts of his irony on her father, he scathed the minister, he laughed at Louis Placide awakened from his sleep, he sang, he told her of the land of desolation, he pleaded. She could hear him calling her name--although he had never spoken it--in low, tender tones, "Virginia! Virginia!" over and over again softly, as though his soul were crying through his lips. Then somehow, in a manner not to be comprehended, it was borne in on her consciousness that he was indeed near her, and that he was indeed calling her name. And at once she made him out, standing dripping on the beach. A moment later she was in his arms. "Ah!" he cried, in gladness; "you are here!" He crushed her hungrily to him, unmindful of his wet clothes, kissing her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, her chin, even the fragrant corner of her throat exposed by the collar of her gown. She did not struggle. "Oh!" she murmured, "my dear, my dear! Why did you come back? Why did you come?" "Why did I come?" he repeated, passionately. "Why did I come? Can you ask that? How could I help but come? You must have known I would come. Surely you must have known! Didn't you hear me calling you when you paddled away? I came to get the right. I came to get your promise, your kisses, to hear you say the word, to get you! I thought you understood. It was all so clear to me. I thought you knew. That was why I was so glad to go, so eager to get away that I could not even realize I was parting from you--so I could the sooner reach Quebec--reach you! Don't you see how I felt? All this present was merely something to get over, to pass by, to put behind us until I got to Quebec in August--and you. I looked forward so eagerly to that, I was so anxious to get away, I was desirous of hastening on to the time when things could be _sure_! Don't you understand?" "Yes, I think I do," replied the girl, softly. "And I thought of course you knew, I should not have kissed you otherwise." "How could I know?" she sighed. "You said nothing, and, oh! I _wanted_ so to hear!" And singularly enough he said nothing now, but they stood facing each other hand in hand, while the great vibrant life they were now touching so closely filled their hearts and eyes, and left them faint. So they stood for hours or for seconds, they could not tell, spirit-hushed, ecstatic. The girl realized that they must part. "You must go," she whispered brokenly, at last. "I do not want you to, but you must." She smiled up at him with trembling lips that whispered to her soul that she must be brave. "Now go," she nerved herself to say, releasing her hands. "Tell me," he commanded. "What?" she asked. "What I most want to hear." "I can tell you many things," said she, soberly, "but I do not know which of them you want to hear. Ah, Ned. I can tell you that you have come into a girl's life to make her very happy and very much afraid. And that is a solemn thing; is it not?" "Yes," said he. "And I can tell you that this can never be undone. That is a solemn thing, too, is it not?" "Yes," said he. "And that, according as you treat her, this girl will believe or not believe in the goodness of all men or the badness of all men. Ah, Ned, a woman's heart is fragile, and mine is in your keeping." Her face was raised bravely and steadily to his. In the starlight it shone white and pathetic. And her eyes were two liquid wells of darkness in the shadow, and her half-parted lips were wistful and childlike. The man caught both her hands, again looking down on her. Then he answered her, solemnly and humbly. "Virginia," said he, "I am setting out on a perilous Journey. As I deal with you, may God deal with me." "Ah, that is as I like you," she breathed. "Good-by," said he. She raised her lips of her own accord, and he kissed them reverently. "Good-by," she murmured. He turned away with an effort and ran down the beach to the canoe. "Good-by, good-by," she murmured, under her breath. "Ah, good-by! I love you! Oh, I do love you!" Then suddenly from the bushes leaped dark figures. The still night was broken by the sound of a violent scuffle--blows--a fall. She heard Ned Trent's voice calling to her from the _melee_. "Go back at once!" he commanded, clearly and steadily. "You can do no good. I order you to go home before they search the woods." But she crouched in dazed terror, her pupils wide to the dim light. She saw them bind him, and stand waiting; she saw a canoe glide out of the darkness; she saw the occupants of the canoe disembark; she saw them exhibit her little rifle, and heard them explain in Cree, that they had followed the man swimming. Then she knew that the cause was lost, and fled as swiftly as she could through the forest. Chapter Fifteen Galen Albret had chosen to interrogate his recaptured prisoner alone. He sat again, in the arm-chair of the Council Room. The place was flooded with sun. It touched the high-lights of the time-darkened, rough furniture, it picked out the brasses, it glorified the whitewashed walls. In its uncompromising illumination Me-en-gan, the bows-man, standing straight and tall and silent by the door, studied his master's face and knew him to be deeply angered. For Galen Albret was at this moment called upon to deal with a problem more subtle than any with which his policy had been puzzled in thirty years. It was bad enough that, in repeated defiance of his authority, this stranger should persist in his attempt to break the Company's monopoly; it was bad enough that he had, when captured, borne himself with so impudent an air of assurance; it was bad enough that he should have made open love to the Factor's daughter, should have laughed scornfully in the Factor's very face. But now the case had become grave. In some mysterious manner he had succeeded in corrupting one of the Company's servants. Treachery was therefore to be dealt with. Some facts Galen Albret had well in hand. Others eluded him persistently. He had, of course, known promptly enough of the disappearance of a canoe, and had thereupon dispatched his Indians to the recapture. The Reverend Archibald Crane had reported that two figures had been seen in the act of leaving camp, one by the river, the other by the Woods Trail. But here the Factor's investigations encountered a check. The rifle brought in by his Indians, to his bewilderment, he recognized not at all. His repeated cross-questionings, when they touched on the question of Ned Trent's companion, got no farther than the Cree wooden stolidity. No, they had seen no one, neither presence, sign, nor trail. But Galen Albret, versed in the psychology of his savage allies, knew they lied. He suspected them of clan loyalty to one of their own number; and yet they had never failed him before. Now, his heavy revolver at his right hand, he interviewed Ned Trent, alone, except for the Indian by the portal. As with the Indians, his cross-examination had borne scant results. The best of his questions but involved him in a maze of baffling surmises. Gradually his anger had mounted, until now the Indian at the door knew by the wax-like appearance of the more prominent places on his deeply carved countenance that he had nearly reached the point of outbreak. Swiftly, like the play of rapiers, the questions and answers broke across the still room. "You had aid," the Factor asserted, positively. "You think so?" "My Indians say you were alone. But where did you get this rifle?" "I stole it." "You were alone?" Ned Trent paused for a barely appreciable instant. It was not possible that the Indians had failed to establish the girl's presence, and he feared a trap. Then he caught the expressive eye of Me-en-gan at the door. Evidently Virginia had friends. "I was alone," he repeated, confidently. "That is a lie. For though my Indians were deceived, two people were observed by my clergyman to leave the Post immediately before I sent out to your capture. One rounded the island in a canoe; the other took the Woods Trail." "Bully for the Church," replied Trent, imperturbably. "Better promote him to your scouts." "Who was that second person?" "Do you think I will tell you?" "I think I'll find means to make you tell me!" burst out the Factor. Ned Trent was silent. "If you'll tell me the name of that man I'll let you go free. I'll give you a permit to trade in the country. It touches my authority--my discipline. The affair becomes a precedent. It is vital." Ned Trent fixed his eyes on the bay and hummed a little air, half turning his shoulder to the older man. The latter's face blazed with suppressed fury. Twice his hand rested almost convulsively on the butt of his heavy revolver. "Ned Trent," he cried, harshly, at last, "pay attention to me. I've had enough of this. I swear if you do not tell me what I want to know within five minutes, I'll hang you to-day!" The young man spun on his heel. "Hanging!" he cried. "You cannot mean that?" The Free Trader measured him up and down, saw that his purpose was sincere, and turned slowly pale under the bronze of his out-of-door tan. Hanging is always a dreadful death, but in the Far North it carries an extra stigma of ignominy with it, inasmuch as it is resorted to only with the basest malefactors. Shooting is the usual form of execution for all but the most despicable crimes. He turned away with a little gesture. "Well!" cried Albret. Ned Trent locked his lips in a purposeful straight line of silence. To such an outrage there could be nothing to say. The Factor jerked his watch to the table. "I said five minutes," he repeated. "I mean it." The young man leaned against the side at the window, his arms folded, his back to the room. Outside, the varied life of the Post went forward under his eyes. He even noted with a surface interest the fact that out across the river a loon was floating, and remarked that never before had he seen one of those birds so far north. Galen Albret struck the table with the flat of his hand. "Done!" he cried. "This is the last chance I shall give you. Speak at this instant or accept the consequences!" Ned Trent turned sharply, as though breaking a thread that bound him to the distant prospect beyond the window. For an instant he stared enigmatically at his opponent. Then in the sweetest tones, "Oh, go to the devil!" said he, and began to walk deliberately toward the older man. There lay between the window and the head of the table perhaps a dozen ordinary Steps, for the room was large. The young man took them slowly, his eyes fixed with burning intensity on the seated figure, the muscles of his locomotion contracting and relaxing with the smooth, stealthy continuity of a cat. Galen Albret again laid hand on his revolver. "Come no nearer," he commanded. Me-en-gan left the door and glided along the wall. But the table intervened between him and the Free Trader. The latter paid no attention to the Factor's command. Galen Albret suddenly raised his weapon from the table. "Stop, or I'll fire!" he cried, sharply. "I mean just that." said Ned Trent between his clenched teeth. But ten feet separated the two men. Galen Albret levelled the revolver. Ned Trent, watchful, prepared to spring. Me-en-gan, near the foot of the table, gathered himself for attack. Then suddenly the Free Trader relaxed his muscles, straightened his back, and returned deliberately to the window. Facing about in astonishment to discover the reason for this sudden change of decision, the other two men looked into the face of Virginia Albret, standing in the doorway of the other room. "Father!" she cried. "You must go back," said Ned Trent speaking clearly and collectedly, in the hope of imposing his will on her obvious excitement. "This is not an affair in which you should interfere. Galen Albret, send her away." The Factor had turned squarely in his heavy arm-chair to regard the girl, a frown on his brows. "Virginia," he commanded, in deliberate, stern tones of authority, "leave the room. You have nothing to do with this case, and I do not desire your interference." Virginia stepped bravely beyond the portals, and stopped. Her fingers were nervously interlocked, her lip trembled, in her cheeks the color came and went, but her eyes met her father's, unfaltering. "I have more to do with it than you think." she replied. Instantly Ned Trent was at the table. "I really think this has gone far enough," he interposed. "We have had our interview and come to a decision. Miss Albret must not be permitted to exaggerate a slight sentiment of pity into an interest in my affairs. If she knew that such a demonstration only made it worse for me I am sure she would say no more." He looked at her appealingly across the Factor's shoulder. Me-en-gan was already holding open the door. "You come," he smiled, beseechingly. But the Factor's suspicions were aroused. "There is something in this," he decided. "I think you may stay, Virginia." "You are right," broke in the young man, desperately. "There is something in it. Miss Albret knows who gave me the rifle, and she was about to inform you of his identity. There is no need in subjecting her to that distasteful ordeal. I am now ready to confess to you. I beg you will ask her to leave the room." Galen Albret, in the midst of these warring intentions, had sunk into his customary impassive calm. The light had died from his eyes, the expression from his face, the energy from his body. He sat, an inert mass, void of initiative, his intelligence open to what might be brought to his notice. "Virginia, this is true?" his heavy, dead voice rumbled through his beard. "You know who aided this man?" Ned. Trent mutely appealed to her: her glance answered his. "Yes, father," she replied. "Who?" "I did." A dead silence fell on the room. Galen Albret's expression and attitude did not change. Through dull, lifeless eyes, from behind the heavy mask of his waxen face and white beard, he looked steadily out upon nothing. Along either arm of the chair stretched his own arms limp and heavy with inertia. In suspense the other three inmates of the place watched him, waiting for some change. It did not come. Finally his lips moved. "You?" he muttered, questioningly, "I," she repeated Another silence fell. "Why?" he asked at last. "Because it was an unjust thing. Because we could not think of taking a life in that way, without some reason for it." "Why?" he persisted, taking no account of her reply. Virginia let her gaze slowly rest on the Free Trader, and her eyes filled with a world of tenderness and trust. "Because I love him," said she, softly. Chapter Sixteen After an instant Galen Albret turned slowly his massive head and looked at her. He made no other movement, yet she staggered back as though she had received a violent blow on the chest. "Father!" she gasped. Still slowly, gropingly, he arose to his feet, holding tight to the edge of the table. Behind him unheeded the rough-built armchair crashed to the floor. He stood there upright and motionless, looking straight before him, his face formidable. At first his speech was disjointed. The words came in widely punctuated gasps. Then, as the wave of his emotion rolled back from the poise into which the first shock of anger had thrown it, it escaped through his lips in a constantly increasing stream of bitter words. "You--you love him," he cried. "You--my daughter! You have been--a traitor--to me! You have dared--dared--deny that which my whole life has affirmed! My own flesh and blood--when I thought the nearest _metis_ of them all more loyal! You love this man--this man who has insulted me, mocked me! You have taken his part against me! You have deliberately placed yourself in the class of those I would hang for such an offence! If you were not my daughter I would hang you. Hang my own child!" Suddenly his rage flared. "You little fool! Do you dare set your judgment against mine? Do you dare interfere where I think well? Do you dare deny my will? By the eternal, I'll show you, old as you are, that you have still a father! Get to your room! Out of my sight!" He took two steps forward, and so his eye fell on Ned Trent. He uttered a scream of rage, and reached for the pistol. Fortunately the abruptness of his movement when he arose had knocked it to the floor, so now in the blindness of a red anger he could not see it. He shrieked out an epithet and jumped forward, his arm drawn to strike. Ned Trent leaped back into an attitude of defence. All three of those present had many times seen Galen Albret possessed by his noted fits of anger, so striking in contrast to his ordinary contained passivity. But always, though evidently in a white heat of rage and given to violent action and decision, he had retained the clearest command of his faculties, issuing coherent and dreaded orders to those about him. Now he bad become a raging wild beast. And for the spectators the sight had all the horror of the unprecedented. But the younger man, too, had gradually heated to the point where his ordinary careless indifference could give off sparks. The interview had been baffling, the threats real and unjust, the turn of affairs when Virginia Albret entered the room most exasperating on the side of the undesirable and unforeseen. In foiled escape, in thwarted expedient, his emotions had been many times excited, and then eddied back on themselves. The potentialities of as blind an anger as that of Galen Albret were in him. It only needed a touch to loose the flood. The physical threat of a blow supplied that touch. As the two men faced each other both were ripe for the extreme of recklessness. But while Galen Albret looked to nothing less than murder, the Free-Trader's individual genius turned to dead defiance and resistance of will. While Galen Albret's countenance reflected the height of passion, Trent was as smiling and cool and debonair as though he had at that moment received from the older man an extraordinary and particular favor. Only his eyes shot a baleful blue flame, and his words, calmly enough delivered, showed the extent to which his passion had cast policy to the winds. "Don't go too far! I warn you!" said he. As though the words had projected him bodily forward, Galen Albret sprang to deliver his blow. The Free Trader ducked rapidly, threw his shoulder across the middle of the older man's body, and by the very superiority of his position forced his antagonist to give ground. That the struggle would have then continued body to body there can be no doubt, had it not been for the fact that the Factor's retrogressive movement brought his knees sharply against the edge of a chair standing near the side of the table. Albret lost his balance, wavered, and finally sat down violently. Ned Trent promptly pinned him by the shoulder into powerless immobility. Me-en-gan had possessed himself of the fallen pistol, but beyond keeping a generally wary eye out for dangerous developments, did not offer to interfere. Your Indian is in such a crisis a disciplinarian, and he had received no orders. "Now," said Ned Trent, acidly, "I think this will stop right here. You do not cut a very good figure, my dear sir," he laughed a little. "You haven't cut a very good figure from the beginning, you know. You forbade me to do various things, and I have done them all. I traded with your Indians. I came and went in your country. Do you think I have not been here often before I was caught? And you forbade me to see your daughter again. I saw her that very evening, and the next morning and the next evening." He stood, still holding Galen Albret immovably in the chair, looking steadily and angrily into the leader's eyes, driving each word home with the weight of his contained passion. The girl touched his arm. "Hush! oh, hush!" she cried in a panic. "Do not anger him further!" "When you forbade me to make love to her," he continued, unheeding, "I laughed at you." With a sudden, swift motion of his left arm he drew her to him and touched her forehead with his lips. "Look! Your commands have been rather ridiculous, sir. I seem to have had the upper hand of you from first to last. Incidentally you have my life. Oh, welcome! That is small pay and little satisfaction." He threw himself from the Factor and stepped back. Galen Albret sat still without attempting to renew the struggle. The enforced few moments of inaction had restored to him his self-control. He was still deeply angered, but the insanity of rage had left him. Outwardly he was himself again. Only a rapid heaving of his chest answered Ned Trent's quick breathing, as the two men glared defiantly at each other in the pause that followed. "Very well, sir," said the Factor, curtly, at last. "Your time is over. I find it unnecessary to hang you. You will start, on your _Longue Traverse_ to-day." "Oh!" cried Virginia, in a low voice of agony, and fluttered to her lover's side. "Hush! hush!" he soothed her. "There is a chance." "You think so?" broke in Galen Albret, harshly. And looking at his set face and blazing eyes, they saw that there was no chance. The Free Trader shrugged his shoulders. "You are going to do this thing, father," appealed Virginia, "after what I have told you?" "My mind is made up." "I shall not survive him, father!" she threatened, in a low voice. Then, as the Factor did not respond, "Do not misunderstand me. I do not intend to survive him." "Silence! silence! silence!" cried Galen Albret, in a crescendo outburst. "Silence! I will not be gainsaid! You have made your choice! You are no longer a daughter of mine!" "Father!" cried Virginia, faintly, her lips going pale. "Don't speak to me! Don't look at me! Get out of here! Get out of the place! I won't have you here another day--another hour! By----" The girl hesitated for a moment, then ran to him, sinking on her knees, and clasping his hand. "Father," she pleaded, "you are not yourself. This has been very trying to you. To-morrow you will be sorry. But then it will be too late. Think, while there is yet time. He has not committed a crime. You yourself told me he was a man of intelligence and daring--a gentleman; and surely, though he has been hasty, he has acted with a brave spirit through it all. See, he will promise you to go away quietly, to say nothing of all this, never to come into this country again without your permission. He will do this if I ask him, for he loves me. Look at me, father. Are you going to treat your little girl so--your Virginia? You have never refused me anything before. And this is the greatest thing in all my life." She held his hand to her cheek and stroked it, murmuring little feminine, caressing phrases, secure in her power of witchery, which had never failed her before. The sound of her own voice reassured her, the quietude of the man she pleaded with. A lifetime of petting, of indulgence, threw its soothing influence over her perturbation, convincing her that somehow all this storm and stress must be phantasmagoric--a dream from which she was even now awakening into a clearer day of happiness. "For you love me, father," she concluded, and looked up daintily, with a pathetic, coquettish tilt of her fair head, to peer into his face. Galen Albret snarled like a wild beast, throwing aside the girl, as he did the chair in which he had been sitting. Ned Trent caught her, reeling, in his arms. For as is often the case with passionate but strong temperaments, though the Factor had attained a certain calm of control, the turmoil of his deeper anger had not been in the least stilled. Over it a crust of determination had formed--the determination to make an end by the directest means in his autocratic power of this galling opposition. The girl's pleading, instead of appealing to him, had in reality but stirred his fury the more profoundly. It had added a new fuel element to the fire. Heretofore his consciousness had felt merely the thwarting of his pride, his authority, his right to loyalty. Now his daughter's entreaty brought home to him the bitter realization that he had been attained on another side--that of his family affection. This man had also killed for him his only child. For the child had renounced him, had thrust him outside herself into the lonely and ruined temple of his pride. At the first thought his face twisted with emotion, then hardened to cold malice. "Love you!" he cried. "Love you! An unnatural child! An ingrate! One who turns from me so lightly!" He laughed bitterly, eyeing her with chilling scrutiny. "You dare recall my love for you!" Suddenly he stood upright, levelling a heavy, trembling arm at her. "You think an appeal to my love will save him! Fool!" Virginia's breath caught in her throat. She straightened, clutched the neckband of her gown. Then her head fell slowly forward. She had fainted in her lover's arms. They stood exactly so for an appreciable interval, bewildered by the suddenness of this outcome; Galen Albret's hand outstretched in denunciation; the girl like a broken lily, supported in the young man's arms; he searching her face passionately for a sign of life; Me-en-gan, straight and sorrowful, again at the door. Then the old man's arm dropped slowly, His gaze wavered. The lines of his face relaxed. Twice he made an effort to turn away. All at once his stubborn spirit broke; he uttered a cry, and sprang forward to snatch the unconscious form hungrily into his bear clasp, searching the girl's face, muttering incoherent things. "Quick!" he cried, aloud, the guttural sounds jostling one another in his throat. "Get Wishkobun, quick!" Ned Trent looked at him with steady scorn, his arms folded. "Ah!" he dropped distinctly in deliberate monosyllables across the surcharged atmosphere of the scene. "So it seems you have found your heart, my friend!" Galen Albret glared wildly at him over the girl's fair head. "She is my daughter," he mumbled. Chapter Seventeen They carried the unconscious girl into the dim-lighted apartment of the curtained windows, and laid her on the divan. Wishkobun, hastily summoned, unfastened the girl's dress at the throat. "It is a faint," she announced in her own tongue. "She will recover in a few minutes; I will get some water." Ned Trent wiped the moisture from his forehead with his handkerchief. The danger he had undergone coolly, but this overcame his iron self-control. Galen Albret, like an anxious bear, weaved back and forth the length of the couch. In him the rumble of the storm was but just echoing into distance. "Go into the next room," he growled at the Free Trader, when finally he noticed the latter's presence. Ned Trent hesitated. "Go, I say!" snarled the Factor. "You can do nothing here." He followed the young man to the door, which he closed with his own hand, and then turned back to the couch on which his daughter lay. In the middle of the floor his foot clicked on some small object. Mechanically lie picked it up. It proved to be a little silver match-safe of the sort universally used in the Far North. Evidently the Free Trader had nipped it from his pocket with his handkerchief, The Factor was about to thrust it into his own pocket, when his eye caught lettering roughly carved across one side. Still mechanically, he examined it more closely, The lettering was that of a man's name. The man's name was Graehme Stewart. Without thinking of what he did, he dropped the object on the small table, and returned anxiously to the girl's side, cursing the tardiness of the Indian woman. But in a moment Wishkobun returned. "Will she recover?" asked the Factor, distracted at the woman's deliberate examination. The latter smiled her indulgent, slow smile. "But surely," she assured him in her own tongue, "it is no more than if she cut her finger. In a few breaths she will recover. Now I will go to the house of the Cockburn for a morsel of the sweet wood [camphor] which she must smell." She looked her inquiry for permission. "Sagaamig--go," assented Albret. Relieved in mind, he dropped into a chair. His eye caught the little silver match-safe, He picked it up and fell to staring at the rudely carved letters. He found that he was alone with his daughter--and the thoughts aroused by the dozen letters of a man's name. All his life long he had been a hard man. His commands had been autocratic; his anger formidable; his punishments severe, and sometimes cruel. The quality of mercy was with him tenuous and weak. He knew this, and if he did not exactly glory in it, he was at least indifferent to its effect on his reputation with others. But always he had been just. The victims of his displeasure might complain that his retributive measures were harsh, that his forgiveness could not be evoked by even the most extenuating of circumstances, but not that his anger had ever been baseless or the punishment undeserved. Thus he had held always his own self-respect, and from his self-respect had proceeded his iron and effective rule. So in the case of the young man with whom now his thoughts were occupied. Twice he had warned him from the country without the punishment which the third attempt rendered imperative. The events succeeding his arrival at Conjuror's House warmed the Factor's anger to the heat of almost preposterous retribution perhaps--for after all a man's life is worth something, even in the wilds--but it was actually retribution, and not merely a ruthless proof of power. It might be justice as only the Factor saw it, but it was still essentially justice--in the broader sense that to each act had followed a definite consequence. Although another might have condemned his conduct as unnecessarily harsh, Galen Albret's conscience was satisfied and at rest. Nor had his resolution been permanently affected by either the girl's threat to make away with herself or by his momentary softening when she had fainted. The affair was thereby complicated, but that was all. In the sincerity of the threat he recognized his own iron nature, and was perhaps a little pleased at its manifestation. He knew she intended to fulfil her promise not to survive her lover, but at the moment this did not reach his fears; it only aroused further his dogged opposition. The Free Trader's speech as he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those two words had called up. Graehme Stewart! That man he had first met at Fort Rae over twenty years ago. It was but just after he had married Virginia's mother. At once his imagination, with the keen pictorial power of those who have dwelt long in the Silent Places, brought forward the other scene--that of his wooing. He had driven his dogs into Fort la Cloche after a hard day's run in seventy-five degrees of frost. Weary, hungry, half-frozen, he had staggered into the fire-lit room. Against the blaze he had caught for a moment a young girl's profile, lost as she turned her face toward him in startled question of his entrance. Men had cared for his dogs. The girl had brought him hot tea. In the corner of the fire they two had whispered one to the other--the already grizzled traveller of the silent land, the fresh, brave north-maiden. At midnight, their parkas drawn close about their faces in the fearful cold, they had met outside the inclosure of the Post. An hour later they were away under the aurora for Qu'Apelle. Galen Albret's nostrils expanded as he heard the _crack, crack, crack_ of the remorseless dog-whip whose sting drew him away from the vain pursuit. After the marriage at Qu'Apelle they had gone a weary journey to Rae, and there he had first seen Graehme Stewart. Fort Rae is on the northwestward arm of the Great Slave Lake in the country of the Dog Ribs, only four degrees under the Arctic Circle. It is a dreary spot, for the Barren Grounds are near. Men see only the great lake, the great sky, the great gray country. They become moody, fanciful. In the face of the silence they have little to say. At Port Rae were old Jock Wilson, the Chief Trader; Father Bonat, the priest; Andrew Levoy, the _metis_ clerk; four Dog Rib teepees; Galen Albret and his bride; and Graehme Stewart. Jock Wilson was sixty-five; Father Bonat had no age; Andrew Levoy possessed the years of dour silence. Only Graehme Stewart and Elodie, bride of Albret, were young. In the great gray country their lives were like spots of color on a mist. Galen Albret finally became jealous. At first there was nothing to be done, but finally Levoy brought to the older man proof of the younger's guilt. The harsh traveller bowed his head and wept. But since he loved Elodie more than himself--which was perhaps the only redeeming feature of this sorry business--he said nothing, nor did more than to journey south to Edmonton, leaving the younger man alone in Fort Rae to the White Silence. But his soul was stirred. In the course of nature and of time Galen Albret had a daughter, but lost a wife. It was no longer necessary for him to leave his wrong unavenged. Then began a series of baffling hindrances which resulted finally in his stooping to means repugnant to his open sense of what was due himself. At the first he could not travel to his enemy because of the child in his care; when finally he had succeeded in placing the little girl where he would be satisfied to leave her, he himself was suddenly and peremptorily called east to take a post in Rupert's Land. He could not disobey and remain in the Company, and the Company was more to him than life or revenue. The little girl he left in Sacre Coeur of Quebec; he himself took up his residence in the Hudson Bay country. After a few years, becoming lonely for his own flesh and blood, he sent for his daughter. There, as Factor, he gained a vast power, and this power he turned into the channels of his hatred. Graehme Stewart felt always against him the hand of influence. His posts in the Company's service became intolerable. At length, in indignation against continued injustice, oppression, and insult, he resigned, broken in fortune and in prospects. He became one of the earliest Free Traders on the Saskatchewan, devoting his energies to enraged opposition of the Company which had wronged him. In the space of three short years he had met a violent and striking death; for the early days of the Free Trader were adventurous. Galen Albret's revenge had struck home. Then in after years the Factor had again met with Andrew Levoy. The man staggered into Conjuror's House late at night, He had started from Winnipeg to descend the Albany River, but had met with mishap and starvation. One by one his dogs had died. In some blind fashion he pushed on for days after his strength and sanity had left him. Mu-hi-kun had brought him in. His toes and fingers had frozen and dropped off; his face was a mask of black frost-bitten flesh, in which deep fissures opened to the raw. He had gone snow-blind. Scarcely was he recognizable as a human being. From such a man in extremity could come nothing but the truth, so Galen Albret believed him. Before Andrew Levoy died that night he told of his deceit. The Factor left the room with the weight of a crime on his conscience. For Graehme Stewart had been innocent of any wrong toward him or his bride. Such was the story Galen Albret saw in the little silver match-box. That was the one flaw in his consciousness of righteousness; the one instance in a long career when his ruthless acts of punishment or reprisal had not rested on rigid justice, and by the irony of fate the one instance had touched him very near. Now here before him was his enemy's son--he wondered that he had not discovered the resemblance before--and he was about to visit on him the severest punishment in his power. Was not this an opportunity vouchsafed him to repair his ancient fault, to cleanse his conscience of the one sin of the kind it would acknowledge? But then over him swept the same blur of jealousy that had resulted in Graehme Stewart's undoing. This youth wooed his daughter; he had won her affections away. Strangely enough Galen Albret confused the new and the old; again youth cleaved to youth, leaving age apart. Age felt fiercely the desire to maintain its own. The Factor crushed the silver match-box between his great palms and looked up. His daughter lay before him, still, lifeless. Deliberately he rested his chin on his hands and contemplated her. The room, as always, was full of contrast; shafts of light, dust-moted, bewildering, crossed from the embrasured windows, throwing high-lights into prominence and shadows into impenetrable darkness. They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and ethereal, like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued couch on which she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly--cradled on illimitable space. The ordinary and familiar surroundings all disappeared. His consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile of marble white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the mist-like suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the hands. All else was a background of modulated depths. So gradually the old man's spirit, wearied by the stress of the last hour, turned in on itself and began to create. The cameo profile, the mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now Galen Albret saw other things as well. A dim, rare perfume was wafted from some unseen space; indistinct flashes of light spotted the darknesses; faint swells of music lifted the silence intermittently. These things were small and still, and under the external consciousness--like the voices one may hear beneath the roar of a tumbling rapid--but gradually they defined themselves. The perfume came to Galen Albret's nostrils on the wings of incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into grand-breathed organ chords. He felt about him the dim awe of the church, he saw the tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm face of the dead, smiling faintly that at last it should be no more disturbed. So had he looked all one night and all one day in the long time ago. The Factor stretched his arms out to the figure on the couch, but he called upon his wife, gone these twenty years. "Elodie! Elodie!" he murmured, softly. She had never known it, thank God, but he had wronged her too. In all sorrow and sweet heavenly pity he had believed that her youth had turned to the youth of the other man. It had not been so. Did be not owe her, too, some reparation? As though in answer to his appeal, or perhaps that merely the sound of a human voice had broken the last shreds of her swoon, the girl moved slightly. Galen Albret did not stir. Slowly Virginia turned her head, until finally her wandering eyes met his, fixed on her with passionate intensity. For a moment she stared at him, then comprehension came to her along with memory. She cried out, and sat upright in one violent motion. "He! He!" she cried. "Is he gone?" Instantly Galen Albret had her in his arms. "It is all right," he soothed, drawing her close to his great breast. "All right. You are my own little girl." Chapter Eighteen For perhaps ten minutes Ned Trent lingered near the door of the Council Room until he had assured himself that Virginia was in no serious danger. Then he began to pace the room examining minutely the various objects that ornamented it. He paused longest at the full length portrait of Sir George Simpson, the Company's great traveller, with his mild blue eyes, his kindly face, denying the potency of his official frown, his snowy hair and whiskers. The painted man and the real man looked at each, other inquiringly. The latter shook his head. "You travelled the wild country far," said he, thoughtfully. "You knew many men of many lands. And wherever you went they tell me you made friends. And yet, as you embodied this Company to all these people, and so made for the fanatical loyalty that is destroying me, I suppose you and I are enemies!" He shrugged his shoulders whimsically and turned away. Thence he cast a fleeting glance out the window at the long reach of the Moose and the blue bay gleaming in the distance. He tried the outside door. It was locked. Taken with a new idea he proceeded at once to the third door of the apartment. It opened. He found himself in a small and much-littered room containing a desk, two chairs, a vast quantity of papers, a stuffed bird or so, and a row of account-books. Evidently the Factor's private office, Ned Trent returned to the main room and listened intently for several minutes. After that he ran back to the office and began hastily to open and rummage, one after another, the drawers of the desk. He discovered and concealed several bits of string, a desk-knife, and a box of matches. Then he uttered a guarded exclamation of delight. He had found a small revolver, and with it part of a box of cartridges. "A chance!" he exulted: "a chance!" The game would be desperate. He would be forced first of all to seek out and kill the men detailed to shadow him--a toy revolver against rifles; white man against trained savages. And after that he would have, with the cartridges remaining, to assure his subsistence. Still it was a chance. He closed the drawers and the door, and resumed his seat in the arm-chair by the council table. For over an hour thereafter he awaited the next move in the game. He was already swinging up the pendulum arc. The case did not appear utterly hopeless. He resolved, through Me-en-gan, whom he divined as a friend of the girl's, to smuggle a message to Virginia bidding her hope. Already his imagination had conducted him to Quebec, when in August he would search her out and make her his own. Soon one of the Indian servants entered the room for the purpose of conducting him to a smaller apartment, where he was left alone for some time longer. Food was brought him. He ate heartily, for he considered that wise. Then at last the summons for which he had been so long in readiness. Me-en-gan himself entered the room, and motioned him to follow. Ned Trent had already prepared his message on the back of an envelope, writing ft with the lead of a cartridge. He now pressed the bit of paper into the Indian's palm. "For O-mi-mi," he explained. Me-en-gan, bored him through with his bead-like eyes of the surface lights. "Nin nissitotam," he agreed after a moment. He led the way. Ned Trent followed through the narrow, uncarpeted hall with the faded photograph of Westminster, down the crooked steep stairs with the creaking degrees, and finally into the Council Room once more, with its heavy rafters, its two fireplaces, its long table, and its narrow windows, "Beka--wait!" commanded Me-en-gan, and left him. Ned Trent had supposed he was being conducted to the canoe which should bear him on the first stage of his long journey, but now he seemed condemned again to take up the wearing uncertainty of inaction. The interval was not long, however. Almost immediately the other door opened and the Factor entered. His movements were abrupt and impatient, for with whatever grace such a man yields to his better instincts the actual carrying out of their conditions is a severe trial. For one thing it is a species of emotional nakedness, invariably repugnant to the self-contained. Ned Trent, observing this and misinterpreting its cause, hugged the little revolver to his side with grim satisfaction. The interview was likely to be stormy. If worst came to worst, he was at least assured of reprisal before his own end. The Factor walked directly to the head of the table and his customary arm-chair, in which he disposed himself. "Sit down," he commanded the younger man, indicating a chair at his elbow. The latter warily obeyed. Galen Albret hesitated appreciably. Then, as one would make a plunge into cold water, quickly, in one motion, he laid on the table something over which he held his hand. "You are wondering why I am interviewing you again," said he. "It is because I have become aware of certain things. When you left me a few hours ago you dropped this." He moved his hand to one side. The silver match-safe lay on the table. "Yes, it is mine," agreed Ned Trent, "On one side is carved a name." "Yes." "Whose?" The Free Trader hesitated. "My father's," he said, at last. "I thought that must be so. You will understand when I tell you that at one time I knew him very well." "You knew my father?" cried Ned Trent, excitedly. "Yes. At Fort Rae, and elsewhere. But I do not remember you." "I was brought up at Winnipeg," the other explained. "Once," pursued Galen Albret, "I did your father a wrong, unintentionally, but nevertheless a great wrong. For that reason and others I am going to give you your life." "What wrong?" demanded Ned Trent, with dawning excitement. "I forced him from the Company." "You!" "Yes, I. Proof was brought me that he had won from me my young wife. It could not be doubted. I could not kill him. Afterward the man who deceived me confessed. He is now dead." Ned Trent, gasping, rose slowly to his feet. One hand stole inside his jacket and clutched the butt of the little pistol. "You did that," he cried, hoarsely. "You tell me of it yourself? Do you wish to know the real reason for my coming into this country, why I have traded in defiance of the Company throughout the whole Far North? I have thought my father was persecuted by a body of men, and though I could not do much, still I have accomplished what I could to avenge him. Had I known that a single man had done this--and you are that man!" He came a step nearer. Galen Albret regarded him steadily. "If I had known this before, I should never have rested until I had hunted you down, until I had killed you, even in the midst of your own people!" cried the Free Trader at last. Galen Albret drew his heavy revolver and laid it on the table. "Do so now," he said, quietly. A pause fell on them, pregnant with possibility. The Free Trader dropped his head. "No," he groaned. "No, I cannot. She stands in the way!" "So that, after all," concluded the Factor, in a gentler tone than he had yet employed, "we two shall part peaceably. I have wronged you greatly, though without intention. Perhaps one balances the other. We will let it pass." "Yes," agreed Ned Trent with an effort, "we will let it pass." They mused in silence, while the Factor drummed on the table with the stubby fingers of his right hand. "I am dispatching to-day," he announced curtly at length, "the Abitibi _brigade_. Matters of importance brought by runner from Rupert's House force me to do so a month earlier than I had expected. I shall send you out with that _brigade_." "Very well." "You will find your packs and arms in the canoe, quite intact." "Thank you." The Factor examined the young man's face with some deliberation. "You love my daughter truly?" he asked, quietly. "Yes," replied Ned Trent, also quietly. "That is well, for she loves you. And," went on the old man, throwing his massive head back proudly, "my people love well! I won her mother in a day, and nothing could stay us. God be thanked, you are a man and brave and clean. Enough of that! I place the _brigade_ under your command! You must be responsible for it, for I am sending no other white--the crew are Indians and _metis_." "All right," agreed Ned Trent, indifferently. "My daughter you will take to Sacre Coeur at Quebec." "Virginia!" cried the young man. "I am sending her to Quebec. I had not intended doing so until July, but the matters from Rupert's House make it imperative now." "Virginia goes with me?" "Yes." "You consent? You----" "Young man," said Galen Albret, not unkindly, "I give my daughter in your charge; that is all. You must take her to Sacre Coeur. And you must be patient. Next year I shall resign, for I am getting old, and then we shall see. That is all I can tell you now." He arose abruptly. "Come," said he, "they are waiting." They threw wide the door and stepped out into the open. A breeze from the north brought a draught of air like cold water in its refreshment. The waters of the North sparkled and tossed in the silvery sun. Ned Trent threw his arms wide in the physical delight of a new freedom. But his companion was already descending the steps. He followed across the square grass plot to the two bronze guns. A noise of peoples came down the breeze. In a moment he saw them--the varied multitude of the Post--gathered to speed the _brigade_ on its distant journey. The little beach was crowded with the Company's people and with Indians, talking eagerly, moving hither and yon in a shifting kaleidoscope of brilliant color. Beyond the shore floated the long canoe, with its curving ends and its emblazonment of the five-pointed stars. Already its baggage was aboard, its crew in place, ten men in whose caps slanted long, graceful feathers, which proved them boatmen of a factor. The women sat amidships. When Galen Albret reached the edge of the plateau he stopped, and laid his hand on the young man's arm. As yet they were unperceived. Then a single man caught sight of them. He spoke to another; the two informed still others. In an instant the bright colors were dotted with upturned faces. "Listen," said Galen Albret, in his resonant chest-tones of authority. "This is my son, and he must be obeyed. I give to him the command of this _brigade_. See to it." Without troubling himself further as to the crowd below, Galen Albret turned to his companion. "I will say good-by," said he, formally. "Good-by," replied Ned Trent. "All is at peace between us?" The Free Trader looked long into the man's sad eyes. The hard, proud spirit, bowed in knightly expiation of its one fault, for the first time in a long life of command looked out in petition. "All is at peace," repeated Ned Trent. They clasped hands. And Virginia, perceiving them so, threw them a wonderful smile. Chapter Nineteen Instantly the spell of inaction broke. The crowd recommenced its babel of jests, advices, and farewells. Ned Trent swung down the bank to the shore. The boatmen fixed the canoe on the very edge of floating free. Two of them lifted the young man aboard to a place on the furs by Virginia Albret's side. At once the crowd pressed forward, filling up the empty spaces. Now Achille Picard bent his shoulders to lift into free water the stem of the canoe from its touch on the bank. It floated, caught gently by the back wash of the stronger off-shore current. "Good-by, dear," called Mrs. Cockburn. "Remember us!" She pressed the Doctor's arm closer to her side. The Doctor waved his hand, not trusting his masculine self-control to speak. McDonald, too, stood glum and dour, clasping his wrist behind his back. Richardson was openly affected. For in Virginia's person they saw sailing away from their bleak Northern lives the figure of youth, and they knew that henceforth life must be even drearier. "Som' tam' yo' com' back sing heem de res' of dat song!" shouted Louis Placide to his late captive. "I lak' hear heem!" But Galen Albret said nothing, made no sign. Silently and steadily, run up by some invisible hand, the blood-red banner of the Company fluttered to the mast-head. Before it, alone, bulked huge against the sky, dominating the people in the symbolism of his position there as he did in the realities of everyday life, the Factor stood, his hands behind his back. Virginia rose to her feet and stretched her arms out to the solitary figure. "Good-by! good-by!" she cried. A renewed tempest of cheers and shouts of adieu broke from those ashore. The paddles dipped once, twice, thrice, and paused. With one accord those on shore and those in the canoe raised their caps and said, "Que Dieu vous benisse." A moment's silence followed, during which the current of the mighty river bore the light craft a few yards down stream. Then from the ten _voyageurs_ arose a great shout. "Abitibi! Abitibi!" Their paddles struck in unison. The water swirled in white, circular eddies. Instantly the canoe caught its momentum and began to slip along against the sluggish current. Achille Picard raised a high tenor voice, fixing the air, "En roulant ma boule roulante, En roulant ma boule" And the _voyageurs_ swung into the quaint ballad of the fairy ducks and the naughty prince with his magic gun. "Derrier' ches-nous y-a-t-un 'elang, En roulant ma boule." The girl sank back, dabbing uncertainly at her eyes. "I shall never see them again," she explained, wistfully. The canoe had now caught its speed. Conjuror's House was dropping astern. The rhythm of the song quickened as the singers told of how the king's son had aimed at the black duck but killed the white. "Ah fils du roi, tu es mechant, En roulant ma boule, Toutes les plumes s'en vont au vent, Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant." "Way wik! way wik!" commanded Me-en-gan, sharply, from the bow. The men quickened their stroke and shot diagonally across the current of an eddy. "Ni-shi-shin," said Me-en-gan. They fell back to the old stroke, rolling out their full-throated measure. "Toutes les plumes s'en vont au vent, En roulant ma boule, Trois dames s'en vont les ramassant, Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant." The canoe was now in the smooth rush of the first stretch of swifter water. The men bent to their work with stiffened elbows. Achille Picard flashed his white teeth back at the passengers. "Ah, mademoiselle, eet is wan long way," he panted. "C'est une longue traverse!" The term was evidently descriptive, but the two smiled significantly at each other. "So you do take _la Longue Traverse_, after all!" marvelled Virginia. Ned Trent clasped her hand. "We take it together," he replied. Into the distance faded the Post. The canoe rounded a bend. It was gone. Ahead of them lay their long journey. THE END 
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10977	----	THE GRIZZLY KING A ROMANCE OF THE WILD BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD 1918 ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK B. HOFFMAN [Illustration: "As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated."] To MY BOY PREFACE It is with something like a confession that I offer this second of my nature books to the public--a confession, and a hope; the confession of one who for years hunted and killed before he learned that the wild offered a more thrilling sport than slaughter--and the hope that what I have written may make others feel and understand that the greatest thrill of the hunt is not in killing, but in letting live. It is true that in the great open spaces one must kill to live; one must have meat, and meat is life. But killing for food is not the lust of slaughter; it is not the lust which always recalls to me that day in the British Columbia mountains when, in less than two hours, I killed four grizzlies on a mountain slide--a destruction of possibly a hundred and twenty years of life in a hundred and twenty minutes. And that is only one instance of many in which I now regard myself as having been almost a criminal--for killing for the excitement of killing can be little less than murder. In their small way my animal books are the reparation I am now striving to make, and it has been my earnest desire to make them not only of romantic interest, but reliable in their fact. As in human life, there are tragedy, and humour, and pathos in the life of the wild; there are facts of tremendous interest, real happenings and real lives to be written about, and very small necessity for one to draw on imagination. In "Kazan" I tried to give the reader a picture of my years of experience among the wild sledge dogs of the North. In "The Grizzly" I have scrupulously adhered to facts as I have found them in the lives of the wild creatures of which I have written. Little Muskwa was with me all that summer and autumn in the Canadian Rockies. Pipoonaskoos is buried in the Firepan Range country, with a slab over his head, just like a white man. The two grizzly cubs we dug out on the Athabasca are dead. And Thor still lives, for his range is in a country where no hunters go--and when at last the opportunity came we did not kill him. This year (in July of 1916) I am going back into the country of Thor and Muskwa. I think I would know Thor if I saw him again, for he was a monster full-grown. But in two years Muskwa had grown from cubhood into full bearhood. And yet I believe that Muskwa would know me should we chance to meet again. I like to think that he has not forgotten the sugar, and the scores of times he cuddled up close to me at night, and the hunts we had together after roots and berries, and the sham fights with which we amused ourselves so often in camp. But, after all, perhaps he would not forgive me for that last day when we ran away from him so hard--leaving him alone to his freedom in the mountains. JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD. Owosso, Michigan, May 5, 1916. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated." "Like the wind Thor bore down on the flank of the caribou, swung a little to one side, and then without any apparent effort--still like a huge ball--he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done." "They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks. They had not gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and stopped." "'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can get our grizzly!'" THE GRIZZLY KING CHAPTER ONE With the silence and immobility of a great reddish-tinted, rock, Thor stood for many minutes looking out over his domain. He could not see far, for, like all grizzlies, his eyes were small and far apart, and his vision was bad. At a distance of a third or a half a mile he could make out a goat or a mountain sheep, but beyond that his world was a vast sun-filled or night-darkened mystery through which he ranged mostly by the guidance of sound and smell. It was the sense of smell that held him still and motionless now. Up out of the valley a scent had come to his nostrils that he had never smelled before. It was something that did not belong there, and it stirred him strangely. Vainly his slow-working brute mind struggled to comprehend it. It was not caribou, for he had killed many caribou; it was not goat; it was not sheep; and it was not the smell of the fat and lazy whistlers sunning themselves on the rocks, for he had eaten hundreds of whistlers. It was a scent that did not enrage him, and neither did it frighten him. He was curious, and yet he did not go down to seek it out. Caution held him back. If Thor could have seen distinctly for a mile, or two miles, his eyes would have discovered even less than the wind brought to him from down the valley. He stood at the edge of a little plain, with the valley an eighth of a mile below him, and the break over which he had come that afternoon an eighth of a mile above him. The plain was very much like a cup, perhaps an acre in extent, in the green slope of the mountain. It was covered with rich, soft grass and June flowers, mountain violets and patches of forget-me-nots, and wild asters and hyacinths, and in the centre of it was a fifty-foot spatter of soft mud which Thor visited frequently when his feet became rock-sore. To the east and the west and the north of him spread out the wonderful panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of a June afternoon. From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds were never still. There were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air. June and July--the last of spring and the first of summer in the northern mountains--were commingling. The earth was bursting with green; the early flowers were turning the sunny slopes into coloured splashes of red and white and purple, and everything that had life was singing--the fat whistlers on their rocks, the pompous little gophers on their mounds, the big bumblebees that buzzed from flower to flower, the hawks in the valley, and the eagles over the peaks. Even Thor was singing in his way, for as he had paddled through the soft mud a few minutes before he had rumbled curiously deep down in his great chest. It was not a growl or a roar or a snarl; it was the noise he made when he was contented. It was his song. And now, for some mysterious reason, there had suddenly come a change in this wonderful day for him. Motionless he still sniffed the wind. It puzzled him. It disquieted him without alarming him. To the new and strange smell that was in the air he was as keenly sensitive as a child's tongue to the first sharp touch of a drop of brandy. And then, at last, a low and sullen growl came like a distant roll of thunder from out of his chest. He was overlord of these domains, and slowly his brain told him that there should be no smell which he could not comprehend, and of which he was not the master. Thor reared up slowly, until the whole nine feet of him rested on his haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, with his great forefeet, heavy with mud, drooping in front of his chest. For ten years he had lived in these mountains and never had he smelled that smell. He defied it. He waited for it, while it came stronger and nearer. He did not hide himself. Clean-cut and unafraid, he stood up. He was a monster in size, and his new June coat shone a golden brown in the sun. His forearms were almost as large as a man's body; the three largest of his five knifelike claws were five and a half inches long; in the mud his feet had left tracks that were fifteen inches from tip to tip. He was fat, and sleek, and powerful. His eyes, no larger than hickory nuts, were eight inches apart. His two upper fangs, sharp as stiletto points, were as long as a man's thumb, and between his great jaws he could crush the neck of a caribou. Thor's life had been free of the presence of man, and he was not ugly. Like most grizzlies, he did not kill for the pleasure of killing. Out of a herd he would take one caribou, and he would eat that caribou to the marrow in the last bone. He was a peaceful king. He had one law: "Let me alone!" he said, and the voice of that law was in his attitude as he sat on his haunches sniffing the strange smell. In his massive strength, in his aloneness and his supremacy, the great bear was like the mountains, unrivalled in the valleys as they were in the skies. With the mountains, he had come down out of the ages. He was part of them. The history of his race had begun and was dying among them, and they were alike in many ways. Until this day he could not remember when anything had come to question his might and his right--except those of his own kind. With such rivals he had fought fairly and more than once to the death. He was ready to fight again, if it came to a question of sovereignty over the ranges which he claimed as his own. Until he was beaten he was dominator, arbiter, and despot, if he chose to be. He was dynast of the rich valleys and the green slopes, and liege lord of all living things about him. He had won and kept these things openly, without strategy or treachery. He was hated and he was feared, but he was without hatred or fear of his own--and he was honest. Therefore he waited openly for the strange thing that was coming to him from down the valley. As he sat on his haunches, questioning the air with his keen brown nose, something within him was reaching back into dim and bygone generations. Never before had he caught the taint that was in his nostrils, yet now that it came to him it did not seem altogether new. He could not place it. He could not picture it. Yet he knew that it was a menace and a threat. For ten minutes he sat like a carven thing on his haunches. Then the wind shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was gone altogether. Thor's flat ears lifted a little. He turned his huge head slowly so that his eyes took in the green slope and the tiny plain. He easily forgot the smell now that the air was clear and sweet again. He dropped on his four feet, and resumed his gopher-hunting. There was something of humour in his hunt. Thor weighed a thousand pounds; a mountain gopher is six inches long and weighs six ounces. Yet Thor would dig energetically for an hour, and rejoice at the end by swallowing the fat little gopher like a pill; it was his _bonne bouche_, the luscious tidbit in the quest of which he spent a third of his spring and summer digging. He found a hole located to his satisfaction and began throwing out the earth like a huge dog after a rat. He was on the crest of the slope. Once or twice during the next half-hour he lifted his head, but he was no longer disturbed by the strange smell that had come to him with the wind. CHAPTER TWO A mile down the valley Jim Langdon stopped his horse where the spruce and balsam timber thinned out at the mouth of a coulee, looked ahead of him for a breathless moment or two, and then with an audible gasp of pleasure swung his right leg over so that his knee crooked restfully about the horn of his saddle, and waited. Two or three hundred yards behind him, still buried in the timber, Otto was having trouble with Dishpan, a contumacious pack-mare. Langdon grinned happily as he listened to the other's vociferations, which threatened Dishpan with every known form of torture and punishment, from instant disembowelment to the more merciful end of losing her brain through the medium of a club. He grinned because Otto's vocabulary descriptive of terrible things always impending over the heads of his sleek and utterly heedless pack-horses was one of his chief joys. He knew that if Dishpan should elect to turn somersaults while diamond-hitched under her pack, big, good-natured Bruce Otto would do nothing more than make the welkin ring with his terrible, blood-curdling protest. One after another the six horses of their outfit appeared out of the timber, and last of all rode the mountain man. He was gathered like a partly released spring in his saddle, an attitude born of years in the mountains, and because of a certain difficulty he had in distributing gracefully his six-foot-two-inch length of flesh and bone astride a mountain cayuse. Upon his appearance Langdon dismounted, and turned his eyes again up the valley. The stubbly blond beard on his face did not conceal the deep tan painted there by weeks of exposure in the mountains; he had opened his shirt at the throat, exposing a neck darkened by sun and wind; his eyes were of a keen, searching blue-gray, and they quested the country ahead of him now with the joyous intentness of the hunter and the adventurer. Langdon was thirty-five. A part of his life he spent in the wild places; the other part he spent in writing about the things he found there. His companion was five years his junior in age, but had the better of him by six inches in length of anatomy, if those additional inches could be called an advantage. Bruce thought they were not. "The devil of it is I ain't done growin' yet!" he often explained. He rode up now and unlimbered himself. Langdon pointed ahead. "Did you ever see anything to beat that?" he asked. "Fine country," agreed Bruce. "Mighty good place to camp, too, Jim. There ought to be caribou in this range, an' bear. We need some fresh meat. Gimme a match, will you?" It had come to be a habit with them to light both their pipes with one match when possible. They performed this ceremony now while viewing the situation. As he puffed the first luxurious cloud of smoke from his bulldog, Langdon nodded toward the timber from which they had just come. "Fine place for our tepee," he said. "Dry wood, running water, and the first good balsam we've struck in a week for our beds. We can hobble the horses in that little open plain we crossed a quarter of a mile back. I saw plenty of buffalo grass and a lot of wild timothy." He looked at his watch. "It's only three o'clock. We might go on. But--what do you say? Shall we stick for a day or two, and see what this country looks like?" "Looks good to me," said Bruce. He sat down as he spoke, with his back to a rock, and over his knee he levelled a long brass telescope. From his saddle Langdon unslung a binocular glass imported from Paris. The telescope was a relic of the Civil War. Together, their shoulders touching as they steadied themselves against the rock, they studied the rolling slopes and the green sides of the mountains ahead of them. They were in the Big Game country, and what Langdon called the Unknown. So far as he and Bruce Otto could discover, no other white man had ever preceded them. It was a country shut in by tremendous ranges, through which it had taken them twenty days of sweating toil to make a hundred miles. That afternoon they had crossed the summit of the Great Divide that split the skies north and south, and through their glasses they were looking now upon the first green slopes and wonderful peaks of the Firepan Mountains. To the northward--and they had been travelling north--was the Skeena River; on the west and south were the Babine range and waterways; eastward, over the Divide, was the Driftwood, and still farther eastward the Ominica range and the tributaries of the Finley. They had started from civilization on the tenth day of May and this was the thirtieth of June. As Langdon looked through his glasses he believed that at last they had reached the bourne of their desires. For nearly two months they had worked to get beyond the trails of men, and they had succeeded. There were no hunters here. There were no prospectors. The valley ahead of them was filled with golden promise, and as he sought out the first of its mystery and its wonder his heart was filled with the deep and satisfying joy which only men like Langdon can fully understand. To his friend and comrade, Bruce Otto, with whom he had gone five times into the North country, all mountains and all valleys were very much alike; he was born among them, he had lived among them all his life, and he would probably die among them. It was Bruce who gave him a sudden sharp nudge with his elbow. "I see the heads of three caribou crossing a dip about a mile and a half up the valley," he said, without taking his eyes from the telescope. "And I see a Nanny and her kid on the black shale of that first mountain to the right," replied Langdon. "And, by George, there's a Sky Pilot looking down on her from a crag a thousand feet above the shale! He's got a beard a foot long. Bruce, I'll bet we've struck a regular Garden of Eden!" "Looks it," vouchsafed Bruce, coiling up his long legs to get a better rest for his telescope. "If this ain't a sheep an' bear country, I've made the worst guess I ever made in my life." For five minutes they looked, without a word passing between them. Behind them their horses were nibbling hungrily in the thick, rich grass. The sound of the many waters in the mountains droned in their ears, and the valley seemed sleeping in a sea of sunshine. Langdon could think of nothing more comparable than that--slumber. The valley was like a great, comfortable, happy cat, and the sounds they heard, all commingling in that pleasing drone, was its drowsy purring. He was focussing his glass a little more closely on the goat standing watchfully on its crag, when Otto spoke again. "I see a grizzly as big as a house!" he announced quietly. Bruce seldom allowed his equanimity to be disturbed, except by the pack-horses. Thrilling news like this he always introduced as unconcernedly as though speaking of a bunch of violets. Langdon sat up with a jerk. "Where?" he demanded. He leaned over to get the range of the other's telescope, every nerve in his body suddenly aquiver. "See that slope on the second shoulder, just beyond the ravine over there?" said Bruce, with one eye closed and the other still glued to the telescope. "He's halfway up, digging out a gopher." Langdon focussed his glass on the slope, and a moment later an excited gasp came from him. "See 'im?" asked Bruce. "The glass has pulled him within four feet of my nose," replied Langdon. "Bruce, that's the biggest grizzly in the Rocky Mountains!" "If he ain't, he's his twin brother," chuckled the packer, without moving a muscle. "He beats your eight-footer by a dozen inches, Jimmy! An'"--he paused at this psychological moment to pull a plug of black MacDonald from his pocket and bite off a mouthful, without taking the telescope from his eye--"an' the wind is in our favour an' he's as busy as a flea!" he finished. Otto unwound himself and rose to his feet, and Langdon jumped up briskly. In such situations as this there was a mutual understanding between them which made words unnecessary. They led the eight horses back into the edge of the timber and tied them there, took their rifles from the leather holsters, and each was careful to put a sixth cartridge in the chamber of his weapon. Then for a matter of two minutes they both studied the slope and its approaches with their naked eyes. "We can slip up the ravine," suggested Langdon. Bruce nodded. "I reckon it's a three-hundred-yard shot from there," he said. "It's the best we can do. He'd get our wind if we went below 'im. If it was a couple o' hours earlier--" "We'd climb over the mountain and come down on him from _above_!" exclaimed Langdon, laughing. "Bruce, you're the most senseless idiot on the face of the globe when it comes to climbing mountains! You'd climb over Hardesty or Geikie to shoot a goat from above, even though you could get him from the valley without any work at all. I'm glad it isn't morning. We can get that bear from the ravine!" "Mebbe," said Bruce, and they started. They walked openly over the green, flower-carpeted meadows ahead of them. Until they came within at least half a mile of the grizzly there was no danger of him seeing them. The wind had shifted, and was almost in their faces. Their swift walk changed to a dog-trot, and they swung in nearer to the slope, so that for fifteen minutes a huge knoll concealed the grizzly. In another ten minutes they came to the ravine, a narrow, rock-littered and precipitous gully worn in the mountainside by centuries of spring floods gushing down from the snow-peaks above. Here they made cautious observation. The big grizzly was perhaps six hundred yards up the slope, and pretty close to three hundred yards from the nearest point reached by the gully. Bruce spoke in a whisper now. "You go up an' do the stalkin', Jimmy," he said. "That bear's goin' to do one of two things if you miss or only wound 'im--one o' three, mebbe: he's going to investigate _you_, or he's going up over the break, or he's comin' down in the valley--this way. We can't keep 'im from goin' over the break, an' if he tackles you--just summerset it down the gully. You can beat 'im out. He's most apt to come this way if you don't get 'im, so I'll wait here. Good luck to you, Jimmy!" With this he went out and crouched behind a rock, where he could keep an eye on the grizzly, and Langdon began to climb quietly up the boulder-strewn gully. CHAPTER THREE Of all the living creatures in this sleeping valley, Thor was the busiest. He was a bear with individuality, you might say. Like some people, he went to bed very early; he began to get sleepy in October, and turned in for his long nap in November. He slept until April, and usually was a week or ten days behind other bears in waking. He was a sound sleeper, and when awake he was very wide awake. During April and May he permitted himself to doze considerably in the warmth of sunny rocks, but from the beginning of June until the middle of September he closed his eyes in real sleep just about four hours out of every twelve. He was very busy as Langdon began his cautious climb up the gully. He had succeeded in getting his gopher, a fat, aldermanic old patriarch who had disappeared in one crunch and a gulp, and he was now absorbed in finishing off his day's feast with an occasional fat, white grub and a few sour ants captured from under stones which he turned over with his paw. In his search after these delicacies Thor used his right paw in turning over the rocks. Ninety-nine out of every hundred bears--probably a hundred and ninety-nine out of every two hundred--are left-handed; Thor was right-handed. This gave him an advantage in fighting, in fishing, and in stalking meat, for a grizzly's right arm is longer than his left--so much longer that if he lost his sixth sense of orientation he would be constantly travelling in a circle. In his quest Thor was headed for the gully. His huge head hung close to the ground. At short distances his vision was microscopic in its keenness; his olfactory nerves were so sensitive that he could catch one of the big rock-ants with his eyes shut. He would choose the flat rocks mostly. His huge right paw, with its long claws, was as clever as a human hand. The stone lifted, a sniff or two, a lick of his hot, flat tongue, and he ambled on to the next. He took this work with tremendous seriousness, much like an elephant hunting for peanuts hidden in a bale of hay. He saw no humour in the operation. As a matter of fact, Nature had not intended there should be any humour about it. Thor's time was more or less valueless, and during the course of a summer he absorbed in his system a good many hundred thousand sour ants, sweet grubs, and juicy insects of various kinds, not to mention a host of gophers and still tinier rock-rabbits. These small things all added to the huge rolls of fat which it was necessary for him to store up for that "absorptive consumption" which kept him alive during his long winter sleep. This was why Nature had made his little greenish-brown eyes twin microscopes, infallible at distances of a few feet, and almost worthless at a thousand yards. As he was about to turn over a fresh stone Thor paused in his operations. For a full minute he stood nearly motionless. Then his head swung slowly, his nose close to the ground. Very faintly he had caught an exceedingly pleasing odour. It was so faint that he was afraid of losing it if he moved. So he stood until he was sure of himself, then he swung his huge shoulders around and descended two yards down the slope, swinging his head slowly from right to left, and sniffing. The scent grew stronger. Another two yards down the slope he found it very strong under a rock. It was a big rock, and weighed probably two hundred pounds. Thor dragged it aside with his one right hand as if it were no more than a pebble. Instantly there was a wild and protesting chatter, and a tiny striped rock-rabbit, very much like a chipmunk, darted away just as Thor's left hand came down with a smash that would have broken the neck of a caribou. It was not the scent of the rock-rabbit, but the savour of what the rock-rabbit had stored under the stone that had attracted Thor. And this booty still remained--a half-pint of ground-nuts piled carefully in a little hollow lined with moss. They were not really nuts. They were more like diminutive potatoes, about the size of cherries, and very much like potatoes in appearance. They were starchy and sweet, and fattening. Thor enjoyed them immensely, rumbling in that curious satisfied way deep down in his chest as he feasted. And then he resumed his quest. He did not hear Langdon as the hunter came nearer and nearer up the broken gully. He did not smell him, for the wind was fatally wrong. He had forgotten the noxious man-smell that had disturbed and irritated him an hour before. He was quite happy; he was good-humoured; he was fat and sleek. An irritable, cross-grained, and quarrelsome bear is always thin. The true hunter knows him as soon as he sets eyes on him. He is like the rogue elephant. Thor continued his food-seeking, edging still closer to the gully. He was within a hundred and fifty yards of it when a sound suddenly brought him alert. Langdon, in his effort to creep up the steep side of the gully for a shot, had accidentally loosened a rock. It went crashing down the ravine, starting other stones that followed in a noisy clatter. At the foot of the coulee, six hundred yards down, Bruce swore softly under his breath. He saw Thor sit up. At that distance he was going to shoot if the bear made for the break. For thirty seconds Thor sat on his haunches. Then he started for the ravine, ambling slowly and deliberately. Langdon, panting and inwardly cursing at his ill luck, struggled to make the last ten feet to the edge of the slope. He heard Bruce yell, but he could not make out the warning. Hands and feet he dug fiercely into shale and rock as he fought to make those last three or four yards as quickly as possible. He was almost to the top when he paused for a moment and turned his eyes upward. His heart went into his throat, and he started. For ten seconds he could not move. Directly over him was a monster head and a huge hulk of shoulder. Thor was looking down on him, his jaws agape, his finger-long fangs snarling, his eyes burning with a greenish-red fire. In that moment Thor saw his first of man. His great lungs were filled with the hot smell of him, and suddenly he turned away from that smell as if from a plague. With his rifle half under him Langdon had had no opportunity to shoot. Wildly he clambered up the remaining few feet. The shale and stones slipped and slid under him. It was a matter of sixty seconds before he pulled himself over the top. Thor was a hundred yards away, speeding in a rolling, ball-like motion toward the break. From the foot of the coulee came the sharp crack of Otto's rifle. Langdon squatted quickly, raising his left knee for a rest, and at a hundred and fifty yards began firing. Sometimes it happens that an hour--a minute--changes the destiny of man; and the ten seconds which followed swiftly after that first shot from the foot of the coulee changed Thor. He had got his fill of the man-smell. He had seen man. And now he _felt_ him. It was as if one of the lightning flashes he had often seen splitting the dark skies had descended upon him and had entered his flesh like a red-hot knife; and with that first burning agony of pain came the strange, echoing roar of the rifles. He had turned up the slope when the bullet struck him in the fore-shoulder, mushrooming its deadly soft point against his tough hide, and tearing a hole through his flesh--but without touching the bone. He was two hundred yards from the ravine when it hit; he was nearer three hundred when the stinging fire seared him again, this time in his flank. Neither shot had staggered his huge bulk, twenty such shots would not have killed him. But the second stopped him, and he turned with a roar of rage that was like the bellowing of a mad bull--a snarling, thunderous cry of wrath that could have been heard a quarter of a mile down the valley. Bruce heard it as he fired his sixth unavailing shot at seven hundred yards. Langdon was reloading. For fifteen seconds Thor offered himself openly, roaring his defiance, challenging the enemy he could no longer see; and then at Langdon's seventh shot, a whiplash of fire raked his back, and in strange dread of this lightning which he could not fight, Thor continued up over the break. He heard other rifle shots, which were like a new kind of thunder. But he was not hit again. Painfully he began the descent into the next valley. Thor knew that he was hurt, but he could not comprehend that hurt. Once in the descent he paused for a few moments, and a little pool of blood dripped upon the ground under his foreleg. He sniffed at it suspiciously and wonderingly. He swung eastward, and a little later he caught a fresh taint of the man-smell in the air. The wind was bringing it to him now, and in spite of the fact that he wanted to lie down and nurse his wound he ambled on a little faster, for he had learned one thing that he would never forget: the man-smell and his hurt had come together. He reached the bottoms, and buried himself in the thick timber; and then, crossing this timber, he came to a creek. Perhaps a hundred times he had travelled up and down this creek. It was the main trail that led from one half of his range to the other. Instinctively he always took this trail when he was hurt or when he was sick, and also when he was ready to den up for the winter. There was one chief reason for this: he was born in the almost impenetrable fastnesses at the head of the creek, and his cubhood had been spent amid its brambles of wild currants and soap berries and its rich red ground carpets of kinnikinic. It was home. In it he was alone. It was the one part of his domain that he held inviolate from all other bears. He tolerated other bears--blacks and grizzlies--on the wider and sunnier slopes of his range just so long as they moved on when he approached. They might seek food there, and nap in the sun-pools, and live in quiet and peace if they did not defy his suzerainty. Thor did not drive other bears from his range, except when it was necessary to demonstrate again that he was High Mogul. This happened occasionally, and there was a fight. And always after a fight Thor came into this valley and went up the creek to cure his wounds. He made his way more slowly than usual to-day. There was a terrible pain in his fore-shoulder. Now and then it hurt him so that his leg doubled up, and he stumbled. Several times he waded shoulder-deep into pools and let the cold water run over his wounds. Gradually they stopped bleeding. But the pain grew worse. Thor's best friend in such an emergency was a clay wallow. This was the second reason why he always took this trail when he was sick or hurt. It led to the clay wallow. And the clay wallow was his doctor. The sun was setting before he reached the wallow. His jaws hung open a little. His great head drooped lower. He had lost a great deal of blood. He was tired, and his shoulder hurt him so badly that he wanted to tear with his teeth at the strange fire that was consuming it. The clay wallow was twenty or thirty feet in diameter, and hollowed into a little shallow pool in the centre. It was a soft, cool, golden-coloured clay, and Thor waded into it to his armpits. Then he rolled over gently on his wounded side. The clay touched his hurt like a cooling salve. It sealed the cut, and Thor gave a great heaving gasp of relief. For a long time he lay in that soft bed of clay. The sun went down, darkness came, and the wonderful stars filled the sky. And still Thor lay there, nursing that first hurt of man. CHAPTER FOUR In the edge of the balsam and spruce Langdon and Otto sat smoking their pipes after supper, with the glowing embers of a fire at their feet. The night air in these higher altitudes of the mountains had grown chilly, and Bruce rose long enough to throw a fresh armful of dry spruce on the coals. Then he stretched out his long form again, with his head and shoulders bolstered comfortably against the butt of a tree, and for the fiftieth time he chuckled. "Chuckle an' be blasted," growled Langdon. "I tell you I hit him twice, Bruce--twice anyway; and I was at a devilish disadvantage!" "'Specially when 'e was lookin' down an' grinnin' in your face," retorted Bruce, who had enjoyed hugely his comrade's ill luck. "Jimmy, at that distance you should a'most ha' killed 'im with a rock!" "My gun was under me," explained Langdon for the twentieth time. "W'ich ain't just the proper place for a gun to be when yo'r hunting a grizzly," reminded Bruce. "The gully was confoundedly steep. I had to dig in with both feet and my fingers. If it had been any steeper I would have used my teeth." Langdon sat up, knocked the ash out of the bowl of his pipe, and reloaded it with fresh tobacco. "Bruce, that's the biggest grizzly in the Rocky Mountains!" "He'd 'a' made a fine rug in your den, Jimmy--if yo'r gun hadn't 'appened to 'ave been under you." "And I'm going to have him in my den before I finish," declared Langdon. "I've made up my mind. We'll make a permanent camp here. I'm going to get that grizzly if it takes all summer. I'd rather have him than any other ten bears in the Firepan Range. He was a nine-footer if an inch. His head was as big as a bushel basket, and the hair on his shoulders was four inches long. I don't know that I'm sorry I didn't kill him. He's hit, and he'll surely fight say. There'll be a lot of fun in getting him." "There will that," agreed Bruce, "'specially if you meet 'im again during the next week or so, while he's still sore from the bullets. Better not have the gun under you then, Jimmy!" "What do you say to making this a permanent camp?" "Couldn't be better. Plenty of fresh meat, good grazing, and fine water." After a moment he added: "He was hit pretty hard. He was bleedin' bad at the summit." In the firelight Langdon began cleaning his rifle. "You think he may clear out--leave the country?" Bruce emitted a grunt of disgust. "Clear out? _Run away_? Mebbe he would if he was a black. But he's a grizzly, and the boss of this country. He may fight shy of this valley for a while, but you can bet he ain't goin' to emigrate. The harder you hit a grizzly the madder he gets, an' if you keep on hittin' 'im he keeps on gettin' madder, until he drops dead. If you want that bear bad enough we can surely get him." "I do," Langdon reiterated with emphasis. "He'll smash record measurements or I miss my guess. I want him, and I want him bad, Bruce. Do you think we'll be able to trail him in the morning?" Bruce shook his head. "It won't be a matter of trailing," he said. "It's just simply _hunt_. After a grizzly has been hit he keeps movin'. He won't go out of his range, an' neither is he going to show himself on the open slopes like that up there. Metoosin ought to be along with the dogs inside of three or four days, an' when we get that bunch of Airedales in action, there'll be some fun." Langdon sighted at the fire through the polished barrel of his rifle, and said doubtfully: "I've been having my doubts about Metoosin for a week back. We've come through some mighty rough country." "That old Indian could follow our trail if we travelled on rock," declared Bruce confidently. "He'll be here inside o' three days, barring the dogs don't run their fool heads into too many porcupines. An' when they come"--he rose and stretched his gaunt frame--"we'll have the biggest time we ever had in our lives. I'm just guessin' these mount'ins are so full o' bear that them ten dogs will all be massacreed within a week. Want to bet?" Langdon closed his rifle with a snap. "I only want one bear," he said, ignoring the challenge, "and I have an idea we'll get him to-morrow. You're the bear specialist of the outfit, Bruce, but I think he was too hard hit to travel far." They had made two beds of soft balsam boughs near the fire, and Langdon now followed his companion's example, and began spreading his blankets. It had been a hard day, and within five minutes after stretching himself out he was asleep. He was still asleep when Bruce rolled out from under his blanket at dawn. Without rousing Langdon the young packer slipped on his boots and waded back a quarter of a mile through the heavy dew to round up the horses. When he returned he brought Dishpan and their saddle-horses with him. By that time Langdon was up, and starting a fire. Langdon frequently reminded himself that such mornings as this had made him disappoint the doctors and rob the grave. Just eight years ago this June he had come into the North for the first time, thin-chested and with a bad lung. "You can go if you insist, young man," one of the doctors had told him, "but you're going to your own funeral." And now he had a five-inch expansion and was as tough as a knot. The first rose-tints of the sun were creeping over the mountain-tops; the air was filled with the sweetness of flowers, and dew, and growing things, and his lungs drew in deep breaths of oxygen laden with the tonic and perfume of balsam. He was more demonstrative than his companion in the joyousness of this wild life. It made him want to shout, and sing, and whistle. He restrained himself this morning. The thrill of the hunt was in his blood. While Otto saddled the horses Langdon made the bannock. He had become an expert at what he called "wild-bread" baking, and his method possessed the double efficiency of saving both waste and time. He opened one of the heavy canvas flour sacks, made a hollow in the flour with his two doubled fists, partly filled this hollow with a pint of water and half a cupful of caribou grease, added a tablespoonful of baking powder and a three-finger pinch of salt, and began to mix. Inside of five minutes he had the bannock loaves in the big tin reflector, and half an hour later the sheep steaks were fried, the potatoes done, and the bannock baked to a golden brown. The sun was just showing its face in the east when they trailed out of camp. They rode across the valley, but walked up the slope, the horses following obediently in their footsteps. It was not difficult to pick up Thor's trail. Where he had paused to snarl back defiance at his enemies there was a big red spatter on the ground; from this point to the summit they followed a crimson thread of blood. Three times in descending into the other valley they found where Thor had stopped, and each time they saw where a pool of blood had soaked into the earth or run over the rock. They passed through the timber and came to the creek, and here, in a strip of firm black sand, Thor's footprints brought them to a pause. Bruce stared. An exclamation of amazement came from Langdon, and without a word having passed between them he drew out his pocket-tape and knelt beside one of the tracks. "Fifteen and a quarter inches!" he gasped. "Measure another," said Bruce. "Fifteen and--a half!" Bruce looked up the gorge. "The biggest I ever see was fourteen an' a half," he said, and there was a touch of awe in his voice. "He was shot up the Athabasca an' he's stood as the biggest grizzly ever killed in British Columbia. Jimmy, _this one beats 'im_!" They went on, and measured the tracks again at the edge of the first pool where Thor had bathed his wounds. There was almost no variation in the measurements. Only occasionally after this did they find spots of blood. It was ten o'clock when they came to the clay wallow and saw where Thor had made his bed in it. "He was pretty sick," said Bruce in a low voice. "He was here most all night." Moved by the same impulse and the same thought, they looked ahead of them. Half a mile farther on the mountains closed in until the gorge between them was dark and sunless. "He was pretty sick," repeated Bruce, still looking ahead. "Mebbe we'd better tie the horses an' go on alone. It's possible--he's in there." They tied the horses to scrub cedars, and relieved Dishpan of her pack. Then, with their rifles in readiness, and eyes and ears alert, they went on cautiously into the silence and gloom of the gorge. CHAPTER FIVE Thor had gone up the gorge at daybreak. He was stiff when he rose from the clay wallow, but a good deal of the burning and pain had gone from his wound. It still hurt him, but not as it had hurt him the preceding evening. His discomfort was not all in his shoulder, and it was not in any one place in particular. He was _sick_, and had he been human he would have been in bed with a thermometer under his tongue and a doctor holding his pulse. He walked up the gorge slowly and laggingly. An indefatigable seeker of food, he no longer thought of food. He was not hungry, and he did not want to eat. With his hot tongue he lapped frequently at the cool water of the creek, and even more frequently he turned half about, and sniffed the wind. He knew that the man-smell and the strange thunder and the still more inexplicable lightning lay behind him. All night he had been on guard, and he was cautious now. For a particular hurt Thor knew of no particular remedy. He was not a botanist in the finer sense of the word, but in creating him the Spirit of the Wild had ordained that he should be his own physician. As a cat seeks catnip, so Thor sought certain things when he was not feeling well. All bitterness is not quinine, but certainly bitter things were Thor's remedies, and as he made his way up the gorge his nose hung close to the ground, and he sniffed in the low copses and thick bush-tangles he passed. He came to a small green spot covered with kinnikinic, a ground plant two inches high which bore red berries as big as a small pea. They were not red now, but green; bitter as gall, and contained an astringent tonic called uvaursi. Thor ate them. After that he found soap berries growing on bushes that looked very much like currant bushes. The fruit was already larger than currants, and turning pink. Indians ate these berries when they had fever, and Thor gathered half a pint before he went on. They, too, were bitter. He nosed the trees, and found at last what he wanted. It was a jackpine, and at several places within his reach the fresh pitch was oozing. A bear seldom passes a bleeding jackpine. It is his chief tonic, and Thor licked the fresh pitch with his tongue. In this way he absorbed not only turpentine, but also, in a roundabout sort of way, a whole pharmacopoeia of medicines made from this particular element. By the time he arrived at the end of the gorge Thor's stomach was a fairly well-stocked drug emporium. Among other things he had eaten perhaps half a quart of spruce and balsam needles. When a dog is sick he eats grass; when a bear is sick he eats pine or balsam needles if he can get them. Also he pads his stomach and intestines with them in the last hour before denning himself away for the winter. The sun was not yet up when Thor came to the end of the gorge, and stood for a few moments at the mouth of a low cave that reached back into the wall of the mountain. How far his memory went back it would be impossible to say; but in the whole world, as he knew it, this cave was home. It was not more than four feet high, and twice as wide, but it was many times as deep and was carpeted with a soft white floor of sand. In some past age a little stream had trickled out of this cavern, and the far end of it made a comfortable bedroom for a sleeping bear when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero. Ten years before Thor's mother had gone in there to sleep through the winter, and when she waddled out to get her first glimpse of spring three little cubs waddled with her. Thor was one of them. He was still half blind, for it is five weeks after a grizzly cub is born before he can see; and there was not much hair on his body, for a grizzly cub is born as naked as a human baby. His eyes open and his hair begins to grow at just about the same time. Since then Thor had denned eight times in that cavern home. He wanted to go in now. He wanted to lie down in the far end of it and wait until he felt better. For perhaps two or three minutes he hesitated, sniffing yearningly at the door to his cave, and then feeling the wind from down the gorge. Something told him that he should go on. To the westward there was a sloping ascent up out of the gorge to the summit, and Thor climbed this. The sun was well up when he reached the top, and for a little while he rested again and looked down on the other half of his domain. Even more wonderful was this valley than the one into which Bruce and Langdon had ridden a few hours before. From range to range it was a good two miles in width, and in the opposite directions it stretched away in a great rolling panorama of gold and green and black. From where Thor stood it was like an immense park. Green slopes reached almost to the summits of the mountains, and to a point halfway up these slopes--the last timber-line--clumps of spruce and balsam trees were scattered over the green as if set there by the hands of men. Some of these timber-patches were no larger than the decorative clumps in a city park, and others covered acres and tens of acres; and at the foot of the slopes on either side, like decorative fringes, were thin and unbroken lines of forest. Between these two lines of forest lay the open valley of soft and undulating meadow, dotted with its purplish bosks of buffalo willow and mountain sage, its green coppices of wild-rose and thorn, and its clumps of trees. In the hollow of the valley ran a stream. Thor descended about four hundred yards from where he stood, and then turned northward along the green slope, so that he was travelling from patch to patch of the parklike timber, a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards above the fringe of forest. To this height, midway between the meadows in the valley and the first shale and bare rock of the peaks, he came most frequently on his small game hunts. Like fat woodchucks the whistlers were already beginning to sun themselves on their rocks. Their long, soft, elusive whistlings, pleasant to hear above the drone of mountain waters, filled the air with a musical cadence. Now and then one would whistle shrilly and warningly close at hand, and then flatten himself out on his rock as the big bear passed, and for a few moments no whistling would break upon the gentle purring of the valley. But Thor was giving no thought to the hunt this morning. Twice he encountered porcupines, the sweetest of all morsels to him, and passed them unnoticed; the warm, _sleeping_ smell of a caribou came hot and fresh from a thicket, but he did not approach the thicket to investigate; out of a coulee, narrow and dark, like a black ditch, he caught the scent of a badger. For two hours he travelled steadily northward along the half-crest of the slopes before he struck down through the timber to the stream. The clay adhering to his wound was beginning to harden, and again he waded shoulder-deep into a pool, and stood there for several minutes. The water washed most of the clay away. For another two hours he followed the creek, drinking frequently. Then came the _sapoos oowin_--six hours after he had left the clay wallow. The kinnikinic berries, the soap berries, the jackpine pitch, the spruce and balsam needles, and the water he had drunk, all mixed in his stomach in one big compelling dose, brought it about--and Thor felt tremendously better, so much better that for the first time he turned and growled back in the direction of his enemies. His shoulder still hurt him, but his sickness was gone. For many minutes after the _sapoos oowin_ he stood without moving, and many times he growled. The snarling rumble deep in his chest had a new meaning now. Until last night and to-day he had not known a real hatred. He had fought other bears, but the fighting rage was not hate. It came quickly, and passed away quickly; it left no growing ugliness; he licked the wounds of a clawed enemy, and was quite frequently happy while he nursed them. But this new thing that was born in him was different. With an unforgetable and ferocious hatred he hated the thing that had hurt him. He hated the man-smell; he hated the strange, white-faced thing he had seen clinging to the side of the gorge; and his hatred included everything associated with them. It was a hatred born of instinct and roused sharply from its long slumber by experience. Without ever having seen or smelled man before, he knew that man was his deadliest enemy, and to be feared more than all the wild things in the mountains. He would fight the biggest grizzly. He would turn on the fiercest pack of wolves. He would brave flood and fire without flinching. But before man he must flee! He must hide! He must constantly guard himself in the peaks and on the plains with eyes and ears and nose! Why he sensed this, why he understood all at once that a creature had come into his world, a pigmy in size, yet more to be dreaded than any foe he had ever known, was a miracle which nature alone could explain. It was a hearkening back in the age-dimmed mental fabric of Thor's race to the earliest days of man--man, first of all, with the club; man with the spear hardened in fire; man with the flint-tipped arrow; man with the trap and the deadfall, and, lastly, man with the gun. Through all the ages man had been his one and only master. Nature had impressed it upon him--had been impressing it upon him through a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand generations. And now for the first time in his life that dormant part of his instinct leaped into warning wakefulness, and he understood. He hated man, and hereafter he would hate everything that bore the man-smell. And with this hate there was also born in him for the first time _fear_. Had man never pushed Thor and his kind to the death the world would not have known him as Ursus Horribilis the Terrible. Thor still followed the creek, nosing along slowly and lumberingly, but very steadily; his head and neck bent low, his huge rear quarters rising and falling in that rolling motion peculiar to all bears, and especially so of the grizzly. His long claws _click-click-clicked_ on the stones; he crunched heavily in the gravel; in soft sand he left enormous footprints. That part of the valley which he was now entering held a particular significance for Thor, and he began to loiter, pausing often to sniff the air on all sides of him. He was not a monogamist, but for many mating seasons past he had come to find his _Iskwao_ in this wonderful sweep of meadow and plain between the two ranges. He could always expect her in July, waiting for him or seeking him with that strange savage longing of motherhood in her breast. She was a splendid grizzly who came from the western ranges when the spirit of mating days called; big, and strong, and of a beautiful golden-brown colour, so that the children of Thor and his _Iskwao_ were the finest young grizzlies in all the mountains. The mother took them back with her unborn, and they opened their eyes and lived and fought in the valleys and on the slopes far to the west. If in later years Thor ever chased his own children out of his hunting grounds, or whipped them in a fight, Nature kindly blinded him to the fact. He was like most grouchy old bachelors: he did not like small folk. He tolerated a little cub as a cross-grained old woman-hater might have tolerated a pink baby; but he wasn't as cruel as Punch, for he had never killed a cub. He had cuffed them soundly whenever they had dared to come within reach of him, but always with the flat, soft palm of his paw, and with just enough force behind it to send them keeling over and over like little round fluffy balls. This was Thor's only expression of displeasure when a strange mother-bear invaded his range with her cubs. In other ways he was quite chivalrous. He would not drive the mother-bear and her cubs away, and he would not fight with her, no matter how shrewish or unpleasant she was. Even if he found them eating at one of his kills, he would do nothing more than give the cubs a sound cuffing. All this is somewhat necessary to show with what sudden and violent agitation Thor caught a certain warm, close smell as he came around the end of a mass of huge boulders. He stopped, turned his head, and swore in his low, growling way. Six feet away from him, grovelling flat in a patch of white sand, wriggling and shaking for all the world like a half-frightened puppy that had not yet made up its mind whether it had met a friend or an enemy, was a lone bear cub. It was not more than three months old--altogether too young to be away from its mother; and it had a sharp little tan face and a white spot on its baby breast which marked it as a member of the black bear family, and not a grizzly. The cub was trying as hard as it could to say, "I am lost, strayed, or stolen; I'm hungry, and I've got a porcupine quill in my foot," but in spite of that, with another ominous growl, Thor began to look about the rocks for the mother. She was not in sight, and neither could he smell her, two facts which turned his great head again toward the cub. Muskwa--an Indian would have called the cub that--had crawled a foot or two nearer on his little belly. He greeted Thor's second inspection with a genial wriggling which carried him forward another half foot, and a low warning rumbled in Thor's chest. "Don't come any nearer," it said plainly enough, "or I'll keel you over!" Muskwa understood. He lay as if dead, his nose and paws and belly flat on the sand, and Thor looked about him again. When his eyes returned to Muskwa, the cub was within three feet of him, squirming flat in the sand and whimpering softly. Thor lifted his right paw four inches from the ground. "Another inch and I'll give you a welt!" he growled. Muskwa wriggled and trembled; he licked his lips with his tiny red tongue, half in fear and half pleading for mercy, and in spite of Thor's lifted paw he wormed his way another six inches nearer. There was a sort of rattle instead of a growl in Thor's throat. His heavy hand fell to the sand. A third time he looked about and sniffed the air; he growled again. Any crusty old bachelor would have understood that growl. "Now where the devil is the kid's mother!" it said. Something happened then. Muskwa had crept close to Thor's wounded leg. He rose up, and his nose caught the scent of the raw wound. Gently his tongue touched it. It was like velvet--that tongue. It was wonderfully pleasant to feel, and Thor stood there for many moments, making neither movement nor sound while the cub licked his wound. Then he lowered his great head. He sniffed the soft little ball of friendship that had come to him. Muskwa whined in a motherless way. Thor growled, but more softly now. It was no longer a threat. The heat of his great tongue fell once on the cub's face. "Come on!" he said, and resumed his journey into the north. And close at his heels followed the motherless little tan-faced cub. CHAPTER SIX The creek which Thor was following was a tributary of the Babine, and he was headed pretty nearly straight for the Skeena. As he was travelling upstream the country was becoming higher and rougher. He had come perhaps seven or eight miles from the summit of the divide when he found Muskwa. From this point the slopes began to assume a different aspect. They were cut up by dark, narrow gullies, and broken by enormous masses of rocks, jagged cuffs, and steep slides of shale. The creek became noisier and more difficult to follow. Thor was now entering one of his strongholds: a region which contained a thousand hiding-places, if he had wanted to hide; a wild, uptorn country where it was not difficult for him to kill big game, and where he was certain that the man-smell would not follow him. For half an hour after leaving the mass of rocks where he had encountered Muskwa, Thor lumbered on as if utterly oblivious of the fact that the cub was following. But he could hear him and smell him. Muskwa was having a hard time of it. His fat little body and his fat little legs were unaccustomed to this sort of journeying, but he was a game youngster, and only twice did he whimper in that half-hour--once he toppled off a rock into the edge of the creek, and again when he came down too hard on the porcupine quill in his foot. At last Thor abandoned the creek and turned up a deep ravine, which he followed until he came to a dip, or plateau-like plain, halfway up a broad slope. Here he found a rock on the sunny side of a grassy knoll, and stopped. It may be that little Muskwa's babyish friendship, the caress of his soft little red tongue at just the psychological moment, and his perseverance in following Thor had all combined to touch a responsive chord in the other's big brute heart, for after nosing about restlessly for a few moments Thor stretched himself out beside the rock. Not until then did the utterly exhausted little tan-faced cub lie down, but when he did lie down he was so dead tired that he was sound asleep in three minutes. Twice again during the early part of the afternoon the _sapoos oowin_ worked on Thor, and he began to feel hungry. It was not the sort of hunger to be appeased by ants and grubs, or even gophers and whistlers. It may be, too, that he guessed how nearly starved little Muskwa was. The cub had not once opened his eyes, and he still lay in his warm pool of sunshine when Thor made up his mind to go on. It was about three o'clock, a particularly quiet and drowsy part of a late June or early July day in a northern mountain valley. The whistlers had piped until they were tired, and lay squat out in the sunshine on their rocks; the eagles soared so high above the peaks that they were mere dots; the hawks, with meat-filled crops, had disappeared into the timber; goat and sheep were lying down far up toward the sky-line, and if there were any grazing animals near they were well fed and napping. The mountain hunter knew that this was the hour when he should scan the green slopes and the open places between the clumps of timber for bears, and especially for flesh-eating bears. It was Thor's chief prospecting hour. Instinct told him that when all other creatures were well fed and napping he could move more openly and with less fear of detection. He could find his game, and watch it. Occasionally he would kill a goat or a sheep or a caribou in broad daylight, for over short distances he could run faster than either a goat or a sheep, and as fast as a caribou. But chiefly he killed at sunset or in the darkness of early evening. Thor rose from beside the rock with a prodigious whoof that roused Muskwa. The cub got up, blinked at Thor and then at the sun, and shook himself until he fell down. Thor eyed the black and tan mite a bit sourly. After the _sapoos oowin_ he was craving red, juicy flesh, just as a very hungry man yearns for a thick porterhouse instead of lady fingers or mayonnaise salad--flesh and plenty of it; and how he could hunt down and kill a caribou with that half-starved but very much interested cub at his heels puzzled him. Muskwa himself seemed to understand and answer the question. He ran a dozen yards ahead of Thor, then stopped and looked back impudently, his little ears perked forward, and with the look in his face of a small boy proving to his father that he is perfectly qualified to go on his first rabbit hunt. With another _whoof_ Thor started along the slope in a spurt that brought him up to Muskwa immediately, and with a sudden sweep of his right paw he sent the cub rolling a dozen feet behind him, a manner of speech that said plainly enough, "That's where you belong if you're going hunting with me!" Then Thor lumbered slowly on, eyes and ears and nostrils keyed for the hunt. He descended until he was not more than a hundred yards above the creek, and he no longer sought out the easiest trail, but the rough and broken places. He travelled slowly and in a zigzag fashion, stealing cautiously around great masses of boulders, sniffing up each coulee that he came to, and investigating the timber clumps and windfalls. At one time he would be so high up that he was close to the bare shale, and again so low down that he walked in the sand and gravel of the creek. He caught many scents in the wind, but none that held or deeply interested him. Once, up near the shale, he smelled goat; but he never went above the shale for meat. Twice he smelled sheep, and late in the afternoon he saw a big ram looking down on him from a precipitous crag a hundred feet above. Lower down his nose touched the trails of porcupines, and often his head hung over the footprints of caribou as he sniffed the air ahead. There were other bears in the valley, too. Mostly these had travelled along the creek-bottom, showing they were blacks or cinnamons. Once Thor struck the scent of another grizzly, and he rumbled ill-humouredly. Not once in the two hours after they left the sunrock did Thor pay any apparent attention to Muskwa, who was growing hungrier and weaker as the day lengthened. No boy that ever lived was gamer than the little tan-faced cub. In the rough places he stumbled and fell frequently; up places that Thor could make in a single step he had to fight desperately to make his way; three times Thor waded through the creek and Muskwa half drowned himself in following; he was battered and bruised and wet and his foot hurt him--but he followed. Sometimes he was close to Thor, and at others he had to run to catch up. The sun was setting when Thor at last found game, and Muskwa was almost dead. He did not know why Thor flattened his huge bulk suddenly alongside a rock at the edge of a rough meadow, from which they could look down into a small hollow. He wanted to whimper, but he was afraid. And if he had ever wanted his mother at any time in his short life he wanted her now. He could not understand why she had left him among the rocks and had never come back; that tragedy Langdon and Bruce were to discover a little later. And he could not understand why she did not come to him now. This was just about his nursing hour before going to sleep for the night, for he was a March cub, and, according to the most approved mother-bear regulations, should have had milk for another month. He was what Metoosin, the Indian, would have called _munookow_--that is, he was very soft. Being a bear, his birth had not been like that of other animals. His mother, like all mother-bears in a cold country, had brought him into life a long time before she had finished her winter nap in her den. He had come while she was asleep. For a month or six weeks after that, while he was still blind and naked, she had given him milk, while she herself neither ate nor drank nor saw the light of day. At the end of those six weeks she had gone forth with him from her den to seek the first mouthful of sustenance for herself. Not more than another six weeks had passed since then, and Muskwa weighed about twenty pounds--that is, he had weighed twenty pounds, but he was emptier now than he had ever been in his life, and probably weighed a little less. Three hundred yards below Thor was a clump of balsams, a small thick patch that grew close to the edge of the miniature lake whose water crept around the farther end of the hollow. In that clump there was a caribou--perhaps two or three. Thor knew that as surely as though he saw them. The _wenipow_, or "lying down," smell of hoofed game was as different from the _nechisoo_, or "grazing smell," to Thor as day from night. One hung elusively in the air, like the faint and shifting breath of a passing woman's scented dress and hair; the other came hot and heavy, close to the earth, like the odour of a broken bottle of perfume. Even Muskwa now caught the scent as he crept up close behind the big grizzly and lay down. For fully ten minutes Thor did not move. His eyes took in the hollow, the edge of the lake, and the approach to the timber, and his nose gauged the wind as accurately as the pointing of a compass. The reason he remained quiet was that he was almost on the danger-line. In other words, the mountains and the sudden dip had formed a "split wind" in the hollow, and had Thor appeared fifty yards above where he now crouched, the keen-scented caribou would have got full wind of him. With his little ears cocked forward and a new gleam of understanding in his eyes, Muskwa now looked upon his first lesson in game-stalking. Crouched so low that he seemed to be travelling on his belly, Thor moved slowly and noiselessly toward the creek, the huge ruff just forward of his shoulders standing out like the stiffened spine of a dog's back. Muskwa followed. For fully a hundred yards Thor continued his detour, and three times in that hundred yards he paused to sniff in the direction of the timber. At last he was satisfied. The wind was full in his face, and it was rich with promise. [Illustration: "Like the wind Thor bore down on the flank of the caribou, swung a little to one side, and then without any apparent effort--still like a huge ball--he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done."] He began to advance, in a slinking, rolling, rock-shouldered motion, taking shorter steps now, and with every muscle in his great body ready for action. Within two minutes he reached the edge of the balsams, and there he paused again. The crackling of underbrush came distinctly. The caribou were up, but they were not alarmed. They were going forth to drink and graze. Thor moved again, parallel to the sound. This brought him quickly to the edge of the timber, and there he stood, concealed by foliage, but with the lake and the short stretch of meadow in view. A big bull caribou came out first. His horns were half grown, and in velvet. A two-year-old followed, round and sleek and glistening like brown velvet in the sunset. For two minutes the bull stood alert, eyes, ears, and nostrils seeking for danger-signals; at his heels the younger animal nibbled less suspiciously at the grass. Then lowering his head until his antlers swept back over his shoulders the old bull started slowly toward the lake for his evening drink. The two-year-old followed--and Thor came out softly from his hiding-place. For a single moment he seemed to gather himself--and then he started. Fifty feet separated him from the caribou. He had covered half that distance like a huge rolling ball when the animals heard him. They were off like arrows sprung from the bow. But they were too late. It would have taken a swift horse to beat Thor and he had already gained momentum. Like the wind he bore down on the flank of the two-year-old, swung a little to one side, and then without any apparent effort--still like a huge ball--he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done. His huge right arm swung over the two-year-old's shoulder, and as they went down his left paw gripped the caribou's muzzle like a huge human hand. Thor fell under, as he always planned to fall. He did not hug his victim to death. Just once he doubled up one of his hind legs, and when it went back the five knives it carried disembowelled the caribou. They not only disembowelled him, but twisted and broke his ribs as though they were of wood. Then Thor got up, looked around, and shook himself with a rumbling growl which might have been either a growl of triumph or an invitation for Muskwa to come to the feast. If it was an invitation, the little tan-faced cab did not wait for a second. For the first time he smelled and tasted the warm blood of meat. And this smell and taste had come at the psychological moment in his life, just as it had come in Thor's life years before. All grizzlies are not killers of big game. In fact, very few of them are. Most of them are chiefly vegetarians, with a meat diet of smaller animals, such as gophers, whistling marmots, and porcupines. Now and then chance makes of a grizzly a hunter of caribou, goat, sheep, deer, and even moose. Such was Thor. And such, in days to come, would Muskwa be, even though he was a black and not of the family Ursus Horribilis Ord. For an hour the two feasted, not in the ravenous way of hungry dogs, but in the slow and satisfying manner of gourmets. Muskwa, flat on his little paunch, and almost between Thor's huge forearms, lapped up the blood and snarled like a kitten as he ground tender flesh between his tiny teeth. Thor, as in all his food-seeking, hunted first for the tidbits, though the _sapoos oovin_ had made him as empty as a room without furniture. He pulled out the thin leafs of fat from about the kidneys and bowels, and munched at yard-long strings of it, his eyes half closed. The last of the sun faded away from the mountains, and darkness followed swiftly after the twilight. It was dark when they finished, and little Muskwa was as wide as he was long. Thor was the greatest of nature's conservators. With him nothing went to waste that was good to eat, and at the present moment if the old bull caribou had deliberately walked within his reach Thor in all probability would not have killed him. He had food, and his business was to store that food where it would be safe. He went back to the balsam thicket, but the gorged cub now made no effort to follow him. He was vastly contented, and something told him that Thor would not leave the meat. Ten minutes later Thor verified his judgment by returning. In his huge jaws he caught the caribou at the back of the neck. Then he swung himself partly sidewise and began dragging the carcass toward the timber as a dog might have dragged a ten-pound slab of bacon. The young bull probably weighed four hundred pounds. Had he weighed eight hundred, or even a thousand, Thor would still have dragged him--but had the carcass weighed that much he would have turned straight around and _backed_ with his load. In the edge of the balsams Thor had already found a hollow in the ground. He thrust the carcass into this hollow, and while Muskwa watched with a great and growing interest, he proceeded to cover it over with dry needles, sticks, a rotting tree butt, and a log. He did not rear himself up and leave his "mark" on a tree as a warning to other bears. He simply nosed round for a bit, and then went out of the timber. Muskwa followed him now, and he had some trouble in properly navigating himself under the handicap of his added weight. The stars were beginning to fill the sky, and under these stars Thor struck straight up a steep and rugged slope that led to the mountain-tops. Up and up he went, higher than Muskwa had ever been. They crossed a patch of snow. And then they came to a place where it seemed as if a volcano had disrupted the bowels of a mountain. Man could hardly have travelled where Thor led Muskwa. At last he stopped. He was on a narrow ledge, with a perpendicular wall of rock at his back. Under him fell away the chaos of torn-up rock and shale. Far below the valley lay a black and bottomless pit. Thor lay down, and for the first time since his hurt in the other valley he stretched out his head between his great arms, and heaved a deep and restful sigh. Muskwa crept up close to him, so close that he was warmed by Thor's body; and together they slept the deep and peaceful sleep of full stomachs, while over them the stars grew brighter, and the moon came up to flood the peaks and the valley in a golden splendour. CHAPTER SEVEN Langdon and Bruce crossed the summit into the westward valley in the afternoon of the day Thor left the clay wallow. It was two o'clock when Bruce turned back for the three horses, leaving Langdon on a high ridge to scour the surrounding country through his glasses. For two hours after the packer returned with the outfit they followed slowly along the creek above which the grizzly had travelled, and when they camped for the night they were still two or three miles from the spot where Thor came upon Muskwa. They had not yet found his tracks in the sand of the creek bottom. Yet Bruce was confident. He knew that Thor had been following the crests of the slopes. "If you go back out of this country an' write about bears, don't make a fool o' yo'rself like most of the writin' fellows, Jimmy," he said, as they sat back to smoke their pipes after supper. "Two years ago I took a natcherlist out for a month, an' he was so tickled he said 'e'd send me a bunch o' books about bears an' wild things. He did! I read 'em. I laughed at first, an' then I got mad an' made a fire of 'em. Bears is cur'ous. There's a mighty lot of interestin' things to say about 'em without making a fool o' yo'rself. There sure is!" Langdon nodded. "One has to hunt and kill and hunt and kill for years before he discovers the real pleasure in big game stalking," he said slowly, looking into the fire. "And when he comes down to that real pleasure, the part of it that absorbs him heart and soul, he finds that after all the big thrill isn't in killing, but in letting live. I want this grizzly, and I'm going to have him. I won't leave the mountains until I kill him. But, on the other hand, we could have killed two other bears to-day, and I didn't take a shot. I'm learning the game, Bruce--I'm beginning to taste the real pleasure of hunting. And when one hunts in the right way one learns facts. You needn't worry. I'm going to put only facts in what I write." Suddenly he turned and looked at Bruce. "What were some of the 'fool things' you read in those books?" he asked. Bruce blew out a cloud of smoke reflectively. "What made me maddest," he said, "was what those writer fellows said about bears havin' 'marks.' Good Lord, accordin' to what they said all a bear has to do is stretch 'imself up, put a mark on a tree, and that country is his'n until a bigger bear comes along an' licks 'im. In one book I remember where a grizzly rolled a log up under a tree so he could stand on it an' put his mark above another grizzly's mark. Think of that! "No bear makes a mark that means anything. I've seen grizzlies bite hunks out o' trees an' scratch 'em just as a cat might, an' in the summer when they get itchy an' begin to lose their hair they stand up an' rub against trees. They rub because they itch an' not because they're leavin' their cards for other bears. Caribou an' moose an' deer do the same thing to get the velvet off their horns. "Them same writers think every grizzly has his own range, an' they don't--not by a long shot they don't! I've seen eight full-grown grizzlies feedin' on the same slide! You remember, two years ago, we shot four grizzlies in a little valley that wasn't a mile long. Now an' then there's a boss among grizzlies, like this fellow we're after, but even he ain't got his range alone. I'll bet there's twenty other bears in these two valleys! An' that natcherlist I had two years ago couldn't tell a grizzly's track from a black bear's track, an so 'elp me if he knew what a cinnamon was!" He took his pipe from his mouth and spat truculently into the fire, and Langdon knew that other things were coming. His richest hours were those when the usually silent Bruce fell into these moods. "A cinnamon!" he growled. "Think of that, Jimmy--he thought there were such a thing as a cinnamon bear! An' when I told him there wasn't, an' that the cinnamon bear you read about is a black or a grizzly of a cinnamon colour, he laughed at me--an' there I was born an' brung up among bears! His eyes fair popped when I told him about the colour o' bears, an' he thought I was feedin' him rope. I figgered afterward mebby that was why he sent me the books. He wanted to show me he was right. "Jimmy, there ain't anything on earth that's got more colours than a bear! I've seen black bears as white as snow, an' I've seen grizzlies almost as black as a black bear. I've seen cinnamon black bears an' I've seen cinnamon grizzlies, an' I've seen browns an' golds an' almost-yellows of both kinds. They're as different in colour as they are in their natchurs an' way of eatin'. "I figger most natcherlists go out an' get acquainted with one grizzly, an' then they write up all grizzlies accordin' to that one. That ain't fair to the grizzlies, darned if it is! There wasn't one of them books that didn't say the grizzly wasn't the fiercest, man-eatingest cuss alive. He ain't--unless you corner 'im. He's as cur'ous as a kid, an' he's good-natured if you don't bother 'im. Most of 'em are vegetarians, but some of 'em ain't. I've seen grizzlies pull down goat an' sheep an' caribou, an' I've seen other grizzlies feed on the same slides with them animals an' never make a move toward them. They're cur'ous, Jimmy. There's lots you can say about 'em without makin' a fool o' yourself!" Bruce beat the ash out of his pipe as an emphasis to his final remark. As he reloaded with fresh tobacco, Langdon said: "You can make up your mind this big fellow we are after is a game-killer, Bruce." "You can't tell," replied Bruce. "Size don't always tell. I knew a grizzly once that wasn't much bigger'n a dog, an' he was a game-killer. Hundreds of animals are winter-killed in these mount'ins every year, an' when spring comes the bears eat the carcasses; but old flesh don't make game-killers. Sometimes it's born in a grizzly to be a killer, an' sometimes he becomes a killer by chance. If he kills once, he'll kill again. "Once I was on the side of a mount'in an' saw a goat walk straight into the face of a grizzly. The bear wasn't going to make a move, but the goat was so scared it ran plump into the old fellow, and he killed it. He acted mighty surprised for ten minutes afterward, an' he sniffed an' nosed around the warm carcass for half an hour before he tore it open. That was his first taste of what you might call live game. I didn't kill him, an' I'm sure from that day on he was a big-game hunter." "I should think size would have something to do with it," argued Langdon. "It seems to me that a bear which eats flesh would be bigger and stronger than if he was a vegetarian." "That's one o' the cur'ous things you want to write about," replied Bruce, with one of his odd chuckles. "Why is it a bear gets so fat he can hardly walk along in September when he don't feed on much else but berries an' ants an' grubs? Would you get fat on wild currants? "An' why does he grow so fast during the four or five months he's denned up an' dead to the world without a mouthful to eat or drink? "Why is it that for a month, an' sometimes two months, the mother gives her cubs milk while she's still what you might call asleep? Her nap ain't much more'n two-thirds over when the cubs are born. "And why ain't them cubs bigger'n they are? That natcherlist laughed until I thought he'd split when I told him a grizzly bear cub wasn't much bigger'n a house-cat kitten when born!" "He was one of the few fools who aren't willing to learn--and yet you cannot blame him altogether," said Langdon. "Four or five years ago I wouldn't have believed it, Bruce. I couldn't actually believe it until we dug out those cubs up the Athabasca--one weighed eleven ounces and the other nine. You remember?" "An' they were a week old, Jimmy. An' the mother weighed eight hundred pounds." For a few moments they both puffed silently on their pipes. "Almost--inconceivable," said Langdon then. "And yet it's true. And it isn't a freak of nature, Bruce--it's simply a result of Nature's far-sightedness. If the cubs were as large comparatively as a house-cat's kittens the mother-bear could not sustain them during those weeks when she eats and drinks nothing herself. There seems to be just one flaw in this scheme: an ordinary black bear is only about half as large as a grizzly, yet a black bear cub when born is much larger than a grizzly cub. Now why the devil that should be--" Bruce interrupted his friend with a good-natured laugh. "That's easy--easy, Jimmy!" he exclaimed. "Do you remember last year when we picked strawberries in the valley an' threw snowballs two hours later up on the mountain? Higher you climb the colder it gets, don't it? Right now--first day of July--you'd half freeze up on some of those peaks! A grizzly dens high, Jimmy, and a black bear dens low. When the snow is four feet deep up where the grizzly dens, the black bear can still feed in the deep valleys an' thick timber. He goes to bed mebby a week or two weeks later than the grizzly, an' he gets up in the spring a week or two weeks earlier; he's fatter when he dens up an' he ain't so poor when he comes out--an' so the mother's got more strength to give to her cubs. It looks that way to me." "You've hit the nail on the head as sure as you're a year old!" cried Langdon enthusiastically. "Bruce, I never thought of that!" "There's a good many things you don't think about until you run across 'em," said the mountaineer. "It's what you said a while ago--such things are what makes huntin' a fine sport when you've learned huntin' ain't always killin'--but lettin' live. One day I lay seven hours on a mountain-top watchin' a band o' sheep at play, an' I had more fun than if I'd killed the whole bunch." Bruce rose to his feet and stretched himself, an after-supper operation that always preceded his announcement that he was going to turn in. "Fine day to-morrow," he said, yawning. "Look how white the snow is on the peaks." "Bruce--" "What?" "How heavy is this bear we're after?" "Twelve hundred pounds--mebby a little more. I didn't have the pleasure of lookin' at him so close as you did, Jimmy. If I had we'd been dryin' his skin now!" "And he's in his prime?" "Between eight and twelve years old, I'd say, by the way he went up the slope. An old bear don't roll so easy." "You've run across some pretty old bears, Bruce?" "So old some of 'em needed crutches," said Bruce, unlacing his boots. "I've shot bears so old they'd lost their teeth." "How old?" "Thirty--thirty-five--mebby forty years. Good-night, Jimmy!" "Good-night, Bruce!" Langdon was awakened some time hours later by a deluge of rain that brought him out of his blankets with a yell to Bruce. They had not put up their tepee, and a moment later he heard Bruce anathematizing their idiocy. The night was as black as a cavern, except when it was broken by lurid flashes of lightning, and the mountains rolled and rumbled with deep thunder. Disentangling himself from his drenched blanket, Langdon stood up. A glare of lightning revealed Bruce sitting in his blankets, his hair dripping down over his long, lean face, and at sight of him Langdon laughed outright. [Illustration: "They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks. They had not gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and stopped."] "Fine day to-morrow," he taunted, repeating Bruce's words of a few hours before. "Look how white the snow is on the peaks!" Whatever Bruce said was drowned in a crash of thunder. Langdon waited for another lightning flash and then dove for the shelter of a thick balsam. Under this he crouched for five or ten minutes, when the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The thunder rolled southward, and the lightning went with it. In the darkness he heard Bruce fumbling somewhere near. Then a match was lighted, and he saw his comrade looking at his watch. "Pretty near three o'clock," he said. "Nice shower, wasn't it?" "I rather expected it," replied Langdon carelessly. "You know, Bruce, whenever the snow on the peaks is so white--" "Shut up--an' let's get a fire! Good thing we had sense enough to cover our grub with the blankets. Are yo' wet?" Langdon was wringing the water from his hair. He felt like a drowned rat. "No. I was under a thick balsam, and prepared for it. When you called my attention to the whiteness of the snow on the peaks I knew--" "Forget the snow," growled Bruce, and Langdon could hear him breaking off dry pitch-filled twigs under a spruce. He went to help him, and five minutes later they had a fire going. The light illumined their faces, and each saw that the other was not unhappy. Bruce was grinning under his sodden hair. "I was dead asleep when it came," he explained. "An' I thought I'd fallen in a lake. I woke up tryin' to swim." An early July rain at three o'clock in the morning in the northern British Columbia mountains is not as warm as it might be, and for the greater part of an hour Langdon and Bruce continued to gather fuel and dry their blankets and clothing. It was five o'clock before they had breakfast, and a little after six when they started with their two saddles and single pack up the valley. Bruce had the satisfaction of reminding Langdon that his prediction had come true for a glorious day followed the thunder shower. Under them the meadows were dripping. The valley purred louder with the music of the swollen streamlets. From the mountain-tops a half of last night's snow was gone, and to Langdon the flowers seemed taller and more beautiful. The air that drifted through the valley was laden with the sweetness and freshness of the morning, and over and through it all the sun shone in a warm and golden sea. They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks. They had not gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation, and stopped. He pointed to a round patch of sand in which Thor had left one of his huge footprints. Langdon dismounted and measured it. "It's he!" he cried, and there was a thrill of excitement in his voice. "Hadn't we better go on without the horses, Bruce?" The mountaineer shook his head. But before he voiced an opinion he got down from his horse and scanned the sides of the mountains ahead of them through his long telescope. Langdon used his double-barrelled hunting glass. They discovered nothing. "He's still in the creek-bottom, an' he's probably three or four miles ahead," said Bruce. "We'll ride on a couple o' miles an' find a place good for the horses. The grass an' bushes will be dry then." It was easy to follow Thor's course after this, for he had hung close to the creek. Within three or four hundred yards of the great mass of boulders where the grizzly had come upon the tan-faced cub was a small copse of spruce in the heart of a grassy dip, and here the hunters stripped and hobbled their horses. Twenty minutes later they had come up cautiously to the soft carpet of sand where Thor and Muskwa had become acquainted. The heavy rain had obliterated the cub's tiny footprints, but the sand was cut up by the grizzly's tracks. The packer's teeth gleamed as he looked at Langdon. "He ain't very far," he whispered. "Shouldn't wonder if he spent the night pretty close an' he's mooshing on just ahead of us." He wet a finger and held it above his head to get the wind. He nodded significantly. "We'd better get up on the slopes," he said. They made their way around the end of the boulders, holding their guns in readiness, and headed for a small coulee that promised an easy ascent of the first slope. At the mouth of this both paused again. Its bottom was covered with sand, and in this sand were the tracks of another bear. Bruce dropped on his knees. "It's another grizzly," said Langdon. "No, it ain't; it's a black," said Bruce. "Jimmy, can't I ever knock into yo'r head the difference between a black an' a grizzly track? This is the hind foot, an' the heel is round. If it was a grizzly it would be pointed. An' it's too broad an' clubby f'r a grizzly, an' the claws are too long f'r the length of the foot. It's a black as plain as the nose on yo'r face!" "And going our way," said Langdon. "Come on!" Two hundred yards up the coulee the bear had climbed out on the slope. Langdon and Bruce followed. In the thick grass and hard shale of the first crest of the slope the tracks were quickly lost, but the hunters were not much interested in these tracks now. From the height at which they were travelling they had a splendid view below them. Not once did Bruce take his eyes from the creek bottom. He knew that it was down there they would find the grizzly, and he was interested in nothing else just at present. Langdon, on the other hand, was interested in everything that might be living or moving about them; every mass of rock and thicket of thorn held possibilities for him, and his eyes were questing the higher ridges and the peaks as well as their immediate trail. It was because of this that he saw something which made him suddenly grip his companion's arm and pull him down beside him on the ground. "Look!" he whispered, stretching out an arm. From his kneeling posture Bruce stared. His eyes fairly popped in amazement. Not more than thirty feet above them was a big rock shaped like a dry-goods box, and protruding from behind the farther side of this rock was the rear half of a bear. It was a black bear, its glossy coat shining in the sunlight. For a full half minute Bruce continued to stare. Then he grinned. "Asleep--dead asleep! Jimmy--you want to see some fun?" He put down his gun and drew out his long hunting knife. He chuckled softly as he felt of its keen point. "If you never saw a bear run yo'r goin' to see one run now, Jimmy! You stay here!" He began crawling slowly and quietly up the slope toward the rock, while Langdon held his breath in anticipation of what was about to happen. Twice Bruce looked back, and he was grinning broadly. There was undoubtedly going to be a very much astonished bear racing for the tops of the Rocky Mountains in another moment or two, and between this thought and the picture of Bruce's long lank figure snaking its way upward foot by foot the humour of the situation fell upon Langdon. Finally Bruce reached the rock. The long knife-blade gleamed in the sun; then it shot forward and a half inch of steel buried itself in the bear's rump. What followed in the next thirty seconds Langdon would never forget. The bear made no movement. Bruce jabbed again. Still there was no movement, and at the second thrust Bruce remained as motionless as the rock against which he was crouching, and his mouth was wide open as he stared down at Langdon. "Now what the devil do you think of that?" he said, and rose slowly to his feet. "He ain't asleep--he's dead!" Langdon ran up to him, and they went around the end of the rock. Bruce still held the knife in his hand and there was an odd expression in his face--a look that put troubled furrows between his eyes as he stood for a moment without speaking. "I never see anything like that before," he said, slowly slipping his knife in its sheath. "It's a she-bear, an' she had cubs--pretty young cubs, too, from the looks o' her.' "She was after a whistler, and undermined the rock," added Langdon. "Crushed to death, eh, Bruce?" Bruce nodded. "I never see anything like it before," he repeated. "I've wondered why they didn't get killed by diggin' under the rocks--but I never see it. Wonder where the cubs are? Poor little devils!" He was on his knees examining the dead mother's teats. "She didn't have more'n two--mebby one," he said, rising. "About three months old." "And they'll starve?" "If there was only one he probably will. The little cuss had so much milk he didn't have to forage for himself. Cubs is a good deal like babies--you can wean 'em early or you can ha'f grow 'em on pap. An' this is what comes of runnin' off an' leavin' your babies alone," moralized Bruce. "If you ever git married, Jimmy, don't you let yo'r wife do it. Sometimes th' babies burn up or break their necks!" Again he turned along the crest of the slope, his eyes once more searching the valley, and Langdon followed a step behind him, wondering what had become of the cub. And Muskwa, still slumbering on the rock-ledge with Thor, was dreaming of the mother who lay crushed under the rock on the slope, and as he dreamed he whimpered softly. CHAPTER EIGHT The ledge where Thor and Muskwa lay caught the first gleams of the morning sun, and as the sun rose higher the ledge grew warmer and warmer, and Thor, when he awoke, merely stretched himself and made no effort to rise. After his wounds and the _sapoos oowin_ and the feast in the valley he was feeling tremendously fine and comfortable, and he was in no very great haste to leave this golden pool of sunlight. For a long time he looked steadily and curiously at Muskwa. In the chill of the night the little cub had snuggled up close between the warmth of Thor's huge forearms, and still lay there, whimpering in his babyish way as he dreamed. After a time Thor did something that he had never been guilty of before--he sniffed gently at the soft little ball between his paws, and just once his big flat red tongue touched the cub's face; and Muskwa, perhaps still dreaming of his mother, snuggled closer. As little white children have won the hearts of savages who were about to slay them, so Muskwa had come strangely into the life of Thor. The big grizzly was still puzzled. Not only was he struggling against an unaccountable dislike of all cubs in general, but also against the firmly established habits of ten years of aloneness. Yet he was beginning to comprehend that there was something very pleasant and companionable in the nearness of Muskwa. With the coming of man a new emotion had entered into his being--perhaps only the spark of an emotion. Until one has enemies, and faces dangers, one cannot fully appreciate friendship--and it may be that Thor, who now confronted real enemies and a real danger for the first time, was beginning to understand what friendship meant. Also it was drawing near to his mating season, and about Muskwa was the scent of his mother. And so as Muskwa continued to bask and dream in the sunshine, there was a growing content in Thor. He looked down into the valley, shimmering in the wet of the night's rain, and he saw nothing to rouse discontent; he sniffed the air, and it was filled with the unpolluted sweetness of growing grass, of flowers, and balsam, and water fresh from the clouds. Thor began to lick his wound, and it was this movement that roused Muskwa. The cub lifted his head. He blinked at the sun for a moment--then rubbed his face sleepily with his tiny paw and stood up. Like all youngsters, he was ready for another day, in spite of the hardships and toil of the preceding one. While Thor still lay restfully looking down into the valley, Muskwa began investigating the crevices in the rock wall, and tumbled about among the boulders on the ledge. From the valley Thor turned his eyes to the cub. There was curiosity in his attitude as he watched Muskwa's antics and queer tumblings among the rocks. Then he rose cumbrously and shook himself. For at least five minutes he stood looking down into the valley, and sniffing the wind, as motionless as though carven out of rock. And Muskwa, perking up his little ears, came and stood beside him, his sharp little eyes peering from Thor off into sunlit space, and then back to Thor again, as if wondering what was about to happen next. The big grizzly answered the question. He turned along the rock shelf and began descending into the valley. Muskwa tagged behind, just as he had followed the day before. The cub felt twice as big and fully twice as strong as yesterday, and he no longer was obsessed by that uncomfortable yearning for his mother's milk. Thor had graduated him quickly, and he was a meat-eater. And he knew they were returning to where they had feasted last night. They had descended half the distance of the slope when the wind brought something to Thor. A deep-chested growl rolled out of him as he stopped for a moment, the thick ruff about his neck bristling ominously. The scent he had caught came from the direction of his cache, and it was an odour which he was not in a humour to tolerate in this particular locality. Strongly he smelled the presence of another bear. This would not have excited him under ordinary conditions, and it would not have excited him now had the presence been that of a female bear. But the scent was that of a he-bear, and it drifted strongly up a rock-cut ravine that ran straight down toward the balsam patch in which he had hidden the caribou. Thor stopped to ask himself no questions. Growling under his breath, he began to descend so swiftly that Muskwa had great difficulty in keeping up with him. Not until they came to the edge of the plain that overlooked the lake and the balsams did they stop. Muskwa's little jaws hung open as he panted. Then his ears pricked forward, he stared, and suddenly every muscle in his small body became rigid. Seventy-five yards below them their cache was being outraged. The robber was a huge black bear. He was a splendid outlaw. He was, perhaps, three hundred pounds lighter than Thor, but he stood almost as high, and in the sunlight his coat shone with the velvety gloss of sable--the biggest and boldest bear that had entered Thor's domain in many a day. He had pulled the caribou carcass from its hiding-place and was eating as Thor and Muskwa looked down on him. After a moment Muskwa peered up questioningly at Thor. "What are we going to do?" he seemed to ask. "He's got our dinner!" Slowly and very deliberately Thor began picking his way down those last seventy-five yards. He seemed to be in no hurry bow. When he reached the edge of the meadow, perhaps thirty or forty yards from the big invader, he stopped again. There was nothing particularly ugly in his attitude, but the ruff about his shoulders was bigger than Muskwa had ever seen it before. The black looked up from his feast, and for a full half minute they eyed each other. In a slow, pendulum-like motion the grizzly's huge head swung from side to side; the black was as motionless as a sphinx. Four or five feet from Thor stood Muskwa. In a small-boyish sort of way he knew that something was going to happen soon, and in that same small-boyish way he was ready to put his stub of a tail between his legs and flee with Thor, or advance and fight with him. His eyes were curiously attracted by that pendulum-like swing of Thor's head. All nature understood that swing. Man had learned to understand it. "Look out when a grizzly rolls his head!" is the first commandment of the bear-hunter in the mountains. The big black understood, and like other bears in Thor's domain, he should have slunk a little backward, turned about and made his exit. Thor gave him ample time. But the black was a new bear in the valley--and he was not only that: he was a powerful bear, and unwhipped; and he had overlorded a range of his own. He stood his ground. The first growl of menace that passed between the two came from the black. Again Thor advanced, slowly and deliberately--straight for the robber. Muskwa followed halfway and then stopped and squatted himself on his belly. Ten feet from the carcass Thor paused again; and now his huge head swung more swiftly back and forth, and a low rumbling thunder came from between his half-open jaws. The black's ivory fangs snarled; Muskwa whined. Again Thor advanced, a foot at a time, and now his gaping jaws almost touched the ground, and his huge body was hunched low. When no more than the length of a yardstick separated them there came a pause. For perhaps thirty seconds they were like two angry men, each trying to strike terror to the other's heart by the steadiness of his look. Muskwa shook as if with the ague, and whined--softly and steadily he whined, and the whine reached Thor's ears. What happened after that began so quickly that Muskwa was struck dumb with terror, and he lay flattened out on the earth as motionless as a stone. With that grinding, snarling grizzly roar, which is unlike any other animal cry in the world, Thor flung himself at the black. The black reared a little--just enough to fling himself backward easily as they came together breast to breast. He rolled upon his back, but Thor was too old a fighter to be caught by that first vicious ripping stroke of the black's hind foot, and he buried his four long flesh-rending teeth to the bone of his enemy's shoulder. At the same time he struck a terrific cutting stroke with his left paw. Thor was a digger, and his claws were dulled; the black was not a digger, but a tree-climber, and his claws were like knives. And like knives they buried themselves in Thor's wounded shoulder, and the blood spurted forth afresh. With a roar that seemed to set the earth trembling, the huge grizzly lunged backward and reared himself to his full nine feet. He had given the black warning. Even after their first tussle his enemy might have retreated and he would not have pursued. Now it was a fight to the death! The black had done more than ravage his cache. He had opened the man-wound! A minute before Thor had been fighting for law and right--without great animosity or serious desire to kill. Now, however, he was terrible. His mouth was open, and it was eight inches from jaw to jaw; his lips were drawn up until his white teeth and his red gums were bared; muscles stood out like cords on his nostrils, and between his eyes was a furrow like the cleft made by an axe in the trunk of a pine. His eyes shone with the glare of red garnets, their greenish-black pupils almost obliterated by the ferocious fire that was in them. Man, facing Thor in this moment, would have known that only one would come out alive. Thor was not a "stand-up" fighter. For perhaps six or seven seconds he remained erect, but as the black advanced a step he dropped quickly to all fours. The black met him halfway, and after this--for many minutes--Muskwa hugged closer and closer to the earth while with gleaming eyes he watched the battle. It was such a fight as only the jungles and the mountains see, and the roar of it drifted up and down the valley. Like human creatures the two giant beasts used their powerful forearms while with fangs and hind feet they ripped and tore. For two minutes they were in a close and deadly embrace, both rolling on the ground, now one under and then the other. The black clawed ferociously; Thor used chiefly his teeth and his terrible right hind foot. With his forearms he made no effort to rend the black, but used them to hold and throw his enemy. He was fighting to get _under_, as he had flung himself under the caribou he had disembowelled. Again and again Thor buried his long fangs in the other's flesh; but in fang-fighting the black was even quicker than he, and his right shoulder was being literally torn to pieces when their jaws met in midair. Muskwa heard the clash of them; he heard the grind of teeth on teeth, the sickening crunch of bone. Then suddenly the black was flung upon his side as though his neck had been broken, and Thor was at his throat. Still the black fought, his gaping and bleeding jaws powerless now as the grizzly closed his own huge jaws on the jugular. Muskwa stood up. He was shivering still, but with a new and strange emotion. This was not play, as he and his mother had played. For the first time he was looking upon _battle_, and the thrill of it sent the blood hot and fast through his little body. With a faint, puppyish snarl he darted in. His teeth sank futilely into the thick hair and tough hide of the black's rump. He pulled and he snarled; he braced himself with his forefeet and tugged at his mouthful of hair, filled with a blind and unaccountable rage. The black twisted himself upon his back, and one of his hind feet raked Thor from chest to vent. That stroke would have disembowelled a caribou or a deer; it left a red, open, bleeding wound three feet long on Thor. Before it could be repeated, the grizzly swung himself sidewise, and the second blow caught Muskwa. The flat of the black's foot struck him, and for twenty feet he was sent like a stone out of a sling-shot. He was not cut, but he was stunned. In that same moment Thor released his hold on his enemy's throat, and swung two or three feet to one side. He was dripping blood. The black's shoulders, chest, and neck were saturated with it; huge chunks had been torn from his body. He made an effort to rise, and Thor was on him again. This time Thor got his deadliest of all holds. His great jaws clamped in a death-grip over the upper part of the black's nose. One terrific grinding crunch, and the fight was over. The black could not have lived after that. But this fact Thor did not know. It was now easy for him to rip with those knifelike claws on his hind feet. He continued to maul and tear for ten minutes after the black was dead. When Thor finally quit the scene of battle was terrible to look upon. The ground was torn up and red; it was covered with great strips of black hide and pieces of flesh; and the black, on the under side, was torn open from end to end. Two miles away, tense and white and scarcely breathing as they looked through their glasses, Langdon and Bruce crouched beside a rock on the mountainside. At that distance they had witnessed the terrific spectacle, but they could not see the cub. As Thor stood panting and bleeding over his lifeless enemy, Langdon lowered his glass. "My God!" he breathed. Bruce sprang to his feet. "Come on!" he cried. "The black's dead! If we hustle we can get our grizzly!" And down in the meadow Muskwa ran to Thor with a bit of warm black hide in his mouth, and Thor lowered his great bleeding head, and just once his red tongue shot out and caressed Muskwa's face. For the little tan-faced cub had proved himself; and it may be that Thor had seen and understood. CHAPTER NINE Neither Thor nor Muskwa went near the caribou meat after the big fight. Thor was in no condition to eat, and Muskwa was so filled with excitement and trembling that he could not swallow a mouthful. He continued to worry a strip of black hide, snarling and growling in his puny way, as though finishing what the other had begun. For many minutes the grizzly stood with his big head drooping, and the blood gathered in splashes under him. He was facing down the valley. There was almost no wind--so little that it was scarcely possible to tell from which direction it came. Eddies of it were caught in the coulees, and higher up about the shoulders and peaks it blew stronger. Now and then one of these higher movements of air would sweep gently downward and flow through the valley for a few moments in a great noiseless breath that barely stirred the tops of the balsams and spruce. One of these mountain-breaths came as Thor faced the east. And with it, faint and terrible, came the _man-smell_! Thor roused himself with a sudden growl from the lethargy into which he had momentarily allowed himself to sink. His relaxed muscles hardened. He raised his head and sniffed the wind. Muskwa ceased his futile fight with the bit of hide and also sniffed the air. It was warm with the man-scent, for Langdon and Bruce were running and sweating, and the odour of man-sweat drifts heavy and far. It filled Thor with a fresh rage. For a second time it came when he was hurt and bleeding. He had already associated the man-smell with hurt, and now it was doubly impressed upon him. He turned his head and snarled at the mutilated body of the big black. Then he snarled menacingly in the face of the wind. He was in no humour to run away. In these moments, if Bruce and Langdon had appeared over the rise, Thor would have charged with that deadly ferocity which lead can scarcely stop, and which has given to his kind their terrible name. But the breath of air passed, and there followed a peaceful calm. The valley was filled with the purr of running water; from their rocks the whistlers called forth their soft notes; up on the green plain the ptarmigan were fluting, and rising in white-winged flocks. These things soothed Thor, as a woman's gentle hand quiets an angry man. For five minutes he continued to rumble and growl as he tried vainly to catch the scent again; but the rumbling and growling grew steadily less, and finally he turned and walked slowly toward the coulee down which he and Muskwa had come a little while before. Muskwa followed. [Illustration: "'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can get our grizzly!'"] The coulee, or ravine, hid them from the valley as they ascended. Its bottom was covered with rock and shale. The wounds Thor had received in the fight, unlike bullet wounds, had stopped bleeding after the first few minutes, and he left no telltale red spots behind. The ravine took them to the first chaotic upheaval of rock halfway up the mountain, and here they were still more lost to view from below. They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks, and then went on. Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which they had slept the previous night. And this time Muskwa was not tired when they reached the ledge. Two days had made a big change in the little tan-faced cub. He was not so round and puffy. And he was stronger--a great deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor's strenuous tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood. It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time. He knew where he was going. It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end in the face of a precipitous wall of rock. Thor's trail led him directly to a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went, emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa had ever seen. It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above. For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first rocks the cub stopped and whined. It was the first time he had given up, and when he saw that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted frantically for a path up through the rocks. Utterly oblivious of Muskwa's predicament, Thor continued until he was fully thirty yards away. Then he stopped, faced about deliberately, and waited. This gave Muskwa courage, and he scratched and clawed and even used his chin and teeth in his efforts to follow. It took him ten minutes to reach Thor, and he was completely winded. Then, all at once, his terror vanished. For Thor stood on a white, narrow path that was as solid as a floor. The path was perhaps eighteen inches wide. It was unusual--and mysterious-looking, and strangely out of place where it was. It looked as though an army of workmen had come along with hammers and had broken up tons of sandstone and slate, and then filled in between the boulders with rubble, making a smooth and narrow road that in places was ground to the fineness of powder and the hardness of cement. But instead of hammers, the hoofs of a hundred or perhaps a thousand generations of mountain sheep had made the trail. It was the sheep-path over the range. The first band of bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among the rocks. Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more frequently. As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above. Forty or fifty feet up the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine. There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine. He is the "lost man's friend," for the wandering and starving prospector or hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can kill him. He is the humourist of the wilderness--the happiest, the best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew breath. He talks and chatters and chuckles incessantly, and when he travels he walks like a huge animated pincushion; he is oblivious of everything about him as though asleep. As this particular "porky" advanced upon Muskwa and Thor, he was communing happily with himself, the chuckling notes he made sounding very much like a baby's cooing. He was enormously fat, and as he waddled slowly along his side and tail quills clicked on the stones. His eyes were on the path at his feet. He was deeply absorbed in nothing at all, and he was within five feet of Thor before he saw the grizzly. Then, in a wink, he humped himself into a ball. For a few seconds he scolded vociferously. After that he was as silent as a sphinx, his little red eyes watching the big bear. Thor did not want to kill him, but the path was narrow, and he was ready to go on. He advanced a foot or two, and Porky turned his back toward Thor and made ready to deliver a swipe with his powerful tail. In that tail were several hundred quills. As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated. Muskwa was looking on curiously. He still had his lesson to learn, for the quill he had once picked up in his foot had been a loose quill. But since the porcupine seemed to puzzle Thor, the cub turned and made ready to go back along the slide if it became necessary. Thor advanced another foot, and with a sudden _chuck, chuck, chuck_--the most vicious sound he was capable of making--Porky advanced backward and his broad, thick tail whipped through the air with a force that would have driven quills a quarter of an inch into the butt of a tree. Having missed, he humped himself again, and Thor stepped out on the boulder and circled around him. There he waited for Muskwa. Porky was immensely satisfied with his triumph. He unlimbered himself; his quills settled a bit; and he advanced toward Muskwa, at the same time resuming his good-natured chuckling. Instinctively the cub hugged the edge of the path, and in doing so slipped over the edge. By the time he had scrambled up again Porky was four or five feet beyond him and totally absorbed in his travel. The adventure of the sheep-trail was not yet quite over, for scarcely had Porky maneuvered himself to safety when around the edge of the big boulder above appeared a badger, hot on the fresh and luscious scent of his favourite dinner, a porcupine. This worthless outlaw of the mountains was three times as large as Muskwa, and every ounce of him was fighting muscle and bone and claw and sharp teeth. He had a white mark on his nose and forehead; his legs were short and thick; his tail was bushy, and the claws on his front feet were almost as long as a bear's. Thor greeted him with an immediate growl of warning, and the badger scooted back up the trail in fear of his life. Meanwhile Porky lumbered slowly along in quest of new feeding-grounds, talking and singing to himself, forgetting entirely what had happened a minute or two before, and unconscious of the fact that Thor had saved him from a death as certain as though he had fallen over a thousand-foot precipice. For nearly a mile Thor and Muskwa followed the Bighorn Highway before its winding course brought them at last to the very top of the range. They were fully three-quarters of a mile above the creek-bottom, and so narrow in places was the crest of the mountain along which the sheep-trail led that they could look down into both valleys. To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow. Up here the wind was blowing, too. It whipped him with a strange fierceness, and half a dozen times he felt the mysterious and very unpleasant chill of snow under his feet. Twice a great bird swooped near him. It was the biggest bird he had ever seen--an eagle. The second time it came so near that he heard the _beat_ of it, and saw its great, fierce head and lowering talons. Thor whirled toward the eagle and growled. If Muskwa had been alone, the cub would have gone sailing off in those murderous talons. As it was, the third time the eagle circled it was down the slope from them. It was after other game. The scent of the game came to Thor and Muskwa, and they stopped. Perhaps a hundred yards below them was a shelving slide of soft shale, and on this shale, basking in the warm sun after their morning's feed lower down, was a band of sheep. There were twenty or thirty of them, mostly ewes and their lambs. Three huge old rams were lying on a patch of snow farther to the east. With his six-foot wings spread out like twin fans, the eagle continued to circle. He was as silent as a feather floating with the wind. The ewes and even the old bighorns were unconscious of his presence over them. Most of the lambs were lying close to their mothers, but two or three of a livelier turn of mind were wandering over the shale and occasionally hopping about in playful frolic. The eagle's fierce eyes were upon these youngsters. Suddenly he drifted farther away--a full rifle-shot distance straight in the face of the wind; then he swung gracefully, and came back with the wind. And as he came, his wings apparently motionless, he gathered greater and greater speed, and shot like a rocket straight for the lambs. He seemed to have come and gone like a great shadow, and just one plaintive, agonized bleat marked his passing-and two little lambs were left where there had been three. There was instant commotion on the slide. The ewes began to run back and forth and bleat excitedly. The three rams sprang up and stood like rocks, their huge battlemented heads held high as they scanned the depths below them and the peaks above for new danger. One of them saw Thor, and the deep, grating bleat of warning that rattled out of his throat a hunter could have heard a mile away. As he gave his danger signal he started down the slide, and in another moment an avalanche of hoofs was clattering down the steep shale slope, loosening small stones and boulders that went tumbling and crashing down the mountain with a din that steadily increased as they set others in motion on the way. This was all mighty interesting to Muskwa, and he would have stood for a long time looking down for other things to happen if Thor had not led him on. After a time the Bighorn Highway began to descend into the valley from the upper end of which Thor had been driven by Langdon's first shots. They were now six or eight miles north of the timber in which the hunters had made their permanent camp, and headed for the lower tributaries of the Skeena. Another hour of travel, and the bare shale and gray crags were above them again, and they were on the green slopes. After the rocks, and the cold winds, and the terrible glare he had seen in the eagle's eyes, the warm and lovely valley into which they were descending lower and lower was a paradise to Muskwa. It was evident that Thor had something in his mind. He was not rambling now. He cut off the ends and the bulges of the slopes. With his head hunched low he travelled steadily northward, and a compass could not have marked out a straighter line for the lower waters of the Skeena. He was tremendously businesslike, and Muskwa, tagging bravely along behind, wondered if he were never going to stop; if there could be anything in the whole wide world finer for a big grizzly and a little tan-faced cub than these wonderful sunlit slopes which Thor seemed in such great haste to leave. CHAPTER TEN If it had not been for Langdon, this day of the fight between the two bears would have held still greater excitement and another and deadlier peril for Thor and Muskwa. Three minutes after the hunters had arrived breathless and sweating upon the scene of the sanguinary conflict Bruce was ready and anxious to continue the pursuit of Thor. He knew the big grizzly could not be far away; he was certain that Thor had gone up the mountain. He found signs of the grizzly's feet in the gravel of the coulee at just about the time Thor and the tan-faced cub struck the Bighorn Highway. His arguments failed to move Langdon. Stirred to the depth of his soul by what he had seen, and what he saw about him now, the hunter-naturalist refused to leave the blood-stained and torn-up arena in which the grizzly and the black had fought their duel. "If I knew that I was not going to fire a single shot, I would travel five thousand miles to see this," he said. "It's worth thinking about, and looking over, Bruce. The grizzly won't spoil. This will--in a few hours. If there's a story here we can dig out I want it." Again and again Langdon went over the battlefield, noting the ripped-up ground, the big spots of dark-red stain, the strips of flayed skin, and the terrible wounds on the body of the dead black. For half an hour Bruce paid less attention to these things than he did to the carcass of the caribou. At the end of that time he called Langdon to the edge of the clump of balsams. "You wanted the story," he said, "an' I've got it for you, Jimmy." He entered the balsams and Langdon followed him. A few steps under the cover Bruce halted and pointed to the hollow in which Thor had cached his meat. The hollow was stained with blood. "You was right in your guess, Jimmy," he said. "Our grizzly is a meat-eater. Last night he killed a caribou out there in the meadow. I know it was the grizzly that killed 'im an' not the black, because the tracks along the edge of the timber are grizzly tracks. Come on. I'll show you where 'e jumped the caribou!" He led the way back into the meadow, and pointed out where Thor had dragged down the young bull. There were bits of flesh and a great deal of stain where he and Muskwa had feasted. "He hid the carcass in the balsams after he had filled himself," went on Bruce. "This morning the black came along, smelled the meat, an' robbed the cache. Then back come the grizzly after his morning feed, an' that's what happened! There's yo'r story, Jimmy." "And--he may come back again?" asked Langdon. "Not on your life, he won't!" cried Bruce. "He wouldn't touch that carcass ag'in if he was starving. Just now this place is like poison to him." After that Bruce left Langdon to meditate alone on the field of battle while he began trailing Thor. In the shade of the balsams Langdon wrote for a steady hour, frequently rising to establish new facts or verify others already discovered. Meanwhile the mountaineer made his way foot by foot up the coulee. Thor had left no blood, but where others would have seen nothing Bruce detected the signs of his passing. When he returned to where Langdon was completing his notes, his face wore a look of satisfaction. "He went over the mount'in," he said briefly. It was noon before they climbed over the volcanic quarry of rock and followed the Bighorn Highway to the point where Thor and Muskwa had watched the eagle and the sheep. They ate their lunch here, and scanned the valley through their glasses. Bruce was silent for a long time. Then he lowered his telescope, and turned to Langdon. "I guess I've got his range pretty well figgered out," he said. "He runs these two valleys, an' we've got our camp too far south. See that timber down there? That's where our camp should be. What do you say to goin' back over the divide with our horses an' moving up here?" "And leave our grizzly until to-morrow?" Bruce nodded. "We can't go after 'im and leave our horses tied up in the creek-bottom back there." Langdon boxed his glasses and rose to his feet. Suddenly he grew rigid. "What was that?" "I didn't hear anything," said Bruce. For a moment they stood side by side, listening. A gust of wind whistled about their ears. It died away. "Hear it!" whispered Langdon, and his voice was filled with a sudden excitement. "The dogs!" cried Bruce. "Yes, the dogs!" They leaned forward, their ears turned to the south, and faintly there came to them the distant, thrilling tongue of the Airedales! Metoosin had come, and he was seeking them in the valley! CHAPTER ELEVEN Thor was on what the Indians call a _pimootao_. His brute mind had all at once added two and two together, and while perhaps he did not make four of it, his mental arithmetic was accurate enough to convince him that straight north was the road to travel. By the time Langdon and Bruce had reached the summit of the Bighorn Highway, and were listening to the distant tongueing of the dogs, little Muskwa was in abject despair. Following Thor had been like a game of tag with never a moment's rest. An hour after they left the sheep trail they came to the rise in the valley where the waters separated. From this point one creek flowed southward into the Tacla Lake country and the other northward into the Babine, which was a tributary of the Skeena. They descended very quickly into a much lower country, and for the first time Muskwa encountered marshland, and travelled at times through grass so rank and thick that he could not see but could only hear Thor forging on ahead of him. The stream grew wider and deeper, and in places they skirted the edges of dark, quiet pools that Muskwa thought must have been of immeasurable depth. These pools gave Muskwa his first breathing-spells. Now and then Thor would stop and sniff over the edge of them. He was hunting for something, and yet he never seemed to find it; and each time that he started on afresh Muskwa was so much nearer to the end of his endurance. They were fully seven miles north of the point from which Bruce and Langdon were scanning the valley through their glasses when they came to a lake. It was a dark and unfriendly looking lake to Muskwa, who had never seen anything but sunlit pools in the dips. The forest grew close down to its shore. In places it was almost black. Queer birds squawked in the thick reeds. It was heavy with a strange odour--a fragrance of something that made the cub lick his little chops, and filled him with hunger. For a minute or two Thor stood sniffing this scent that filled the air. It was the smell of fish. Slowly the big grizzly began picking his way along the edge of the lake. He soon came to the mouth of a small creek. It was not more than twenty feet wide, but it was dark and quiet and deep, like the lake itself. For a hundred yards Thor made his way up this creek, until he came to where a number of trees had fallen across it, forming a jam. Close to this jam the water was covered with a green scum. Thor knew what lay under that scum, and very quietly he crept out on the logs. Midway in the stream he paused, and with his right paw gently brushed back the scum so that an open pool of clear water lay directly under him. Muskwa's bright little eyes watched him from the shore. He knew that Thor was after something to eat, but how he was going to get it out of that pool of water puzzled and interested him in spite of his weariness. Thor stretched himself out on his belly, his head and right paw well over the jam. He now put his paw a foot into the water and held it there very quietly. He could see clearly to the bottom of the stream. For a few moments he saw only this bottom, a few sticks, and the protruding end of a limb. Then a long slim shadow moved slowly under him--a fifteen-inch trout. It was too deep for him, and Thor did not make an excited plunge. Patiently he waited, and very soon this patience was rewarded. A beautiful red-spotted trout floated out from under the scum, and so suddenly that Muskwa gave a yelp of terror, Thor's huge paw sent a shower of water a dozen feet into the air, and the fish landed with a thump within three feet of the cub. Instantly Muskwa was upon it. His sharp teeth dug into it as it flopped and struggled. Thor rose on the logs, but when he saw that Muskwa had taken possession of the fish, he resumed his former position. Muskwa was just finishing his first real kill when a second spout of water shot upward and another trout pirouetted shoreward through the air. This time Thor followed quickly, for he was hungry. It was a glorious feast they had that early afternoon beside the shaded creek. Five times Thor knocked fish out from under the scum, but for the life of him Muskwa could not eat more than his first trout. For several hours after their dinner they lay in a cool, hidden spot close to the log-jam. Muskwa did not sleep soundly. He was beginning to understand that life was now largely a matter of personal responsibility with him, and his ears had begun to attune themselves to sound. Whenever Thor moved or heaved a deep sigh, Muskwa knew it. After that day's Marathon with the grizzly he was filled with uneasiness--a fear that he might lose his big friend and food-killer, and he was determined that the parent he had adopted should have no opportunity of slipping away from him unheard and unseen. But Thor had no intention of deserting his little comrade. In fact, he was becoming quite fond of Muskwa. It was not alone his hunger for fish or fear of his enemies that was bringing Thor into the lower country of the Babine waterways. For a week past there had been in him a steadily growing unrest, and it had reached its climax in these last two or three days of battle and flight. He was filled with a strange and unsatisfied yearning, and as Muskwa napped in his little bed among the bushes Thor's ears were keenly alert for certain sounds and his nose frequently sniffed the air. He wanted a mate. It was _puskoowepesim_--the "moulting moon"--and always in this moon, or the end of the "egg-laying moon," which was June, he hunted for the female that came to him from the western ranges. He was almost entirely a creature of habit, and always he made this particular detour, entering the other valley again far down toward the Babine. He never failed to feed on fish along the way, and the more fish he ate the stronger was the odour of him. It is barely possible Thor had discovered that this perfume of golden-spotted trout made him more attractive to his lady-love. Anyway, he ate fish, and he smelled abundantly. Thor rose and stretched himself two hours before sunset, and he knocked three more fish out of the water. Muskwa ate the head of one and Thor finished the rest. Then they continued their pilgrimage. It was a new world that Muskwa entered now. In it there were none of the old familiar sounds. The purring drone of the upper valley was gone. There were no whistlers, and no ptarmigan, and no fat little gophers running about. The water of the lake lay still, and dark, and deep, with black and sunless pools hiding themselves under the roots of trees, so close did the forest cling to it. There were no rocks to climb over, but dank, soft logs, thick windfalls, and litters of brush. The air was different, too. It was very still. Under their feet at times was a wonderful carpet of soft moss in which Thor sank nearly to his armpits. And the forest was filled with a strange gloom and many mysterious shadows, and there hung heavily in it the pungent smells of decaying vegetation. Thor did not travel so swiftly here. The silence and the gloom and the oppressively scented air seemed to rouse his caution. He stepped quietly; frequently he stopped and looked about him, and listened; he smelled at the edges of pools hidden under the roots; every new sound brought him to a stop, his head hung low and his ears alert. Several times Muskwa saw shadowy things floating through the gloom. They were the big gray owls that turned snow white in winter. And once, when it was almost dark, they came upon a pop-eyed, loose-jointed, fierce-looking creature in the trail who scurried away like a ball at sight of Thor. It was a lynx. It was not yet quite dark when Thor came out very quietly into a clearing, and Muskwa found himself first on the shore of a creek, and then close to a big pond. The air was full of the breath and warmth of a new kind of life. It was not fish, and yet it seemed to come from the pond, in the centre of which were three or four circular masses that looked like great brush-heaps plastered with a coating of mud. Whenever he came into this end of the valley Thor always paid a visit to the beaver colony, and occasionally he helped himself to a fat young beaver for supper or breakfast. This evening he was not hungry, and he was in a hurry. In spite of these two facts he stood for some minutes in the shadows near the pond. The beavers had already begun their night's work. Muskwa soon understood the significance of the shimmering streaks that ran swiftly over the surface of the water. At the end of each streak was always a dark, flat head, and now he saw that most of these streaks began at the farther edge of the pond and made directly for a long, low barrier that shut in the water a hundred yards to the east. This particular barrier was strange to Thor, and with his maturer knowledge of beaver ways he knew that his engineering friends--whom he ate only occasionally--were broadening their domain by building a new dam. As they watched, two fat workmen shoved a four-foot length of log into the pond with a big splash, and one of them began piloting it toward the scene of building operations, while his companion returned to other work. A little later there was a crash in the timber on the opposite side of the pond, where another workman had succeeded in felling a tree. Then Thor made his way toward the dam. Almost instantly there was a terrific crack out in the middle of the pond, followed by a tremendous splash. An old beaver had seen Thor and with the flat side of his broad tail had given the surface of the water a warning slap that cut the still air like a rifle-shot. All at once there were splashings and divings in every direction, and a moment later the pond was ruffled and heaving as a score of interrupted workers dove excitedly under the surface to the safety of their brush-ribbed and mud-plastered strongholds, and Muskwa was so absorbed in the general excitement that he almost forgot to follow Thor. He overtook the grizzly at the dam. For a few moments Thor inspected the new work, and then tested it with his weight. It was solid, and over this bridge ready built for them they crossed to the higher ground on the opposite side. A few hundred yards farther on Thor struck a fairly well-beaten caribou trail which in the course of half an hour led them around the end of the lake to the outlet stream flowing north. Every minute Muskwa was hoping that Thor would stop. His afternoon's nap had not taken the lameness out of his legs nor the soreness from the tender pads of his feet. He had had enough, and more than enough, of travel, and could he have regulated the world according to his own wishes he would not have walked another mile for a whole month. Mere walking would not have been so bad, but to keep up with Thor's ambling gait he was compelled to trot, like a stubby four-year-old child hanging desperately to the thumb of a big and fast-walking man. Muskwa had not even a thumb to hang to. The bottoms of his feet were like boils; his tender nose was raw from contact with brush and the knife-edged marsh grass, and his little back felt all caved in. Still he hung on desperately, until the creek-bottom was again sand and gravel, and travelling was easier. The stars were up now, millions of them, clear and brilliant; and it was quite evident that Thor had set his mind on an "all-night hike," a _kuppatipsk pimootao_ as a Cree tracker would have called it. Just how it would have ended for Muskwa is a matter of conjecture had not the spirits of thunder and rain and lightning put their heads together to give him a rest. For perhaps an hour the stars were undimmed, and Thor kept on like a heathen without a soul, while Muskwa limped on all four feet. Then a low rumbling gathered in the west. It grew louder and louder, and approached swiftly--straight from the warm Pacific. Thor grew uneasy, and sniffed in the face of it. Livid streaks began to criss-cross a huge pall of black that was closing in on them like a vast curtain. The stars began to go out. A moaning wind came. And then the rain. Thor had found a huge rock that shelved inward, like a lean-to, and he crept back under this with Muskwa before the deluge descended. For many minutes it was more like a flood than a rain. It seemed as though a part of the Pacific Ocean had been scooped up and dropped on them, and in half an hour the creek was a swollen torrent. The lightning and the crash of thunder terrified Muskwa. Now he could see Thor in great blinding flashes of fire, and the next instant it was as black as pitch; the tops of the mountains seemed falling down into the valley; the earth trembled and shook--and he snuggled closer and closer to Thor until at last he lay between his two forearms, half buried in the long hair of the big grizzly's shaggy chest. Thor himself was not much concerned in these noisy convulsions of nature, except to keep himself dry. When he took a bath he wanted the sun to be shining and a nice warm rock close at hand on which to stretch himself. For a long time after its first fierce outbreak the rain continued to fall in a gentle shower. Muskwa liked this, and under the sheltering rock, snuggled against Thor, he felt very comfortable and easily fell asleep. Through long hours Thor kept his vigil alone, drowsing now and then, but kept from sound slumber by the restlessness that was in him. It stopped raining soon after midnight, but it was very dark, the stream was flooding over its bars, and Thor remained under the rock. Muskwa had a splendid sleep. Day had come when Thor's stirring roused Muskwa. He followed the grizzly out into the open, feeling tremendously better than last night, though his feet were still sore and his body was stiff. Thor began to follow the creek again. Along this stream there were low flats and many small bayous where grew luxuriantly the tender grass and roots, and especially the slim long-stemmed lilies on which Thor was fond of feeding. But for a thousand-pound grizzly to fill up on such vegetarian dainties as these consumed many hours, if not one's whole time, and Thor considered that he had no time to lose. Thor was a most ardent lover when he loved at all, which was only a few days out of the year; and during these days he twisted his mode of living around so that while the spirit possessed him he no longer existed for the sole purpose of eating and growing fat. For a short time he put aside his habit of living to eat, and ate to live; and poor Muskwa was almost famished before another dinner was forthcoming. But at last, early in the afternoon, Thor came to a pool which he could not pass. It was not a dozen feet in width, and it was alive with trout. The fish had not been able to reach the lake above, and they had waited too long after the flood-season to descend into the deeper waters of the Babine and the Skeena. They had taken refuge in this pool, which was now about to become a death-trap. At one end the water was two feet deep; at the other end only a few inches. After pondering over this fact for a few moments, the grizzly waded openly into the deepest part, and from the bank above Muskwa saw the shimmering trout darting into the shallower water. Thor advanced slowly, and now, when he stood in less than eight inches of water, the panic-stricken fish one after another tried to escape back into the deeper part of the pool. Again and again Thor's big right paw swept up great showers of water. The first inundation knocked Muskwa off his feet. But with it came a two-pound trout which the cub quickly dragged out of range and began eating. So agitated became the pool because of the mighty strokes of Thor's paw that the trout completely lost their heads, and no sooner did they reach one end than they turned about and darted for the other. They kept this up until the grizzly had thrown fully a dozen of their number ashore. So absorbed was Muskwa in his fish, and Thor in his fishing, that neither had noticed a visitor. Both saw him at about the same time, and for fully thirty seconds they stood and stared, Thor in his pool and the cub over his fish, utter amazement robbing them of the power of movement. The visitor was another grizzly, and as coolly as though he had done the fishing himself he began eating the fish which Thor had thrown out! A worse insult or a deadlier challenge could not have been known in the land of Beardom. Even Muskwa sensed that fact. He looked expectantly at Thor. There was going to be another fight, and he licked his little chops in anticipation. Thor came up out of the pool slowly. On the bank he paused. The grizzlies gazed at each other, the newcomer crunching a fish as he looked. Neither growled. Muskwa perceived no signs of enmity, and then to his increased astonishment Thor began eating a fish within three feet of the interloper! Perhaps man is the finest of all God's creations, but when it comes to his respect for old age he is no better, and sometimes not as good, as a grizzly bear; for Thor would not rob an old bear, he would not fight an old bear, and he would not drive an old bear from his own meat--which is more than can be said of some humans. And the visitor was an old bear, and a sick bear as well. He stood almost as high as Thor, but he was so old that he was only half as broad across the chest, and his neck and head were grotesquely thin. The Indians have a name for him. _Kuyas Wapusk_ they call him--the bear so old he is about to die. They let him go unharmed; other bears tolerate him and let him eat their meat if he chances along; the white man kills him. This old bear was famished. His claws were gone; his hair was thin, and in some places his skin was naked, and he had barely more than red, hard gums to chew with. If he lived until autumn he would den up--for the last time. Perhaps death would come even sooner than that. If so, _Kuyas Wapusk_ would know in time, and he would crawl off into some hidden cave or deep crevice in the rocks to breathe his last. For in all the Rocky Mountains, so far as Bruce or Langdon knew, there was not a man who had found the bones or body of a grizzly that had died a natural death! And big, hunted Thor, torn by wound and pursued by man, seemed to understand that this would be the last real feast on earth for _Kuyas Wapusk_--too old to fish for himself, too old to hunt, too old even to dig out the tender lily roots; and so he let him eat until the last fish was gone, and then went on, with Muskwa tagging at his heels. CHAPTER TWELVE For still another two hours Thor led Muskwa on that tiresome jaunt into the north. They had travelled a good twenty miles since leaving the Bighorn Highway, and to the little tan-faced cub those twenty miles were like a journey around the world. Ordinarily he would not have gone that far away from his birthplace until his second year, and very possibly his third. Not once in this hike down the valley had Thor wasted time on the mountain slopes. He had picked out the easiest trails along the creek. Three or four miles below the pool where they had left the old bear he suddenly changed this procedure by swinging due westward, and a little later they were once more climbing a mountain. They went up a long green slide for a quarter of a mile, and luckily for Muskwa's legs this brought them to the smooth plainlike floor of a break which took them without much more effort out on the slopes of the other valley. This was the valley in which Thor had killed the black bear twenty miles to the southward. From the moment Thor looked out over the northern limits of his range a change took possession of him. All at once he lost his eagerness to hurry. For fifteen minutes he stood looking down into the valley, sniffing the air. He descended slowly, and when he reached the green meadows and the creek-bottom he _mooshed_ along straight in the face of the wind, which was coming from the south and west. It did not bring him the scent he wanted--the smell of his mate. Yet an instinct that was more infallible than reason told him that she was near, or should be near. He did not take accident or sickness or the possibility of hunters having killed her into consideration. This was where he had always started in to hunt for her, and sooner or later he had found her. He knew her smell. And he crossed and recrossed the bottoms so that it could not escape him. When Thor was love-sick he was more or less like a man: that is to say, he was an idiot. The importance of all other things dwindled into nothingness. His habits, which were as fixed as the stars at other times, took a complete vacation. He even forgot hunger, and the whistlers and gophers were quite safe. He was tireless. He rambled during the night as well as the day in quest of his lady-love. It was quite natural that in these exciting hours he should forget Muskwa almost entirely. At least ten times before sunset he crossed and recrossed the creek, and the disgusted and almost ready-to-quit cub waded and swam and floundered after him until he was nearly drowned. The tenth or dozenth time Thor forded the stream Muskwa revolted and followed along on his own side. It was not long before the grizzly returned. It was soon after this, just as the sun was setting, that the unexpected happened. What little wind there was suddenly swung straight into the east, and from the western slopes half a mile away it brought a scent that held Thor motionless in his tracks for perhaps half a minute, and then set him off on that ambling run which is the ungainliest gait of all four-footed creatures. Muskwa rolled after him like a ball, pegging away for dear life, but losing ground at every jump. In that half-mile stretch he would have lost Thor altogether if the grizzly had not stopped near the bottom of the first slope to take fresh reckonings. When he started up the slope Muskwa could see him, and with a yelping cry for him to wait a minute set after him again. Two or three hundred yards up the mountainside the slope shelved downward into a hollow, or dip, and nosing about in this dip, questing the air as Thor had quested it, was the beautiful she-grizzly from over the range. With her was one of her last year's cubs. Thor was within fifty yards of her when he came over the crest. He stopped. He looked at her. And Iskwao, "the female," looked at him. Then followed true bear courtship. All haste, all eagerness, all desire for his mate seemed to have left Thor; and if Iskwao had been eager and yearning she was profoundly indifferent now. For two or three minutes Thor stood looking casually about, and this gave Muskwa time to come up and perch himself beside him, expecting another fight. As though Thor was a thousand miles or so from her thoughts, Iskwao turned over a flat rock and began hunting for grubs and ants, and not to be outdone in this stoic unconcern Thor pulled up a bunch of grass and swallowed it. Iskwao moved a step or two, and Thor moved a step or two, and as if purely by accident their steps were toward each other. Muskwa was puzzled. The older cub was puzzled. They sat on their haunches like two dogs, one three times as big as the other, and wondered what was going to happen. It took Thor and Iskwao five minutes to arrive within five feet of each other, and then very decorously they smelled noses. The year-old cub joined the family circle. He was of just the right age to have an exceedingly long name, for the Indians called him Pipoonaskoos-- "the yearling." He came boldly up to Thor and his mother. For a moment Thor did not seem to notice him. Then his long right arm shot out in a sudden swinging upper-cut that lifted Pipoonaskoos clean off the ground and sent him spinning two-thirds of the distance up to Muskwa. The mother paid no attention to this elimination of her offspring, and still lovingly smelled noses with Thor. Muskwa, however, thought this was the preliminary of another tremendous fight, and with a yelp of defiance he darted down the slope and set upon Pipoonaskoos with all his might. Pipoonaskoos was "mother's boy." That is, he was one of those cubs who persist in following their mothers through a second season, instead of striking out for themselves. He had nursed until he was five months old; his parent had continued to hunt tidbits for him; he was fat, and sleek, and soft; he was, in fact, a "Willie" of the mountains. On the other hand, a few days had put a lot of real mettle into Muskwa, and though he was only a third as large as Pipoonaskoos, and his feet were sore, and his back ached, he landed on the other cub like a shot out of a gun. Still dazed by the blow of Thor's paw, Pipoonaskoos gave a yelping call to his mother for help at this sudden onslaught. He had never been in a fight, and he rolled over on his back and side, kicking and scratching and yelping as Muskwa's needle-like teeth sank again and again into his tender hide. Luckily Muskwa got him once by the nose, and bit deep, and if there was any sand at all in Willie Pipoonaskoos this took it out of him, and while Muskwa held on for dear life he let out a steady stream of yelps, informing his mother that he was being murdered. To these cries Iskwao paid no attention at all, but continued to smell noses with Thor. Finally freeing his bleeding nose, Pipoonaskoos shook Muskwa off by sheer force of superior weight and took to flight on a dead run. Muskwa pegged valiantly after him. Twice they made the circle of the basin, and in spite of his shorter legs, Muskwa was a close second in the race when Pipoonaskoos, turning an affrighted glance sidewise for an instant, hit against a rock and went sprawling. In another moment Muskwa was at him again, and he would have continued biting and snarling until there was no more strength left in him had he not happened to see Thor and Iskwao disappearing slowly over the edge of the slope toward the valley. Almost immediately Muskwa forgot fighting. He was amazed to find that Thor, instead of tearing up the other bear, was walking off with her. Pipoonaskoos also pulled himself together and looked. Then Muskwa looked at Pipoonaskoos, and Pipoonaskoos looked at Muskwa. The tan-faced cub licked his chops just once, as if torn between the prospective delight of mauling Pipoonaskoos and the more imperative duty of following Thor. The other gave him no choice. With a whimpering yelp he set off after his mother. Exciting times followed for the two cubs. All that night Thor and Iskwao kept by themselves in the buffalo willow thickets and the balsams of the creek-bottom. Early in the evening Pipoonaskoos sneaked up to his mother again, and Thor lifted him into the middle of the creek. The second visual proof of Thor's displeasure impinged upon Muskwa the fact that the older bears were not in a mood to tolerate the companionship of cubs, and the result was a wary and suspicious truce between him and Pipoonaskoos. All the next day Thor and Iskwao kept to themselves. Early in the morning Muskwa began adventuring about a little in quest of food. He liked tender grass, but it was not very filling. Several times he saw Pipoonaskoos digging in the soft bottom close to the creek, and finally he drove the other cub away from a partly digged hole and investigated for himself. After a little more excavating he pulled out a white, bulbous, tender root that he thought was the sweetest and nicest thing he had ever eaten, not even excepting fish. It was the one _bonne bouche_ of all the good things he would eventually learn to eat--the spring beauty. One other thing alone was at all comparable with it, and that was the dog-tooth violet. Spring beauties were growing about him abundantly, and he continued to dig until his feet were grievously tender. But he had the satisfaction of being comfortably fed. Thor was again responsible for a fight between Muskwa and Pipoonaskoos. Late in the afternoon the older bears were lying down side by side in a thicket when, without any apparent reason at all, Thor opened his huge jaws and emitted a low, steady, growling roar that sounded very much like the sound he had made when tearing the life out of the big black. Iskwao raised her head and joined him in the tumult, both of them perfectly good-natured and quite happy during the operation. Why mating bears indulge in this blood-curdling duet is a mystery which only the bears themselves can explain. It lasts for about a minute, and during this particular minute Muskwa, who lay outside the thicket, thought that surely the glorious hour had come when Thor was beating up the parent of Pipoonaskoos. And instantly he looked for Pipoonaskoos. Unfortunately the Willie-bear came sneaking round the edge of the brush just then, and Muskwa gave him no chance to ask questions. He shot at him in a black streak and Pipoonaskoos bowled over like a fat baby. For several minutes they bit and dug and clawed, most of the biting and digging and clawing being done by Muskwa, while Pipoonaskoos devoted his time and energy to yelping. Finally the larger cub got away and again took to flight. Muskwa pursued him, into the brush and out, down to the creek and back, halfway up the slope and down again, until he was so tired he had to drop on his belly for a rest. At this juncture Thor emerged from the thicket. He was alone. For the first time since last night he seemed to notice Muskwa. Then he sniffed the wind up the valley and down the valley, and after that turned and walked straight toward the distant slopes down which they had come the preceding afternoon. Muskwa was both pleased and perplexed. He wanted to go into the thicket and snarl and pull at the hide of the dead bear that must be in there, and he also wanted to finish Pipoonaskoos. After a moment or two of hesitation he ran after Thor and again followed close at his heels. After a little Iskwao came from the thicket and nosed the wind as Thor had felt it. Then she turned in the opposite direction, and with Pipoonaskoos close behind her, went up the slope and continued slowly and steadily in the face of the setting sun. So ended Thor's love-making and Muskwa's first fighting; and together they trailed eastward again, to face the most terrible peril that had ever come into the mountains for four-footed beast-a peril that was merciless, a peril from which there was no escape, a peril that was fraught with death. CHAPTER THIRTEEN The first night after leaving Iskwao and Pipoonaskoos the big grizzly and the tan-faced cub wandered without sleep under the brilliant stars. Thor did not hunt for meat. He climbed a steep slope, then went down the shale side of a dip, and in a small basin hidden at the foot of a mountain came to a soft green meadow where the dog-tooth violet, with its slender stem, its two lily-like leaves, its single cluster of five-petalled flowers, and its luscious, bulbous root grew in great profusion. And here all through the night he dug and ate. Muskwa, who had filled himself on spring beauty roots, was not hungry, and as the day had been a restful one for him, outside of his fighting, he found this night filled with its brilliant stars quite enjoyable. The moon came up about ten o'clock, and it was the biggest, and the reddest, and the most beautiful moon Muskwa had seen in his short life. It rolled up over the peaks like a forest fire, and filled all the Rocky Mountains with a wonderful glow. The basin, in which there were perhaps ten acres of meadow, was lighted up almost like day. The little lake at the foot of the mountain glimmered softly, and the tiny stream that fed it from the melting snows a thousand feet above shot down in glistening cascades that caught the moonlight like rivulets of dull polished diamonds. About the meadow were scattered little clumps of bushes and a few balsams and spruce, as if set there for ornamental purposes; and on one side there was a narrow, verdure-covered slide that sloped upward for a third of a mile, and at the top of which, unseen by Muskwa and Thor, a band of sheep were sleeping. Muskwa wandered about, always near Thor, investigating the clumps of bushes, the dark shadows of the balsams and spruce, and the edge of the lake. Here he found a plashet of soft mud which was a great solace to his sore feet. Twenty times during the night he waded in the mud. Even when the dawn came Thor seemed to be in no great haste to leave the basin. Until the sun was well up he continued to wander about the meadow and the edge of the lake, digging up occasional roots, and eating tender grass. This did not displease Muskwa, who made his breakfast of the dog-tooth violet bulbs. The one matter that puzzled him was why Thor did not go into the lake and throw out trout, for he yet had to learn that all water did not contain fish. At last he went fishing for himself, and succeeded in getting a black hard-shelled water beetle that nipped his nose with a pair of needle-like pincers and brought a yelp from him. It was perhaps ten o'clock, and the sun-filled basin was like a warm oven to a thick-coated bear, when Thor searched up among the rocks near the waterfall until he found a place that was as cool as an old-fashioned cellar. It was a miniature cavern. All about it the slate and sandstone was of a dark and clammy wet from a hundred little trickles of snow water that ran down from the peaks. It was just the sort of a place Thor loved on a July day, but to Muskwa it was dark and gloomy and not a thousandth part as pleasant as the sun. So after an hour or two he left Thor in his frigidarium and began to investigate the treacherous ledges. For a few minutes all went well--then he stepped on a green-tinted slope of slate over which a very shallow dribble of water was running. The water had been running over it in just that way for some centuries, and the shelving slate was worn as smooth as the surface of a polished pearl, and it was as slippery as a greased pole. Muskwa's feet went out from under him so quickly that he hardly knew what had happened. The next moment he was on his way to the lake a hundred feet below. He rolled over and over. He plashed into shallow pools. He bounced over miniature waterfalls like a rubber ball. The wind was knocked out of him. He was blinded and dazed by water and shock, and he gathered fresh speed with every yard he made. He had succeeded in letting out half a dozen terrified yelps at the start, and these roused Thor. Where the water from the peaks fell into the lake there was a precipitous drop of ten feet, and over this Muskwa shot with a momentum that carried him twice as far out into the pond. He hit with a big splash, and disappeared. Down and down he went, where everything was black and cold and suffocating; then the life-preserver with which nature had endowed him in the form of his fat brought him to the surface. He began to paddle with all four feet. It was his first swim, and when he finally dragged himself ashore he was limp and exhausted. While he still lay panting and very much frightened, Thor came down from the rocks. Muskwa's mother had given him a sound cuffing when he got the porcupine quill in his foot. She had cuffed him for every accident he had had, because she believed that cuffing was good medicine. Education is largely cuffed into a bear cub, and she would have given him a fine cuffing now. But Thor only smelled of him, saw that he was all right, and began to dig up a dog-tooth violet. He had not finished the violet when suddenly he stopped. For a half-minute he stood like a statue. Muskwa jumped and shook himself. Then he listened. A sound came to both of them. In one slow, graceful movement the grizzly reared himself to his full height. He faced the north, his ears thrust forward, the sensitive muscles of his nostrils twitching. He could smell nothing, but he _heard_! Over the slopes which they had climbed there had come to him faintly a sound that was new to him, a sound that had never before been a part of his life. It was the barking of dogs. For two minutes Thor sat on his haunches without moving a muscle of his great body except those twitching thews in his nose. Deep down in this cup under the mountain it was difficult even for sound to reach him. Quickly he swung down on all fours and made for the green slope to the southward, at the top of which the band of sheep had slept during the preceding night. Muskwa hurried after. A hundred yards up the slope Thor stopped and turned. Again he reared himself. Now Muskwa also faced to the north. A sudden downward drift of the wind brought the barking of the dogs to them clearly. Less than half a mile away Langdon's pack of trained Airedales were hot on the scent. Their baying was filled with the fierce excitement which told Bruce and Langdon, a quarter of a mile behind them, that they were close upon their prey. And even more than it thrilled them did the tongueing of the dogs thrill Thor. Again it was instinct that told him a new enemy had come into his world. He was not afraid. But that instinct urged him to retreat, and he went higher until he came to a part of the mountain that was rough and broken, where once more he halted. This time he waited. Whatever the menace was it was drawing nearer with the swiftness of the wind. He could hear it coming up the slope that sheltered the basin from the valley. The crest of that slope was just about on a level with Thor's eyes, and as he looked the leader of the pack came up over the edge of it and stood for a moment outlined against the sky. The others followed quickly, and for perhaps thirty seconds they stood rigid on the cap of the hill, looking down into the basin at their feet and sniffing the heavy scent with which it was filled. During those thirty seconds Thor watched his enemies without moving, while in his deep chest there gathered slowly a low and terrible growl. Not until the pack swept down into the cup of the mountain, giving full tongue again, did he continue his retreat. But it was not flight. He was not afraid. He was going on--because to go on was his business. He was not seeking trouble; he had no desire even to defend his possession of the meadow and the little lake under the mountain. There were other meadows and other lakes, and he was not naturally a lover of fighting. But he was ready to fight. He continued to rumble ominously, and in him there was burning a slow and sullen anger. He buried himself among the rocks; he followed a ledge with Muskwa slinking close at his heels; he climbed over a huge scarp of rock, and twisted among boulders half as big as houses. But not once did he go where Muskwa could not easily follow. Once, when he drew himself from a ledge to a projecting seam of sandstone higher up, and found that Muskwa could not climb it, he came down and went another way. The baying of the dogs was now deep down in the basin. Then it began to rise swiftly, as if on wings, and Thor knew that the pack was coming up the green slide. He stopped again, and this time the wind brought their scent to him full and strong. It was a scent that tightened every muscle in his great body and set strange fires burning in him like raging furnaces. With the dogs came also the _man-smell_! He travelled upward a little faster now, and the fierce and joyous yelping of the dogs seemed scarcely a hundred yards away when he entered a small open space in the wild upheaval of rock. On the mountainside was a wall that rose perpendicularly. Twenty feet on the other side was a sheer fall of a hundred feet, and the way ahead was closed with the exception of a trail scarcely wider than Thor's body by a huge crag of rock that had fallen from the shoulder of the mountain. The big grizzly led Muskwa close up to this crag and the break that opened through it, and then turned suddenly back, so that Muskwa was behind him. In the face of the peril that was almost upon them a mother-bear would have driven Muskwa into the safety of a crevice in the rock wall. Thor did not do this. He fronted the danger that was coming, and reared himself up on his hind quarters. Twenty feet away the trail he had followed swung sharply around a projecting bulge in the perpendicular wall, and with eyes that were now red and terrible Thor watched the trap he had set. The pack was coming full tongue. Fifty yards beyond the bulge the dogs were running shoulder to shoulder, and a moment later the first of them rushed into the arena which Thor had chosen for himself. The bulk of the horde followed so closely that the first dogs were flung under him as they strove frantically to stop themselves in time. With a roar Thor launched himself among them. His great right arm swept out and inward, and it seemed to Muskwa that he had gathered a half of the pack under his huge body. With a single crunch of his jaws he broke the back of the foremost hunter. From a second he tore the head so that the windpipe trailed out like a red rope. He rolled himself forward, and before the remaining dogs could recover from their panic he had caught one a blow that sent him flying over the edge of the precipice to the rocks a hundred feet below. It had all happened in half a minute, and in that half-minute the remaining nine dogs had scattered. But Langdon's Airedales were fighters. To the last dog they had come of fighting stock, and Bruce and Metoosin had trained them until they could be hung up by their ears without whimpering. The tragic fate of three of their number frightened them no more than their own pursuit had frightened Thor. Swift as lightning they circled about the grizzly, spreading themselves on their forefeet, ready to spring aside or backward to avoid sudden rushes, and giving voice now to that quick, fierce yapping which tells hunters their quarry is at bay. This was their business--to harass and torment, to retard flight, to stop their prey again and again until their masters came to finish the kill. It was a quite fair and thrilling sport for the bear and the dogs. The man who comes up with the rifle ends it in murder. But if the dogs had their tricks, Thor also had his. After three or four vain rushes, in which the Airedales eluded him by their superior quickness, he backed slowly toward the huge rock beside which Muskwa was crouching, and as he retreated the dogs advanced. Their increased barking and Thor's evident inability to drive them away or tear them to pieces terrified Muskwa more than ever. Suddenly he turned tail and darted into a crevice in the rock behind him. Thor continued to back until his great hips touched the stone. Then he swung his head side wise and looked for the cub. Not a hair of Muskwa was to be seen. Twice Thor turned his head. After that, seeing that Muskwa was gone, he continued to retreat until he blocked the narrow passage that was his back door to safety. The dogs were now barking like mad. They were drooling at their mouths, their wiry crests stood up like brushes, and their snarling fangs were bared to their red gums. Nearer and nearer they came to him, challenging him to stay, to rush them, to catch them if he could--and in their excitement they put ten yards of open space behind them. Thor measured this space, as he had measured the distance between him and the young bull caribou a few days before. And then, without so much as a snarl of warning, he darted out upon his enemies with a suddenness that sent them flying wildly for their lives. Thor did not stop. He kept on. Where the rock wall bulged out the trail narrowed to five feet, and he had measured this fact as well as the distance. He caught the last dog, and drove it down under his paw. As it was torn to pieces the Airedale emitted piercing cries of agony that reached Bruce and Langdon as they hurried panting and wind-broken up the slide that led from the basin. Thor dropped on his belly in the narrowed trail, and as the pack broke loose with fresh voice he continued to tear at his victim until the rock was smeared with blood and hair and entrails. Then he rose to his feet and looked again for Muskwa. The cub was curled up in a shivering ball two feet in the crevice. It may be that Thor thought he had gone on up the mountain, for he lost no time now in retreating from the scene of battle. He had caught the wind again. Bruce and Langdon were sweating, and their smell came to him strongly. For ten minutes Thor paid no attention to the eight dogs yapping at his heels, except to pause now and then and swing his head about. As he continued in his retreat the Airedales became bolder, until finally one of them sprang ahead of the rest and buried his fangs in the grizzly's leg. This accomplished what barking had failed to do. With another roar Thor turned and pursued the pack headlong for fifty yards over the back-trail, and five precious minutes were lost before he continued upward toward the shoulder of the mountain. Had the wind been in another direction the pack would have triumphed, but each time that Langdon and Bruce gained ground the wind warned Thor by bringing to him the warm odour of their bodies. And the grizzly was careful to keep that wind from the right quarter. He could have gained the top of the mountain more easily and quickly by quartering the face of it on a back-trail, but this would have thrown the wind too far under him. As long as he held the wind he was safe, unless the hunters made an effort to checkmate his method of escape by detouring and cutting him off. It took him half an hour to reach the topmost ridge of rock, from which point he would have to break cover and reveal himself as he made the last two or three hundred yards up the shale side of the mountain to the backbone of the range. When Thor made this break he put on a sudden spurt of speed that left the dogs thirty or forty yards behind him. For two or three minutes he was clearly outlined on the face of the mountain, and during the last minute of those three he was splendidly profiled against a carpet of pure-white snow, without a shrub or a rock to conceal him from the eyes below. Bruce and Langdon saw him at five hundred yards, and began firing. Close over his head Thor heard the curious ripping wail of the first bullet, and an instant later came the crack of the rifle. A second shot sent up a spurt of snow five yards ahead of him. He swung sharply to the right. This put him broadside to the marksmen. Thor heard a third shot--and that was all. While the reports were still echoing among the crags and peaks something struck Thor a terrific blow on the flat of his skull, five inches back of his right ear. It was as if a club had descended upon him from out of the sky. He went down like a log. It was a glancing shot. It scarcely drew blood, but for a moment it stunned the grizzly, as a man is dazed by a blow on the end of the chin. Before he could rise from where he had fallen the dogs were upon him, tearing at his throat and neck and body. With a roar Thor sprang to his feet and shook them off. He struck out savagely, and Langdon and Bruce could hear his bellowing as they stood with fingers on the triggers of their rifles waiting for the dogs to draw away far enough to give them the final shots. Yard by yard Thor worked his way upward, snarling at the frantic pack, defying the man-smell, the strange thunder, the burning lightning--even death itself, and five hundred yards below Langdon cursed despairingly as the dogs hung so close he could not fire. Up to the very sky-line the blood-thirsting pack shielded Thor. He disappeared over the summit. The dogs followed. And after that their baying came fainter and fainter as the big grizzly led them swiftly away from the menace of man in a long and thrilling race from which more than one was doomed not to return. CHAPTER FOURTEEN In his hiding-place Muskwa heard the last sounds of the battle on the ledge. The crevice was a V-shaped crack in the rock, and he had wedged himself as far back in this as he could. He saw Thor pass the opening of his refuge after he had killed the fourth dog; he heard the click, click, click of his claws as he retreated up the trail; and at last he knew that the grizzly was gone, and that the enemy had followed him. Still he was afraid to come out. These strange pursuers that had come up out of the valley had filled him with a deadly terror. Pipoonaskoos had not made him afraid. Even the big black bear that Thor killed had not terrified him as these red-lipped, white-fanged strangers had frightened him. So he remained in his crevice, crowded as far back as he could get, like a wad shoved in a gun-barrel. He could still hear the tongueing of the dogs when other and nearer sounds alarmed him. Langdon and Bruce came rushing around the bulge in the mountain wall, and at sight of the dead dogs they stopped. Langdon cried out in horror. He was not more than twenty feet from Muskwa. For the first time the cub heard human voices; for the first time the sweaty odour of men filled his nostrils, and he scarcely breathed in his new fear. Then one of the hunters stood directly in front of the crack in which he was hidden, and he saw his first man. A moment later the men, too, were gone. Later Muskwa heard the shots. After that the barking of the dogs grew more and more distant until finally he could not hear them at all. It was about three o'clock--the siesta hour in the mountains, and it was very quiet. For a long time Muskwa did not move. He listened. And he heard nothing. Another fear was growing in him now--the fear of losing Thor. With every breath he drew he was hoping that Thor would return. For an hour he remained wedged in the rock. Then he heard a _cheep, cheep, cheep_, and a tiny striped rock-rabbit came out on the ledge where Muskwa could see him and began cautiously investigating one of the slain Airedales. This gave Muskwa courage. He pricked up his ears a bit. He whimpered softly, as if beseeching recognition and friendship of the one tiny creature that was near him in this dreadful hour of loneliness and fear. Inch by inch he crawled out of his hiding-place. At last his little round, furry head was out, and he looked about him. The trail was clear, and he advanced toward the rock-rabbit. With a shrill chatter the striped mite darted for its own stronghold, and Muskwa was alone again. For a few moments he stood undecided, sniffing the air that was heavy with the scent of blood, of man, and of Thor; then he turned up the mountain. He knew Thor had gone in that direction, and if little Muskwa possessed a mind and a soul they were filled with but one desire now--to overtake his big friend and protector. Even fear of dogs and men, unknown quantities in his life until to-day, was now overshadowed by the fear that he had lost Thor. He did not need eyes to follow the trail. It was warm under his nose, and he started in the zigzag ascent of the mountain as fast as he could go. There were places where progress was difficult for his short legs, but he kept on valiantly and hopefully, encouraged by Thor's fresh scent. It took him a good hour to reach the beginning of the naked shale that reached up to the belt of snow and the sky-line, and it was four o'clock when he started up those last three hundred yards between him and the mountain-top. Up there he believed he would find Thor. But he was afraid, and he continued to whimper softly to himself as he dug his little claws bravely into the shale. Muskwa did not look up to the crest of the peak again after he had started. To have done that it would have been necessary for him to stop and turn sidewise, for the ascent was steep. And so, when Muskwa was halfway to the top, it happened that he did not see Langdon and Bruce as they came over the sky-line; and he could not smell them, for the wind was blowing up instead of down. Oblivious of their presence he came to the snow-belt. Joyously he smelled of Thor's huge footprints, and followed them. And above him Bruce and Langdon waited, crouched low, their guns on the ground, and each with his thick flannel shirt stripped off and held ready in his hands. When Muskwa was less than twenty yards from them they came tearing down upon him like an avalanche. Not until Bruce was upon him did Muskwa recover himself sufficiently to move. He saw and realized danger in the last fifth of a second, and as Bruce flung himself forward, his shirt outspread like a net, Muskwa darted to one side. Sprawling on his face, Bruce gathered up a shirtful of snow and clutched it to his breast, believing for a moment that he had the cub, and at this same instant Langdon made a drive that entangled him with his friend's long legs and sent him turning somersaults down the snow-slide. Muskwa bolted down the mountain as fast as his short legs could carry him. In another second Bruce was after him, and Langdon joined in ten feet behind. Suddenly Muskwa made a sharp turn, and the momentum with which Bruce was coming carried him thirty or forty feet below him, where the lanky mountaineer stopped himself only by doubling up like a jack-knife and digging toes, hands, elbows, and even his shoulders in the soft shale. Langdon had switched, and was hot after Muskwa. He flung himself face downward, shirt outspread, just as the cub made another turn, and when he rose to his feet his face was scratched and he spat half a handful of dirt and shale out of his mouth. Unfortunately for Muskwa his second turn brought him straight down to Bruce, and before he could turn again he was enveloped in sudden darkness and suffocation, and over him there rang out a fiendish and triumphant yell. "I got 'im!" shouted Bruce. Inside the shirt Muskwa scratched and bit and snarled, and Bruce was having his hands full when Langdon ran down with the second shirt. Very shortly Muskwa was trussed up like a papoose. His legs and his body were swathed so tightly that he could not move them. His head was not covered. It was the only part of him that showed, and the only part of him that he could move, and it looked so round and frightened and funny that for a minute or two Langdon and Bruce forgot their disappointments and losses of the day and laughed. Then Langdon sat down on one side of Muskwa, and Bruce on the other, and they filled and lighted their pipes. Muskwa could not even kick an objection. "A couple of husky hunters we are," said Langdon then. "Come out for a grizzly and end up with that!" He looked at the cub. Muskwa was eying him so earnestly that Langdon sat in mute wonder for a moment, and then slowly took his pipe from his mouth and stretched out a hand. "Cubby, cubby, nice cubby," he cajoled softly. Muskwa's tiny ears were perked forward. His bright eyes were like glass. Bruce, unobserved by Langdon, was grinning expectantly. "Cubby won't bite--no--no--nice little cubby--we won't hurt cubby--" The next instant a wild yell startled the mountain-tops as Muskwa's needle-like teeth sank into one of Langdon's fingers. Bruce's howls of joy would have frightened game a mile away. "You little devil!" gasped Langdon, and then, as he sucked his wounded finger, he laughed with Bruce. "He's a sport--a dead game sport," he added. "We'll call him Spitfire, Bruce. By George, I've wanted a cub like that ever since I first came into the mountains. I'm going to take him home with me! Ain't he a funny looking little cuss?" Muskwa shifted his head, the only part of him that was not as stiffly immovable as a mummy, and scrutinized Bruce. Langdon rose to his feet and looked back to the sky-line. His face was set and hard. "Four dogs!" he said, as if speaking to himself. "Three down below--and one up there!" He was silent for a moment, and then said: "I can't understand it, Bruce. They've cornered fifty bears for us, and until to-day we've never lost a dog." Bruce was looping a buckskin thong about Muskwa's middle, making of it a sort of handle by which he could carry the cub as he would have conveyed a pail of water or a slab of bacon. He stood up, and Muskwa dangled at the end of his string. "We've run up against a killer," he said. "An' a meat-killin' grizzly is the worst animal on the face of the earth when it comes to a fight or a hunt. The dogs'll never hold 'im, Jimmy, an' if it don't get dark pretty soon there won't none of the bunch come back. They'll quit at dark--if there's any left. The old fellow's got our wind, an' you can bet he knows what knocked him down up there on the snow. He's hikin'--an' hikin' fast. When we see 'im ag'in it'll be twenty miles from here." Langdon went up for the guns. When he returned Bruce led the way down the mountain, carrying Muskwa by the buckskin thong. For a few moments they paused on the blood-stained ledge of rock where Thor had wreaked his vengeance upon his tormentors. Langdon bent over the dog the grizzly had decapitated. "This is Biscuits," he said. "And we always thought she was the one coward of the bunch. The other two are Jane and Tober; old Fritz is up on the summit. Three of the best dogs we had, Bruce!" Bruce was looking over the ledge. He pointed downward. "There's another--pitched clean off the face o' the mount'in!" he gasped. "Jimmy, that's five!" Langdon's fists were clenched tightly as he stared over the edge of the precipice. A choking sound came from his throat. Bruce understood its meaning. From where they stood they could see a black patch on the upturned breast of the dog a hundred feet under them. Only one of the pack was marked like that. It was Langdon's favourite. He had made her a camp pet. "It's Dixie," he said. For the first time he felt a surge of anger sweep through him, and his face was white as he turned back to the trail. "I've got more than one reason for getting that grizzly now, Bruce," he added. "Wild horses can't tear me away from these mountains until I kill him. I'll stick until winter if I have to. I swear I'm going to kill him--if he doesn't run away." "He won't do that," said Bruce tersely, as he once more swung down the trail with Muskwa. Until now Muskwa had been stunned into submissiveness by what must have appeared to him to be an utterly hopeless situation. He had strained every muscle in his body to move a leg or a paw, but he was swathed as tightly as Rameses had ever been. But now, however, it slowly dawned upon him that as he dangled back and forth his face frequently brushed his enemy's leg, and he still had the use of his teeth. He watched his opportunity, and this came when Bruce took a long step down from a rock, thus allowing Muskwa's body to rest for the fraction of a second on the surface of the stone from which he was descending. Quicker than a wink Muskwa took a bite. It was a good deep bite, and if Langdon's howl had stirred the silences a mile away the yell which now came from Bruce beat him by at least a half. It was the wildest, most blood-curdling sound Muskwa had ever heard, even more terrible than the barking of the dogs, and it frightened him so that he released his hold at once. Then, again, he was amazed. These queer bipeds made no effort to retaliate. The one he had bitten hopped up and down on one foot in a most unaccountable manner for a minute or so, while the other sat down on a boulder and rocked back and forth, with his hands on his stomach, and made a queer, uproarious noise with his mouth wide open. Then the other stopped his hopping and also made that queer noise. It was anything but laughter to Muskwa. But it impinged upon him the truth of one of two things: either these grotesque looking monsters did not dare to fight him, or they were very peaceful and had no intention of harming him. But they were more cautious thereafter, and as soon as they reached the valley they carried him between them, strung on a rifle-barrel. It was almost dark when they approached a clump of balsams red with the glow of a fire. It was Muskwa's first fire. Also he saw his first horses, terrific looking monsters even larger than Thor. A third man--Metoosin, the Indian--came out to meet the hunters, and into this creature's hands Muskwa found himself transferred. He was laid on his side with the glare of the fire in his eyes, and while one of his captors held him by both ears, and so tightly that it hurt, another fastened a hobble-strap around his neck for a collar. A heavy halter rope was then tied to the ring on this strap, and the end of the rope was fastened to a tree. During these operations Muskwa snarled and snapped as much as he could. In another half-minute he was free of the shirts, and as he staggered on four wobbly legs, from which all power of flight had temporarily gone, he bared his tiny fangs and snarled as fiercely as he could. To his further amazement this had no effect upon his strange company at all, except that the three of them--even the Indian--opened their mouths and joined in that loud and incomprehensible din, to which one of them had given voice when he sank his teeth into his captor's leg on the mountainside. It was all tremendously puzzling to Muskwa. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Greatly to Muskwa's relief the three men soon turned away from him and began to busy themselves about the fire. This gave him a chance to escape, and he pulled and tugged at the end of the rope until he nearly choked himself to death. Finally he gave up in despair, and crumpling himself up against the foot of the balsam he began to watch the camp. He was not more than thirty feet from the fire. Bruce was washing his hands in a canvas basin. Langdon was mopping his face with a towel. Close to the fire Metoosin was kneeling, and from the big black skittle he was holding over the coals came the hissing and sputtering of fat caribou steaks, and about the pleasantest smell that had ever come Muskwa's way. The air all about him was heavy with the aroma of good things. When Langdon had finished drying his face he opened a can of something. It was sweetened condensed milk. He poured the white fluid into a basin, and came with it toward Muskwa. The cub had unsuccessfully attempted flight on the ground until his neck was sore; now he climbed the tree. He went up so quickly that Langdon was astonished, and he snarled and spat at the man as the basin of milk was placed where he would almost fall into it when he came down. Muskwa remained at the end of his rope up the tree, and for a long time the hunters paid no more attention to him. He could see them eating and he could hear them talking as they planned a new campaign against Thor. "We've got to trick him after what happened to-day," declared Bruce. "No more tracking 'im after this, Jimmy. We can track until doomsday an' he'll always know where we are." He paused for a moment and listened. "Funny the dogs don't come," he said. "I wonder--" He looked at Langdon. "Impossible!" exclaimed the latter, as he read the significance of his companion's look. "Bruce, you don't mean to say that bear might kill them all!" "I've hunted a good many grizzlies," replied the mountaineer quietly, "but I ain't never hunted a trickier one than this. Jimmy, he trapped them dogs on the ledge, an' he tricked the dog he killed up on the peak. He's liable to get 'em all into a corner, an' if that happens--" He shrugged his shoulders suggestively. Again Langdon listened. "If there were any alive at dark they should be here pretty soon," he said. "I'm sorry, now--sorry we didn't leave the dogs at home." Bruce laughed a little grimly. "Fortunes o' war, Jimmy," he said. "You don't go hunting grizzlies with a pack of lapdogs, an' you've got to expect to lose some of them sooner or later. We've tackled the wrong bear, that's all. He's beat us." "Beat us?" "I mean he's beat us in a square game, an' we dealt a raw hand at that in using dogs at all. Do you want that bear bad enough to go after him my way?" Langdon nodded. "What's your scheme?" "You've got to drop pretty idees when you go grizzly hunting," began Bruce. "And especially when you run up against a 'killer.' There won't be any hour between now an' denning-up time that this grizzly doesn't get the wind from all directions. How? He'll make detours. I'll bet if there was snow on the ground you'd find him back-tracking two miles out of every six, so he can get the wind of anything that's following him. An' he'll travel mostly nights, layin' high up in the rocks an' shale during the day. If you want any more shootin', there's just two things to do, an' the best of them two things is to move on and find other bears." "Which I won't do, Bruce. What's your scheme for getting this one?" Bruce was silent for several moments before he replied. "We've got his range mapped out to a mile," he said then. "It begins up at the first break we crossed, an' it ends down here where we came into this valley. It's about twenty-five miles up an' down. He don't touch the mount'ins west of this valley nor the mount'ins east of the other valleys an' he's dead certain to keep on makin' circles so long as we're after him. He's hikin' southward now on the other side of the range. "We'll lay here for a few days an' not move. Then we'll start Metoosin through the valley over there with the dogs, if there's any left, and we'll start south through this valley at the same time. One of us will keep to the slopes an' the other to the bottom, an' we'll travel slow. Get the idee? "That grizzly won't leave his country, an' Metoosin is pretty near bound to drive him around to us. We'll let him do the open hunting an' we'll skulk. The bear can't get past us both without giving one of us shooting." "It sounds good," agreed Langdon. "And I've got a lame knee that I'm not unwilling to nurse for a few days." Scarcely were the words out of Langdon's mouth when a sudden rattle of hobble-chains and the startled snort of a grazing horse out in the meadow brought them both to their feet. "Utim!" whispered Metoosin, his dark face aglow in the firelight. "You're right--the dogs," said Bruce, and he whistled softly. They heard a movement in the brush near them, and a moment later two of the dogs came into the firelight. They slunk in, half on their bellies, and as they prostrated themselves at the hunters' feet a third and a fourth joined them. They were not like the pack that had gone out that morning. There were deep hollows in their sides; their wiry crests were flat; they were hard run, and they knew that they were beaten. Their aggressiveness was gone, and they had the appearance of whipped curs. A fifth came in out of the night. He was limping, and dragging a torn foreleg. The head and throat of one of the others was red with blood. They all lay flat on their bellies, as if expecting condemnation. "We have failed," their attitude said; "we are beaten, and this is all of us that are left." Mutely Bruce and Langdon stared at them. They listened--waited. No other came. And then they looked at each other. "Two more of them gone," said Langdon. Bruce turned to a pile of panniers and canvases and pulled out the dog-leashes. Up in his tree Muskwa was all atremble. Within a few yards of him he saw again the white-fanged horde that had chased Thor and had driven him into the rock-crevice. Of the men he was no longer greatly afraid. They had attempted him no harm, and he had ceased to quake and snarl when one of them passed near. But the dogs were monsters. They had given battle to Thor. They must have beaten him, for Thor had run away. The tree to which Muskwa was fastened was not much more than a sapling, and he lay in the saddle of a crotch five feet from the ground when Metoosin led one of the dogs past him. The Airedale saw him and made a sudden spring that tore the leash from the Indian's hand. His leap carried him almost up to Muskwa. He was about to make another spring when Langdon rushed forward with a fierce cry, caught the dog by his collar, and with the end of the leash gave him a sound beating. Then he led him away. This act puzzled Muskwa more than ever. The man had saved him. He had beaten the monster with the red mouth and the white fangs, and all of those monsters were now being taken away at the end of ropes. When Langdon returned he stopped close to Muskwa's tree and talked to him. Muskwa allowed Langdon's hand to approach within six inches of him, and did not snap at it. Then a strange and sudden thrill shot through him. While his head was turned a little Langdon had boldly put his hand on his furry back. And in the touch there was not hurt! His mother had never put her paw on him as gently as that! Half a dozen times in the next ten minutes Langdon touched him. For the first three or four times Muskwa bared his two rows of shining teeth, but he made no sound. Gradually he ceased even to bare his teeth. Langdon left him then, and in a few moments he returned with a chunk of raw caribou meat. He held this close to Muskwa's nose. Muskwa could smell it, but he backed away from it, and at last Langdon placed it beside the basin at the foot of the tree and returned to where Bruce was smoking. "Inside of two days he'll be eating out of my hand," he said. It was not long before the camp became very quiet. Langdon, Bruce, and the Indian rolled themselves in their blankets and were soon asleep. The fire burned lower and lower. Soon there was only a single smouldering log. An owl hooted a little deeper in the timber. The drone of the valley and the mountains filled the peaceful night. The stars grew brighter. Far away Muskwa heard the rumbling of a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain. There was nothing to fear now. Everything was still and asleep but himself, and very cautiously he began to back down the tree. He reached the foot of it, loosed his hold, and half fell into the basin of condensed milk, a part of it slopping up over his face. Involuntarily he shot out his tongue and licked his chops, and the sweet, sticky stuff that it gathered filled him with a sudden and entirely unexpected pleasure. For a quarter of an hour he licked himself. And then, as if the secret of this delightful ambrosia had just dawned upon him, his bright little eyes fixed themselves covetously upon the tin basin. He approached it with commendable strategy and caution, circling first on one side of it and then on the other, every muscle in his body prepared for a quick spring backward if it should make a jump for him. At last his nose touched the thick, luscious feast in the basin, and he did not raise his head again until the last drop of it was gone. The condensed milk was the one biggest factor in the civilizing of Muskwa. It was the missing link that connected certain things in his lively little mind. He knew that the same hand that had touched him so gently had also placed this strange and wonderful feast at the foot of his tree, and that same hand had also offered him meat. He did not eat the meat, but he licked the interior of the basin until it shone like a mirror in the starlight. In spite of the milk, he was still filled with a desire to escape, though his efforts were not as frantic and unreasoning as they had been. Experience had taught him that it was futile to jump and tug at the end of his leash, and now he fell to chewing at the rope. Had he gnawed in one place he would probably have won freedom before morning, but when his jaws became tired he rested, and when he resumed his work it was usually at a fresh place in the rope. By midnight his gums were sore, and he gave up his exertions entirely. Humped close to the tree, ready to climb up it at the first sign of danger, the cub waited for morning. Not a wink did he sleep. Even though he was less afraid than he had been, he was terribly lonesome. He missed Thor, and he whimpered so softly that the men a few yards away could not have heard him had they been awake. If Pipoonaskoos had come into the camp then he would have welcomed him joyfully. Morning came, and Metoosin was the first out of his blankets. He built a fire, and this roused Bruce and Langdon. The latter, after he had dressed himself, paid a visit to Muskwa, and when he found the basin licked clean he showed his pleasure by calling the others' attention to what had happened. Muskwa had climbed to his crotch in the tree, and again he tolerated the stroking touch of Langdon's hand. Then Langdon brought forth another can from a cowhide pannier and opened it directly under Muskwa, so that he could see the creamy white fluid as it was turned into the basin. He held the basin up to Muskwa, so close that the milk touched the cub's nose, and for the life of him Muskwa could not keep his tongue in his mouth. Inside of five minutes he was eating from the basin in Langdon's hand! But when Bruce came up to watch the proceedings the cub bared all his teeth and snarled. "Bears make better pets than dogs," affirmed Bruce a little later, when they were eating breakfast. "He'll be following you around like a puppy in a few days, Jimmy." "I'm getting fond of the little cuss already," replied Langdon. "What was that you were telling me about Jameson's bears, Bruce?" "Jameson lived up in the Kootenay country," said Bruce. "Reg'lar hermit, I guess you'd call him. Came out of the mountains only twice a year to get grub. He made pets of grizzlies. For years he had one as big as this fellow we're chasing. He got 'im when a cub, an 'when I saw him he weighed a thousand pounds an' followed Jameson wherever he went like a dog. Even went on his hunts with him, an 'they slept beside the same campfire. Jameson loved bears, an' he'd never kill one." Langdon was silent. After a moment he said: "And I'm beginning to love them, Bruce. I don't know just why, but there's something about bears that makes you love them. I'm not going to shoot many more--perhaps none after we get this dog-killer we're after. I almost believe he will be my last bear." Suddenly he clenched his hands, and added angrily: "And to think there isn't a province in the Dominion or a state south of the Border that has a 'closed season' for bear! It's an outrage, Bruce. They're classed with vermin, and can be exterminated at all seasons. They can even be dug out of their dens with their young--and--so help me Heaven!--I've helped to dig them out! We're beasts, Bruce. Sometimes I almost think it's a crime for a man to carry a gun. And yet--I go on killing." "It's in our blood," laughed Bruce, unmoved. "Did you ever know a man, Jimmy, that didn't like to see things die? Wouldn't every mother's soul of 'em go to a hanging if they had the chance? Won't they crowd like buzzards round a dead horse to get a look at a man crushed to a pulp under a rock or a locomotive engine? Why, Jimmie, if there weren't no law to be afraid of, we humans'd be killing one another for the fun of it! We would. It's born in us to want to kill." "And we take it all out on brute creation," mused Langdon. "After all, we can't have much sympathy for ourselves if a generation or two of us are killed in war, can we? Mebby you're right, Bruce. Inasmuch as we can't kill our neighbours legally whenever we have the inclination, it's possible the Chief Arbiter of things sends us a war now and then to relieve us temporarily of our blood-thirstiness. Hello, what in thunder is the cub up to now?" Muskwa had fallen the wrong way out of his crotch and was dangling like the victim at the end of a hangman's rope. Langdon ran to him, caught him boldly in his bare hands, lifted him up over the limb and placed him on the ground. Muskwa did not snap at him or even growl. Bruce and Metoosin were away from camp all of that day, spying over the range to the westward, and Langdon was left to doctor a knee which he had battered against a rock the previous day. He spent most of his time in company with Muskwa. He opened a can of their griddle-cake syrup and by noon he had the cub following him about the tree and straining to reach the dish which he held temptingly just out of reach. Then he would sit down, and Muskwa would climb half over his lap to reach the syrup. At his present age Muskwa's affection and confidence were easily won. A baby black bear is very much like a human baby: he likes milk, he loves sweet things, and he wants to cuddle up close to any living thing that is good to him. He is the most lovable creature on four legs--round and soft and fluffy, and so funny that he is sure to keep every one about him in good humour. More than once that day Langdon laughed until the tears came, and especially when Muskwa made determined efforts to climb up his leg to reach the dish of syrup. As for Muskwa, he had gone syrup mad. He could not remember that his mother had ever given him anything like it, and Thor had produced nothing better than fish. Late in the afternoon Langdon untied Muskwa's rope and led him for a stroll down toward the creek. He carried the syrup dish and every few yards he would pause and let the cub have a taste of its contents. After half an hour of this manoeuvring he dropped his end of the leash entirely, and walked campward. And Muskwa followed! It was a triumph, and in Langdon's veins there pulsed a pleasurable thrill which his life in the open had never brought to him before. It was late when Metoosin returned, and he was quite surprised that Bruce had not shown up. Darkness came, and they built up the fire. They were finishing supper an hour later when Bruce came in, carrying something swung over his shoulders. He tossed it close to where Muskwa was hidden behind his tree. "A skin like velvet, and some meat for the dogs," he said. "I shot it with my pistol." He sat down and began eating. After a little Muskwa cautiously approached the carcass that lay doubled up three or four feet from him. He smelled of it, and a curious thrill shot through him. Then he whimpered softly as he muzzled the soft fur, still warm with life. And for a time after that he was very still. For the thing that Bruce had brought into camp and flung at the foot of his tree was the dead body of little Pipoonaskoos! CHAPTER SIXTEEN That night the big loneliness returned to Muskwa. Bruce and Metoosin were so tired after their hard climb over the range that they went to bed early, and Langdon followed them, leaving Pipoonaskoos where Bruce had first thrown him. Scarcely a move had Muskwa made after the discovery that had set his heart beating a little faster. He did not know what death was, or what it meant, and as Pipoonaskoos was so warm and soft he was sure that he would move after a little. He had no inclination to fight him now. Again it grew very, very still, and the stars filled the sky, and the fire burned low. But Pipoonaskoos did not move. Gently at first, Muskwa began nosing him and pulling at his silken hair, and as he did this he whimpered softly, as if saying, "I don't want to fight you any more, Pipoonaskoos! Wake up, and let's be friends!" But still Pipoonaskoos did not stir, and at last Muskwa gave up all hope of waking him. And still whimpering to his fat little enemy of the green meadow how sorry he was that he had chased him, he snuggled close up to Pipoonaskoos and in time went to sleep. Langdon was first up in the morning, and when he came over to see how Muskwa had fared during the night he suddenly stopped, and for a full minute he stood without moving, and then a low, strange cry broke from his lips. For Muskwa and Pipoonaskoos were snuggled as closely as they could have snuggled had both been living, and in some way Muskwa had arranged it so that one of the dead cub's little paws was embracing him. Quietly Langdon returned to where Bruce was sleeping, and in a minute or two Bruce returned with him, rubbing his eyes. And then he, too, stared, and the men looked at each other. "Dog meat," breathed Langdon. "You brought it home for dog meat, Bruce!" Bruce did not answer, Langdon said nothing more, and neither talked very much for a full hour after that. During that hour Metoosin came and dragged Pipoonaskoos away, and instead of being skinned and fed to the dogs he was put into a hole down in the creek-bottom and covered with sand and stones. That much, at least, Bruce and Langdon did for Pipoonaskoos. This day Metoosin and Bruce again went over the range. The mountaineer had brought back with him bits of quartz in which were unmistakable signs of gold, and they returned with an outfit for panning. Langdon continued his education of Muskwa. Several times he took the cub near the dogs, and when they snarled and strained at the ends of their leashes he whipped them, until with quick understanding they gripped the fact that Muskwa, although a bear, must not be harmed. In the afternoon of this second day he freed the cub entirely from the rope, and he had no difficulty in recapturing it when he wanted to tie it up again. The third and fourth days Bruce and the Indian explored the valley west of the range and convinced themselves finally that the "colours" they found were only a part of the flood-drifts, and would not lead to fortune. On this fourth night, which happened to be thick with clouds, and chilly, Langdon experimented by taking Muskwa to bed with him. He expected trouble. But Muskwa was as quiet as a kitten, and once he found a proper nest for himself he scarcely made a move until morning. A part of the night Langdon slept with one of his hands resting on the cub's soft, warm body. According to Bruce it was now time to continue the hunt for Thor, but a change for the worse in Langdon's knee broke in upon their plans. It was impossible for Langdon to walk more than a quarter of a mile at a time, and the position he was compelled to take in the saddle caused him so much pain that to prosecute the hunt even on horseback was out of the question. "A few more days won't hurt any," consoled Bruce. "If we give the old fellow a longer rest he may get a bit careless." The three days that followed were not without profit and pleasure for Langdon. Muskwa was teaching him more than he had ever known about bears, and especially bear cubs, and he made notes voluminously. The dogs were now confined to a clump of trees fully three hundred yards from the camp, and gradually the cub was given his freedom. He made no effort to run away, and he soon discovered that Bruce and Metoosin were also his friends. But Langdon was the only one he would follow. On the morning of the eighth day after their pursuit of Thor, Bruce and Metoosin rode over into the eastward valley with the dogs. Metoosin was to have a day's start, and Bruce planned to return to camp that afternoon so that he and Langdon could begin their hunt up the valley the next day. It was a glorious morning. A cool breeze came from the north and west, and about nine o'clock Langdon fastened Muskwa to his tree, saddled a horse, and rode down the valley. He had no intention of hunting. It was a joy merely to ride and breathe in the face of that wind and gaze upon the wonders of the mountains. He travelled northward for three or four miles, until he came to a broad, low slope that broke through the range to the westward. A desire seized upon him to look over into the other valley, and as his knee was giving him no trouble he cut a zigzag course upward that in half an hour brought him almost to the top. Here he came to a short, steep slide that compelled him to dismount and continue on foot. At the summit he found himself on a level sweep of meadow, shut in on each side of him by the bare rock walls of the split mountains, and a quarter of a mile ahead he could see where the meadow broke suddenly into the slope that shelved downward into the valley he was seeking. Halfway over this quarter of a mile of meadow there was a dip into which he could not see, and as he came to the edge of this he flung himself suddenly upon his face and for a minute or two lay as motionless as a rock. Then he slowly raised his head. A hundred yards from him, gathered about a small water-hole in the hollow, was a herd of goats. There were thirty or more, most of them Nannies with young kids. Langdon could make out only two Billies in the lot. For half an hour he lay still and watched them. Then one of the Nannies struck out with her two kids for the side of the mountain; another followed, and seeing that the whole band was about to move, Langdon rose quickly to his feet and ran as fast as he could toward them. For a moment Nannies, Billies, and little kids were paralyzed by his sudden appearance. They faced half about and stood as if without the power of flight until he had covered half the distance between t hem. Then their wits seemed to return all at once, and they broke in a wild panic for the side of the nearest mountain. Their hoofs soon began to clatter on boulder and shale, and for another half-hour Langdon heard the hollow booming of the rocks loosened by their feet high up among the crags and peaks. At the end of that time they were infinitesimal white dots on the sky-line. He went on, and a few minutes later looked down into the other valley. Southward this valley was shut out from his vision by a huge shoulder of rock. It was not very high, and he began to climb it. He had almost reached the top when his toe caught in a piece of slate, and in falling he brought his rifle down with tremendous force on a boulder. He was not hurt, except for a slight twinge in his lame knee. But his gun was a wreck. The stock was shattered close to the breech and a twist of his hand broke it off entirely. As he carried two extra rifles in his outfit the mishap did not disturb Langdon as much as it might otherwise have done, and he continued to climb over the rocks until he came to what appeared to be a broad, smooth ledge leading around the sandstone spur of the mountain. A hundred feet farther on he found that the ledge ended in a perpendicular wall of rock. From this point, however, he had a splendid view of the broad sweep of country between the two ranges to the south. He sat down, pulled out his pipe, and prepared to enjoy the magnificent panorama under him while he was getting his wind. Through his glasses he could see for miles, and what he looked upon was an unhunted country. Scarcely half a mile away a band of caribou was filing slowly across the bottom toward the green slopes to the west. He caught the glint of many ptarmigan wings in the sunlight below. After a time, fully two miles away, he saw sheep grazing on a thinly verdured slide. He wondered how many valleys there were like this in the vast reaches of the Canadian mountains that stretched three hundred miles from sea to prairie and a thousand miles north and south. Hundreds, even thousands, he told himself, and each wonderful valley a world complete within itself; a world filled with its own life, its own lakes and streams and forests, its own joys and its own tragedies. Here in this valley into which he gazed was the same soft droning and the same warm sunshine that had filled all the other valleys; and yet here, also, was a different life. Other bears ranged the slopes that he could see dimly with his naked eyes far to the west and north. It was a new domain, filled with other promise and other mystery, and he forgot time and hunger as he sat lost in the enchantment of it. It seemed to Langdon that these hundreds or thousands of valleys would never grow old for him; that he could wander on for all time, passing from one into another, and that each would possess its own charm, its own secrets to be solved, its own life to be learned. To him they were largely inscrutable; they were cryptic, as enigmatical as life itself, hiding their treasures as they droned through the centuries, giving birth to multitudes of the living, demanding in return other multitudes of the dead. As he looked off through the sunlit space he wondered what the story of this valley would be, and how many volumes it would fill, if the valley itself could tell it. First of all, he knew, it would whisper of the creation of a world; it would tell of oceans torn and twisted and thrown aside--of those first strange eons of time when there was no night, but all was day; when weird and tremendous monsters stalked where he now saw the caribou drinking at the creek, and when huge winged creatures half bird and half beast swept the sky where he now saw an eagle soaring. And then it would tell of The Change--of that terrific hour when the earth tilted on its axis, and night came, and a tropical world was turned into a frigid one, and new kinds of life were born to fill it. It must have been long after that, thought Langdon, that the first bear came to replace the mammoth, the mastodon, and the monstrous beasts that had been their company. And that first bear was the forefather of the grizzly he and Bruce were setting forth to kill the next day! So engrossed was Langdon in his thoughts that he did not hear a sound behind him. And then something roused him. It was as if one of the monsters he had been picturing in his imagination had let out a great breath close to him. He turned slowly, and the next moment his heart seemed to stop its beating; his blood seemed to grow cold and lifeless in his veins. Barring the ledge not more than fifteen feet from him, his great jaws agape, his head moving slowly from side to side as he regarded his trapped enemy, stood Thor, the King of the Mountains! And in that space of a second or two Langdon's hands involuntarily gripped at his broken rifle, and he decided that he was doomed! CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A broken, choking breath--a stifled sound that was scarcely a cry--was all that came from Langdon's lips as he saw the monstrous grizzly looking at him. In the ten seconds that followed he lived hours. His first thought was that he was powerless--utterly powerless. He could not even run, for the rock wall was behind him; he could not fling himself valleyward, for there was a sheer fall of a hundred feet on that side. He was face to face with death, a death as terrible as that which had overtaken the dogs. And yet in these last moments Langdon did not lose himself in terror. He noted even the redness in the avenging grizzly's eyes. He saw the naked scat along his back where one of his bullets had plowed; he saw the bare spot where another of his bullets had torn its way through Thor's fore-shoulder. And he believed, as he observed these things, that Thor had deliberately trailed him, that the bear had followed him along the ledge and had cornered him here that he might repay in full measure what had been inflicted upon him. Thor advanced--just one step; and then in that slow, graceful movement, reared himself to full height. Langdon, even then, thought that he was magnificent. On his part, the man did not move; he looked steadily up at Thor, and he had made up his mind what to do when the great beast lunged forward. He would fling himself over the edge. Down below there was one chance in a thousand for life. There might be a ledge or a projecting spur to catch him. And Thor! Suddenly--unexpectedly--he had come upon man! This was the creature that had hunted him, this was the creature that had hurt him--and it was so near that he could reach out with his paw and crush it! And how weak, and white, and shrinking it looked now! Where was its strange thunder? Where was its burning lightning? Why did it make no sound? Even a dog would have done more than this creature, for the dog would have shown its fangs; it would have snarled, it would have fought. But this thing that was man did nothing. And a great, slow doubt swept through Thor's massive head. Was it really this shrinking, harmless, terrified thing that had hurt him? He smelled the man-smell. It was thick. And yet this time there came with it no hurt. And then, slowly again, Thor came down to all fours. Steadily he looked at the man. Had Langdon moved then he would have died. But Thor was not, like man, a murderer. For another half-minute he waited for a hurt, for some sign of menace. Neither came, and he was puzzled. His nose swept the ground, and Langdon saw the dust rise where the grizzly's hot breath stirred it. And after that, for another long and terrible thirty seconds, the bear and the man looked at each other. Then very slowly--and doubtfully--Thor half turned. He growled. His lips drew partly back. Yet he saw no reason to fight, for that shrinking, white-faced pigmy crouching on the rock made no movement to offer him battle. He saw that he could not go on, for the ledge was blocked by the mountain wall. Had there been a trail the story might have been different for Langdon. As it was, Thor disappeared slowly in the direction from which he had come, his great head hung low, his long claws click, click, clicking like ivory castanets as he went. Not until then did it seem to Langdon that he breathed again, and that his heart resumed its beating. He gave a great sobbing gasp. He rose to his feet, and his legs seemed weak. He waited--one minute, two, three; and then he stole cautiously to the twist in the ledge around which Thor had gone. The rocks were clear, and he began to retrace his own steps toward the meadowy break, watching and listening, and still clutching the broken parts of his rifle. When he came to the edge of the plain he dropped down behind a huge boulder. Three hundred yards away Thor was ambling slowly over the crest of the dip toward the eastward valley. Not until the bear reappeared on the farther ridge of the hollow, and then vanished again, did Langdon follow. When he reached the slope on which he had hobbled his horse Thor was no longer in sight. The horse was where he had left it. Not until he was in the saddle did Langdon feel that he was completely safe. Then he laughed, a nervous, broken, joyous sort of laugh, and as he scanned the valley he filled his pipe with fresh tobacco. "You great big god of a bear!" he whispered, and every fibre in him was trembling in a wonderful excitement as he found voice for the first time. "You--you monster with a heart bigger than man!" And then he added, under his breath, as if not conscious that he was speaking: "If I'd cornered you like that I'd have killed you! And you! You cornered me, and let me live!" He rode toward camp, and as he went he knew that this day had given the final touch to the big change that had been working in him. He had met the King of the Mountains; he had stood face to face with death, and in the last moment the four-footed thing he had hunted and maimed had been merciful. He believed that Bruce would not understand; that Bruce could not understand; but unto himself the day and the hour had brought its meaning in a way that he would not forget so long as he lived, and he knew that hereafter and for all time he would not again hunt the life of Thor, or the lives of any of his kind. Langdon reached the camp and prepared himself some dinner, and as he ate this, with Muskwa for company, he made new plans for the days and weeks that were to follow. He would send Bruce back to overtake Metoosin the next day, and they would no longer hunt the big grizzly. They would go on to the Skeena and possibly even up to the edge of the Yukon, and then swing eastward into the caribou country some time early in September, hitting back toward civilization on the prairie side of the Rockies. He would take Muskwa with them. Back in the land of men and cities they would be great friends. It did not occur to him just then what this would mean for Muskwa. It was two o'clock, and he was still dreaming of new and unknown trails into the North when a sound came to rouse and disturb him. For a few minutes he paid no attention to it, for it seemed to be only a part of the droning murmur of the valley. But slowly and steadily it rose above this, and at last he got up from where he was lying with his back to a tree and walked out from the timber, where he could hear more plainly. Muskwa followed him, and when Langdon stopped the tan-faced cub also stopped. His little ears shot out inquisitively. He turned his head to the north. From that direction the sound was coming. In another moment Langdon had recognized it, and yet even then he told himself that his ears must be playing him false. It could not be the barking of dogs! By this time Bruce and Metoosin were far to the south with the pack; at least Metoosin should be, and Bruce was on his return to the camp! Quickly the sound grew more distinct, and at last he knew that he could not be mistaken. The dogs were coming up the valley. Something had turned Bruce and Metoosin northward instead of into the south. And the pack was giving tongue--that fierce, heated baying which told him they were again on the fresh spoor of game. A sudden thrill shot through him. There could be but one living thing in the length and breadth of the valley that Bruce would set the dogs after, and that was the big grizzly! For a few moments longer Langdon stood and listened. Then he hurried back to camp, tied Muskwa to his tree, armed himself with another rifle, and resaddled his horse. Five minutes later he was riding swiftly in the direction of the range where a short time before Thor had given him his life. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Thor heard the dogs when they were a mile away. There were two reasons why he was even less in a mood to run from them now than a few days before. Of the dogs alone he had no more fear than if they had been so many badgers, or so many whistlers piping at him from the rocks. He had found them all mouth and little fang, and easy to kill. It was what followed close after them that disturbed him. But to-day he had stood face to face with the thing that had brought the strange scent into his valleys, and it had not offered to hurt him, and he had refused to kill it. Besides, he was again seeking Iskwao, the she-bear, and man is not the only animal that will risk his life for love. After killing his last dog at dusk of that fatal day when they had pursued him over the mountain Thor had done just what Bruce thought that he would do, and instead of continuing southward had made a wider detour toward the north, and the third night after the fight and the loss of Muskwa he found Iskwao again. In the twilight of that same evening Pipoonaskoos had died, and Thor had heard the sharp cracking of Bruce's automatic. All that night and the next day and the night that followed he spent with Iskwao, and then he left her once more. A third time he was seeking her when he found Langdon in the trap on the ledge, and he had not yet got wind of her when he first heard the baying of the dogs on his trail. He was travelling southward, which brought him nearer the hunters' camp. He was keeping to the high slopes where there were little dips and meadows, broken by patches of shale, deep coulees, and occasionally wild upheavals of rock. He was keeping the wind straight ahead so that he would not fail to catch the smell of Iskwao when he came near her, and with the baying of the dogs he caught no scent of the pursuing beasts, or of the two men who were riding behind them. At another time he would have played his favourite trick of detouring so that the danger would be ahead of him, with the wind in his favour. Caution had now become secondary to his desire to find his mate. The dogs were less than half a mile away when he stopped suddenly, sniffed the air for a moment, and then went on swiftly until he was halted by a narrow ravine. Up that ravine Iskwao was coming from a dip lower down the mountain, and she was running. The yelping of the pack was fierce and close when Thor scrambled down in time to meet her as she rushed upward. Iskwao paused for a single moment, smelled noses with Thor, and then went on, her ears laid back flat and sullen and her throat filled with growling menace. Thor followed her, and he also growled. He knew that his mate was fleeing from the dogs, and again that deadly and slowly increasing wrath swept through him as he climbed after her higher up the mountain. In such an hour as this Thor was at his worst. He was a fighter when pursued as the dogs had pursued him a week before--but he was a demon, terrible and without mercy, when danger threatened his mate. He fell farther and farther behind Iskwao, and twice lie turned, his fangs gleaming under drawn lips, and his defiance rolling back upon his enemies in low thunder. When he came up out of the coulee he was in the shadow of the peak, and Iskwao had already disappeared in her skyward scramble. Where she had gone was a wild chaos of rock-slide and the piled-up débris of fallen and shattered masses of sandstone crag. The sky-line was not more than three hundred yards above him. He looked up. Iskwao was among the rocks, and here was the place to fight. The dogs were close upon him now. They were coming up the last stretch of the coulee, baying loudly. Thor turned about, and waited for them. Half a mile to the south, looking through his glasses, Langdon saw Thor, and at almost the same instant the dogs appeared over the edge of the coulee. He had ridden halfway up the mountain; from that point he had climbed higher, and was following a well-beaten sheep trail at about the same altitude as Thor. From where he stood the valley lay under his glasses for miles. He did not have far to look to discover Bruce and the Indian. They were dismounting at the foot of the coulee, and as he gazed they ran quickly into it and disappeared. Again Langdon swung back to Thor. The dogs were holding him now, and he knew there was no chance of the grizzly killing them in that open space. Then he saw movement among the rocks higher up, and a low cry of understanding broke from his lips as he made out Iskwao climbing steadily toward the ragged peak. He knew that this second bear was a female. The big grizzly--her mate--had stopped to fight. And there was no hope for him if the dogs succeeded in holding him for a matter of ten or fifteen minutes. Bruce and Metoosin would appear in that time over the rim of the coulee at a range of less than a hundred yards! Langdon thrust his binoculars in their case and started at a run along the sheep trail. For two hundred yards his progress was easy, and then the patch broke into a thousand individual tracks on a slope of soft and slippery shale, and it took him five minutes to make the next fifty yards. The trail hardened again. He ran on pantingly, and for another five minutes the shoulder of a ridge hid Thor and the dogs from him. When he came over that ridge and ran fifty yards, down the farther side of it, he stopped short. Further progress was barred by a steep ravine. He was five hundred yards from where Thor stood with his back to the rocks and his huge head to the pack. Even as he looked, struggling to get breath enough to shout, Langdon expected to see Bruce and Metoosin appear out of the coulee. It flashed upon him then that even if he could make them hear it would be impossible for them to understand him. Bruce would not guess that he wanted to spare the beast they had been hunting for almost two weeks. Thor had rushed the dogs a full twenty yards toward the coulee when Langdon dropped quickly behind a rock. There was only one way of saving him now, if he was not too late. The pack had retreated a few yards down the slope, and he aimed at the pack. One thought only filled his brain--he must sacrifice his dogs or let Thor die. And that day Thor had given him his life! There was no hesitation as he pressed the trigger. It was a long shot, and the first bullet threw up a cloud of dust fifty feet short of the Airedales. He fired again, and missed. The third time his rifle cracked there answered it a sharp yelp of pain which Laagdon himself did not hear. One of the dogs rolled over and over down the slope. The reports of the shots alone had not stirred Thor, but now when he saw one of his enemies crumple up and go rolling down the mountain he turned slowly toward the safety of the rocks. A fourth and then a fifth shot followed, and at the fifth the yelping dogs dropped back toward the coulee, one of them limping with a shattered fore-foot. Langdon sprang upon the boulder over which he had rested his gun, and his eyes caught the sky-line. Iskwao had just reached the top. She paused for a moment and looked down. Then she disappeared. Thor was now hidden among the boulders and broken masses of sandstone, following her trail. Within two minutes after the grizzly disappeared Bruce and Metoosin scrambled up over the edge of the coulee. From where they stood even the sky-line was within fairly good shooting distance, and Langdon suddenly began shouting excitedly, waving his arms, and pointing downward. Bruce and Metoosin were caught by his ruse, in spite of the fact that the dogs were again giving fierce tongue close to the rocks among which Thor had gone. They believed that from where he stood Langdon could see the progress of the bear, and that it was running toward the valley. Not until they were another hundred yards down the slope did they stop and look back at Langdon to get further directions. From his rock Langdon was pointing to the sky-line. Thor was just going over. He paused for a moment, as Iskwao had stopped, and took one last look at man. And Langdon, as he saw the last of him, waved his hat and shouted, "Good luck to you, old man--good luck!" CHAPTER NINETEEN That night Langdon and Bruce made their new plans, while Metoosin sat aloof, smoking in stolid silence, and gazing now and then at Langdon as if he could not yet bring himself to the point of believing what had happened that afternoon. Thereafter through many moons Metoosin would never forget to relate to his children and his grandchildren and his friends of the tepee tribes how he had once hunted with a white man who had shot his own dogs to save the life of a grizzly bear. Langdon was no longer the same old Langdon to him, and after this hunt Metoosin knew that he would never hunt with him again. For Langdon was _keskwao_ now. Something had gone wrong in his head. The Great Spirit had taken away his heart and had given it to a grizzly bear, and over his pipe Metoosin watched him cautiously. This suspicion was confirmed when he saw Bruce and Langdon making a cage out of a cowhide pannier and realized that the cub was to accompany them on their long journey. There was no doubt in his mind now. Langdon was "queer," and to an Indian that sort of queerness boded no good to man. The next morning at sunrise the outfit was ready for its long trail into the northland. Bruce and Langdon led the way up the slope and over the divide into the valley where they had first encountered Thor, the train filing picturesquely behind them, with Metoosin bringing up the rear. In his cowhide pannier rode Muskwa. Langdon was satisfied and happy. "It was the best hunt of my life," he said to Bruce. "I'll never be sorry we let him live." "You're the doctor," said Bruce rather irreverently. "If I had my way about it his hide would be back there on Dishpan. Almost any tourist down on the line of rail would jump for it at a hundred dollars." "He's worth several thousand to me alive," replied Langdon, with which enigmatic retort he dropped behind to see how Muskwa was riding. The cub was rolling and pitching about in his pannier like a raw amateur in a howdab on an elephant's back, and after contemplating him for a few moments Langdon caught up with Bruce again. Half a dozen times during the next two or three hours he visited Muskwa, and each time that he returned to Bruce he was quieter, as if debating something with himself. It was nine o'clock when they came to what was undoubtedly the end of Thor's valley. A mountain rose up squarely in the face of it, and the stream they were following swung sharply to the westward into a narrow canyon. On the east rose a green and undulating slope up which the horses could easily travel, and which would take the outfit into a new valley in the direction of the Driftwood. This course Bruce decided to pursue. Halfway up the slope they stopped to give the horses a breathing spell. In his cowhide prison Muskwa whimpered pleadingly. Langdon heard, but he seemed to pay no attention. He was looking steadily back into the valley. It was glorious in the morning sun. He could see the peaks under which lay the cool, dark lake in which Thor had fished; for miles the slopes were like green velvet and there came to him as he looked the last droning music of Thor's world. It struck him in a curious way as a sort of anthem, a hymnal rejoicing that he was going, and that he was leaving things as they were before he came. And yet, _was_ he leaving things as they had been? Did his ears not catch in that music of the mountains something of sadness, of grief, of plaintive prayer? And again, close to him, Muskwa whimpered softly. Then Langdon turned to Bruce. "It's settled," he said, and his words had a decisive ring in them. "I've been trying to make up my mind all the morning, and it's made up now. You and Metoosin go on when the horses get their wind. I'm going to ride down there a mile or so and free the cub where he'll find his way back home!" He did not wait for arguments or remarks, and Bruce made none. He took Muskwa in his arms and rode back into the south. A mile up the valley Langdon came to a wide, open meadow dotted with clumps of spruce and willows and sweet with the perfume of flowers. Here he dismounted, and for ten minutes sat on the ground with Muskwa. From his pocket he drew forth a small paper bag and fed the cub its last sugar. A thick lump grew in his throat as Muskwa's soft little nose muzzled the palm of his hand, and when at last he jumped up and sprang into his saddle there was a mist in his eyes. He tried to laugh. Perhaps he was weak. But he loved Muskwa, and he knew that he was leaving more than a human friend in this mountain valley. "Good-bye, old fellow," he said, and his voice was choking. "Good-bye, little Spitfire! Mebby some day I'll come back and see you, and you'll be a big, fierce bear--but I won't shoot--never--never--" He rode fast into the north. Three hundred yards away he turned his head and looked back. Muskwa was following, but losing ground. Langdon waved his hand. "Good-bye!" he called through the lump in his throat. "Good-bye!" Half an hour later he looked down from the top of the slope through his glasses. He saw Muskwa, a black dot. The cub had stopped, and was waiting confidently for him to return. And trying to laugh again, but failing dismally, Langdon rode over the divide and out of Muskwa's life. CHAPTER TWENTY For a good half-mile Muskwa followed over the trail of Langdon. He ran at first; then he walked; finally he stopped entirely and sat down like a dog, facing the distant slope. Had Langdon been afoot he would not have halted until he was tired. But the cub had not liked his pannier prison. He had been tremendously jostled and bounced about, and twice the horse that carried him had shaken himself, and those shakings had been like earthquakes to Muskwa. He knew that the cage as well as Langdon was ahead of him. He sat for a time and whimpered wistfully, but he went no farther. He was sure that the friend he had grown to love would return after a little. He always came back. He had never failed him. So he began to hunt about for a spring beauty or a dog-tooth violet, and for some time he was careful not to stray very far away from where the outfit had passed. All that day the cub remained in the flower-strewn meadows under the slope; it was very pleasant in the sunshine, and he found more than one patch of the bulbous roots he liked. He dug, and he filled himself, and he took a nap in the afternoon; but when the sun began to go down and the heavy shadows of the mountain darkened the valley he began to grow afraid. He was still a very small baby of a cub, and only that one dreadful night after his mother had died had he spent entirely alone. Thor had replaced mother, and Langdon had taken the place of Thor, so that until now he had never felt the loneliness and emptiness of darkness. He crawled under a clump of thorn close to the trail, and continued to wait, and listen, and sniff expectantly. The stars came out clear and brilliant, but to-night their lure was not strong enough to call him forth. Not until dawn did he steal out cautiously from his shelter of thorn. The sun gave him courage and confidence again and he began wandering back through the valley, the scent of the horse-trail growing fainter and fainter until at last it disappeared entirely. That day Muskwa ate some grass and a few dog-tooth violet roots, and when the second night came he was abreast of the slope over which the outfit had come from the valley in which were Thor and Iskwao. He was tired and hungry, and he was utterly lost. That night he slept in the end of a hollow log. The next day he went on, and for many days and many nights after that he was alone in the big valley. He passed close to the pool where Thor and he had met the old bear, and he nosed hungrily among the fishbones; he skirted the edge of the dark, deep lake; he saw the shadowy things fluttering in the gloom of the forest again; he passed over the beaver dam, and he slept for two nights close to the log-jam from which he had watched Thor throw out their first fish. He was almost forgetting Langdon now, and was thinking more and more about Thor and his mother. He wanted them. He wanted them more than he had ever wanted the companionship of man, for Muskwa was fast becoming a creature of the wild again. It was the beginning of August before the cub came to the break in the valley and climbed up the slope where Thor had first heard the thunder and had first felt the sting of the white men's guns. In these two weeks Muskwa had grown rapidly, in spite of the fact that he often went to bed on an empty stomach; and he was no longer afraid of the dark. Through the deep, sunless canyon above the clay wallow he went, and as there was only one way out he came at last to the summit of the break over which Thor had gone, and over which Langdon and Bruce had followed in close pursuit. And the other valley--his home--lay under Muskwa. Of course he did not recognize it. He saw and smelled in it nothing that was familiar. But it was such a beautiful valley, and so abundantly filled with plenty and sunshine, that he did not hurry through it. He found whole gardens of spring beauties and dog-tooth violets. And on the third day he made his first real kill. He almost stumbled over a baby whistler no larger than a red squirrel, and before the little creature could escape he was upon it. It made him a splendid feast. It was fully a week before he passed along the creek-bottom close under the slope where his mother had died. If he had been travelling along the crest of the slope he would have found her bones, picked clean by the wild things. It was another week before he came to the little meadow where Thor had killed the bull caribou and the big black bear. And now Muskwa knew that he was home! For two days he did not travel two hundred yards from the scene of feast and battle, and night and day he was on the watch for Thor. Then he had to seek farther for food, but each afternoon when the mountains began to throw out long shadows he would return to the clump of trees in which they had made the cache that the black bear robber had despoiled. One day he went farther than usual in his quest for roots. He was a good half-mile from the place he had made home, and he was sniffing about the end of a rock when a great shadow fell suddenly upon him. He looked up, and for a full half-minute he stood transfixed, his heart pounding and jumping as it had never pounded and jumped before in his life. Within five feet of him stood Thor! The big grizzly was as motionless as he, looking at him steadily. And then Muskwa gave a puppy-like whine of joy and ran forward. Thor lowered his huge head, and for another half-minute they stood without moving, with Thor's nose buried in the hair on Muskwa's back. After that Thor went up the slope as if the cub had never been lost at all, and Muskwa followed him happily. Many days of wonderful travel and of glorious feasting came after this, and Thor led Muskwa into a thousand new places in the two valleys and the mountains between. There were great fishing days, and there was another caribou killed over the range, and Muskwa grew fatter and fatter and heavier and heavier until by the middle of September he was as large as a good-sized dog. Then came the berries, and Thor knew where they all grew low down in the valleys--first the wild red raspberries, then the soap berries, and after those the delicious black currants which grew in the cool depths of the forests and were almost as large as cherries and nearly as sweet as the sugar which Langdon had fed Muskwa. Muskwa liked the black currants best of all. They grew in thick, rich clusters; there were no leaves on the bushes that were loaded with them, and he could pick and eat a quart in five minutes. But at last the time came when there were no berries. This was in October. The nights were very cold, and for whole days at a time the sun would not shine, and the skies were dark and heavy with clouds. On the peaks the snow was growing deeper and deeper, and it never thawed now up near the sky-line. Snow fell in the valley, too--at first just enough to make a white carpet that chilled Muskwa's feet, but it quickly disappeared. Raw winds began to come out of the north, and in place of the droning music of the valley in summertime there were now shrill wailings and screechings at night, and the trees made mournful sounds. To Muskwa the whole world seemed changing. He wondered in these chill and dark days why Thor kept to the windswept slopes when he might have found shelter in the bottoms. And Thor, if he explained to him at all, told him that winter was very near, and that these slopes were their last feeding grounds. In the valleys the berries were gone; grass and roots alone were no longer nourishing enough for their bodies; they could no longer waste time in seeking ants and grubs; the fish were in deep water. It was the season when the caribou were keen-scented as foxes and swift as the wind. Only along the slopes lay the dinners they were sure of--famine-day dinners of whistlers and gophers. Thor dug for them now, and in this digging Muskwa helped as much as he could. More than once they turned out wagonloads of earth to get at the cozy winter sleeping quarters of a whistler family, and sometimes they dug for hours to capture three or four little gophers no larger than red squirrels, but lusciously fat. Thus they lived through the last days of October into November. And now the snow and the cold winds and the fierce blizzards from the north came in earnest, and the ponds and lakes began to freeze over. Still Thor hung to the slopes, and Muskwa shivered with the cold at night and wondered if the sun was never going to shine again. One day about the middle of November Thor stopped in the very act of digging out a family of whistlers, went straight down into the valley, and struck southward in a most businesslike way. They were ten miles from the clay-wallow canyon when they started, but so lively was the pace set by the big grizzly that they reached it before dark that same afternoon. For two days after this Thor seemed to have no object in life at all. There was nothing in the canyon to eat, and he wandered about among the rocks, smelling and listening and deporting himself generally in a fashion that was altogether mystifying to Muskwa. In the afternoon of the second day Thor stopped in a dump of jackpines under which the ground was strewn with fallen needles. He began to eat these needles. They did not look good to Muskwa, but something told the cub that he should do as Thor was doing; so he licked them up and swallowed them, not knowing that it was nature's last preparation for his long sleep. It was four o'clock when they came to the mouth of the deep cavern in which Thor was born, and here again Thor paused, sniffing up and down the wind, and waiting for nothing in particular. It was growing dark. A wailing storm hung over the canyon. Biting winds swept down from the peaks, and the sky was black and full of snow. For a minute the grizzly stood with his head and shoulders in the cavern door. Then he entered. Muskwa followed. Deep back they went through a pitch-black gloom, and it grew warmer and warmer, and the wailing of the wind died away until it was only a murmur. It took Thor at least half an hour to arrange himself just as he wanted to sleep. Then Muskwa curled up beside him. The cub was very warm and very comfortable. That night the storm raged, and the snow fell deep. It came up the canyon in clouds, and it drifted down through the canyon roof in still thicker clouds, and all the world was buried deep. When morning came there was no cavern door, there were no rocks, and no black and purple of tree and shrub. All was white and still, and there was no longer the droning music in the valley. Deep back in the cavern Muskwa moved restlessly. Thor heaved a deep sigh. After that long and soundly they slept. And it may be that they dreamed. THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN "You are going up from among a people who have many gods to a people who have but one," said Ransom quietly, looking across at the other. "It would be better for you if you turned back. I've spent four years in the Government service, mostly north of Fifty-three, and I know what I'm talking about. I've read all of your books carefully, and I tell you now--go back. If you strike up into the Bay country, as you say you're going to, every dream of socialism you ever had will be shattered, and you will laugh at your own books. Go back!" Roscoe's fine young face lighted up with a laugh at his old college chum's seriousness. "You're mistaken, Ranny," he said. "I'm not a socialist but a sociologist. There's a distinction, isn't there? I don't believe that my series of books will be at all complete without a study of socialism as it exists in its crudest form, and as it must exist up here in the North. My material for this last book will show what tremendous progress the civilization of two centuries on this continent has made over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood. That's my idea, Ranny. I'm an optimist. I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of the North will give me a good picture of what civilization has gained." "What it has lost, you will say a little later," replied Ransom. "See here, Roscoe--has it ever occurred to you that brotherly love, as you call it--the real thing--ended when civilization began? Has it ever occurred to you that somewhere away back in the darkest ages your socialistic Nirvana may have existed, and that you sociologists might still find traces of it, if you would? Has the idea ever come to you that there has been a time when the world has been better than it is to-day, and better than it ever will be again? Will you, as a student of life, concede that the savage can teach you a lesson? Will any of your kind? No, for you are self-appointed civilizers, working according to a certain code." Ransom's weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a questioning look in Roscoe's eyes, as though he were striving to look through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision. "If most of us believed as you believe," he said at last, "civilization would end. We would progress no farther." "And this civilization," said Ransom, "can there not be too much of it? Was it any worse for God's first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand other men, than it is for civilization's sweat-shops to slay twenty thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars and the things you wear? Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn't it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial supremacy kills more people in a day than God's first people killed in a year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can we call it civilization any longer? This talk may all be bally rot, Roscoe. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is. There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures progress as God meant progress to be. I am saying this because I want you to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them. You may find up there the last chapter in life, as it was largely intended that life should be in the beginning of things. And I want you to understand it, because in your books you possess a power which should be well directed. When I received your last letter I hunted up the best man I knew as guide and companion for you--old Rameses, down at the Mission. He is called Rameses because he looks like the old boy himself. You said you wanted to learn Cree, and he'll teach it to you. He will teach you a lot of other things, and when you look at him, especially at night beside the campfire, you will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the first people." Roscoe, at thirty-two, had not lost his boy's enthusiasm in life, in spite of the fact that he had studied too deeply, and had seen too much, and had begun fighting for existence while still in bare feet. From the beginning it seemed as though some grim monster of fate had hovered about him, making his path as rough as it could, and striking him down whenever the opportunity came. His own tremendous energy and ambition had carried him to the top. He worked himself through college, and became a success in his way. But at no time could he remember real happiness. It had almost come to him, he thought, a year before--in the form of a girl; but this promise had passed like the others because, of a sudden, he found that she had shattered the most precious of all his ideals. So he picked himself up, and, encouraged by his virile optimism, began looking forward again. Bad luck had so worked its hand in the moulding of him that he had come to live chiefly in anticipation, and though this bad luck had played battledore and shuttlecock with him, the things which he anticipated were pleasant and beautiful. He believed that the human race was growing better, and that each year was bringing his ideals just so much nearer to realization. More than once he had told himself that he was living two or three centuries too soon. Ransom, his old college chum, had been the first to suggest that he was living some thousands of years too late. He thought of this a great deal during the first pleasant weeks of the autumn, which he and old Rameses spent up in the Lac la Ronge and Reindeer Lake country. During this time he devoted himself almost entirely to the study of Cree under Rameses' tutelage, and the more he learned of it the more he saw the truth of what Ransom had told him once upon a time, that the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world. At the upper end of the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music. He had learned French in Paris, and had heard Italian in Rome, but never in his life had he heard words or voices so beautiful as those which fell from the red, full lips of the Cree girls. He thought more seriously than ever of what Ransom had said about the first people, and the beginning of things. Late in October they swung westward through the Sissipuk and Burntwood water ways to Nelson House, and at this point Rameses returned homeward. Roscoe struck north, with two new guides, and on the eighteenth of November the first of the two great storms which made the year of 1907 one of the most tragic in the history of the far Northern people overtook them on Split Lake, thirty miles from a Hudson's Bay post. It was two weeks later before they reached this post, and here Roscoe was given the first of several warnings. "This has been the worst autumn we've had for years," said the factor to him. "The Indians haven't caught half enough fish to carry them through, and this storm has ruined the early-snow hunting in which they usually get enough meat to last them until spring. We're stinting ourselves on our own supplies now, and farther north the Company will soon be on famine rations if the cold doesn't let up--and it won't. They won't want an extra mouth up there, so you'd better turn back. It's going to be a starvation winter." But Roscoe, knowing as little as the rest of man-kind of the terrible famines of the northern people, which keep an area one-half as large as the whole of Europe down to a population of thirty thousand, went on. A famine, he argued, would give him greater opportunity for study. Two weeks later he was at York Factory, and from there he continued to Fort Churchill, farther up on Hudson's Bay. By the time he reached this point, early in January, the famine of those few terrible weeks during which more than fifteen hundred people died of starvation had begun. From the Barren Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late in February the temperature did not rise above thirty degrees below zero, and remained for the most of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the wilderness reports of starvation came to the Company's posts. Traplines could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose, caribou, and even the furred animals had buried themselves under the snow. Indians and halfbreeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice Roscoe saw mothers who brought dead babies in their arms. One day a white trapper came in with his dogs and sledge, and on the sledge, wrapped in a bear skin, was his wife, who had died fifty miles back in the forest. Late in January there came a sudden rise in the temperature, and Roscoe prepared to take advantage of the change to strike south and westward again, toward Nelson House. Dogs could not be had for love or money, so on the first of February he set out on snowshoes with an Indian guide and two weeks' supply of provisions. The fifth night, in the wild, Barren country west of the Etawney, his Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Roscoe investigated he found him half dead with a strange sickness. Roscoe thought of smallpox, the terrible plague that usually follows northern famine, and a shiver ran through him. He made the Indian's balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The temperature fell again, and the cold became intense. Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Roscoe knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game. But there was no life. Even the brush sparrows and snow hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that he might take what food was left, and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself. But the idea never got further than a first thought. He kept to his post, and each day spent half an hour in writing. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible day, the beginning of the second great storm of that winter. There was food for another twenty-four hours, and Roscoe packed it, together with his blankets and a little tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease. Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian's balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth--the plague-signal of the North. Then he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that his one chance was to keep the wind at his back. * * * * * This was the beginning of the wonderful experience which Roscoe Cummins afterward described in his book "The First People and the Valley of Silent Men." He prepared another manuscript which for personal reasons was never published, the story of a dark-eyed girl of the First People--but this is to come. It has to do with the last tragic weeks of this winter of 1907, in which it was a toss-up between all things of flesh and blood in the Northland to see which would win--life or death--and in which a pair of dark eyes and a voice from the First People turned a sociologist into a possible Member of Parliament. * * * * * At the end of his first day's struggle Roscoe built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber, which was not much more than brush. If he had been an older hand he would have observed that this bit of timber, and every tree and bush that he had passed since noon, was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. It was a sign of the Great Barrens, and of the fierce storms that swept over them, destroying even the life of the trees. He cooked and ate his last food the following day, and went on. The small timber turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly. All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a mouthful of Fox-bite, which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe. At night he made tea, but had nothing to eat. His hunger was acute and painful. It was torture the next day--the third--for the process of starvation is a rapid one in this country where only the fittest survive on four meals a day. He camped, built a small bush fire at night, and slept. He almost failed to rouse himself on the morning that followed, and when he staggered to his feet and felt the cutting sting of the storm still in his face, and heard the swishing wail of it over the Barren, he knew that at last the moment had come when he was standing face to face with the Almighty. For some strange reason he was not frightened at the situation. He found that even over the level spaces he could scarcely drag his snow shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless--even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a sensation of intense cold; he almost felt that he could lie down in the drifted snow and sleep peacefully. He knew what it would be--a sleep without end--with the arctic foxes to pick his bones, and so he resisted the temptation and forced himself onward. The storm still swept straight west from Hudson's Bay, bringing with it endless volleys of snow, round and hard as fine shot; snow that had at first seemed to pierce his flesh, and which swished past his feet, as if trying to trip him, and tossed itself in windrows and mountains in his path. If he could only find timber--shelter! That was what he worked for now. When he had last looked at his watch it was nine o'clock in the morning; now it was late in the afternoon. It might as well have been night. The storm had long since half blinded him. He could not see a dozen paces ahead. But the little life in him still reasoned bravely. It was a heroic spark of life, a fighting spark, and hard to put out. It told him that when he came to shelter be would at least _feel_ it, and that he must fight until the last. And all this time, for ages and ages it seemed to him, he kept mumbling over and over again Ransom's words: _"Go back--Go back--Go back---"_ They rang in his brain. He tried to keep step with their monotone. The storm could not drown them. They were meaningless words to him now, but they kept him company. Also, his rifle was meaningless, but he clung to it. The pack on his back held no significance and no weight for him. He might have travelled a mile or ten miles an hour and he would not have sensed the difference. Most men would have buried themselves in the snow, and died in comfort, dreaming the pleasant dreams which come as a sort of recompense to the unfortunate who die of starvation and cold. But the fighting spark commanded Roscoe to die upon his feet, if he died at all. It was this spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to give him shelter from wind and snow. It burned a little more warmly then. It flared up, and gave him new vision. And, for the first time, he realized that it must be night. For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was gloom. His first thought was that it was a campfire, miles and miles away. Then it drew nearer--until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window. He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to shout. But no sound fell from his swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of his snowshoes. Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door, and plunged in. What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table, directly in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger man, and in this moment of lapsing consciousness it struck Roscoe as strange that he should be clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As Roscoe came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for a dark glare in his sunken eyes. Roscoe smelled the odor of whisky; he smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently. And then the spark--the fighting spark in him--gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor. He heard a voice, which came to him--as if from a great distance, and which said, "Who the h--l is this?" And then, after what seemed to be a long time, he heard another voice say, "Pitch him back into the snow." After that he lost consciousness. * * * * * A long time before he awoke he knew that he was not in the snow, and that hot stuff was running down his throat. When he opened his eyes there was no longer a light burning in the cabin. It was day. He felt strangely comfortable, but there was something in the cabin that stirred him from his rest. It was the odour of frying bacon. He raised himself upon his elbow, prepared to thank his deliverers, and to eat. All of his hunger had come back. The joy of life, of anticipation, shone in his thin face as he pulled himself up. Another face--the bearded face--red-eyed, almost animal-like in its fierce questioning, bent over him. "Where's your grub, pardner?" The question was like a stab. Roscoe did not hear his own voice as he explained. "Got none!" The bearded man's voice was like a bellow as he turned upon the others. "He's got no grub!" "We'll divvy up, Jack," came a weak voice. It was from the thin, white-faced man who had sat corpse-like on the edge of his bunk the night before. "Divvy h--l!" growled the bearded man. "It's up to you--you and Scotty. You're to blame!" You're to blame! The words struck upon Roscoe's ears with a chill of horror. He recalled the voice that had suggested throwing him back into the snow. Starvation was in the cabin. He had fallen among animals instead of men, and his body grew cold with a chill that was more horrible than that of the snow and the wind. He saw the thin-faced man who had spoken for him sitting again on the edge of his bunk. Mutely he looked to the others to see which was Scotty. He was the young man who had clutched the can of beans. It was he who was frying bacon over the sheet iron stove. "We'll divvy--Henry and I," he said. "I told you that last night." He looked over at Roscoe. "Glad you're better," he greeted. "You see--you've struck us at a bad time. We're on our last legs for grub. Our two Indians went out to hunt a week ago and never came back. They're dead--or gone, and we're as good as dead if the storm doesn't let up pretty soon. You can have some of our grub--Henry's and mine." It was a cold invitation, lacking warmth or sympathy, and Roscoe felt that even this man wished that he had died before he reached the cabin. But the man was human; he at least had not cast his voice with those who had wanted to throw him back into the snow, and Roscoe tried to voice his gratitude, and at the same time to hide his hunger. He saw that there were three thin slices of bacon in the frying pan, and it struck him that it would be bad taste to reveal a starvation appetite in the face of such famine. He came up, limping, and stood on the other side of the stove from Scotty. "You saved my life," he said, holding out a hand. "Will you shake?" Scotty shook hands limply. "It's h--l," he said in a low voice. "We'd have had beans this morning if I hadn't shook dice with him last night." He nodded toward the bearded man, who was cutting open the top of a can. "He won!" "My God!" began Roscoe. He didn't finish. Scotty turned the meat, and added: "He won a square meal off me yesterday--a quarter of a pound of bacon. Day before that he won Henry's last can of beans. He's got his share under his blanket over there, and swears he'll shoot any one who goes to monkeying with his bed--so you'd better fight shy of it. Thompson--he isn't up yet--chose the whisky for _his_ share, so you'd better fight shy of him, too. Henry and I'll divvy up with you." "Thanks," said Roscoe, the one word choking him. Henry came from his bunk, bent and wobbling. He looked like a dying man, and for the first time Roscoe saw that his hair was gray. He was a little man, and his thin hands shook as he held them out over the stove, and nodded at Roscoe. The bearded man had opened his can, and approached the stove with a pan of water, coming in beside Roscoe without noticing him. He brought with him a foul odour of stale tobacco smoke and whisky. After he had put his water over the fire he turned to one of the bunks and with half a dozen coarse epithets roused Thompson, who sat up stupidly, still half drunk. Henry had gone to a small table, and Scotty followed him with the bacon. But Roscoe did not move. He forgot his hunger. His pulse was beating quickly. Sensations filled him which he had never known or imagined before. He had known tragedy; he had investigated to what he had supposed to be the depths of human vileness--but this that he was experiencing now stunned him. Was it possible that these were people of his own kind? Had a madness of some sort driven all human instincts from them? He saw Thompson's red eyes fastened upon him, and he turned his face to escape their questioning, stupid leer. The bearded man was turning out the can of beans he had won from Scotty. Beyond the bearded man the door creaked, and Roscoe heard the wail of the storm. It came to him now as a friendly sort of sound. "Better draw up, pardner," he heard Scotty say. "Here's your share." One of the thin slices of bacon and a hard biscuit were waiting for him on a tin plate. He ate as ravenously as Henry and Scotty, and drank a cup of hot tea. In two minutes the meal was over. It was terribly inadequate. The few mouthfuls of food stirred up all his craving, and he found it impossible to keep his eyes from the bearded man and his beans. The bearded man, whom Scotty called Croker, was the only one who seemed well fed, and his horror increased when Henry bent over and said to him in a low whisper: "He didn't get my beans fair. I had three aces and a pair of deuces, an' he took it on three fives and two sixes. When I objected he called me a liar an' hit me. Them's my beans, or Scotty's!" There was something almost like murder in the little man's red eyes. Roscoe remained silent. He did not care to talk, or question. No one had asked him who he was or whence he came, and he felt no inclination to know more of the men he had fallen among. Croker finished, wiped his mouth with his hand, and looked across at Roscoe. "How about going out with me to get some wood?" he demanded. "I'm ready," replied Roscoe. For the first time he took notice of himself. He was lame, and sickeningly weak, but apparently sound in other ways. The intense cold had not frozen his ears or feet. He put on his heavy moccasins, his thick coat and fur cap, and Croker pointed to his rifle. "Better take that along," he said. "Can't tell what you might see." Roscoe picked it up and the pack which lay beside it. He did not catch the ugly leer which the bearded man turned upon Thompson. But Henry did, and his little eyes grew smaller and blacker. On snowshoes the two men went out into the storm, Croker carrying an axe. He led the way through the bit of thin timber, and across a wide open over which the storm swept so fiercely that their trail was covered behind them as they travelled. Roscoe figured that they had gone a quarter of a mile when they came to another clump of trees, and Croker gave him the axe. "You can cut down some of this," he said. "It's better burning than that back there. I'm going on for a dry log that I know of. You wait until I come back." Roscoe set to work upon a spruce, but he could scarcely strike out a chip. After a little he was compelled to drop his axe, and lean against the tree, exhausted. At intervals he resumed his cutting. It was half an hour before the small tree fell. Then he waited for Croker. Behind him his trail was already obliterated. After a little he raised his voice and called for Croker. There was no reply. The wind moaned above him in the spruce tops. It made a noise like the wash of the sea out on the open Barren. He shouted again. And again. The truth dawned upon him slowly--but it came. Croker had brought him out purposely--to lose him. He was saving the bacon and the cold biscuits back in the cabin. Roscoe's hands clenched tightly, and then they relaxed. At last he had found what he was after--his book! It would be a terrible book, if he carried out the idea that flashed upon him now in the wailing and twisting of the storm. And then he laughed, for it occurred to him quickly that the idea would die--with himself. He might find the cabin, but he would not make the effort. Once more he would fight alone and for himself. The Spark returned to him, loyally. He buttoned himself up closely, saw that his snowshoes were securely fastened, and struck out once more with his back to the storm. He was at least a trifle better off for meeting with the flesh and blood of his kind. The clump of timber thinned out, and Roscoe struck out boldly into the low bush. As he went, he wondered what would happen in the cabin. He believed that Henry, of the four, would not pull through alive, and that Croker would come out best. It was not until the following summer that he learned the facts of Henry's madness, and of the terrible manner in which he avenged himself on Croker by sticking a knife under the latter's ribs. For the first time in his life Roscoe found himself in a position to measure accurately the amount of energy contained in a slice of bacon and a cold biscuit. It was not much. Long before noon his old weakness was upon him again. He found even greater difficulty in dragging his feet over the snow, and it seemed now as though all ambition had left him, and that even the fighting spark was becoming disheartened. He made up his mind to go on until the arctic gloom of night began mingling with the storm; then he would stop, build a fire, and go to sleep in its warmth. He would never wake up, and there would be no sensation of discomfort in his dying. During the afternoon he passed out of the scrub into a rougher country. His progress was slower, but more comfortable, for at times he found himself protected from the wind. A gloom darker and more sombre than that of the storm was falling about him when he came to what appeared to be the end of the Barren. The earth dropped away from under his feet, and far below him, in a ravine shut out from wind and storm, he saw the black tops of thick spruce. What life was left in him leaped joyously, and he began to scramble downward. His eyes were no longer fit to judge distance or chance, and he slipped. He slipped a dozen times in the first five minutes, and then there came the time when he did not make a recovery, but plunged down the side of the mountain like a rock. He stopped with a terrific jar, and for the first time during the fall he wanted to cry out with pain. But the voice that he heard did not come from his own lips. It was another voice--and then two, three, many of them. His dazed eyes caught glimpses of dark objects floundering in the deep snow about him, and just beyond these objects were four or five tall mounds of snow, like tents, arranged in a circle. A number of times that winter Roscoe had seen mounds of snow like these, and he knew what they meant. He had fallen into an Indian village. He tried to call out the words of greeting that Rameses had taught him, but he had no tongue. Then the floundering figures caught him up, and he was carried to the circle of snow-mounds. The last that he knew was that warmth was entering his lungs, and that once again there came to him the low, sweet music of a Cree girl's voice. It was a face that he first saw after that, a face that seemed to come to him slowly from out of night, approaching nearer and nearer until he knew that it was a girl's face, with great, dark, shining eyes whose lustre suffused him with warmth and a strange happiness. It was a face of wonderful beauty, he thought--of a wild sort of beauty, yet with something so gentle in the shining eyes that he sighed restfully. In these first moments of his returning consciousness the whimsical thought came to him that he was dying, and the face was a part of a pleasant dream. If that were not so he had fallen at last among friends. His eyes opened wider, he moved, and the face drew back. Movement stimulated returning life, and reason rehabilitated itself in great bounds. In a dozen flashes he went over all that had happened up to the point where he had fallen down the mountain and into the Cree camp. Straight above him he saw a funnel-like peak through which there drifted a blue film of smoke. He was in a wigwam. It was warm and exceedingly comfortable. Wondering if he was hurt, he moved. The movement drew a sharp exclamation of pain from him. It was the first real sound he had made, and in an instant the face was over him again. He saw it plainly this time, with its dark eyes and oval cheeks framed between two great braids of black hair. A hand touched his brow cool and gentle, and a sweet voice soothed him in half a dozen musical words. The girl was a Cree. At the sound of her voice an Indian woman came up beside her, looked down at Roscoe for a moment, and then went to the door of the wigwam, speaking in a low voice to some one who was outside. When she returned a man followed in after her. He was old and bent, and his face was thin. His cheek-bones shone, so tightly was the skin drawn over them. And behind him came a younger man, as straight as a tree, with strong shoulders, and a head set like a piece of bronze sculpture. Roscoe thought of Ransom and of his words about old Rameses: "You will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the First People." The second man carried in his hand a frozen fish, which he gave to the woman. And as he gave it to her he spoke words in Cree which Roscoe understood. "It is the last fish." For a moment some terrible hand gripped at Roscoe's heart and stopped its beating. He saw the woman take the fish and cut it into two equal parts with a knife, and one of these parts he saw her drop into a pot of boiling water which hung over the stone fireplace built under the vent in the wall. The girl went up and stood beside the older woman, with her back turned to him. He opened his eyes wide, and stared. The girl was tall and slender, as lithely and as beautifully formed as one of the northern lilies that thrust their slender stems from between the mountain rocks. Her two heavy braids fell down her back almost to her knees. And this girl, the woman, the two men _were dividing with him their last fish_! He made an effort and sat up. The younger man came to him, and put a bear skin at his back. He had picked up some of the patois of half-blood French and English. "You seek," he said, "you hurt--you hungr'. You have eat soon." He motioned with his hand to the boiling pot. There was not a ficker of animation in his splendid face. There was something godlike in his immobility, something that was awesome in the way he moved and breathed. His voice, too, it seemed to Roscoe, was filled with the old, old mystery of the beginning of things, of history that was long dead and lost for all time. And it came upon Roscoe now, like a flood of rare knowledge descending from a mysterious source, that he had at last discovered the key to new life, and that through the blindness of reason, through starvation and death, fate had led him to the Great Truth that was dying with the last sons of the First People. For the half of the last fish was brought to him, and he ate; and when the knowledge that he was eating life away from these people choked him, and he thrust a part of it back, the girl herself urged him to continue, and he finished, with her dark, glorious eyes fixed upon him and sending warm floods through his veins. And after that the men bolstered him up with the bear skin, and the two went out again into the storm. The woman sat hunched before the fire, and after a little the girl joined her and piled fresh fagots on the blaze. Then she sat beside her, with her chin resting in the little brown palms of her hands, the fire lighting up a half profile of her face and painting rich colour in her deep-black hair. For a long time there was silence, and Roscoe lay as if he were asleep. It was not an ordinary silence, the silence of a still room, or of emptiness--but a silence that throbbed and palpitated with an unheard life, a silence which was thrilling because it spoke a language which Roscoe was just beginning to understand. The fire grew redder, and the cone-shaped vacancy at the top of the tepee grew duskier, so Roscoe knew that night was falling outside. Far above he could hear the storm wailing over the top of the mountain. Redder and redder grew the birch flame that lighted up the profile of the girl's face. Once she turned, so that he caught the lustrous darkness of her eyes upon him. He could not hear the breath of the two in front of the fire. He heard no sound outside except that of the wind and the trees, and all grew as dark as it was silent in the snow-covered tepee, except in front of the fire. And then, as he lay with wide-open eyes, it seemed to Roscoe as though the stillness was broken by a sob that was scarcely more than a sigh, and he saw the girl's head droop a little lower in her hands, and fancied that a shuddering tremor ran through her slender shoulders. The fire burned low, and she reached out for more fagots. Then she rose slowly, and turned toward him. She could not see his face in the gloom, but the deep breathing which he feigned drew her to him, and through his half-closed eyes he could see her face bending over him, until one of her heavy braids slipped over her shoulder and fell upon his breast. After a moment she sat down silently beside him, and he felt her fingers brush gently through his tangled hair. Something in their light, soft touch thrilled him, and he moved his hand in the darkness until it came in contact with the big, soft braid that still lay where it had fallen across him. He was on the point of speaking, but the fingers left his hair and stroked as gentle as velvet over his storm-beaten face. She believed that he was asleep, and a warm flood of shame swept through him at the thought of his hypocrisy. The birch flared up suddenly, and he saw the glisten of her hair, the glow of her eyes, and the startled change that came into them when she saw that his own eyes were wide open, and looking up at her. Before she could move he had caught her hand, and was holding it tighter to his face--against his lips. The birch bark died as suddenly as it had flared up; he heard her breathing quickly, he saw her great eyes melt away like lustrous stars into the returning gloom, and a wild, irresistible impulse moved him. He raised his free hand to the dark head, and drew it down to him, holding it against his feverish face while he whispered Rameses's prayer of thankfulness in Cree: "The spirits bless you forever, _Meeani_." The nearness of her, the touch of her heavy hair, the caress of her breath stirred him still more deeply with the strange, new emotion that was born in him, and in the darkness he found and kissed a pair of lips, soft and warm. The woman stirred before the fire. The girl drew back, her breath coming almost sobbingly. And then the thought of what he had done rushed in a flood of horror upon Roscoe. These wild people had saved his life; they had given him to eat of their last fish; they were nursing him back from the very threshold of death--and he had already repaid them by offering to the Cree maiden next to the greatest insult that could come to her people. He remembered what Rameses had told him--that the Cree girl's first kiss was her betrothal kiss; that it was the white garment of her purity, the pledge of her fealty forever. He lifted himself upon his elbow, but the girl had run to the door. Voices came from outside, and the two men reëntered the tepee. He understood enough of what was said to learn that the camp had been holding council, and that two men were about to make an effort to reach the nearest post. Each tepee was to furnish these two men a bit of food to keep them alive on their terrible hazard, and the woman brought forth the half of a fish. She cut it into quarters, and with one of the pieces the elder man went out again into the night. The younger man spoke to the girl. He called her Oachi, and to Roscoe's astonishment spoke in French. "If they do not come back, or if we do not find meat in seven days," he said, "we will die." Roscoe made an effort to rise, and the effort sent a rush of fire into his head. He turned dizzy, and fell back with a groan. In an instant the girl was at his side--ahead of the man. Her hands were at his face, her eyes glowing again. He felt that he was falling into a deep sleep. But the eyes did not leave him. They were wonderful eyes, glorious eyes! He dreamed of them in the strange sleep that came to him, and they grew more and more beautiful, shining with a light which thrilled him even in his unconsciousness. After a time there came a black, more natural sort of night to him. He awoke from it refreshed. It was day. The tepee was filled with light, and for the first time he looked about him. He was alone. A fire burned low among the stones; over it simmered a pot. The earth floor of the tepee was covered with deer and caribou skins, and opposite him there was another bunk. He drew himself painfully to a sitting posture and found that it was his shoulder and hip that hurt him. He rose to his feet, and stood balancing himself feebly when the door to the tepee was drawn back and Oachi entered. At sight of him, standing up from his bed, she made a quick movement to draw back, but Roscoe reached out his hands with a low cry of pleasure. "Oachi," he cried softly. "Come in!" He spoke in French, and Oachi's face lighted up like sunlight. "I am better," he said. "I am well. I want to thank you--and the others." He made a step toward her, and the strength of his left leg gave way. He would have fallen if she had not darted to him so quickly that she made a prop for him, and her eyes looked up into his whitened face, big and frightened and filled with pain. "Oo-ee-ee," she said in Cree, her red lips rounded as she saw him flinch, and that one word, a song in a word; came to him like a flute note. "It hurts--a little," he said. He dropped back on his bunk, and Oachi sank upon the skins at his feet, looking up at him steadily with her wonderful, pure eyes, her mouth still rounded, little wrinkles of tense anxiety drawn in her forehead. Roscoe laughed. For a few moments his soul was filled with a strange gladness. He reached out his hand and stroked it over her shining hair, and a radiance such as he had never seen leapt into her eyes. "You--talk--French?" he asked slowly. She nodded. "Then tell me this--you are hungry--starving?" She nodded again, and made a cup of her two small hands. "No meat. This little--so much--flour--" Her throat trembled and her voice fluttered. But even as she measured out their starvation her face was looking at him joyously. And then she added, with the gladness of a child, "_Feesh_, for you," and pointed to the simmering pot. "For _ME_!" Roscoe looked at the pot, and then back at her. "Oachi," he said gently, "go tell your father that I am ready to talk with him. Ask him to come--now." She looked at him for a moment as though she did not quite understand what he had said, and he repeated the words. Even as he was speaking he marvelled at the fairness of her skin, which shone with a pink flush, and at the softness and beauty of her hair. What he saw impelled him to ask, as she made to rise: "Your father--your mother--is French. Is that so, Oachi?" The girl nodded again, with the soft little Cree throat note that meant yes. Then she slipped to her feet and ran out, and a little later there came into the tepee the man who had first loomed up in the dusky light like a god of the First People to Roscoe Cummins. His splendid face was a little more gaunt than the night before, and Roscoe knew that famine came hand in hand with him. He had seen starvation before, and he knew that it reddened the eyes and gave the lips a grayish pallor. These things, and more, he saw in Oachi's father. But Mukoki came in straight and erect, hiding his weakness under the pride of his race. Fighting down his pain Roscoe rose at sight of him and held out his hands. "I want to thank you," he said, repeating the words he had spoken to Oachi. "You have saved my life. But I have eyes, and I can see. You gave me of your last fish. You have no meat. You have no flour. You are starving. What? I have asked you to come and tell me, so that I may know how it fares with your women and children. You will give me a council, and we will smoke." Roscoe dropped back on his bunk. He drew forth his pipe and filled it with tobacco. The Cree sat down mutely in the centre of the tepee. They smoked, passing the pipe back and forth without speaking. Once Roscoe loaded the pipe, and once the chief; and when the last puff of the last pipeful was taken the Indian reached over his hand, and Roscoe gripped it hard. And then, while the storm still moaned far up over their heads, Roscoe Cummins listened to the old, old story of the First People--the story of starvation and of death. To him it was epic. It was terrible. But to the other it was the mere coming and going of a natural thing, of a thing that had existed for him and for his kind since life began, and he spoke of it quietly and without a gesture. There had been a camp of twenty-two, and there were now fifteen. Seven had died, four men, two women, and one child. Each day during the great storm the men had gone out on their futile search for game, and every few days one of them had failed to return. Thus four had died. The dogs were eaten. Corn and fish were gone; there remained but a little flour, and this was for the women and the children. The men had eaten nothing but bark and roots for five days. And there seemed to be no hope. It was death to stray far from the camp. That morning the two men had set out for the post, but Mukoki said calmly that they would never return. And then Roscoe spoke of Oachi, his daughter, and for the first time the iron lines of the chief's bronze face seemed to soften, and his head bent over a little, and his shoulders drooped. Not until then did Roscoe learn the depths of sorrow hidden behind the splendid strength of the starving man. Oachi's mother had been a French woman. Six months before she had died in this tepee, and Mukoki had buried his wife up on the face of the mountain, where the storm was moaning. After this Roscoe could not speak. He was choking. He loaded his pipe again, and sat down close to the chief, so that their knees and their shoulders touched, and thus, as taught him by old Rameses, he smoked with Oachi's father the pledge of eternal friendship, of brotherhood in life, of spirit communion in the Valley of Silent Men. After that Mukoki left him and he crawled back upon his bunk, weak and filled with pain, knowing that he was facing death with the others. He was not afraid, but was filled with a great thankfulness that, even at the price of starvation, fate had allowed him to touch at last the edge of the fabric of his dreams. All of that day he wrote, in the hours when he felt best. He filled page after page of the tablets which he carried in his pack, writing feverishly and with great haste, oppressed only by the fear that he would not be able to finish the message which he had for the people of that other world a thousand miles away. Three times during the morning Oachi came in and brought him the cooked fish and a biscuit which she had made for him out of flour and meal. And each time he said, "I am a man with the other men, Oachi. I would be a woman if I ate." The third time Oachi knelt close down at his side, and when he refused the food again there came a strange light into her eyes, and she said, "If you starve--I starve!" It was the first revelation to him. He put up his hands. They touched her face. Some potent spirit in him carried him across all gulfs. In that moment, thrilling, strange, he was heart and soul of the First People. In an instant he had drifted back a thousand years, beyond the memory of cities, of clubs, of all that went with civilization. A wild, half savage longing filled him. One of his hands slipped to her shining hair, and suddenly their faces lay close to each other, and he knew that in that moment love had come to him from the fount of glory itself. * * * * * Days followed--black days filled with the endless terrors of the storm. And yet they were days of a strange contentment which Roscoe had never felt before. Oachi and her father were with him a great deal in the tepee which they had given up to him. On the third day Roscoe noticed that Oachi's little hands were bruised and red and he found that the chief's daughter had gone out to dig down through ice and snow with the other women after roots. The camp lived entirely on roots now--wild flag and moose roots ground up and cooked in a batter. On this same day, late in the afternoon, there came a low wailing grief from one of the tepees, a moaning sound that pitched itself to the key of the storm until it seemed to be a part of it. A child had died, and the mother was mourning. That night another of the camp huntsmen failed to return at dusk. The next day Roscoe was able to move about in his tepee without pain. Oachi and her father were with him when, for the first time, he got out his comb and military brushes and began grooming his touselled hair. Oachi watched him, and suddenly, seeing the wondering pleasure in her eyes, he held out the brushes to her. "You may have them, Oachi," he said, and the girl accepted them with a soft little cry of delight. To his amazement she began unbraiding her hair immediately, and then she stood up before him, hidden to her knees in her wonderful wealth of shining tresses, and Roscoe Cummins thought in this moment that he had never seen a woman more beautiful than the half Cree girl. When they had gone he still saw her, and the vision troubled him. They came in again at night, when the fire was sending red and yellow lights up and down the tepee walls, and the more he watched Oachi the stronger there grew within him something that seemed to gnaw and gripe with a dull sort of pain. Oachi was beautiful. He had never seen hair like her hair. He had never before seen eyes more beautiful. He had never heard a voice so low and sweet and filled with bird-like ripples of music. She was beautiful, and yet with her beauty there was a primitiveness, a gentle savagery, and an age-old story written in the fine lines of her face which made him uneasy with the thought of a thing that was almost tragedy. Oachi loved him. He could see that love in her eyes, in her movement; he could feel it in her presence, and the sweet song of it trembled in her voice when she spoke to him. Ordinarily a white man would have accepted this love; he would have rejoiced in it, and would have played with it for a time, as they have done with the loves of the women of Oachi's people since the beginning of white man's time. But Roscoe Cummins was of a different type. He was a man of ideals, and in Oachi's love he saw his ideal of love set apart from him by illimitable voids. This night, in the firelit tepee, there came to him like a painful stab the truth of Ransom's words. He had been born some thousands of years too late. He saw in Oachi love and life as they might have been for him; but beyond them he also saw, like a grim and threatening hand, a vision of cities, of toiling millions, of a great work just begun--a vision of life as it was intended that he should live it; and to shut it out from him he bowed his head in his two hands, overwhelmed by a new grief. The chief sat with his face to the fire, smoking silently, and Oachi came to Roscoe's side, and touched hands timidly, like a little child. She seemed to him wondrously like a child when he lifted his head and looked down into her face. She smiled at him, questioning him, and he smiled his answer back, yet neither broke the silence with words. He heard only the soft little note in Oachi's throat that filled him with such an exquisite sensation, and he wondered what music would be if it could find expression through a voice like hers. "Oachi," he asked softly, "why did you never sing?" The girl looked at him in silence for a moment. "We starve," she said. She swept her hand toward the door of the tepee. "We starve--die--there is no song." He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to him, as he might have done with a little child. "I wish you would sing, Oachi," he said. For a moment the girl's dark eyes glowed up at him. Then she drew back softly, and seated herself before the fire, with her back turned toward him, close beside her father. A strange quiet filled the tepee. Over their heads the wailing storm seemed to die for a moment; and then something rose in its place, so low and gentle at first that it seemed like a whisper, but growing in sweetness and volume until Roscoe Cummins sat erect, his eyes flashing, his hands clenched, looking at Oachi. The storm rose, and with it the song--a song that reached down into his soul, stirring him now with its gladness, now with a half savage pain; but always with a sweetness that engulfed for him all other things, until he was listening only to the voice. And then silence came again within the tepee. Over the mountain the wind burst more fiercely. The chief sat motionless. In Oachi's hair the firelight glistened with a dull radiance. There was quiet, and yet Roscoe still heard the voice. He knew that he would always hear it, that it would never die. Not until long afterward did he know that Oachi had sung to him the great love song of the Crees. That night and the next day, and the terrible night and day that followed, Roscoe fought with himself. He won--when alone--and lost when Oachi was with him. In some ways she knew intuitively that he loved to see her with her splendid hair down, and she would sit at his feet and brush it, while he tried to hide his admiration and smother the passion which sprang up in his breast when she was near. He knew, in these moments, that it was too late to kill the thing that was born in him--the craving of his heart and his soul for this girl of the First People who had laid her life at his feet and who was removed from him by barriers which he could never pass. On the afternoon of his seventh day in camp an Indian hunter ran in from the forest nearly crazed with joy. He had ventured farther away than the others, and had found a moose-yard. He had killed two of the animals. The days of famine were over. Oachi brought the first news to Roscoe. Her face was radiant with joy, her eyes burned like stars, and in her excitement she stretched out her arms to him as she cried out the wonderful news. Roscoe took her two hands. "Is it true, Oachi?" he asked. "They have surely killed meat?" "Yes--yes--yes," she cried. "They have killed meat--much meat--" She stopped at the strange, hard look in Roscoe's eyes. He was looking overhead. If he had looked down, into the glory and love of her eyes, he would have swept her close in his arms, and the last fight would have been over then and there. Oachi went out, wondering at the coldness with which he had received the word of their deliverance, and little guessing that in that moment he had fought the greatest battle of his life. Each day after this called him back to the fight. His two broken ribs healed slowly. The storm passed. The sun followed it, and the March winds began bringing up warmth from the south. Days grew into weeks, and the snow was growing soft underfoot before he dared venture forth short distances from the camp alone. He tried often to make Oachi understand, but he always stopped short of what he meant to say; his hand would steal to her beautiful hair, and in Oachi's throat would sound the inimitable little note of happiness. Each day he was more and more handicapped. For in the joy of her great love Oachi became more beautiful and her voice still sweeter. By the time the snows began running down from the mountains and the poplar buds began to swell she was telling him the most sacred of all sacred things, and one day she told him of the wonderful world far to the west, painted by the glow of the setting sun, wherein lay the Valley of Silent Men. "And that is Heaven--your Heaven," breathed Roscoe. He was almost well now, but he was sitting on the edge of his bunk, and Oachi knelt in the old place upon the deer skin at his feet. As he spoke he stroked her hair. "Tell me," he said, "what sort of a place it is, Oachi." "It is beautiful," spoke Oachi softly. "Long, long ago the Great God came down among us and lived for a time; and He came at a time like that which has just passed, and He saw suffering, and hunger, and death. And when He saw what life was He made for us another world, and told us that it should be called the Valley of Silent Men; and that when we died we would go to this place, and that at last--when all of our race were gone--He would cause the earth to roll three times, and in the Valley of Silent Men all would awaken into life which would never know death, or sorrow, or pain again. And He says that those who love will awaken there--hand in hand." "It is beautiful," said Roscoe. He felt himself trembling. Oachi's breath was against his hand. It was his last fight. He half reached out, as if to clasp her to him; but beyond her he still saw the other thing--the other world. He rose to his feet, not daring to look at her now. He loved her too much to sacrifice her. And it would be a sacrifice. He tried to speak firmly. "Oachi," he said, "I am nearly well enough to travel now. I have spent pleasant weeks with you, weeks which I shall never forget. But it is time for me to go back to my people. They are expecting me. They are waiting for me, and wondering at my absence. I am as you would be if you were down there in a great city. So I must go. I must go to-morrow, or the next day, or soon after. Oachi--" He still looked where he could not see her face. But he heard her move. He knew that slowly she was drawing away. "Oachi--" She was near the door now, and his eyes turned toward her. She was looking back, her slender shoulders bent over, her glorious hair rippling to her knees, as she had left it undone for him. In her eyes was love such as falls from the heavens. But her face was as white as a mask. "Oachi!" With a cry Roscoe reached out his arms. But Oachi was gone. At last the Cree girl understood. * * * * * Three days later there came in the passing of a single day and night the splendour of northern spring. The sun rose warm and golden. From the sides of the mountains and in the valleys water poured forth in rippling, singing floods. There bakneesh glowed on bared rocks. Moose-birds, and jays, and wood-thrushes flitted about the camp, and the air was filled with the fragrant smells of new life bursting from earth, and tree, and shrub. On this morning of the third day Roscoe strode forth from his tepee, with his pack upon his back. An Indian guide waited for him outside. He had smoked his last pipe with the chief, and now he went from tepee to tepee, in the fashion of the Crees, and drew a single puff from the pipe of each master, until there was but one tepee left, and in that was Oachi. With a white face he rubbed his hand over the deer-flap, and waited. Slowly it was drawn back, and Oachi came out. He had not seen her since the night he had driven her from him, and he had planned to say things in this last moment which he might have said then. But words stumbled on his lips. Oachi was changed. She seemed taller. Her beautiful eyes looked at him clearly and proudly. For the first time she was to him Oachi, the "Sun Child," a princess of the First People--the daughter of a Cree chief. He held out his hand, and the hand which Oachi gave to him was cold and lifeless. She smiled when he told her that he had come to say good-bye, and when she spoke to him her voice was as clear as the stream singing through the cañon. His own voice trembled. In spite of his mightiest effort a tightening fist seemed choking him. "I am coming back--some day," he managed. Oachi smiled, with the glory of the morning sun in her eyes and hair. She turned, still smiling, and pointed far to the west. "And some day--the Valley of Silent Men will awaken," she said, and reëntered her father's tepee. Out of the camp staggered Roscoe Cummins behind his Indian guide, a blinding heat in his eyes. Once or twice a gulping sob rose in his throat, and he clutched hard at his heart to beat himself into submission to the great law of life as it had been made for him. An hour later the two came to a stream where there was a canoe. Because of rapids and the fierceness of the spring floods, portages were many, and progress slow during the whole of that day. They had made twenty miles when the sun began sinking in the west, and they struck camp. After their supper of meat the Cree rolled himself in his blanket and slept. But for long hours Roscoe sat beside their fire. Night dropped about him, a splendid night filled with sweet breaths and stars and a new moon, and with strange sounds which came to him now in a language which he was beginning to understand. From far away there floated faintly to his ears the lonely cry of a wolf, and it no longer made him shudder, but filled him with the mysterious longing of the cry itself. It was the mate-song of the beast of prey, sending up its message to the stars--crying out to all the wilderness for a response to its loneliness. Night birds twittered about him. A loon laughed in its mocking joy. An owl hooted down at him from the black top of a tall spruce. From out of starvation and death the wilderness had awakened. Its sounds spoke to him still of grief, of the suffering that would never know end; and yet there trembled in them a note of happiness and of content. Beside the campfire it came to him that in this world he had discovered two things--a suffering that he had never known, and a peace he had never known. And Oachi stood for them both. He thought of her until drowsiness drew a pale film over his eyes. The birch crackled more and more faintly in the fire and sounds died away. The stillness of sleep fell about him. Scarce had he fallen into slumber than his eyes seemed to open wide and wakeful, and out of the gloom beyond the smouldering fire he saw a human form slowly revealing itself, until there stood clearly within his vision a figure which he at first took to be that of Mukoki, the chief. But in another moment he saw that it was even taller than the tall chief, and that its eyes had searched him out. When he heard a voice, speaking in Cree the words which mean, "Whither goest thou?" he was startled to hear his own voice reply: "I am going back to my people." He stared into vacancy, for at the sound of his voice the vision faded away; but there came a voice to him back through the night, which said: "And it is here that you have found that of which you have dreamed--Life, and the Valley of Silent Men!" Roscoe was wide awake now. The voice and the vision had seemed so real to him that he looked about him tremblingly into the starlit gloom of the forest, as if not quite sure that he had been dreaming. Then he crawled into his balsam shelter, drew his blankets about him, and fell asleep. The next day he had little to say to his Indian companion as they made their way downstream. At each dip of their paddles a deeper sickness seemed to enter into his heart. Life, after all, he tried to reason, was like a tailored garment. One might have an ideal, and if that ideal became a realization it would be found a misfit for one reason or another. So he told himself, in spite of fill the dreams which had urged him on in the fight for better things. There flooded upon him now the forceful truth of what Ransom had said. His work, as he had begun it, was at an end, his fabric of idealism had fallen into ruins. For he had found all that was ideal--love, faith, purity, and beauty--and he, Roscoe Cummins, the idealist, had repulsed them because they were not dressed in the tailored fashion of his kind. He told himself the truth with brutal directness. Before him he saw another work in his books, but of a different kind; and each hour that passed added to the conviction within him that at last that work would prove a failure. He went off alone into the forest when they camped, early in the afternoon, and thought of Oachi, who would mourn him until the end of time. And he--could he forget? What if he had yielded to temptation, and had taken Oachi with him? She would have come. He knew that. She would have sacrificed herself to him forever, would have gone with him into a life which she could not understand, and would never understand, satisfied to live in his love alone. The old, choking hand gripped at his heart, and yet with the pain of it there was still a rejoicing that he had not surrendered to the temptation, that he had been strong enough to save her. The last light of the setting sun cast film-like webs of yellow and gold through the forest as he turned in the direction of camp. It was that hour in which a wonderful quiet falls upon the wilderness, the last minutes between night and day, when all wild life seems to shrink in suspensive waiting for the change. Seven months had taught Roscoe a quiet of his own. His moccasined feet made no sound. His head was bent, his shoulders had a tired droop, and his eyes searched for nothing in the mystery about him. His heart seemed weighted under a pressure that had taken all life from him, and close above him, in a balsam bough, a night bird twittered. In response to it a low cry burst from his lips, a cry of loneliness and of grief. In that moment he saw Oachi again at his feet; he heard the low, sweet note of love in her throat, so much like that of the bird over his head; he saw the soft lustre of her hair, the glory of her eyes, looking up at him from the half gloom of the tepee, telling him that they had found their god. It was all so near, so real for a moment, that he sprang erect, his fingers clutching handfuls of moss. He looked toward the camp, and he saw something move between the rock and the fire. It was a wolf, he thought, or perhaps a lynx, and drawing his revolver he moved quickly and silently in its direction. The object had disappeared behind a little clump of balsam shrub within fifty paces of the camp, and as he drew nearer, until he was no more than ten paces away, he wondered why it did not break cover. There were no trees, and it was quite light where the balsam grew. He approached, step by step. And then, suddenly, from almost under his hands, something darted away with a strange, human cry, turning upon him for a single instant a face that was as white as the white stars of early night--a face with great, glowing, half-mad eyes. It was Oachi. His pistol dropped to the ground. His heart stopped beating. No cry, no breath of sound, came from his paralyzed lips. And like a wild thing Oachi was fleeing from him into the darkening depths of the forest. Life leaped into his limbs, and he raced like mad after her, overtaking her with a panting, joyous cry. When she saw that she was caught the girl turned. Her hair had fallen, and swept about her shoulders and her body. She tried to speak, but only bursting sobs came from her breast. As she shrank from him, Roscoe saw that her clothing was in shreds, and that her thin moccasins were almost torn from her little feet. The truth held him for another moment stunned and speechless. Like a lightning flash there recurred to him her last words: "And some day--the Valley of Silent Men will awaken." He understood--now. She had followed him, fighting her way through swamp and forest along the river, hiding from him, and yet keeping him company so long as her little broken heart could urge her on. And then alone, with a last prayer for him--_she had planned to kill herself_. He trembled. Something wonderful happened with him, flooding his soul with day--with a joy that descended upon him as the Hand of the Messiah must have fallen upon the heads of the children of Samaria. With a great, glad cry he sprang toward Oachi and caught her in his arms, crushing her face to him, kissing her hair and her eyes and her mouth until at last with a strange, soft cry she put her arms up about his neck and sobbed like a little child upon his breast. Back in the camp the Indian waited. The white stars grew red. In the forest the shadows deepened to the chaos of night. Once more there was sound, the pulse and beat of a life that moves in darkness. In the camp the Indian grew restless with the thought that Roscoe had wandered away until he was lost. So at last he fired his rifle. Oachi started in Roscoe's arms. "You should go back--alone," she whispered. The old, fluttering love-note was in her voice, sweeter than the sweetest music to Roscoe Cummins. He turned her face up, and held it between his two hands. "If I go there," he said, pointing for a moment into the south, "I go _alone_. But if I go there--" and he pointed into the north--"I go _with you_. Oachi, my beloved, I am going with you." He drew her close again, and asked, almost in a whisper: "And when we awaken in the Valley of Silent Men, how shall it be, my Oachi?" And with the sweet love-note, Oachi said in Cree: "Hand in hand, my master." Hand in hand they returned to the waiting Indian and the fire. 
4515	----	THE GOLDEN SNARE BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD AUTHOR OF KAZAN, THE DANGER TRAIL, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE, THE GRIZZLY KING, ETC. JTABLE 10 26 1 THE GOLDEN SNARE CHAPTER I Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was, above all other things, a creature of environment--and necessity, and of that something else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and at others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and the girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too much. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if he really had what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it was hidden--hidden to the forests and the wild things that had made him. Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three generations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of Sixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a canoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great Slave and thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a number of remarkable ethnological changes. The racial characteristics of the world he is entering change swiftly. The thin-faced Chippewa with his alert movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree, with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racier birchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; each new tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, until at last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place. And the Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off. Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is still broader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human history call him Eskimo. The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular point. There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of that hundred year story which was to have its finality in Bram. But there were more in time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first with the Chippewa, and then with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa Johnson blood, when at last it reached the Eskimo, had in it also a strain of Chippewyan. It is curious how the name itself lived. Johnson! One entered a tepee or a cabin expecting to find there a white man, and was startled when he discovered the truth. Bram, after nearly a century of this intermixing of bloods, was a throwback--a white man, so far as his skin and his hair and his eyes went. In other physical ways he held to the type of his half-strain Eskimo mother, except in size. He was six feet, and a giant in strength. His face was broad, his cheek-bones high, his lips thick, his nose flat. And he was WHITE. That was the shocking thing about it all. Even his hair was a reddish blonde, wild and coarse and ragged like a lion's mane, and his eyes were sometimes of a curious blue, and at others--when he was angered--green like a cat's at night-time. No man knew Bram for a friend. He was a mystery. He never remained at a post longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for supplies, and it might be months or even years before he returned to that particular post again. He was ceaselessly wandering. More or less the Royal Northwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and in many reports of faraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are the laconic words, "We saw Bram and his wolves traveling northward" or "Bram and his wolves passed us"--always Bram AND HIS WOLVES. For two years the Police lost track of him. That was when Bram was buried in the heart of the Sulphur Country east of the Great Bear. After that the Police kept an even closer watch on him, waiting, and expecting something to happen. And then--the something came. Bram killed a man. He did it so neatly and so easily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was well off in flight before it was discovered that his victim was dead. The next tragedy followed quickly--a fortnight later, when Corporal Lee and a private from the Fort Churchill barracks closed in on him out on the edge of the Barren. Bram didn't fire a shot. They could hear his great, strange laugh when they were still a quarter of a mile away from him. Bram merely set loose his wolves. By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to drag himself to a half-breed's cabin, where he died a little later, and the half-breed brought the story to Fort Churchill. After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he lived in those four or five years that followed would well be worth his pardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers of a book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it. Alone. In all that time without a voice to talk to him. Not once appearing at a post for food. A loup-garou. An animal-man. A companion of wolves. By the end of the third year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack. It was wolf, all wolf. From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty in his pack. They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed. Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death, but these wolf-beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they recognized instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And Bram, monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they were brother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate with them, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were comradeship and protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was meat in the country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a caribou or a moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram himself there would always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he arrived. Four years of that! The Police would not believe it. They laughed at the occasional rumors that drifted in from the far places; rumors that Bram had been seen, and that his great voice had been heard rising above the howl of his pack on still winter nights, and that half-breeds and Indians had come upon his trails, here and there--at widely divergent places. It was the French half-breed superstition of the chasse-galere that chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere is a thing not to be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of creatures who have sold their souls to the devil for the power of navigating the air, and there were those who swore with their hands on the crucifix of the Virgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram and his wolves pursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through the skies. So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram, meanwhile, keeping himself from all human eyes, was becoming more and more each day like the wolves who were his brothers. But the white blood in a man dies hard, and always there flickered in the heart of Bram's huge chest a great yearning. It must at times have been worse than death--that yearning to hear a human voice, to have a human creature to speak to, though never had he loved man or woman. Which brings us at last to the final tremendous climax in Bram's life--to the girl, and the other man. CHAPTER II The other man was Raine--Philip Raine. To-night he sat in Pierre Breault's cabin, with Pierre at the opposite side of the table between them, and the cabin's sheet iron stove blazing red just beyond. It was a terrible night outside. Pierre, the fox hunter, had built his shack at the end of a long slim forefinger of scrub spruce that reached out into the Barren, and to-night the wind was wailing and moaning over the open spaces in a way that made Raine shiver. Close to the east was Hudson's Bay--so close that a few moments before when Raine had opened the cabin door there came to him the low, never-ceasing thunder of the under-currents fighting their way down through the Roes Welcome from the Arctic Ocean, broken now and then by a growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like a great knife, through one of the frozen mountains. Westward from Pierre's cabin there stretched the lifeless Barren, illimitable and void, without rock or bush, and overhung at day by a sky that always made Raine think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Dore's "Inferno"--a low, thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always threatening to pitch itself down in terrific avalanches. And at night, when the white foxes yapped, and the wind moaned-- "As I have hope of paradise I swear that I saw him--alive, M'sieu," Pierre was saying again over the table. Raine, of the Fort Churchill patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, no longer smiled in disbelief. He knew that Pierre Breault was a brave man, or he would not have perched himself alone out in the heart of the Barren to catch the white foxes; and he was not superstitious, like most of his kind, or the sobbing cries and strife of the everlasting night-winds would have driven him away. "I swear it!" repeated Pierre. Something that was almost eagerness was burning now in Philip's face. He leaned over the table, his hands gripping tightly. He was thirty-five; almost slim as Pierre himself, with eyes as steely blue as Pierre's were black. There was a time, away back, when he wore a dress suit as no other man in the big western city where he lived; now the sleeves of his caribou skin coat were frayed and torn, his hands were knotted, in his face were the lines of storm and wind. "It is impossible," he said. "Bram Johnson is dead!" "He is alive, M'sieu." In Pierre's voice there was a strange tremble. "If I had only HEARD, if I had not SEEN, you might disbelieve, M'sieu," he cried, his eyes glowing with a dark fire. "Yes, I heard the cry of the pack first, and I went to the door, and opened it, and stood there listening and looking out into the night. UGH! they went near. I could hear the hoofs of the caribou. And then I heard a great cry, a voice that rose above the howl of the wolves like the voice of ten men, and I knew that Bram Johnson was on the trail of meat. MON DIEU--yes--he is alive. And that is not all. No. No. That is not all--" His fingers were twitching. For the third or fourth time in the last three-quarters of an hour Raine saw him fighting back a strange excitement. His own incredulity was gone. He was beginning to believe Pierre. "And after that--you saw him?" "Yes. I would not do again what I did then for all the foxes between the Athabasca and the Bay, M'sieu. It must have been--I don't know what. It dragged me out into the night. I followed. I found the trail of the wolves, and I found the snowshoe tracks of a man. Oui. I still followed. I came close to the kill, with the wind in my face, and I could hear the snapping of jaws and the rending of flesh--yes--yes--AND A MAN'S TERRIBLE LAUGH! If the wind had shifted--if that pack of devils' souls had caught the smell of me--tonnerre de dieu!" He shuddered, and the knuckles of his fingers snapped as he clenched and unclenched his hands. "But I stayed there, M'sieu, half buried in a snow dune. They went on after a long time. It was so dark I could not see them. I went to the kill then, and--yes, he had carried away the two hind quarters of the caribou. It was a bull, too, and heavy. I followed--clean across that strip of Barren down to the timber, and it was there that Bram built himself the fire. I could see him then, and I swear by the Blessed Virgin that it was Bram! Long ago, before he killed the man, he came twice to my cabin--and he had not changed. And around him, in the fire-glow, the wolves huddled. It was then that I came to my reason. I could see him fondling them. I could see their gleaming fangs. Yes, I could HEAR their bodies, and he was talking to them and laughing with them through his great beard--and I turned and fled back to the cabin, running so swiftly that even the wolves would have had trouble in catching me. And that--that--WAS NOT ALL!" Again his fingers were clenching and unclenching as he stared at Raine. "You believe me, M'sieu?" Philip nodded. "It seems impossible. And yet--you could not have been dreaming, Pierre." Breault drew a deep breath of satisfaction, and half rose to his feet. "And you will believe me if I tell you the rest?" "Yes." Swiftly Pierre went to his bunk and returned with the caribou skin pouch in which he carried his flint and steel and fire material for the trail. "The next day I went back, M'sieu," he said, seating himself again opposite Philip. "Bram and his wolves were gone. He had slept in a shelter of spruce boughs. And--and--par les mille cornes du diable if he had even brushed the snow out! His great moccasin tracks were all about among the tracks of the wolves, and they were big as the spoor of a monster bear. I searched everywhere for something that he might have left, and I found--at last--a rabbit snare." Pierre Breault's eyes, and not his words--and the curious twisting and interlocking of his long slim fingers about the caribou-skin bag in his hand stirred Philip with the thrill of a tense and mysterious anticipation, and as he waited, uttering no word, Pierre's fingers opened the sack, and he said: "A rabbit snare, M'sieu, which had dropped from his pocket into the snow--" In another moment he had given it into Philip's hands. The oil lamp was hung straight above them. Its light flooded the table between them, and from Philip's lips, as he stared at the snare, there broke a gasp of amazement. Pierre had expected that cry. He had at first been disbelieved; now his face burned with triumph. It seemed, for a space, as if Philip had ceased breathing. He stared--stared--while the light from above him scintillated on the thing he held. It was a snare. There could be no doubt of that. It was almost a yard in length, with the curious Chippewyan loop at one end and the double-knot at the other. The amazing thing about it was that it was made of a woman's golden hair. CHAPTER III The process of mental induction occasionally does not pause to reason its way, but leaps to an immediate and startling finality, which, by reason of its very suddenness, is for a space like the shock of a sudden blow. After that one gasp of amazement Philip made no sound. He spoke no word to Pierre. In a sudden lull of the wind sweeping over the cabin the ticking of his watch was like the beating of a tiny drum. Then, slowly, his eyes rose from the silken thread in his fingers and met Pierre's. Each knew what the other was thinking. If the hair had been black. If it had been brown. Even had it been of the coarse red of the blond Eskimo of the upper Mackenzie! But it was gold--shimmering gold. Still without speaking, Philip drew a knife from his pocket and cut the shining thread above the second knot, and worked at the finely wrought weaving of the silken filaments until a tress of hair, crinkled and waving, lay on the table before them. If he had possessed a doubt, it was gone now. He could not remember where he had ever seen just that colored gold in a woman's hair. Probably he had, at one time or another. It was not red gold. It possessed no coppery shades and lights as it rippled there in the lamp glow. It was flaxen, and like spun silk--so fine that, as he looked at it, he marveled at the patience that had woven it into a snare. Again he looked at Pierre. The same question was in their eyes. "It must be--that Bram has a woman with him," said Pierre. "It must be," said Philip. "Or--" That final word, its voiceless significance, the inflection which Philip gave to it as he gazed at Pierre, stood for the one tremendous question which, for a space, possessed the mind of each. Pierre shrugged his shoulders. He could not answer it. And as he shrugged his shoulders he shivered, and at a sudden blast of the wind against the cabin door he turned quickly, as though he thought the blow might have been struck by a human hand. "Diable!" he cried, recovering himself, his white teeth flashing a smile at Philip. "It has made me nervous--what I saw there in the light of the campfire, M'sieu. Bram, and his wolves, and THAT!" He nodded at the shimmering strands. "You have never seen hair the color of this, Pierre?" "Non. In all my life--not once." "And yet you have seen white women at Fort Churchill, at York Factory, at Lac la Biche, at Cumberland House, and Norway House, and at Fort Albany?" "Ah-h-h, and at many other places, M'sieu. At God's Lake, at Lac Seul, and over on the Mackenzie--and never have I seen hair on a woman like that." "And Bram has never been out of the northland, never farther south than Fort Chippewyan that we know of," said Philip. "It makes one shiver, eh, Pierre? It makes one think of--WHAT? Can't you answer? Isn't it in your mind?" French and Cree were mixed half and half in Pierre's blood. The pupils of his eyes dilated as he met Philip's steady gaze. "It makes one think," he replied uneasily, "of the chasse-galere and the loup-garou, and--and--almost makes one believe. I am not superstitious, M'sieu--non--non--I am not superstitious," he cried still more uneasily. "But many strange things are told about Bram and his wolves;--that he has sold his soul to the devil, and can travel through the air, and that he can change himself into the form of a wolf at will. There are those who have heard him singing the Chanson de Voyageur to the howling of his wolves away up in the sky. I have seen them, and talked with them, and over on the McLeod I saw a whole tribe making incantation because they had seen Bram and his wolves building themselves a conjuror's house in the heart of a thunder-cloud. So--is it strange that he should snare rabbits with, a woman's hair?" "And change black into the color of the sun?" added Philip, falling purposely into the other's humor. "If the rest is true--" Pierre did not finish. He caught himself, swallowing hard, as though a lump had risen in his throat, and for a moment or two Philip saw him fighting with himself, struggling with the age-old superstitions which had flared up for an instant like a powder-flash. His jaws tightened, and he threw back his head. "But those stories are NOT true, M'sieu," he added in a repressed voice. "That is why I showed you the snare. Bram Johnson is not dead. He is alive. And there is a woman with him, or--" "Or--" The same thought was in their eyes again. And again neither gave voice to it. Carefully Philip was gathering up the strands of hair, winding them about his forefinger, and placing them afterward in a leather wallet which he took from his pocket. Then, quite casually, he loaded his pipe and lighted it. He went to the door, opened it, and for a few moments stood listening to the screech of the wind over the Barren. Pierre, still seated at the table, watched him attentively. Philip's mind was made up when he closed the door and faced the half-breed again. "It is three hundred miles from here to Fort Churchill," he said. "Half way, at the lower end of Jesuche Lake, MacVeigh and his patrol have made their headquarters. If I go after Bram, Pierre, I must first make certain of getting a message to MacVeigh, and he will see that it gets to Fort Churchill. Can you leave your foxes and poison-baits and your deadfalls long enough for that?" A moment Pierre hesitated. Then he said: "I will take the message." Until late that night Philip sat up writing his report. He had started out to run down a band of Indian thieves. More important business had crossed his trail, and he explained the whole matter to Superintendent Fitzgerald, commanding "M" Division at Fort Churchill. He told Pierre Breault's story as he had heard it. He gave his reasons for believing it, and that Bram Johnson, three times a murderer, was alive. He asked that another man be sent after the Indians, and explained, as nearly as he could, the direction he would take in his pursuit of Bram. When the report was finished and sealed he had omitted just one thing. Not a word had he written about the rabbit snare woven from a woman's hair. CHAPTER IV The next morning the tail of the storm was still sweeping bitterly over the edge of the Barren, but Philip set out, with Pierre Breault as his guide, for the place where the half-breed had seen Bram Johnson and his wolves in camp. Three days had passed since that exciting night, and when they arrived at the spot where Bram had slept the spruce shelter was half buried in a windrow of the hard, shot like snow that the blizzard had rolled in off the open spaces. From this point Pierre marked off accurately the direction Bram had taken the morning after the hunt, and Philip drew the point of his compass to the now invisible trail. Almost instantly he drew his conclusion. "Bram is keeping to the scrub timber along the edge of the Barren," he said to Pierre. "That is where I shall follow. You might add that much to what I have written to MacVeigh. But about the snare, Pierre Breault, say not a word. Do you understand? If he is a loup-garou man, and weaves golden hairs out of the winds--" "I will say nothing, M'sieu," shuddered Pierre. They shook hands, and parted in silence. Philip set his face to the west, and a few moments later, looking back, he could no longer see Pierre. For an hour after that he was oppressed by the feeling that he was voluntarily taking a desperate chance. For reasons which he had arrived at during the night he had left his dogs and sledge with Pierre, and was traveling light. In his forty-pound pack, fitted snugly to his shoulders, were a three pound silk service-tent that was impervious to the fiercest wind, and an equal weight of cooking utensils. The rest of his burden, outside of his rifle, his Colt's revolver and his ammunition, was made up of rations, so much of which was scientifically compressed into dehydrated and powder form that he carried on his back, in a matter of thirty pounds, food sufficient for a month if he provided his meat on the trail. The chief article in this provision was fifteen pounds of flour; four dozen eggs he carried in one pound of egg powder; twenty-eight pounds of potatoes in four pounds of the dehydrated article; four pounds of onions in a quarter of a pound of the concentration, and so on through the list. He laughed a little grimly as he thought of this concentrated efficiency in the pack on his shoulders. In a curious sort of way it reminded him of other days, and he wondered what some of his old-time friends would say if he could, by some magic endowment, assemble them here for a feast on the trail. He wondered especially what Mignon Davenport would say--and do. P-f-f-f! He could see the blue-blooded horror in her aristocratic face! That wind from over the Barren would curdle the life in her veins. She would shrivel up and die. He considered himself a fairly good judge in the matter, for once upon a time he thought that he was going to marry her. Strange why he should think of her now, he told himself; but for all that he could not get rid of her for a time. And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into the old days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram. Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him. Five years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he belonged was not famous for its longevity. Nor love, for that matter. Mignon had convinced him of that. He grimaced, and in the teeth of the wind he chuckled. Fate was a playful old chap. It was a good joke he had played on him--first a bit of pneumonia, then a set of bad lungs afflicted with that "galloping" something-or-other that hollows one's cheeks and takes the blood out of one's veins. It was then that the horror had grown larger and larger each day in Mignon's big baby-blue eyes, until she came out with childish frankness and said that it was terribly embarrassing to have one's friends know that one was engaged to a consumptive. Philip laughed as he thought of that. The laugh came so suddenly and so explosively that Bram could have heard it a hundred yards away, even with the wind blowing as it was. A consumptive! Philip doubled up his arm until the hard muscles in it snapped. He drew in a deep lungful of air, and forced it out again with a sound like steam escaping from a valve. The NORTH had done that for him; the north with its wonderful forests, its vast skies, its rivers, and its lakes, and its deep snows--the north that makes a man out of the husk of a man if given half a chance. He loved it. And because he loved it, and the adventure of it, he had joined the Police two years ago. Some day he would go back, just for the fun of it; meet his old friends in his old clubs, and shock baby-eyed Mignon to death with his good health. He dropped these meditations as he thought of the mysterious man he was following. During the course of his two years in the Service he had picked up a great many odds and ends in the history of Bram's life, and in the lives of the Johnsons who had preceded him. He had never told any one how deeply interested he was. He had, at times, made efforts to discuss the quality of Bram's intelligence, but always he had failed to make others see and understand his point of view. By the Indians and half-breeds of the country in which he had lived, Bram was regarded as a monster of the first order possessed of the conjuring powers of the devil himself. By the police he was earnestly desired as the most dangerous murderer at large in all the north, and the lucky man who captured him, dead or alive, was sure of a sergeantcy. Ambition and hope had run high in many valiant hearts until it was generally conceded that Bram was dead. Philip was not thinking of the sergeantcy as he kept steadily along the edge of the Barren. His service would shortly be up, and he had other plans for the future. From the moment his fingers had touched the golden strand of hair he had been filled with a new and curious emotion. It possessed him even more strongly to-day than it had last night. He had not given voice to that emotion, or to the thoughts it had roused, even to Pierre. Perhaps he was ridiculous. But he possessed imagination, and along with that a great deal of sympathy for animals--and some human beings. He had, for the time, ceased to be the cool and calculating man-hunter intent on the possession of another's life. He knew that his duty was to get Bram and take him back to headquarters, and he also knew that he would perform his duty when the opportunity came--unless he had guessed correctly the significance of the golden snare. And had he guessed correctly? There was a tremendous doubt in his mind, and yet he was strangely thrilled. He tried to argue that there were many ways in which Bram might have secured the golden hairs that had gone into the making of his snare; and that the snare itself might long have been carried as a charm against the evils of disease and the devil by the strange creature whose mind and life were undoubtedly directed to a large extent by superstition. In that event it was quite logical that Bram had come into possession of his golden talisman years ago. In spite of himself, Philip could not believe that this was so. At noon, when he built a small fire to make tea and warm his bannock, he took the golden tress from his wallet and examined it even more closely than last night. It might have come from a woman's head only yesterday, so bright and shimmery was it in the pale light of the midday sun. He was amazed at the length and fineness of it, and the splendid texture of each hair. Possibly there were half a hundred hairs, each of an equal and unbroken length. He ate his dinner, and went on. Three days of storm had covered utterly every trace of the trail made by Bram and his wolves. He was convinced, however, that Bram would travel in the scrub timber close to the Barren. He had already made up his mind that this Barren--the Great Barren of the unmapped north--was the great snow sea in which Bram had so long found safety from the law. Beaching five hundred miles east and west, and almost from the Sixtieth degree to the Arctic Ocean, its un-peopled and treeless wastes formed a tramping ground for him as safe as the broad Pacific to the pirates of old. He could not repress a shivering exclamation as his mind dwelt on this world of Bram's. It was worse than the edge of the Arctic, where one might at least have the Eskimo for company. He realized the difficulty of his own quest. His one chance lay in fair weather, and the discovery of an old trail made by Bram and his pack. An old trail would lead to fresher ones. Also he was determined to stick to the edge of the scrub timber, for if the Barren was Bram's retreat he would sooner or later strike a trail--unless Bram had gone straight out into the vast white plain shortly after he had made his camp in the forest near Pierre Breault's cabin. In that event it might be weeks before Bram would return to the scrub timber again. That night the last of the blizzard that had raged for days exhausted itself. For a week clear weather followed. It was intensely cold, but no snow fell. In that week Philip traveled a hundred and twenty miles westward. It was on the eighth night, as he sat near his fire in a thick clump of dwarf spruce, that the thing happened which Pierre Breault, with a fatalism born of superstition, knew would come to pass. And it is curious that on this night, and in the very hour of the strange happening, Philip had with infinite care and a great deal of trouble rewoven the fifty hairs back into the form of the golden snare. CHAPTER V The night was so bright that the spruce trees cast vivid shadows on the snow. Overhead there were a billion stars in a sky as dear as an open sea, and the Great Dipper shone like a constellation of tiny suns. The world did not need a moon. At a distance of three hundred yards Philip could have seen a caribou if it had passed. He sat close to his fire, with the heat of it reflected from the blackened face of a huge rock, finishing the snare which had taken him an hour to weave. For a long time he had been conscious of the curious, hissing monotone of the Aurora, the "music of the skies," reaching out through the space of the earth with a purring sound that was at times like the purr of a cat and at others like the faint hum of a bee. Absorbed in his work he did not, for a time, hear the other sound. Not until he had finished, and was placing the golden snare in his wallet, did the one sound individualize and separate itself from the other. He straightened himself suddenly, and listened. Then he jumped to his feet and ran through fifty feet of low scrub to the edge of the white plain. It was coming from off there, a great distance away. Perhaps a mile. It might be two. The howling of wolves! It was not a new or unusual sound to him. He had listened to it many times during the last two years. But never had it thrilled him as it did now, and he felt the blood leap in sudden swiftness through his body as the sound bore straight in his direction. In a flash he remembered all that Pierre Breault had said. Bram and his pack hunted like that. And it was Bram who was coming. He knew it. He ran back to his tent and in what remained of the heat of the fire he warmed for a few moments the breech of his rifle. Then he smothered the fire by kicking snow over it. Returning to the edge of the plain, he posted himself near the largest spruce he could find, up which it would be possible for him to climb a dozen feet or so if necessity drove him to it. And this necessity bore down upon him like the wind. The pack, whether guided by man or beast, was driving straight at him, and it was less than a quarter of a mile away when Philip drew himself up in the spruce. His breath came quick, and his heart was thumping like a drum, for as he climbed up the slender refuge that was scarcely larger in diameter than his arm he remembered the time when he had hung up a thousand pounds of moose meat on cedars as thick as his leg, and the wolves had come the next night and gnawed them through as if they had been paper. From his unsteady perch ten feet off the ground he stared out into the starlit Barren. Then came the other sound. It was the swift chug, chug, chug of galloping feet--of hoofs breaking through the crust of the snow. A shape loomed up, and Philip knew it was a caribou running for its life. He drew an easier breath as he saw that the animal was fleeing parallel with the projecting finger of scrub in which he had made his camp, and that it would strike the timber a good mile below him. And now, with a still deeper thrill, he noted the silence of the pursuing wolves. It meant but one thing. They were so close on the heels of their prey that they no longer made a sound. Scarcely had the caribou disappeared when Philip saw the first of them--gray, swiftly moving shapes, spread out fan-like as they closed in on two sides for attack, so close that he could hear the patter of their feet and the blood-curdling whines that came from between their gaping jaws. There were at least twenty of them, perhaps thirty, and they were gone with the swiftness of shadows driven by a gale. From his uncomfortable position Philip lowered himself to the snow again. With its three or four hundred yard lead he figured that the caribou would almost reach the timber a mile away before the end came. Concealed in the shadow of the spruce, he waited. He made no effort to analyze the confidence with which he watched for Bram. When he at last heard the curious ZIP--ZIP--ZIP of snowshoes approaching his blood ran no faster than it had in the preceding minutes of his expectation, so sure had he been that the man he was after would soon loom up out of the starlight. In the brief interval after the passing of the wolves he had made up his mind what he would do. Fate had played a trump card into his hand. From the first he had figured that strategy would have much to do in the taking of Bram, who would be practically unassailable when surrounded by the savage horde which, at a word from him, had proved themselves ready to tear his enemies into pieces. Now, with the wolves gorging themselves, his plan was to cut Bram off and make him, a prisoner. From his knees he rose slowly to his feet, still hidden in the shadow of the spruce. His rifle he discarded. In his un-mittened hand he held his revolver. With staring eyes he looked for Bram out where the wolves had passed. And then, all at once, came the shock. It was tremendous. The trickery of sound on the Barren had played an unexpected prank with his senses, and while he strained his eyes to pierce the hazy starlight of the plain far out, Bram himself loomed up suddenly along the edge of the bush not twenty paces away. Philip choked back the cry on his lips, and in that moment Bram stopped short, standing full in the starlight, his great lungs taking in and expelling air with a gasping sound as he listened for his wolves. He was a giant of a man. A monster, Philip thought. It is probable that the elusive glow of the night added to his size as he stood there. About his shoulders fell a mass of unkempt hair that looked like seaweed. His beard was short and thick, and for a flash Philip saw the starlight in his eyes--eyes that were shining like the eyes of a cat. In that same moment he saw the face. It was a terrible, questing face--the face of a creature that was hunting, and yet hunted; of a creature half animal and half man. So long as he lived he knew that he would never forget it; the wild savagery of it, the questing fire that was in the eyes, the loneliness of it there in the night, set apart from all mankind; and with the face he would never forget that other thing that came to him audibly--the throbbing, gasping heartbeat of the man's body. In this moment Philip knew that the time to act was at hand. His fingers gripped tighter about the butt of his revolver as he stepped forward out of the shadow. Bram would have seen him then, but in that same instant he had flung back his head and from his throat there went forth a cry such as Philip had never heard from man or beast before. It began deep in Bram's cavernous chest, like the rolling of a great drum, and ended in a wailing shriek that must have carried for miles over the open plain--the call of the master to his pack, of the man-beast to his brothers. It may be that even before the cry was finished some super-instinct had warned Bram Johnson of a danger which he had not seen. The cry was cut short. It ended in a hissing gasp, as steam is cut off by a valve. Before Philip's startled senses had adjusted themselves to action Bram was off, and as his huge strides carried him swiftly through the starlight the cry that had been on his lips was replaced by the strange, mad laugh that Pierre Breault had described with a shiver of fear. Without moving, Philip called after him: "Bram--Bram Johnson--stop! In the name of the King--" It was the old formula, the words that carried with them the majesty and power of Law throughout the northland. Bram heard them. But he did not stop. He sped on more swiftly, and again Philip called his name. "Bram--Bram Johnson--" The laugh came back again. It was weird and chuckling, as though Bram was laughing at him. In the starlight Philip flung up his revolver. He did not aim to hit. Twice he fired over Bram's head and shoulders, so close that the fugitive must have heard the whine of the bullets. "Bram--Bram Johnson!" he shouted a third time. His pistol arm relaxed and dropped to his side, and he stood staring after the great figure that was now no more than a shadow in the gloom. And then it was swallowed up entirely. Once more he was alone under the stars, encompassed by a world of nothingness. He felt, all at once, that he had been a very great fool. He had played his part like a child; even his voice had trembled as he called out Bram's name. And Bram--even Bram--had laughed at him. Very soon he would pay the price of his stupidity--of his slowness to act. It was thought of that which quickened his pulse as he stared out into the white space into which Bram had gone. Before the night was over Bram would return, and with him would come the wolves. With a shudder Philip thought of Corporal Lee as he turned back through the scrub to the big rock where he had made his camp. The picture that flashed into his mind of the fate of the two men from Churchill added to the painful realization of his own immediate peril--a danger brought upon himself by an almost inconceivable stupidity. Philip was no more than the average human with good red blood in his veins. A certain amount of personal hazard held a fascination for him, but he had also the very great human desire to hold a fairly decent hand in any game of chance he entered. It was the oppressive conviction that he had no chance now that stunned him. For a few minutes he stood over the spot where his fire had been, a film of steam rising into his face, trying to adjust his mind to some sort of logical action. He was not afraid of Bram. He would quite cheerfully have gone out and fought open-handedly for his man, even though he had seen that Bram was a giant. This, much he told himself, as he fingered the breech of his rifle, and listened. But it was not Bram who would fight. The wolves would come. He probably would not see Bram again. He would hear only his laugh, or his great voice urging on his pack, as Corporal Lee and the other man had heard it. That Bram would not return for vengeance never for a moment entered his analysis of the situation. By firing after his man Philip had too clearly disclosed his identity and his business; and Bram, fighting for his own existence, would be a fool not to rid himself of an immediate and dangerous enemy. And then, for the first time since he had returned from the edge of the Barren, Philip saw the man again as he had seen him standing under the white glow of the stars. And it struck him, all at once, that Bram had been unarmed. Comprehension of this fact, slow as it had been, worked a swift and sudden hope in him, and his eyes took in quickly the larger trees about him. From a tree he could fight the pack and kill them one by one. He had a rifle and a revolver, and plenty of ammunition. The advantage would lay all with him. But if he was treed, and Bram happened to have a rifle-- He put on the heavy coat he had thrown off near the fire, filled his pockets with loose ammunition, and hunted for the tree he wanted. He found it a hundred yards from his camp. It was a gnarled and wind-blown spruce six inches in diameter, standing in an open. In this open Philip knew that he could play havoc with the pack. On the other hand, if Bram possessed a rifle, the gamble was against him. Perched in the tree, silhouetted against the stars that made the night like day, he would be an easy victim. Bram could pick him off without showing himself. But it was his one chance, and he took it. CHAPTER VI An hour later Philip looked at his watch. It was close to midnight. In that hour his nerves had been keyed to a tension that was almost at the breaking point. Not a sound came from off the Barren or from out of the scrub timber that did not hold a mental and physical shock for him. He believed that Bram and his pack would come up quietly; that he would not hear the man's footsteps or the soft pads of his beasts until they were very near. Twice a great snow owl fluttered over his head. A third time it pounced down upon a white hare back in the shrub, and for an instant Philip thought the time had come. The little white foxes, curious as children, startled him most. Half a dozen times they sent through him the sharp thrill of anticipation, and twice they made him climb his tree. After that hour the reaction came, and with the steadying of his nerves and the quieter pulse of his blood Philip began to ask himself if he was going to escape the ordeal which a short time before he had accepted as a certainty. Was it possible that his shots had frightened Bram? He could not believe that. Cowardice was the last thing he would associate with the strange man he had seen in the starlight. Vividly he saw Bram's face again. And now, after the almost unbearable strain he had been under, a mysterious SOMETHING that had been in that face impinged itself upon him above all other things. Wild and savage as the face had been, he had seen in it the unutterable pathos of a creature without hope. In that moment, even as caution held him listening for the approach of danger, he no longer felt the quickening thrill of man on the hunt for man. He could not have explained the change in himself--the swift reaction of thought and emotion that filled him with a mastering sympathy for Bram Johnson. He waited, and less and less grew his fear of the wolves. Even more clearly he saw Bram as the time passed; the hunted look in the man's eyes, even as he hunted--the loneliness of him as he had stood listening for a sound from the only friends he had--the padded beasts ahead. In spite of Bram's shrieking cry to his pack, and the strangeness of the laugh that had floated back out of the white night after the shots, Philip was convinced that he was not mad. He had heard of men whom loneliness had killed. He had known one--Pelletier, up at Point Fullerton, on the Arctic. He could repeat by heart the diary Pelletier had left scribbled on his cabin door. It was worse than madness. To Pelletier death had come at last as a friend. And Bram had been like that--dead to human comradeship for years. And yet-- Under it all, in Philip's mind, ran the thought of the woman's hair. In Pierre Breault's cabin he had not given voice to the suspicion that had flashed upon him. He had kept it to himself, and Pierre, afraid to speak because of the horror of it, had remained as silent as he. The thought oppressed him now. He knew that human hair retained its life and its gloss indefinitely, and that Bram might have had the golden snare for years. It was quite reasonable to suppose that he had bartered for it with some white man in the years before he had become an outlaw, and that some curious fancy or superstition had inspired him in its possession. But Philip had ceased to be influenced by reason alone. Sharply opposed to reason was that consciousness within him which told him that the hair had been freshly cut from a woman's head. He had no argument with which to drive home the logic of this belief even with himself, and yet he found it impossible not to accept that belief fully and unequivocally. There was, or HAD been, a woman with Bram--and as he thought of the length and beauty and rare texture of the silken strand in his pocket he could not repress a shudder at the possibilities the situation involved. Bram--and a woman! And a woman with hair like that! He left his tree after a time. For another hour he paced slowly back and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to the highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every few moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was very cold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lights over the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growing dimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther and farther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out of the stars always interested him. It was one of the miracles of the northern world that lay just under the long Arctic night which, a few hundred miles beyond the Barren, was now at its meridian. It seemed to him as though ten thousand invisible hands were sweeping under the heavens extinguishing the lights first in ones and twos and then in whole constellations. It preceded by perhaps half an hour the utter and chaotic blackness that comes before the northern dawn, and it was this darkness that Philip dreaded as he waited beside his fire. In the impenetrable gloom of that hour Bram might come. It was possible that he had been waiting for that darkness. Philip looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. Once more he went to his tree, and waited. In another quarter of an hour he could not see the tree beside which he stood. And Bram did not come. With the beginning of the gray dawn Philip rebuilt his fire for the third time and prepared to cook his breakfast. He felt the need of coffee--strong coffee--and he boiled himself a double ration. At seven o'clock he was ready to take up the trail. He believed now that some mysterious and potent force had restrained Bram Johnson from taking advantage of the splendid opportunity of that night to rid himself of an enemy. As he made his way through the scrub timber along the edge of the Barren it was with the feeling that he no longer desired Bram as a prisoner. A thing more interesting than Bram had entered into the adventure. It was the golden snare. Not with Bram himself, but only at the end of Bram's trail, would he find what the golden snare stood for. There he would discover the mystery and the tragedy of it, if it meant anything at all. He appreciated the extreme hazard of following Bram to his long hidden retreat. The man he might outwit in pursuit and overcome in fair fight, if it came to a fight, but against the pack he was fighting tremendous odds. What this odds meant had not fully gripped him until he came cautiously out of the timber half an hour later and saw what was left of the caribou the pack had killed. The bull had fallen within fifty yards of the edge of the scrub. For a radius of twenty feet about it the snow was beaten hard by the footprints of beasts, and this arena was stained red with blood and scattered thickly with bits of flesh, broken bones and patches of hide. Philip could see where Bram had come in on the run, and where he had kicked off his snowshoes. After that his great moccasin tracks mingled with those of the wolves. Bram had evidently come in time to save the hind quarters, which had been dragged to a spot well out of the red ring of slaughter. After that the stars must have looked down upon an amazing scene. The hungry horde had left scarcely more than the disemboweled offal. Where Bram had dragged his meat there was a small circle worn by moccasin tracks, and here, too, were small bits of flesh, scattered about--the discarded remnants of Bram's own feast. The snow told as clearly as a printed page what had happened after that. Its story amazed Philip. From somewhere Bram had produced a sledge, and on this sledge he had loaded what remained of the caribou meat. From the marks in the snow Philip saw that it had been of the low ootapanask type, but that it was longer and broader than any sledge he had ever seen. He did not have to guess at what had happened. Everything was too clear for that. Far back on the Barren Bram had loosed his pack at sight of the caribou, and the pursuit and kill had followed. After that, when beasts and man had gorged themselves, they had returned through the night for the sledge. Bram had made a wide detour so that he would not again pass near the finger of scrub timber that concealed his enemy, and with a curious quickening of the blood in his veins Philip observed how closely the pack hung at his heels. The man was master--absolutely. Later they had returned with the sledge, Bram had loaded his meat, and with his pack had struck out straight north over the Barren. Every wolf was in harness, and Bram rode on the sledge. Philip drew a deep breath. He was learning new things about Bram Johnson. First he assured himself that Bram was not afraid, and that his disappearance could not be called a flight. If fear of capture had possessed him he would not have returned for his meat. Suddenly he recalled Pierre Breault's story of how Bram had carried off the haunches of a bull upon his shoulders as easily as a child might have carried a toy gun, and he wondered why Bram--instead of returning for the meat this night--had not carried the meat to his sledge. It would have saved time and distance. He was beginning to give Bram credit for a deeply mysterious strategy. There was some definite reason why he had not made an attack with his wolves that night. There was a reason for the wide detour around the point of timber, and there was a still more inexplicable reason why he had come back with his sledge for the meat, instead of carrying his meat to the sledge. The caribou haunch had not weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds, which was scarcely half a burden for Bram's powerful shoulders. In the edge of the timber, where he could secure wood for his fire, Philip began to prepare. He cooked food for six days. Three days he would follow Bram out into that unmapped and treeless space--the Great Barren. Beyond that it would be impossible to go without dogs or sledge. Three days out, and three days back--and even at that he would be playing a thrilling game with death. In the heart of the Barren a menace greater than Bram and his wolves would be impending. It was storm. His heart sank a little as he set out straight north, marking the direction by the point of his compass. It was a gray and sunless day. Beyond him for a distance the Barren was a white plain, and this plain seemed always to be merging not very far ahead into the purple haze of the sky. At the end of an hour he was in the center of a vast amphitheater which was filled with the gloom and the stillness of death. Behind him the thin fringe of the forest had disappeared. The rim of the sky was like a leaden thing, widening only as he advanced. Under that sky, and imprisoned within its circular walls, he knew that men had gone mad; he felt already the crushing oppression of an appalling loneliness, and for another hour he fought an almost irresistible desire to turn back. Not a rock or a shrub rose to break the monotony, and over his head--so low that at times it seemed as though he might have flung a stone up to them--dark clouds rolled sullenly from out of the north and east. Half a dozen times in those first two hours he looked at his compass. Not once in that time did Bram diverge from his steady course into the north. In the gray gloom, without a stone or a tree to mark his way, his sense of orientation was directing him as infallibly as the sensitive needle of the instrument which Philip carried. It was in the third hour, seven or eight miles from the scene of slaughter, that Philip came upon the first stopping place of the sledge. The wolves had not broken their traveling rank, and for this reason he guessed that Bram had paused only long enough to put on his snowshoes. After this Philip could measure quite accurately the speed of the outlaw and his pack. Bram's snow-shoe strides were from twelve to sixteen inches longer than his own, and there was little doubt that Bram was traveling six miles to his four. It was one o'clock when Philip stopped to eat his dinner. He figured that he was fifteen miles from the timber-line. As he ate there pressed upon him more and more persistently the feeling that he had entered upon an adventure which was leading toward inevitable disaster for him. For the first time the significance of Bram's supply of meat, secured by the outlaw at the last moment before starting out into the Barren, appeared to him with a clearness that filled him with uneasiness. It meant that Bram required three or four days' rations for himself and his pack in crossing this sea of desolation that reached in places to the Arctic. In that time, if necessity was driving him, he could cover a hundred and fifty miles, while Philip could make less than a hundred. Until three o'clock in the afternoon he followed steadily over Bram's trail. He would have pursued for another hour if a huge and dome-shaped snowdrift had not risen in his path. In the big drift he decided to make his house for the night. It was an easy matter--a trick learned of the Eskimo. With his belt-ax he broke through the thick crust of the drift, using care that the "door" he thus opened into it was only large enough for the entrance of his body. Using a snowshoe as a shovel he then began digging out the soft interior of the drift, burrowing a two foot tunnel until he was well back from the door, where he made himself a chamber large enough for his sleeping-bag. The task employed him less than an hour, and when his bed was made, and he stood in front of the door to his igloo, his spirits began to return. The assurance that he had a home at his back in which neither cold nor storm could reach him inspirited him with an optimism which he had not felt at any time during the day. From the timber he had borne a precious bundle of finely split kindlings of pitch-filled spruce, and with a handful of these he built himself a tiny fire over which, on a longer stick brought for the purpose, he suspended his tea pail, packed with snow. The crackling of the flames set him whistling. Darkness was falling swiftly about him. By the time his tea was ready and he had warmed his cold bannock and bacon the gloom was like a black curtain that he might have slit with a knife. Not a star was visible in the sky. Twenty feet on either side of him he could not see the surface of the snow. Now and then he added a bit of his kindling to the dying embers, and in the glow of the last stick he smoked his pipe, and as he smoked he drew from his wallet the golden snare. Coiled in the hollow of his hand and catching the red light of the pitch-laden fagot it shone with the rich luster of rare metal. Not until the pitch was burning itself out in a final sputter of flame did Philip replace it in the wallet. With the going of the fire an utter and chaotic blackness shut him in. Feeling his way he crawled through the door of his tunnel, over the inside of which he had fastened as a flap his silk service tent. Then he stretched himself out in his sleeping-bag. It was surprisingly comfortable. Since he had left Breault's cabin he had not enjoyed such a bed. And last night he had not slept at all. He fell into deep sleep. The hours and the night passed over him. He did not hear the wailing of the wind that came with the dawn. When day followed dawn there were other sounds which he did not hear. His inner consciousness, the guardian of his sleep, cried for him to arouse himself. It pounded like a little hand in his brain, and at last he began to move restlessly, and twist in his sleeping-bag. His eyes shot open suddenly. The light of day filled his tunnel. He looked toward the "door" which he had covered with his tent. The tent was gone. In its place was framed a huge shaggy head, and Philip found himself staring straight into the eyes of Bram Johnson. CHAPTER VII Philip was not unaccustomed to the occasional mental and physical shock which is an inevitable accompaniment of the business of Law in the northland. But never had he felt quite the same stir in his blood as now--when he found himself looking down the short tunnel into the face of the man he was hunting. There come now and then moments in which a curious understanding is impinged upon one without loss of time in reason and surmise--and this was one of those moments for Philip. His first thought as he saw the great wild face in the door of his tunnel was that Bram had been looking at him for some time--while he was asleep; and that if the desire to kill had been in the outlaw's breast he might have achieved his purpose with very little trouble. Equally swift was his observance of the fact that the tent with which he had covered the aperture was gone, and that his rifle, with the weight of which he had held the tent in place, had disappeared. Bram had secured possession of them before he had roused himself. It was not the loss of these things, or entirely Bram's sudden and unexpected appearance, that sent through him the odd thrill, which he experienced. It was Bram's face, his eyes, the tense and mysterious earnestness that was in his gaze. It was not the watchfulness of a victor looking at his victim. In it there was no sign of hatred or of exultation. There was not even unfriendliness there. Rather it was the study of one filled with doubt and uneasiness, and confronted by a question which he could not answer. There was not a line of the face which Philip could not see now--its high cheek-bones, its wide cheeks, the low forehead, the flat nose, the thick lips. Only the eyes kept it from being a terrible face. Straight down through the generations Bram must have inherited those eyes from some woman of the past. They were strange things in that wild and hunted creature's face--gray eyes, large, beautiful. With the face taken away they would have been wonderful. For a full minute not a sound passed between the two men. Philip's hand had slipped to the butt of his revolver, but he had no intention of using it. Then he found his voice. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should say what he did. "Hello, Bram!" "Boo-joo, m'sieu!" Only Bram's thick lips moved. His voice was low and guttural. Almost instantly his head disappeared from the opening. Philip dug himself quickly from his sleeping-bag. Through the aperture there came to him now another sound, the yearning whine of beasts. He could not hear Bram. In spite of the confidence which his first look at Bram had given him he felt a sudden shiver run up his spine as he faced the end of the tunnel on his hands and knees, his revolver in his hand. What a rat in a trap he would be if Bram loosed his wolves! What sport for the pack--and perhaps for the master himself! He could kill two or three--and that would be all. They would be in on him like a whirlwind, diving through his snow walls as easily as a swimmer might cut through water. Had he twice made a fool of himself? Should he have winged Bram Johnson, three times a murderer, in place of offering him a greeting? He began crawling toward the opening, and again he heard the snarl and whine of the beasts. The sound seemed some distance away. He reached the end of the tunnel and peered out through the "door" he had made in the crust. From his position he could see nothing--nothing but the endless sweep of the Barren and his old trail leading up to the snow dune. The muzzle of his revolver was at the aperture when he heard Bram's voice. "M'sieu--ze revolv'--ze knife--or I mus' keel yon. Ze wolve plent' hungr'--" Bram was standing just outside of his line of vision. He had not spoken loudly or threateningly, but Philip felt in the words a cold and unexcited deadliness of purpose against which he knew that it would be madness for him to fight. Bram had more than the bad man's ordinary drop on him. In his wolves he possessed not only an advantage but a certainty. If Philip had doubted this, as he waited for another moment with the muzzle of his revolver close to the opening, his uncertainty was swept away by the appearance thirty feet in front of his tunnel of three of Bram's wolves. They were giants of their kind, and as the three faced his refuge he could see the snarling gleam of their long fangs. A fourth and a fifth joined them, and after that they came within his vision in twos and threes until a score of them were huddled straight in front of him. They were restless and whining, and the snap of their jaws was like the clicking of castanets. He caught the glare of twenty pairs of eyes fastened on his retreat and involuntarily he shrank back that they might not see him. He knew that it was Bram who was holding them back, and yet he had heard no word, no command. Even as he stared a long snakelike shadow uncurled itself swiftly in the air and the twenty foot lash of Bram's caribou-gut whip cracked viciously over the heads of the pack. At the warning of the whip the horde of beasts scattered, and Bram's voice came again. "M'sieu--ze revolv'--ze knife--or I loose ze wolve--" The words were scarcely out of his mouth when Philip's revolver flew through the opening and dropped in the snow. "There it is, old man," announced Philip. "And here comes the knife." His sheath-knife followed the revolver. "Shall I throw out my bed?" he asked. He was making a tremendous effort to appear cheerful. But he could not forget that last night he had shot at Bram, and that it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that Bram might knock his brains out when he stuck his head out of the hole. The fact that Bram made no answer to his question about the bed did not add to his assurance. He repeated the question, louder than before, and still there was no answer. In the face of his perplexity he could not repress a grim chuckle as he rolled up his blankets. What a report he would have for the Department--if he lived to make it! On paper there would be a good deal of comedy about it--this burrowing oneself up like a hibernating woodchuck, and then being invited out to breakfast by a man with a club and a pack of brutes with fangs that had gleamed at him like ivory stilettos. He had guessed at the club, and a moment later as he thrust his sleeping-bag out through the opening he saw that it was quite obviously a correct one. Bram was possessing himself of the revolver and the knife. In the same hand he held his whip and a club. Seizing the opportunity, Philip followed his bed quickly, and when Bram faced him he was standing on his feet outside the drift. "Morning, Bram!" His greeting was drowned in a chorus of fierce snarls that made his blood curdle even as he tried to hide from Bram any visible betrayal of the fact that every nerve up and down his spine was pricking him, like a pin. From Bram's throat there shot forth at the pack a sudden sharp clack of Eskimo, and with it the long whip snapped in their faces again. Then he looked steadily at his prisoner. For the first time Philip saw the look which he dreaded darkening his face. A greenish fire burned in the strange eyes. The thick lips were set tightly, the flat nose seemed flatter, and with a shiver Philip noticed Bram's huge, naked hand gripping his club until the cords stood out like babiche thongs under the skin. In that moment he was ready to kill. A wrong word, a wrong act, and Philip knew that the end was inevitable. In the same thick guttural voice which he used in his half-breed patois he demanded, "Why you shoot--las' night!" "Because I wanted to talk with you, Bram," replied Philip calmly. "I didn't shoot to hit you. I fired over your head." "You want--talk," said Bram, speaking as if each word cost him a certain amount of effort. "Why--talk?" "I wanted to ask you why it was that you killed a man down in the God's Lake country." The words were out before Philip could stop them. A growl rose in Bram's chest. It was like the growl of a beast. The greenish fire in his eyes grew brighter. "Ze poleece," he said. "KA, ze poleece--like kam from Churchill an' ze wolve keel!" Philip's hand was fumbling in his pocket. The wolves were behind him and he dared not turn to look. It was their ominous silence that filled him with dread. They were waiting--watching--their animal instinct telling them that the command for which they yearned was already trembling on the thick lips of their master. The revolver and the knife dropped from Bram's hand. He held only the whip and the club. Philip drew forth the wallet. "You lost something--when you camped that night near Pierre Breault's cabin," he said, and his own voice seemed strange and thick to him. "I've followed you--to give it back. I could have killed you if I had wanted to--when I fired over your head. But I wanted to stop you. I wanted to give you--this." He held out to Bram the golden snare. CHAPTER VIII It must have been fully half a minute that Bram stood like a living creature turned suddenly into dead stone. His eyes had left Philip's face and were fixed on the woven tress of shining hair. For the first time his thick lips had fallen agape. He did not seem to breathe. At the end of the thirty seconds his hand unclenched from about the whip and the club and they fell into the snow. Slowly, his eyes still fixed on the snare as if it held for him an overpowering fascination, he advanced a step, and then another, until he reached out and took from Philip the thing which he held. He uttered no word. But from his eyes there disappeared the greenish fire. The lines in his heavy face softened and his thick lips lost some of their cruelty as he held up the snare before his eyes so that the light played on its sheen of gold. It was then that Philip saw that which must have meant a smile in Bram's face. Still this strange man made no spoken sound as he coiled the silken thread around one of his great fingers and then placed it somewhere inside his coat. He seemed, all at once, utterly oblivious of Philip's presence. He picked up the revolver, gazed heavily at it for a moment, and with a grunt which must have reflected his mental decision hurled it far out over the plain. Instantly the wolves were after it in a mad rush. The knife followed the revolver; and after that, as coolly as though breaking firewood, the giant went to Philip's rifle, braced it across his knee, and with a single effort snapped the stock off close to the barrel. "The devil!" growled Philip. He felt a surge of anger rise in him, and for an instant the inclination to fling himself at Bram in the defense of his property. If he had been helpless a few minutes before, he was utterly so now. In the same breath it flashed upon him that Bram's activity in the destruction of his weapons meant that his life was spared, at least for the present. Otherwise Bram would not be taking these precautions. The futility of speech kept his own lips closed. At last Bram looked at him, and pointed to his snowshoes where he had placed them last night against the snow dune. His invitation for Philip to prepare himself for travel was accompanied by nothing more than a grunt. The wolves were returning, sneaking in watchfully and alert. Bram greeted them with the snap of his whip, and when Philip was ready motioned him to lead the way into the north. Half a dozen paces behind Philip followed Bram, and twice that distance behind the outlaw came the pack. Now that his senses were readjusting themselves and his pulse beating more evenly Philip began to take stock of the situation. It was, first of all, quite evident that Bram had not accepted him as a traveling companion, but as a prisoner; and he was equally convinced that the golden snare had at the last moment served in some mysterious way to save his life. It was not long before he saw how Bram had out-generaled him. Two miles beyond the big drift they came upon the outlaw's huge sledge, from which Bram and his wolves had made a wide circle in order to stalk him from behind. The fact puzzled him. Evidently Bram had expected his unknown enemy to pursue him, and had employed his strategy accordingly. Why, then, had he not attacked him the night of the caribou kill? He watched Bram as he got the pack into harness. The wolves obeyed him like dogs. He could perceive among them a strange comradeship, even an affection, for the man-monster who was their master. Bram spoke to them entirely in Eskimo--and the sound of it was like the rapid CLACK--CLACK--CLACK of dry bones striking together. It was weirdly different from the thick and guttural tones Bram used in speaking Chippewyan and the half-breed patois. Again Philip made an effort to induce Bram to break his oppressive silence. With a suggestive gesture and a hunch of his shoulders he nodded toward the pack, just as they were about to start. "If you thought I tried to kill you night before last why didn't you set your wolves after me, Bram--as you did those other two over on the Barren north of Kasba Lake? Why did you wait until this morning? And where--WHERE in God's name are we going?" Bram stretched out an arm. "There!" It was the one question he answered, and he pointed straight as the needle of a compass into the north. And then, as if his crude sense of humor had been touched by the other thing Philip had asked, he burst into a laugh. It made one shudder to see laughter in a face like Bram's. It transformed his countenance from mere ugliness into one of the leering gargoyles carven under the cornices of ancient buildings. It was this laugh, heard almost at Bram's elbow, that made Philip suddenly grip hard at a new understanding--the laugh and the look in Bram's eyes. It set him throbbing, and filled him all at once with the desire to seize his companion by his great shoulders and shake speech from his thick lips. In that moment, even before the laughter had gone from Bram's face, he thought again of Pelletier. Pelletier must have been like this--in those terrible days when he scribbled the random thoughts of a half-mad man on his cabin door. Bram was not yet mad. And yet he was fighting the thing that had killed Pelletier. Loneliness. The fate forced upon him by the law because he had killed a man. His face was again heavy and unemotional when with a gesture he made Philip understand that he was to ride on the sledge. Bram himself went to the head of the pack. At the sharp clack of his Eskimo the wolves strained in their traces. Another moment and they were off, with Bram in the lead. Philip was amazed at the pace set by the master of the pack. With head and shoulders hunched low he set off in huge swinging strides that kept the team on a steady trot behind him. They must have traveled eight miles an hour. For a few minutes Philip could not keep his eyes from Bram and the gray backs of the wolves. They fascinated him, and at the same time the sight of them--straining on ahead of him into a voiceless and empty world--filled him with a strange and overwhelming compassion. He saw in them the brotherhood of man and beast. It was splendid. It was epic. And to this the Law had driven them! His eyes began to take in the sledge then. On it was a roll of bear skins--Bram's blankets. One was the skin of a polar bear. Near these skins were the haunches of caribou meat, and so close to him that he might have reached out and touched it was Bram's club. At the side of the club lay a rifle. It was of the old breech-loading, single-shot type, and Philip wondered why Bram had destroyed his own modern weapon instead of keeping it in place of this ancient Company relic. It also made him think of night before last, when he had chosen for his refuge a tree out in the starlight. The club, even more than the rifle, bore marks of use. It was of birch, and three feet in length. Where Bram's hand gripped it the wood was worn as smooth and dark as mahogany. In many places the striking end of the club was dented as though it had suffered the impact of tremendous blows, and it was discolored by suggestive stains. There was no sign of cooking utensils and no evidence of any other food but the caribou flesh. On the rear of the sledge was a huge bundle of pitch-soaked spruce tied with babiche, and out of this stuck the crude handle of an ax. Of these things the gun and the white bear skin impressed Philip most. He had only to lean forward a little to reach the rifle, and the thought that he could scarcely miss the broad back of the man ahead of him struck him all at once with a sort of mental shock. Bram had evidently forgotten the weapon, or was utterly confident in the protection of the pack. Or--had he faith in his prisoner? It was this last question that Philip would liked to have answered in the affirmative. He had no desire to harm Bram. He had even a less desire to escape him. He had forgotten, so far as his personal intentions were concerned, that he was an agent of the Law--under oath to bring in to Divisional Headquarters Bram's body dead or alive. Since night before last Bram had ceased to be a criminal for him. He was like Pelletier, and through him he was entering upon a strange adventure which held for him already the thrill and suspense of an anticipation which he had never experienced in the game of man-hunting. Had the golden snare been taken from the equation--had he not felt the thrill of it in his fingers and looked upon the warm fires of it as it lay unbound on Pierre Breault's table, his present relation with Bram Johnson he would have considered as a purely physical condition, and he might then have accepted the presence of the rifle there within his reach as a direct invitation from Providence. As it was, he knew that the master of the wolves was speeding swiftly to the source of the golden snare. From the moment he had seen the strange transformation it had worked in Bram that belief within him had become positive. And now, as his eyes turned from the inspection of the sledge to Bram and his wolves, he wondered where the trail was taking him. Was it possible that Bram was striking straight north for Coronation Gulf and the Eskimo? He had noted that the polar bear skin was only slightly worn--that it had not long been taken from the back of the animal that had worn it. He recalled what he could remember of his geography. Their course, if continued in the direction Bram was now heading, would take them east of the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and they would hit the Arctic somewhere between Melville Sound and the Coppermine River. It was a good five hundred miles to the Eskimo settlements there. Bram and his wolves could make it in ten days, possibly in eight. If his guess was correct, and Coronation Gulf was Bram's goal, he had found at least one possible explanation for the tress of golden hair. The girl or woman to whom it had belonged had come into the north aboard a whaling ship. Probably she was the daughter or the wife of the master. The ship had been lost in the ice--she had been saved by the Eskimo--and she was among them now, with other white men. Philip pictured it all vividly. It was unpleasant--horrible. The theory of other white men being with her he was conscious of forcing upon himself to offset the more reasonable supposition that, as in the case of the golden snare, she belonged to Bram. He tried to free himself of that thought, but it clung to him with a tenaciousness that oppressed him with a grim and ugly foreboding. What a monstrous fate for a woman! He shivered. For a few moments every instinct in his body fought to assure him that such a thing could not happen. And yet he knew that it COULD happen. A woman up there--with Bram! A woman with hair like spun gold--and that giant half-mad enormity of a man! He clenched his hands at the picture his excited brain was painting for him. He wanted to jump from the sledge, overtake Bram, and demand the truth from him. He was calm enough to realize the absurdity of such action. Upon his own strategy depended now whatever answer he might make to the message chance had sent to him through the golden snare. For an hour he marked Bram's course by his compass. It was straight north. Then Bram changed the manner of his progress by riding in a standing position behind Philip. With his long whip he urged on the pack until they were galloping over the frozen level of the plain at a speed that must have exceeded ten miles an hour. A dozen times Philip made efforts at conversation. Not a word did he get from Bram in reply. Again and again the outlaw shouted to his wolves in Eskimo; he cracked his whip, he flung his great arms over his head, and twice there rolled out of his chest deep peals of strange laughter. They had been traveling more than two hours when he gave voice to a sudden command that stopped the pack, and at a second command--a staccato of shrill Eskimo accompanied by the lash of his whip--the panting wolves sank upon their bellies in the snow. Philip jumped from the sledge, and Bram went immediately to the gun. He did not touch it, but dropped on his knees and examined it closely. Then he rose to his feet and looked at Philip, and there was no sign of madness in his heavy face as he said, "You no touch ze gun, m'sieu. Why you no shoot when I am there--at head of pack?" The calmness and directness with which Bram put the question after his long and unaccountable silence surprised Philip. "For the same reason you didn't kill me when I was asleep, I guess," he said. Suddenly he reached out and caught Bram's arm. "Why the devil don't you come across!" he demanded. "Why don't you talk? I'm not after you--now. The Police think you are dead, and I don't believe I'd tip them off even if I had a chance. Why not be human? Where are we going? And what in thunder--" He did not finish. To his amazement Bram flung back his head, opened his great mouth, and laughed. It was not a taunting laugh. There was no humor in it. The thing seemed beyond the control of even Bram himself, and Philip stood like one paralyzed as his companion turned quickly to the sledge and returned in a moment with the gun. Under Philip's eyes he opened the breech. The chamber was empty. Bram had placed in his way a temptation--to test him! There was saneness in that stratagem--and yet as Philip looked at the man now his last doubt was gone. Bram Johnson was hovering on the borderland of madness. Replacing the gun on the sledge, Bram began hacking off chunks of the caribou flesh with a big knife. Evidently he had decided that it was time for himself and his pack to breakfast. To each of the wolves he gave a portion, after which he seated himself on the sledge and began devouring a slice of the raw meat. He had left the blade of his knife buried in the carcass--an invitation for Philip to help himself. Philip seated himself near Bram and opened his pack. Purposely he began placing his food between them, so that the other might help himself if he so desired. Bram's jaws ceased their crunching. For a moment Philip did not look up. When he did he was startled. Bram's eyes were blazing with a red fire. He was staring at the cooked food. Never had Philip seen such a look in a human face before. He reached out and seized a chunk of bannock, and was about to bite into it when with the snarl of a wild beast Bram dropped his meat and was at him. Before Philip could raise an arm in defense his enemy had him by the throat. Back over the sledge they went. Philip scarcely knew how it happened--but in another moment the giant had hurled him clean over his head and he struck the frozen plain with a shock that stunned him. When he staggered to his feet, expecting a final assault that would end him, Bram was kneeling beside his pack. A mumbling and incoherent jargon of sound issued from his thick lips as he took stock of Philip's supplies. Of Philip himself he seemed now utterly oblivious. Still mumbling, he dragged the pile of bear skins from the sledge, unrolled them, and revealed a worn and tattered dunnage bag. At first Philip thought this bag was empty. Then Bram drew from it a few small packages, some of them done up in paper and others in bark. Only one of these did Philip recognize--a half pound package of tea such as the Hudson's Bay Company offers in barter at its stores. Into the dunnage bag Bram now put Philip's supplies, even to the last crumb of bannock, and then returned the articles he had taken out, after which he rolled the bag up in the bear skins and replaced the skins on the sledge. After that, still mumbling, and still paying no attention to Philip, he reseated himself on the edge of the sledge and finished his breakfast of raw meat. "The poor devil!" mumbled Philip. The words were out of his mouth before he realized that he had spoken them. He was still a little dazed by the shock of Bram's assault, but it was impossible for him to bear malice or thought of vengeance. In Bram's face, as he had covetously piled up the different articles of food, he had seen the terrible glare of starvation--and yet he had not eaten a mouthful. He had stored the food away, and Philip knew it was as much as his life was worth to contend its ownership. Again Bram seemed to be unconscious of his presence, but when Philip went to the meat and began carving himself off a slice the wolf-man's eyes shot in his direction just once. Purposely he stood in front of Bram as he ate the raw steak, feigning a greater relish than he actually enjoyed in consuming his uncooked meal. Bram did not wait for him to finish. No sooner had he swallowed the last of his own breakfast than he was on his feet giving sharp commands to the pack. Instantly the wolves were alert in their traces. Philip took his former position on the sledge, with Bram behind him. Never in all the years afterward did he forget that day. As the hours passed it seemed to him that neither man nor beast could very long stand the strain endured by Bram and his wolves. At times Bram rode on the sledge for short distances, but for the most part he was running behind, or at the head of the pack. For the pack there was no rest. Hour after hour it surged steadily onward over the endless plain, and whenever the wolves sagged for a moment in their traces Brain's whip snapped over their gray backs and his voice rang out in fierce exhortation. So hard was the frozen crust of the Barren that snowshoes were no longer necessary, and half a dozen times Philip left the sledge and ran with the wolf-man and his pack until he was winded. Twice he ran shoulder to shoulder with Bram. It was in the middle of the afternoon that his compass told him they were no longer traveling north--but almost due west. Every quarter of an hour after that he looked at his compass. And always the course was west. He was convinced that some unusual excitement was urging Bram on, and he was equally certain this excitement had taken possession of him from the moment he had found the food in his pack. Again and again he heard the strange giant mumbling incoherently to himself, but not once did Bram utter a word that he could understand. The gray world about them was darkening when at last they stopped. And now, strangely as before, Bram seemed for a few moments to turn into a sane man. He pointed to the bundle of fuel, and as casually as though he had been conversing with him all the day he said to Philip: "A fire, m'sieu." The wolves had dropped in their traces, their great shaggy heads stretched out between their paws in utter exhaustion, and Bram went slowly down the line speaking to each one in turn. After that he fell again into his stolid silence. From the bear skins he produced a kettle, filled it with snow, and hung it over the pile of fagots to which Philip was touching a match. Philip's tea pail he employed in the same way. "How far have we come, Bram?" Philip asked. "Fift' mile, m'sieu," answered Bram without hesitation. "And how much farther have we to go?" Bram grunted. His face became more stolid. In his hand he was holding the big knife with which he cut the caribou meat. He was staring at it. From the knife he looked at Philip. "I keel ze man at God's Lake because he steal ze knife--an' call me lie. I keel heem--lak that!"--and he snatched up a stick and broke it into two pieces. His weird laugh followed the words. He went to the meat and began carving off chunks for the pack, and for a long time after that one would have thought that he was dumb. Philip made greater effort than ever to rouse him into speech. He laughed, and whistled, and once tried the experiment of singing a snatch of the Caribou Song which he knew that Bram must have heard many times before. As he roasted his steak over the fire he talked about the Barren, and the great herd of caribou he had seen farther east; he asked Bram questions about the weather, the wolves, and the country farther north and west. More than once he was certain that Bram was listening intently, but nothing more than an occasional grunt was his response. For an hour after they had finished their supper they continued to melt snow for drinking water for themselves and the wolves. Night shut them in, and in the glow of the fire Bram scooped a hollow in the snow for a bed, and tilted the big sledge over it as a roof. Philip made himself as comfortable as he could with his sleeping bag, using his tent as an additional protection. The fire went out. Bram's heavy breathing told Philip that the wolf-man was soon asleep. It was a long time before he felt a drowsiness creeping over himself. Later he was awakened by a heavy grasp on his arm, and roused himself to hear Bram's voice close over him. "Get up, m'sieu." It was so dark he could not see Bram when he got on his feet, but he could hear him a moment later among the wolves, and knew that he was making ready to travel. When his sleeping-bag and tent were on the sledge he struck a match and looked at his watch. It was less than a quarter of an hour after midnight. For two hours Bram led his pack straight into the west. The night cleared after that, and as the stars grew brighter and more numerous in the sky the plain was lighted up on all sides of them, as on the night when Philip had first seen Bram. By lighting an occasional match Philip continued to keep a record of direction and time. It was three o'clock, and they were still traveling west, when to his surprise they struck a small patch of timber. The clump of stunted and wind-snarled spruce covered no more than half an acre, but it was conclusive evidence they were again approaching a timber-line. From the patch of spruce Bram struck due north, and for another hour their trail was over the white Barren. Soon after this they came to a fringe of scattered timber which grew steadily heavier and deeper as they entered into it. They must have penetrated eight or ten miles into the forest before the dawn came. And in that dawn, gray and gloomy, they came suddenly upon a cabin. Philip's heart gave a jump. Here, at last, would the mystery of the golden snare be solved. This was his first thought. But as they drew nearer, and stopped at the threshold of the door, he felt sweep over him an utter disappointment. There was no life here. No smoke came from the chimney and the door was almost buried in a huge drift of snow. His thoughts were cut short by the crack of Bram's whip. The wolves swept onward and Bram's insane laugh sent a weird and shuddering echo through the forest. From the time they left behind them the lifeless and snow-smothered cabin Philip lost account of time and direction. He believed that Bram was nearing the end of his trail. The wolves were dead tired. The wolf-man himself was lagging, and since midnight had ridden more frequently on the sledge. Still he drove on, and Philip searched with increasing eagerness the trail ahead of them. It was eight o'clock--two hours after they had passed the cabin--when they came to the edge of a clearing in the center of which was a second cabin. Here at a glance Philip saw there was life. A thin spiral of smoke was rising from the chimney. He could see only the roof of the log structure, for it was entirely shut in by a circular stockade of saplings six feet high. Twenty paces from where Bram stopped his team was the gate of the stockade. Bram went to it, thrust his arm through a hole even with his shoulders, and a moment later the gate swung inward. For perhaps a space of twenty seconds he looked steadily at Philip, and for the first time Philip observed the remarkable change that had come into his face. It was no longer a face of almost brutish impassiveness. There was a strange glow in his eyes. His thick lips were parted as if on the point of speech, and he was breathing with a quickness which did not come of physical exertion. Philip did not move or speak. Behind him he heard the restless whine of the wolves. He kept his eyes on Bram, and as he saw the look of joy and anticipation deepening in the wolf-man's face the appalling thought of what it meant sickened him. He clenched his hands. Bram did not see the act. He was looking again toward the cabin and at the spiral of smoke rising out of the chimney. Then he faced Philip, and said, "M'sieu, you go to ze cabin." He held the gate open, and Philip entered. He paused to make certain of Bram's intention. The wolf-man swept an arm about the enclosure. "In ze pit I loose ze wolve, m'sieu." Philip understood. The stockade enclosure was Bram's wolf-pit, and Bram meant that he should reach the cabin before he gave the pack the freedom of the corral. He tried to conceal the excitement in his face as he turned toward the cabin. From the gate to the door ran a path worn by many footprints, and his heart beat faster as he noted the smallness of the moccasin tracks. Even then his mind fought against the possibility of the thing. Probably it was an Indian woman who lived with Bram, or an Eskimo girl he had brought down from the north. He made no sound as he approached the door. He did not knock, but opened it and entered, as Bram had invited him to do. From the gate Bram watched the cabin door as it closed behind him, and then he threw back his head and such a laugh of triumph came from his lips that even the tired beasts behind him pricked up their ears and listened. And Philip, in that same moment, had solved the mystery of the golden snare. CHAPTER IX Philip had entered Bram Johnson's cabin from the west. Out of the east the pale fire of the winter sun seemed to concentrate itself on the one window of Bram's habitation, and flooded the opposite partition. In this partition there was a doorway, and in the doorway stood a girl. She was standing full in the light that came through the window when Philip saw her. His first impression was that she was clouded in the same wonderful hair that had gone into the making of the golden snare. It billowed over her arms and breast to her hips, aflame with the living fires of the reflected sun. His second impression was that his entrance had interrupted her while she was dressing and that she was benumbed with astonishment as she stared at him. He caught the white gleam of her bare shoulders under her hair. And then, with a shock, he saw what was in her face. It turned his blood cold. It was the look of a soul that had been tortured. Agony and doubt burned in the eyes that were looking at him. He had never seen such eyes. They were like violet amethysts. Her face was dead white. It was beautiful. And she was young. She was not over twenty, it flashed upon him--but she had gone through a hell. "Don't let me alarm you," he said, speaking gently. "I am Philip Raine of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police." It did not surprise him that she made no answer. As plainly as if she had spoken it he had in those few swift moments read the story in her face. His heart choked him as he waited for her lips to move. It was a mystery to him afterward why he accepted the situation so utterly as he stood there. He had no question to ask, and there was no doubt in his mind. He knew that he would kill Bram Johnson when the moment arrived. The girl had not seemed to breathe, but now she drew in her breath in a great gasp. He could see the sudden throb of her breast under her hair, but the frightened light did not leave her eyes even when he repeated the words he had spoken. Suddenly she ran to the window, and Philip saw the grip of her hands at the sill as she looked out. Through the gate Bram was driving his wolves. When she faced him again, her eyes had in them the look of a creature threatened by a whip. It amazed and startled him. As he advanced a step she cringed back from him. It struck him then that her face was like the face of an angel--filled with a mad horror. She reached out her bare arms to hold him back, and a strange pleading cry came from her lips. The cry stopped him like a shot. He knew that she had spoken to him. And yet he had not understood! He tore open his coat and the sunlight fell on his bronze insignia of the Service. Its effect on her amazed him even more than had her sudden fear of him. It occurred to him suddenly that with a two weeks' ragged growth of beard on his face he must look something like a beast himself. She had feared him, as she feared Bram, until she saw the badge. "I am Philip Raine, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," he repeated again. "I have come up here especially to help you, if you need help. I could have got Bram farther back, but there was a reason why I didn't want him until I found his cabin. That reason was you. Why are you here with a madman and a murderer?" She was watching him intently. Her eyes were on his lips, and into her face--white a few moments before--had risen swiftly a flush of color. He saw the dread die out of her eyes in a new and dazzling excitement. Outside they could hear Bram. The girl turned again and looked through the window. Then she began talking, swiftly and eagerly, in a language that was as strange to Philip as the mystery of her presence in Bram Johnson's cabin. She knew that he could not understand, and suddenly she came up close to him and put a finger to his lips, and then to her own, and shook her head. He could fairly feel the throb of her excitement. The astounding truth held him dumb. She was trying to make him comprehend something--in a language which he had never heard before in all his life. He stared at her--like an idiot he told himself afterward. And then the shuffle of Bram's heavy feet sounded just outside the door. Instantly the old light leapt into the girl's eyes. Before the door could open she had darted into the room from which she had first appeared, her hair floating about her in a golden cloud as she ran. The door opened, and Bram entered. At his heels, beyond the threshold, Philip caught a glimpse of the pack glaring hungrily into the cabin. Bram was burdened under the load he had brought from the sledge. He dropped it to the floor, and without looking at Philip his eyes fastened themselves on the door to the inner room. They stood there for a full minute, Bram as if hypnotized by the door, and Philip with his eyes on Bram. Neither moved, and neither made a sound. A curtain had dropped over the entrance to the inner room, and beyond that they could hear the girl moving about. A dozen emotions were fighting in Philip. If he had possessed a weapon he would have ended the matter with Bram then, for the light that was burning like a strange flame in the wolf-man's eyes convinced him that he had guessed the truth. Bare-handed he was no match for the giant madman. For the first time he let his glance travel cautiously about the room. Near the stove was a pile of firewood. A stick of this would do--when the opportunity came. And then, in a way that made him almost cry out, every nerve in his body was startled. The girl appeared in the doorway, a smile on her lips and her eyes shining radiantly--straight at Bram! She partly held out her arms, and began talking. She seemed utterly oblivious of Philip's presence. Not a word that she uttered could he understand. It was not Cree or Chippewyan or Eskimo. It was not French or German or any tongue that he had ever heard. Her voice was pure and soft. It trembled a little, and she was breathing quickly. But the look in her face that had at first horrified him was no longer there. She had braided her hair and had coiled the shining strands on the crown of her head, and the coloring in her face was like that of a rare painting. In these astounding moments he knew that such color and such hair did not go with any race that had ever bred in the northland. From her face, even as her lips spoke, he looked at Bram. The wolf-man was transfigured. His strange eyes were shining, his heavy face was filled with a dog-like joy, and his thick lips moved as if he was repeating to himself what the girl was saying. Was it possible that he understood her? Was the strange language in which she was speaking common between them! At first Philip thought that it must be so--and all the horrors of the situation that he had built up for himself fell about him in confusing disorder. The girl, as she stood there now, seemed glad that Bram had returned; and with a heart choking him with its suspense he waited for Bram to speak, and act. When the girl ceased speaking the wolf-man's response came in a guttural cry that was like a paean of triumph. He dropped on his knees beside the dunnage bag and mumbling thickly as he worked he began emptying its contents upon the floor. Philip looked at the girl. She was looking at him now. Her hands were clutched at her breast, and in her face and attitude there was a wordless entreaty for him to understand. The truth came to him like a flash. For some reason she had forced herself to appear that way to the wolf-man. She had forced herself to smile, forced the look of gladness into her face, and the words from her lips. And now she was trying to tell him what it meant, and pointing to Bram as he knelt with his huge head and shoulders bent over the dunnage bag on the floor she exclaimed in a low, tense voice: "Tossi--tossi--han er tossi!" It was useless. He could not understand, and it was impossible for him to hide the bewilderment in his face. All at once an inspiration came to him. Bram's back was toward him, and he pointed to the sticks of firewood. His pantomime was clear. Should he knock the wolf-man's brains out as he knelt there? He could see that his question sent a thrill of alarm through her. She shook her head. Her lips formed strange words, and looking again at Bram she repeated, "Tossi--tossi--han er tossi!" She clasped her hands suddenly to her head then. Her slim fingers buried themselves in the thick braids of her hair. Her eyes dilated--and suddenly understanding flashed upon him. She was telling him what he already knew--that Bram Johnson was mad, and he repeated after her the "Tossi-tossi," tapping his forehead suggestively, and nodding at Bram. Yes, that was it. He could see it in the quick intake of her breath and the sudden expression of relief that swept over her face. She had been afraid he would attack the wolf-man. And now she was glad that he understood he was not to harm him. If the situation had seemed fairly clear to him a few minutes before it had become more deeply mysterious than ever now. Even as the wolf-man rose from his knees, still mumbling to himself in incoherent exultation, the great and unanswerable question pounded in Philip's brain: "Who was this girl, and what was she to Bram Johnson--the crazed outlaw whom she feared and yet whom she did not wish him to harm?" And then he saw her staring at the things which Bram had sorted out on the floor. In her eyes was hunger. It was a living, palpitant part of her now as she stared at the things which Bram had taken from the dunnage bag--as surely as Bram's madness was a part of him. As Philip watched her he knew that slowly the curtain was rising on the tragedy of the golden snare. In a way the look that he saw in her face shocked him more than anything that he had seen in Bram's. It was as if, in fact, a curtain had lifted before his eyes revealing to him an unbelievable truth, and something of the hell through which she had gone. She was hungry--FOR SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT FLESH! Swiftly the thought flashed upon him why the wolf-man had traveled so far to the south, and why he had attacked him for possession of his food supply. It was that he might bring these things to the girl. He knew that it was sex-pride that restrained the impulse that was pounding in every vein of her body. She wanted to fling herself down on her knees beside that pile of stuff--but she remembered HIM! Her eyes met his, and the shame of her confession swept in a crimson flood into her face. The feminine instinct told her that she had betrayed herself--like an animal, and that he must have seen in her for a moment something that was almost like Bram's own madness. CHAPTER X Until he felt the warm thrill of the girl's arm under his hand Philip did not realize the hazard he had taken. He turned suddenly to confront Bram. He would not have known then that the wolf-man was mad, and impulsively he reached out a hand. "Bram, she's starving," he cried. "I know now why you wanted that stuff! But why didn't you tell me! Why don't you talk, and let me know who she is, and why she is here, and what you want me to do?" He waited, and Bram stared at him without a sound. "I tell you I'm a friend," he went on. "I--" He got no farther than that, for suddenly the cabin was filled with the madness of Bram's laugh. It was more terrible than out on the open Barren, or in the forest, and he felt the shudder of the girl at his side. Her face was close to his shoulder, and looking down he saw that it was white as death, but that even then she was trying to smile at Bram. And Bram continued to laugh--and as he laughed, his eyes blazing a greenish fire, he turned to the stove and began putting fuel into the fire. It was horrible. Bram's laugh--the girl's dead white face, AND HER SMILE! He no longer asked himself who she was, and why she was there. He was overwhelmed by the one appalling fact that she WAS here, and that the stricken soul crying out to him from the depths of those eyes that were like wonderful blue amethysts told him that Bram had made her pay the price. His muscles hardened as he looked at the huge form bending over the stove. It was a splendid opportunity. A single leap and he would be at the outlaw's throat. With that advantage, in open combat, the struggle would at least be equal. The girl must have guessed what was in his mind, for suddenly her fingers were clutching at his arm and she was pulling him away from the wolf-man, speaking to him in the language which he could not understand. And then Bram turned from the stove, picked up a pail, and without looking at them left the cabin. They could hear his laugh as he joined the wolves. Again Philip's conclusions toppled down about him like a thing made of blocks. During the next few moments he knew that the girl was telling him that Bram had not harmed her. She seemed almost hysterically anxious to make him understand this, and at last, seizing him by the hand, she drew him into the room beyond the curtained door. Her meaning was quite as plain as words. She was showing him what Bram had done for her. He had made her this separate room by running a partition across the cabin, and in addition to this he had built a small lean-to outside the main wall entered through a narrow door made of saplings that were still green. He noticed that the partition was also made of fresh timber. Except for the bunk built against the wall, a crude chair, a sapling table and half a dozen bear skins that carpeted the floor the room was empty. A few garments hung on the wall--a hood made of fur, a thick mackinaw coat belted at the waist with a red scarf, and something done up in a small bundle. "I guess--I begin to get your meaning," he said, looking straight into her shining blue eyes. "You want to impress on me that I'm not to wring Bram Johnson's neck when his back is turned, or at any other time, and you want me to believe that he hasn't done you any harm. And yet you're afraid to the bottom of your soul. I know it. A little while ago your face was as white as chalk, and now--now--it's the prettiest face I've ever seen. Now, see here, little girl--" It gave him a pleasant thrill to see the glow in her eyes and the eager poise of her slim, beautiful body as she listened to him. "I'm licked," he went on, smiling frankly at her. "At least for the present. Maybe I've gone loony, like Bram, and don't realize it yet. I set out for a couple of Indians, and find a madman; and at the madman's cabin I find YOU, looking at first as though you were facing straight up against the door of-of-well, seeing that you can't understand I might as well say it--OF HELL! Now, if you weren't afraid of Bram, and if he hasn't hurt you, why did you look like that? I'm stumped. I repeat it--dead stumped. I'd give a million dollars if I could make Bram talk. I saw what was in his eyes. YOU saw it--and that pretty pink went out of your face so quick it seemed as though your heart must have stopped beating. And yet you're trying to tell me he hasn't harmed you. My God--I wish I could believe it!" In her face he saw the reflection of the change that must have come suddenly into his own. "You're a good fifteen hundred miles from any other human being with hair and eyes and color like yours," he continued, as though in speaking his thoughts aloud to her some ray of light might throw itself on the situation. "If you had something black about you. But you haven't. You're all gold--pink and white and gold. If Bram has another fit of talking he may tell me you came from the moon--that a chasse-galere crew brought you down out of space to keep house for him. Great Scott, can't you give me some sort of an idea of who you are and where you same from?" He paused for an answer--and she smiled at him. There was something pathetically sweet in that smile. It brought a queer lump into his throat, and for a space he forgot Bram. "You don't understand a cussed word of it, do you?" he said, taking her hand in both his own and holding it closely for a moment. "Not a word. But we're getting the drift of things--slowly. I know you've been here quite a while, and that morning, noon and night since the chasse-galere brought you down from the moon you've had nothing to put your little teeth into but meat. Probably without salt, too. I saw how you wanted to throw yourself down on that pile of stuff on the floor. Let's have breakfast!" He led her into the outer room, and eagerly she set to work helping him gather the things from the floor. He felt that an overwhelming load had been lifted from his heart, and he continued to tell her about it while he hurried the preparation of the breakfast for which he knew she was hungering. He did not look at her too closely. All at once it had dawned upon him that her situation must be tremendously more embarrassing than his own. He felt, too, the tingle of a new excitement in his veins. It was a pleasurable sensation, something which he did not pause to analyze just at present. Only he knew that it was because she had told him as plainly as she could that Bram had not harmed her. "And if he HAD I guess you'd have let me smash his brains out when he was bending over the stove, wouldn't you?" he said, stirring the mess of desiccated potato he was warming in one of his kit-pans. He looked up to see her eyes shining at him, and her lips parted. She was delightfully pretty. He knew that every nerve in her body was straining to understand him. Her braid had slipped over her shoulder. It was as thick as his wrist, and partly undone. He had never dreamed that a woman's hair could hold such soft warm fires of velvety gold. Suddenly he straightened himself and tapped his chest, an inspiring thought leaping into his head. "I am Philip Raine," he said. "Philip Raine--Philip Raine--Philip Raine--" He repeated the name over and over again, pointing each time to himself. Instantly light flashed into her face. It was as if all at once they had broken through the barrier that had separated them. She repeated his name, slowly, clearly, smiling at him, and then with both hands at her breast, she said: "Celie Armin." He wanted to jump over the stove and shake hands with her, but the potatoes were sizzling. Celie Armin! He repeated the name as he stirred the potatoes, and each time he spoke it she nodded. It was decidedly a French name--but half a minute's experiment with a few simple sentences of Pierre Breault's language convinced him that the girl understood no word of it. Then he said again: "Celie!" Almost in the same breath she answered: "Philip!" Sounds outside the cabin announced the return of Bram. Following the snarl and whine of the pack came heavy footsteps, and the wolf-man entered. Philip did not turn his head toward the door. He did not look at first to see what effect Bram's return had on Celie Armin. He went on casually with his work. He even began to whistle; and then, after a final stir or two at the potatoes, he pointed to the pail in which the coffee was bubbling, and said: "Turn the coffee, Celie. We're ready!" He caught a glimpse of her face then. The excitement and color had partly died out of it. She took the pail of coffee and went with it to the table. Then Philip faced Bram. The wolf-man was standing with his back to the door. He had not moved since entering, and he was staring at the scene before him in a dull, stupid sort of way. In one hand he carried a pail filled with water; in the other a frozen fish. "Too late with the fish, Bram," said Philip. "We couldn't make the little lady wait. Besides, I think you've fed her on fish and meat until she is just about ready to die. Come to breakfast!" He loaded a tin plate with hot potatoes, bannock-bread and rice that he had cooked before setting out on the Barren, and placed it before the girl. A second plate he prepared for Bram, and a third for himself. Bram had not moved. He still held the pail and the fish in his hands. Suddenly he lowered both to the floor with a growl that seemed to come from the bottom of his great chest, and came to the table. With one huge hand he seized Philip's arm. It was not a man's grip. There was apparently no effort in it, and yet it was a vise-like clutch that threatened to snap the bone. And all the time Bram's eyes were on the girl. He drew Philip back, released the terrible grip on his arm, and shoved the two extra plates of food to the girl. Then he faced Philip. "We eat ze meat, m'sieu!" Quietly and sanely he uttered the words. In his eyes and face there was no trace of madness. And then, even as Philip stared, the change came. The giant flung back his head and his wild, mad laugh rocked the cabin. Out in the corral the snarl and cry of the wolves gave a savage response to it. It took a tremendous effort for Philip to keep a grip on himself. In that momentary flash of sanity Bram had shown a chivalry which must have struck deep home in the heart of the girl. There was a sort of triumph in her eyes when he looked at her. She knew now that he must understand fully what she had been trying to tell him. Bram, in his madness, had been good to her. Philip did not hesitate in the impulse of the moment. He caught Bram's hand and shook it. And Bram, his laugh dying away in a mumbling sound, seemed not to notice it. As Philip began preparing the fish the wolf-man took up a position against the farther wall, squatted Indian-fashion on his heels. He did not take his eyes from the girl until she had finished, and Philip brought him a half of the fried fish. He might as well have offered the fish to a wooden sphinx. Bram rose to his feet, mumbling softly, and taking what was left of one of the two caribou quarters he again left the cabin. His mad laugh and the snarling outcry of the wolves came to them a moment later. CHAPTER XI Scarcely had the door closed when Celie Armin ran to Philip and pulled him to the table. In the tense half hour of Bram's watchfulness she had eaten her own breakfast as if nothing unusual had happened; now she insisted on adding potatoes and bannock to Philip's fish, and turned him a cup of coffee. "Bless your heart, you don't want to see me beat out of a breakfast, do you?" he smiled up at her, feeling all at once an immense desire to pull her head down to him and kiss her. "But you don't understand the situation, little girl. Now I've been eating this confounded bannock"--he picked up a chunk of it to demonstrate his point--"morning, noon and night until the sight of it makes me almost cry for one of mother's green cucumber pickles. I'm tired of it. Bram's fish is a treat. And this coffee, seeing that you have turned it in that way--" She sat opposite him while he ate, and he had the chance of observing her closely while his meal progressed. It struck him that she was growing prettier each time that he looked at her, and he was more positive than ever that she was a stranger in the northland. Again he told himself that she was not more than twenty. Mentally he even went so far as to weigh her and would have gambled that she would not have tipped a scale five pounds one way or the other from a hundred and twenty. Some time he might have seen the kind of violet-blue that was in her eyes, but he could not remember it. She was lost--utterly lost at this far-end of the earth. She was no more a part of it than a crepe de chine ball dress or a bit of rose china. And there she was, sitting opposite him, a bewitching mystery for him to solve. And she WANTED to be solved! He could see it in her eyes, and in the little beating throb at her throat. She was fighting, with him, to find a way; a way to tell him who she was, and why she was here, and what he must do for her. Suddenly he thought of the golden snare. That, after all, he believed to be the real key to the mystery. He rose quickly from the table and drew the girl to the window. At the far end of the corral they could see Bram tossing chunks of meat to the horde of beasts that surrounded him. In a moment or two he had the satisfaction of seeing that his companion understood that he was directing her attention to the wolf-man and not the pack. Then he began unbraiding her hair. His fingers thrilled at the silken touch of it. He felt his face flushing hot under his beard, and he knew that her eyes were on him wonderingly. A small strand he divided into three parts and began weaving into a silken thread only a little larger than the wolf-man's snare. From, the woven tress he pointed to Bram and in an instant her face lighted up with understanding. She answered him in pantomime. Either she or Bram had cut the tress from her head that had gone into the making of the golden snare. And not only one tress, but several. There had been a number of golden snares. She bowed her head and showed him where strands as large as her little finger had been clipped in several places. Philip almost groaned. She was telling him nothing new, except that there had been many snares instead of one. He was on the point of speech when the look in her face held him silent. Her eyes glowed with a sudden excitement--a wild inspiration. She held out her hands until they nearly touched his breast. "Philip Raine--Amerika!" she cried. Then, pressing her hands to her own breast, she added eagerly: "Celie Armin--Danmark!" "Denmark!" exclaimed Philip. "Is that it, little girl? You're from Denmark? Denmark!" She nodded. "Kobenhavn--Danmark!" "Copenhagen, Denmark," he translated for himself. "Great Scott, Celie--we're TALKING! Celie Armin, from Copenhagen, Denmark! But how in Heaven's name did you get HERE?" He pointed to the floor under their feet and embraced the four walls of the cabin in a wide gesture of his arms. "How did you get HERE?" Her next words thrilled him. "Kobenhavn--Muskvas--St. Petersburg--Rusland--Sibirien--Amerika." "Copenhagen--Muskvas, whatever that is--St. Petersburg--Russia--Siberia--America," he repeated, staring at her incredulously. "Celie, if you love me, be reasonable! Do you expect me to believe that you came all the way from Denmark to this God-forsaken madman's cabin in the heart of the Canada Barrens by way of Russia and Siberia? YOU! I can't believe it. There's a mistake somewhere. Here--" He thought of his pocket atlas, supplied by the department as a part of his service kit, and remembered that in the back of it was a small map of the world. In half a minute he had secured it and was holding the map under her eyes. Her little forefinger touched Copenhagen. Leaning over her shoulder, he felt her hair crumpling against his breast. He felt an insane desire to bury his face in it and hug her up close in his arms--for a single moment the question of whether she came from Copenhagen or the moon was irrelevant and of little consequence. He, at least, had found her. He was digging her out of chaos, and he was filled with the joyous exultation of a triumphant discoverer--almost the thrill of ownership. He held his breath as he watched the little forefinger telling him its story on the map. From Copenhagen it went to Moscow--which must have been Muskvas, and from there it trailed slowly to St. Petersburg and thence straight across Russia and Siberia to Bering Sea. "Skunnert," she said softly, and her finger came across to the green patch on the map which was Alaska. It hesitated there. Evidently it was a question in her own mind where she had gone after that. At least she could not tell him on the map. And now, seeing that he was understanding her, she was becoming visibly excited. She pulled him to the window and pointed to the wolves. Alaska--and after that dogs and sledge. He nodded. He was jubilant. She was Celie Armin, of Copenhagen, Denmark, and had come to Alaska by way of Russia and Siberia--and after that had traveled by dog-train. But WHY had she come, and what had happened to make her the companion or prisoner of Bram Johnson? He knew she was trying to tell him. With her back to the window she talked to him again, gesturing with her hands, and almost sobbing under the stress of the emotion that possessed her. His elation turned swiftly to the old dread as he watched the change in her face. Apprehension--a grim certainty--gripped hold of him. Something terrible had happened to her--a thing that had racked her soul and that filled her eyes with the blaze of a strange terror as she struggled to make him understand. And then she broke down, and with a sobbing cry covered her face with her hands. Out in the corral Philip heard Bram Johnson's laugh. It was a mockery--a challenge. In an instant every drop of blood in his body answered it in a surge of blind rage. He sprang to the stove, snatched up a length of firewood, and in another moment was at the door. As he opened it and ran out he heard Celie's wild appeal for him to stop. It was almost a scream. Before he had taken a dozen steps from the cabin he realized what the warning meant. The pack had seen him and from the end of the corral came rushing at him in a thick mass. This time Bram Johnson's voice did not stop them. He saw Philip, and from the doorway Celie looked upon the scene while the blood froze in her veins. She screamed--and in the same breath came the wolf-man's laugh. Philip heard both as he swung the stick of firewood over his head and sent it hurling toward the pack. The chance accuracy of the throw gave him an instant's time in which to turn and make a dash for the cabin. It was Celie who slammed the door shut as he sprang through. Swift as a flash she shot the bolt, and there came the lunge of heavy bodies outside. They could hear the snapping of jaws and the snarling whine of the beasts. Philip had never seen a face whiter than the girl's had gone. She covered it with her hands, and he could see her trembling. A bit of a sob broke hysterically from her lips. He knew of what she was thinking--the horrible thing she was hiding from her eyes. It was plain enough to him now. Twenty seconds more and they would have had him. And then-- He drew in a deep breath and gently uncovered her face. Her hands shivered in his. And then a great throb of joy repaid him for his venture into the jaws of death as he saw the way in which her beautiful eyes were looking at him. "Celie--my little mystery girl--I've discovered something," he cried huskily, holding her hands so tightly that it must have hurt her. "I'm almost glad you can't understand me, for I wouldn't blame you for being afraid of a man who told you he loved you an hour or two after he first saw you. I love you. I've never wanted anything in all my life as I want you. And I must be careful and not let you know it, mustn't I? If I did you'd think I was some kind of an animal-brute--like Bram. Wouldn't you?" Bram's voice came in a sharp rattle of Eskimo outside. Philip could hear the snarling rebellion of the wolves as they slunk away from the cabin, and he drew Celie back from the door. Suddenly she freed her hands, ran to the door and slipped back the wooden bolt as the wolf-man's hand fumbled at the latch. In a moment she was back at his side. When Bram entered every muscle in Philip's body was prepared for action. He was amazed at the wolf-man's unconcern. He was mumbling and chuckling to himself, as if amused at what he had seen. Celie's little fingers dug into Philip's arm and he saw in her eyes a tense, staring look that had not been there before. It was as if in Bram's face and his queer mumbling she had recognized something which was not apparent to him. Suddenly she left him and hurried into her room. During the few moments she was gone Bram did not look once at Philip. His mumbling was incessant. Perhaps a minute passed before the girl reappeared. She went straight to Bram and before the wolf-man's eyes held a long, shining tress of hair! Instantly the mumbling in Bram's throat ceased and he thrust out slowly a huge misshapen hand toward the golden strand. Philip felt his nerves stretching to the breaking point. With Bram the girl's hair was a fetich. A look of strange exultation crept over the giant's heavy features as his fingers clutched the golden offering. It almost drew a cry of warning from Philip. He saw the girl smiling in the face of a deadly peril--a danger of which she was apparently unconscious. Her hair still fell loose about her in a thick and shimmering glory. And BRAM'S EYES WERE ON IT AS HE TOOK THE TRESS FROM HER FINGERS! Was it conceivable that this mad-man did not comprehend his power! Had the thought not yet burned its way into his thick brain that a treasure many times greater than, that which she had doled out to him lay within the reach of his brute hands at any time he cared to reach out for it? And was it possible that the girl did not guess her danger as she stood there? What she could see of his face must have been as pale as her own when she looked at him. She smiled, and nodded at Bram. The giant was turning slowly toward the window, and after a moment or two in which they could hear him mumbling softly he sat down cross-legged against the wall, divided the tress into three silken threads and began weaving them into a snare. The color was returning to Celie's face when Philip looked at her again. She told him with a gesture of her head and hands that she was going into her room for a time. He didn't blame her. The excitement had been rather unusual. After she had gone he dug his shaving outfit out of his kit-bag. It included a mirror and the reflection he saw in this mirror fairly shocked him. No wonder the girl had been frightened at his first appearance. It took him half an hour to shave his face clean, and all that time Bram paid no attention to him but went on steadily at his task of weaving the golden snare. Celie did not reappear until the wolf-man had finished and was leaving the cabin. The first thing she noticed was the change in Philip's face. He saw the pleasure in her eyes and felt himself blushing. From the window they watched Bram. He had called his wolves and was going with them to the gate. He carried his snowshoes and his long whip. He went through the gate first and one by one let his beasts out until ten of the twenty had followed him. The gate was closed then. Celie turned to the table and Philip saw that she had brought from her room a pencil and a bit of paper. In a moment she held the paper out to him, a light of triumph in her face. At last they had found a way to talk. On the paper was a crude sketch of a caribou head. It meant that Bram had gone hunting. And in going Bram had left a half of his blood-thirsty pack in the corral. There was no longer a doubt in Philip's mind. They were not the chance guests of this madman. They were prisoners. CHAPTER XII For a few minutes after the wolf-man and his hunters had gone from the corral Philip did not move from the window. He almost forgot that the girl was standing behind him. At no time since Pierre Breault had revealed the golden snare had the situation been more of an enigma to him than now. Was Bram Johnson actually mad--or was he playing a colossal sham? The question had unleashed itself in his brain with a suddenness that had startled him. Out of the past a voice came to him distinctly, and it said, "A madman never forgets!" It was the voice of a great alienist, a good friend of his, with whom he had discussed the sanity of a man whose crime had shocked the country. He knew that the words were true. Once possessed by an idea the madman will not forget it. It becomes an obsession with him--a part of his existence. In his warped brain a suspicion never dies. A fear will smolder everlastingly. A hatred lives steadily on. If Bram Johnson was mad would he play the game as he was playing it now! He had almost killed Philip for possession of the food, that the girl might have the last crumb of it. Now, without a sign of the madman's caution, he had left it all within his reach again. A dozen times the flaming suspicion in his eyes had been replaced by a calm and stupid indifference. Was the suspicion real and the stupidity a clever dissimulation? And if dissimulation--why? He was positive now that Bram had not harmed the girl in the way he had dreaded. Physical desire had played no part in the wolf-man's possession of her. Celie had made him understand that;--and yet in Bram's eyes he had caught a look now and then that was like the dumb worship of a beast. Only once had that look been anything different--and that was when Celie had given him a tress of her hair. Even the suspicion roused in him then was gone now, for if passion and desire were smoldering in the wolf-man's breast he would not have brought a possible rival to the cabin, nor would he have left them alone together. His mind worked swiftly as he stared unseeing out into the corral. He would no longer play the part of a pawn. Thus far Bram had held the whip hand. Now he would take it from him no matter what mysterious protestation the girl might make! The wolf-man had given him a dozen opportunities to deliver the blow that would make him a prisoner. He would not miss the next. He faced Celie with the gleam of this determination in his eyes. She had been watching him intently and he believed that she had guessed a part of his thoughts. His first business was to take advantage of Brain's absence to search the cabin. He tried to make Celie understand what his intentions were as he began. "You may have done this yourself," he told her. "No doubt you have. There probably isn't a corner you haven't looked into. But I have a hunch I may find something you missed--something interesting." She followed him closely. He began at each wall and went over it carefully, looking for possible hiding places. Then he examined the floor for a loose sapling. At the end of half an hour his discoveries amounted to nothing. He gave an exclamation of satisfaction when under an old blanket in a dusty corner he found a Colt army revolver. But it was empty, and he found no cartridges. At last there was nothing left to search but the wolf-man's bunk. At the bottom of this he found what gave him his first real thrill--three of the silken snares made from Celie Armin's hair. "We won't touch them," he said after a moment, replacing the bear skin that had covered them. "It's good etiquette up here not to disturb another man's cache and that's Bram's. I can't imagine any one but a madman doing that. And yet--" He looked suddenly at Celie. "Do you suppose he was afraid of YOU?" he asked her. "Is that why he doesn't leave even the butcher-knife in this shack? Was he afraid you might shoot him in his sleep if he left the temptation in your way?" A commotion among the wolves drew him to the window. Two of the beasts were fighting. While his back was turned Celie entered her room and returned a moment or two later with a handful of loose bits of paper. The pack held Philip's attention. He wondered what chance he would have in an encounter with the beasts which Bram had left behind as a guard. Even if he killed Bram or made him a prisoner he would still have that horde of murderous brutes to deal with. If he could in some way induce the wolf-man to bring his rifle into the cabin the matter would be easy. With Bram out of the way he could shoot the wolves one by one from the window. Without a weapon their situation would be hopeless. The pack--with the exception of one huge, gaunt beast directly under the window--had swung around the end of the cabin out of his vision. The remaining wolf in spite of the excitement of battle was gnawing hungrily at a bone. Philip could hear the savage grind of its powerful jaws, and all at once the thought of how they might work out their salvation flashed upon him. They could starve the wolves! It would take a week, perhaps ten days, but with Bram out of the way and the pack helplessly imprisoned within the corral it could be done. His first impulse now was to impress on Celie the necessity of taking physical action against Bram. The sound of his own name turned him from the window with a sudden thrill. If the last few minutes had inspired an eagerness for action in his own mind he saw at a glance that something equally exciting had possessed Celie Armin. Spread out on the table were the bits of paper she had brought from her room, and, pointing to them, she again called him by name. That she was laboring under a new and unusual emotion impressed him immediately. He could see that she was fighting to restrain an impulse to pour out in words what would have been meaningless to him, and that she was telling him the bits of paper were to take the place of voice. For one swift moment as he advanced to the table the papers meant less to him than the fact that she had twice spoken his name. Her soft lips seemed to whisper it again as she pointed, and the look in her eyes and the poise of her body recalled to him vividly the picture of her as he had first seen her in the cabin. He looked at the bits of paper. There were fifteen or twenty pieces, and on each was sketched a picture. He heard a low catch in Celie's breath as he bent over them, and his own pulse quickened. A glance was sufficient to show him that with the pictures Celie was trying to tell him what he wanted to know. They told her own story--who she was, why she was at Bram Johnson's cabin, and how she had come. This, at least, was the first thought that impressed him. He observed then that the bits of paper were soiled and worn as though they had been handled a great deal. He made no effort to restrain the exclamation that followed this discovery. "You drew these pictures for Bram," he scanning them more carefully. "That settles one thing. Bram doesn't know much more about you than, I do. Ships, and dogs, and men--and fighting--a lot of fighting--and--" His eyes stopped at one of the pictures and his heart gave a sudden excited thump. He picked up the bit of paper which had evidently been part of a small sack. Slowly he turned to the girl and met her eyes. She was trembling in her eagerness for him to understand. "That is YOU," he said, tapping the central figure in the sketch, and nodding at her. "You--with your hair down, and fighting a bunch of men who look as though they were about to beat your brains out with clubs! Now--what in God's name does it mean? And here's a ship up in the corner. That evidently came first. You landed from that ship, didn't you? From the ship--the ship--the ship--" "Skunnert!" she cried softly, touching the ship with her finger. "Skunnert--Sibirien!" "Schooner-Siberia," translated Philip. "It sounds mightily like that, Celie. Look here--" He opened his pocket atlas again at the map of the world. "Where did you start from, and where did you come ashore? If we can get at the beginning of the thing--" She had bent her head over the crook of his arm, so that in her eager scrutiny of the map his lips for a moment or two touched the velvety softness of her hair. Again he felt the exquisite thrill of her touch, the throb of her body against him, the desire to take her in his arms and hold her there. And then she drew back a little, and her finger was once more tracing out its story on the map. The ship had started from the mouth of the Lena River, in Siberia, and had followed the coast to the blue space that marked the ocean above Alaska. And there the little finger paused, and with a hopeless gesture Celie intimated that was all she knew. From somewhere out of that blue patch the ship had touched the American shore. One after another she took up from the table the pieces of paper that carried on the picture-story from that point. It was, of course, a broken and disjointed story. But as it progressed every drop of blood in Philip's body was stirred by the thrill and mystery of it. Celie Armin had traveled from Denmark through Russia to the Lena River in Siberia, and from there a ship had brought her to the coast of North America. There had been a lot of fighting, the significance of which he could only guess at; and now, at the end, the girl drew for Philip another sketch in which a giant and a horde of beasts appeared. It was a picture of Bram and his wolves, and at last Philip understood why she did not want him to harm the wolf-man. Bram had saved her from the fate which the pictures only partly portrayed for him. He had brought her far south to his hidden stronghold, and for some reason which the pictures failed to disclose was keeping her a prisoner there. Beyond these things Celie Armin was still a mystery. Why had she gone to Siberia? What had brought her to the barren Arctic coast of America? Who were the mysterious enemies from whom Bram the madman had saved her? And who--who-- He looked again at one of the pictures which he had partly crumpled in his hand. On it were sketched two people. One was a figure with her hair streaming down--Celie herself. The other was a man. The girl had pictured herself close in the embrace of this man's arms. Her own arms encircled the man's neck. From the picture Philip had looked at Celie, and the look he had seen in her eyes and face filled his heart with a leaden chill. It was more than hope that had flared up in his breast since he had entered Bram Johnson's cabin. And now that hope went suddenly out, and with its extinguishment he was oppressed by a deep and gloomy foreboding. He went slowly to the window and looked out. The next moment Celie was startled by the sudden sharp cry that burst from his lips. Swiftly she ran to his side. He had dropped the paper. His hands were gripping the edge of the sill, and he was staring like one who could not believe his own eyes. "Good God--look! Look at that!" They had heard no sound outside the cabin during the last few minutes. Yet under their eyes, stretched out in the soiled and trampled snow, lay the wolf that a short time before had been gnawing a bone. The animal was stark dead. Not a muscle of its body moved. Its lips were drawn back, its jaws agape, and under the head was a growing smear of blood. It was not these things--not the fact but the INSTRUMENT of death that held Philip's eyes. The huge wolf had been completely transfixed by a spear. Instantly Philip recognized it--the long, slender, javelin-like narwhal harpoon used by only one people in the world, the murderous little black-visaged Kogmollocks of Coronation Gulf and Wollaston Land. He sprang suddenly back from the window, dragging Celie with him. CHAPTER XIII "Kogmollocks--the blackest-hearted little devils alive when it comes to trading wives and fighting," said Philip, a little ashamed of the suddenness with which he had jumped back from the window. "Excuse my abruptness, dear. But I'd recognize that death-thing on the other side of the earth. I've seen them throw it like an arrow for a hundred yards--and I have a notion they're watching that window!" At sight of the dead wolf and the protruding javelin Celie's face had gone as white as ash. Snatching up one of the pictures from the table, she thrust it into Philip's hand. It was one of the fighting pictures. "So it's YOU?" he said, smiling at her and trying to keep the tremble of excitement out of his voice. "It's you they want, eh? And they must want you bad. I've never heard of those little devils coming within a hundred miles of this far south. They MUST want you bad. Now--I wonder WHY?" His voice was calm again. It thrilled him to see how utterly she was judging the situation by the movement of his lips and the sound of his voice. With him unafraid she would be unafraid. He judged that quickly. Her eyes bared her faith in him, and suddenly he reached out and took her face between his two hands, and laughed softly, while each instant he feared the smash of a javelin through the window. "I like to see that look in your eyes," he went on. "And I'm almost glad you can't understand me, for I couldn't lie to you worth a cent. I understand those pictures now--and I think we're in a hell of a fix. The Eskimos have followed you and Bram down from the north, and I'm laying a wager with myself that Bram won't return from the caribou hunt. If they were Nunatalmutes or any other tribe I wouldn't be so sure. But they're Kogmollocks. They're worse than the little brown head-hunters of the Philippines when it comes to ambush, and if Bram hasn't got a spear through him this minute I'll never guess again!" He withdrew his hands from her face, still smiling at her as he talked. The color was returning into her face. Suddenly she made a movement as if to approach the window. He detained her, and in the same moment there came a fierce and snarling outcry from the wolves in the corral. Making Celie understand that she was to remain where he almost forcibly placed her near the table, Philip went again to the window. The pack had gathered close to the gate and two or three of the wolves were leaping excitedly against the sapling bars of their prison. Between the cabin and the gate a second body lay in the snow. Philip's mind leapt to a swift conclusion. The Eskimos had ambushed Bram, and they believed that only the girl was in the cabin. Intuitively he guessed how the superstitious little brown men of the north feared the madman's wolves. One by one they were picking them off with their javelins from outside the corral. As he looked a head and pair of shoulders rose suddenly above the top of the sapling barrier, an arm shot out and he caught the swift gleam of a javelin as it buried itself in the thick of the pack. In a flash the head and shoulders of the javelin-thrower had disappeared, and in that same moment Philip heard a low cry behind him. Celie had returned to the window. She had seen what he had seen, and her breath came suddenly in a swift and sobbing excitement. In amazement he saw that she was no longer pale. A vivid flush had gathered in each of her cheeks and her eyes blazed with a dark fire. One of her hands caught his arm and her fingers pinched his flesh. He stared dumbly for a moment at the strange transformation in her. He almost believed that she wanted to fight--that she was ready to rush out shoulder to shoulder with him against their enemies. Scarcely had the cry fallen from her lips when she turned and ran swiftly into her room. It seemed to Philip that she was not gone ten seconds. When she returned she thrust into his hand a revolver. It was a toy affair. The weight and size of the weapon told him that before he broke it and looked at the caliber. It was a "stocking" gun as they called those things in the service, fully loaded with .22 caliber shots and good for a possible partridge at fifteen or twenty paces. Under other conditions it would have furnished him with considerable amusement. But the present was not yesterday or the day before. It was a moment of grim necessity--and the tiny weapon gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he was not entirely helpless against the javelins. It would shoot as far as the stockade, and it might topple a man over if he hit him just right. Anyway, it would make a noise. A noise! The grin that had come into his face died out suddenly as he looked at Celie. He wondered if to her had come the thought that now flashed upon him--if it was that thought that had made her place the revolver in his hand. The blaze of excitement in her wonderful eyes almost told him that it was. With Bram gone, the Eskimos believed she was alone and at their mercy as soon as the wolves were out of the way. Two or three shots from the revolver--and Philip's appearance in the corral--would shake their confidence. It would at least warn them that Celie was not alone, and that her protector was armed. For that reason Philip thanked the Lord that a "stocking" gun had a bark like the explosion of a toy cannon even if its bite was like that of an insect. Cautiously he took another look at Bram's wolves. The last javelin had transfixed another of their number and the animal was dragging itself toward the center of the corral. The remaining seven were a dozen yards on the other side of the gate now, leaping and snarling at the stockade, and he knew that the next attack would come from there. He sprang to the door. Celie was only a step behind him as he ran out, and was close at his side when he peered around the end of the cabin. "They must not see you," he made her understand. "It won't do any good and when they see another man they may possibly get the idea in their heads that you're not here. There can't be many of them or they'd make quicker work of the wolves. I should say not more than--" "Se! Se!" The warning came in a low cry from Celie's lips. A dark head was appearing slowly above the top of the stockade, and Philip darted suddenly out into the open. The Eskimo did not see him, and Philip waited until he was on the point of hurling his javelin before he made a sound. Then he gave a roar that almost split his throat. In the same instant he began firing. The crack of his pistol and the ferocious outcry he made sent the Eskimo off the stockade like a ball hit by a club. The pack, maddened by their inability to reach their enemies, turned like a flash. Warned by one experience, Philip hustled Celie into the cabin. They were scarcely over the threshold when the wolves were at the door. "We're sure up against a nice bunch," he laughed, standing for a moment with his arm still about Celie's waist. "A regular hell of a bunch, little girl! Now if those wolves only had sense enough to know that we're a little brother and sister to Bram, we'd be able to put up a fight that would be some circus. Did you see that fellow topple off the fence? Don't believe I hit him. At least I hope I didn't. If they ever find out the size of this pea-shooter's sting they'll sit up there like a row of crows and laugh at us. But--what a bully NOISE it made!" He was blissfully unmindful of danger as he held her in the crook of his arm, looking straight into her lovely face as he talked. It was a moment of splendid hypocrisy. He knew that in her excitement and the tremendous effort she was making to understand something of what he was saying that she was unconscious of his embrace. That, and the joyous thrill of the situation, sent the hot blood into his face. "I'm dangerously near to going the limit," he told her, speaking with a seriousness that would impress her. "I'd fight twenty of those little devils single-handed to know just how you'd take it, and I'd fight another dozen to know who that fellow is in the picture. I'm tempted right now to hug you up close, and kiss you, and let you know how I feel. I'd like to do that--before--anything happens. But would you understand? That's it--would you understand that I love every inch of you from the ground up or would you think I was just beast? That's what I'm afraid of. But I'd like to let you know before I have to put up the big fight for you. And it's coming--if they've got Bram. They'll break down the gate to-night, or burn it, and with the wolves out of the way they'll rush the cabin. And then--" Slowly he drew his arm from her, and something of the reaction of his thoughts must have betrayed itself in the look that came into his face. "I guess I've already pulled off a rotten deal on the other fellow," he said, turning to the window. "That is, if you belong to him. And if you didn't why would you stand there with your arms about his neck and he hugging you up like that!" A few minutes before he had crumpled the picture in his hand and dropped it on the floor. He picked it up now and mechanically smoothed it out as he made his observation, through the window. The pack had returned to the stockade. By the aimless manner in which they had scattered he concluded that for the time at least their mysterious enemies had drawn away from the corral. Celie had not moved. She was watching him earnestly. It seemed to him, as he went to her with the picture, that a new and anxious questioning had come into her eyes. It was as if she had discovered something in him which she had not observed before, something which she was trying to analyze even as he approached her. He felt for the first time a sense of embarrassment. Was it possible that she had comprehended some word or thought of what he had expressed to her? He could not believe it And yet, a woman's intuition-- He held out the picture. Celie took it and for a space looked at it steadily without raising her eyes to meet his. When she did look at him the blue in her eyes was so wonderful and deep and the soul that looked out of them was so clear to his own vision that the shame of that moment's hypocrisy when he had stood with his arm about her submerged him completely. If she had not understood him she at least HAD GUESSED. "Min fader," she said quietly, with the tip of her little forefinger on the man in the picture. "Min fader." For a moment he thought she had spoken in English. "Your--your father?" he cried. She nodded. "Oo-ee-min fader!" "Thank the Lord," gasped Philip. And then he suddenly added, "Celie, have you any more cartridges for this pop-gun? I feel like licking the world!" CHAPTER XIV He tried to hide his jubilation as he talked of more cartridges. He forgot Bram, and the Eskimos waiting outside the corral, and the apparent hopelessness of their situation. HER FATHER! He wanted to shout, or dance around the cabin with Celie in his arms. But the change that he had seen come over her made him understand that he must keep hold of himself. He dreaded to see another light come into those glorious blue eyes that had looked at him with such a strange and questioning earnestness a few moments before--the fire of suspicion, perhaps even of fear if he went too far. He realized that he had betrayed his joy when she had said that the man in the picture was her father. She could not have missed that. And he was not sorry. For him. there was an unspeakable thrill in the thought that to a woman, no matter under what sun she is born, there is at least one emotion whose understanding needs no words of speech. And as he had talked to her, sublimely confident that she could not understand him, she had read the betrayal in his face. He was sure of it. And so he talked about cartridges. He talked, he told himself afterwards, like an excited imbecile. There were no more cartridges. Celie made him understand that. All they possessed were the four that remained in the revolver. As a matter of fact this discovery did not disturb him greatly. At close quarters he would prefer a good club to the pop-gun. Such a club, in the event of a rush attack by the Eskimos, was an important necessity, and he began looking about the cabin to see what he could lay his hands on. He thought of the sapling cross-pieces in Bram's bunk against the wall and tore one out. It was four feet in length and as big around as his fist at one end while at the other it tapered down so that he could grip it easily with his hands. "Now we're ready for them," he said, testing the poise and swing of the club as he stood in the center of the room. "Unless they burn us out they'll never get through that door. I'm promising you that--s'elp me God I am, Celie!" As she looked at him a flush burned in her cheeks. He was eager to fight--it seemed to her that he was almost hoping for the attack at the door. It made her splendidly unafraid, and suddenly she laughed softly--a nervous, unexpected little laugh which she could not hold back, and he turned quickly to catch the warm glow in her eyes. Something went up into his throat as she stood there looking at him like that. He had never seen any one quite so beautiful. He dropped his club, and held out his hand. "Let's shake, Celie," he said. "I'm mighty glad you understand--we're pals." Unhesitatingly she gave him her hand, and in spite of the fact that death lurked outside they smiled into each other's eyes. After that she went into her room. For half an hour Philip did not see her again. During that half hour he measured up the situation more calmly. He realized that the exigency was tremendously serious, and that until now he had not viewed it with the dispassionate coolness that characterized the service of the uniform he wore. Celie was accountable for that. He confessed the fact to himself, not without a certain pleasurable satisfaction. He had allowed her presence, and his thoughts of her, to fill the adventure completely for him, and as a result they were now facing an appalling danger. If he had followed his own judgment, and had made Bram Johnson a prisoner, as he should have done in his line of duty, matters would have stood differently. For several minutes after Celie had disappeared into her room he studied the actions of the wolves in the corral. A short time before he had considered a method of ridding himself of Bram's watchful beasts. Now he regarded them as the one greatest protection they possessed. There were seven left. He was confident they would give warning the moment the Eskimos approached the stockade again. But would their enemies return? The fact that only one man had attacked the wolves at a time was almost convincing evidence that they were very few in number--perhaps only a scouting party of three or four. Otherwise, if they had come in force, they would have made short work of the pack. The thought became a positive conviction as he looked through the window. Bram had fallen a victim to a single javelin, and the scouting party of Kogmollocks had attempted to complete their triumph by carrying Celie back with them to the main body. Foiled in this attempt, and with the knowledge that a new and armed enemy opposed them, they were possibly already on their way for re-enforcements. If this were so there could be but one hope--and that was an immediate escape from the cabin. And between the cabin door and the freedom of the forest were Bram's seven wolves! A feeling of disgust, almost of anger, swept over him as he drew Celie's little revolver from his pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. There were four cartridges left. But what would they avail against that horde of beasts! They would stop them no more than so many pin-pricks. And what even would the club avail? Against two or three he might put up a fight. But against seven-- He cursed Bram under his breath. It was curious that in that same instant the thought flashed upon him that the wolf-man might not have fallen a victim to the Eskimos. Was it not possible that the spying Kogmollocks had seen him go away on the hunt, and had taken advantage of the opportunity to attack the cabin? They had evidently thought their task would be an easy one. What Philip saw through the window set his pulse beating quickly with the belief that this last conjecture was the true one. The world outside was turning dark. The sky was growing thick and low. In half an hour a storm would break. The Eskimos had foreseen that storm. They knew that the trail taken in their flight, after they had possessed themselves of the girl, would very soon be hidden from the eyes of Bram and the keen scent of his wolves. So they had taken the chance--the chance to make Celie their prisoner before Bram returned. And why, Philip asked himself, did these savage little barbarians of the north want HER? The fighting she had pictured for him had not startled him. For a long time the Kogmollocks had been making trouble. In the last year they had killed a dozen white men along the upper coast, including two American explorers and a missionary. Three patrols had been sent to Coronation Gulf and Bathurst Inlet since August. With the first of those patrols, headed by Olaf Anderson, the Swede, he had come within an ace of going himself. A rumor had come down to Churchill just before he left for the Barrens that Olaf's party of five men had been wiped out. It was not difficult to understand why the Eskimos had attacked Celie Armin's father and those who had come ashore with him from the ship. It was merely a question of lust for white men's blood and white men's plunder, and strangers in their country would naturally be regarded as easy victims. The mysterious and inexplicable part of the affair was their pursuit of the girl. In this pursuit the Kogmollocks had come far beyond the southernmost boundary of their hunting grounds. Philip was sufficiently acquainted with the Eskimos to know that in their veins ran very little of the red-blooded passion of the white man. Matehood was more of a necessity imposed by nature than a joy in their existence, and it was impossible for him to believe that even Celie Armin's beauty had roused the desire for possession among them. His attention turned to the gathering of the storm. The amazing swiftness with which the gray day was turning into the dark gloom of night fascinated him and he almost called to Celie that she might look upon the phenomenon with him. It was piling in from the vast Barrens to the north and east and for a time it was accompanied by a stillness that was oppressive. He could no longer distinguish a movement in the tops of the cedars and banskian pine beyond the corral. In the corral itself he caught now and then the shadowy, flitting movement of the wolves. He did not hear Celie when she came out of her room. So intently was he straining his eyes to penetrate the thickening pall of gloom that he was unconscious of her presence until she stood close at his side. There was something in the awesome darkening of the world that brought them closer in that moment, and without speaking Philip found her hand and held it in his own. They heard then a low whispering sound--a sound that came creeping up out of the end of the world like a living thing; a whisper so vast that, after a little, it seemed to fill the universe, growing louder and louder until it was no longer a whisper but a moaning, shrieking wail. It was appalling as the first blast of it swept over the cabin. No other place in the world is there storm like the storm that sweeps over the Great Barren; no other place in the world where storm is filled with such a moaning, shrieking tumult of VOICE. It was not new to Philip. He had heard it when it seemed to him that ten thousand little children were crying under the rolling and twisting onrush of the clouds; he had heard it when it seemed to him the darkness was filled with an army of laughing, shrieking madmen--storm out of which rose piercing human shrieks and the sobbing grief of women's voices. It had driven people mad. Through the long dark night of winter, when for five months they caught no glimpse of the sun, even the little brown Eskimos went keskwao and destroyed themselves because of the madness that was in that storm. And now it swept over the cabin, and in Celie's throat there rose a little sob. So swiftly had darkness gathered that Philip could no longer see her, except where her face made a pale shadow in the gloom, but he could feel the tremble of her body against him. Was it only this morning that he had first seen her, he asked himself? Was it not a long, long time ago, and had she not in that time become, flesh and soul, a part of him? He put out his arms. Warm and trembling and unresisting in that thick gloom she lay within them. His soul rose in a wild ecstasy and rode on the wings of the storm. Closer he held her against his breast, and he said: "Nothing can hurt you, dear. Nothing--nothing--" It was a simple and meaningless thing to say--that, and only that. And yet he repeated it over and over again, holding her closer and closer until her heart was throbbing against his own. "Nothing can hurt you. Nothing--nothing--" He bent his head. Her face was turned up to him, and suddenly he was thrilled by the warm sweet touch of her lips. He kissed her. She did not strain away from him. He felt--in that darkness--the wild fire in her face. "Nothing can hurt you, nothing--nothing--" he cried almost sobbingly in his happiness. Suddenly there came a blast of the storm that rocked the cabin like the butt of a battering-ram, and in that same moment there came from just outside the window a shrieking cry such as Philip had never heard in all his life before. And following the cry there rose above the tumult of the storm the howling of Bram Johnson's wolves. CHAPTER XV For a space Philip thought that the cry must have come from Bram Johnson himself--that the wolf-man had returned in the pit of the storm. Against his breast Celie had apparently ceased to breathe. Both listened for a repetition of the sound, or for a signal at the barred door. It was strange that in that moment the wind should die down until they could hear the throbbing of their own hearts. Celie's was pounding like a little hammer, and all at once he pressed his face down against hers and laughed with sudden and joyous understanding. "It was only the wind, dear," he said. "I never heard anything like it before--never! It even fooled the wolves. Bless your dear little heart how it frightened you! And it was enough, too. Shall we light some of Bram's candles?" He held her hand as he groped his way to where he had seen Bram's supply of bear-dips. She held two of the candles while he lighted them and their yellow flare illumined her face while his own was still in shadow. What he saw in its soft glow and the shine of her eyes made him almost take her in his arms again, candles and all. And then she turned with them and went to the table. He continued to light candles until the sputtering glow of half a dozen of them filled the room. It was a wretched wastefulness, but it was also a moment in which he felt himself fighting to get hold of himself properly. And he felt also the desire to be prodigal about something. When he had lighted his sixth candle, and then faced Celie, she was standing near the table looking at him so quietly and so calmly and with such a wonderful faith in her eyes that he thanked God devoutly he had kissed her only once--just that once! It was a thrilling thought to know that SHE knew he loved her. There was no doubt of it now. And the thought of what he might have done in that darkness and in the moment of her helplessness sickened him. He could look her straight in the eyes now--unashamed and glad. And she was unashamed, even if a little flushed at what had happened. The same thought was in their minds--and he knew that she was not sorry. Her eyes and the quivering tremble of a smile on her lips told him that. She had braided her hair in that interval when she had gone to her room, and the braid had fallen over her breast and lay there shimmering softly in the candle-glow. He wanted to take her in his arms again. He wanted to kiss her on the mouth and eyes. But instead of that he took the silken braid gently in his two hands and crushed it against his lips. "I love you," he cried softly. "I love you." He stood for a moment or two with his head bowed, the thrill of her hair against his face. It was as if he was receiving some kind of a wonderful benediction. And then in a voice that trembled a little she spoke to him. Before he could see fully what was in her eyes she turned suddenly to the wall, took down his coat, and hung it over the window. When he saw her face again it was gloriously flushed. She pointed to the candles. "No danger of that," he said, comprehending her. "They won't throw any javelins in this storm. Listen!" It was the wolves again. In a moment their cry was drowned in a crash of the storm that smote the cabin like a huge hand. Again it was wailing over them in a wild orgy of almost human tumult. He could see its swift effect on Celie in spite of her splendid courage. It was not like the surge of mere wind or the roll of thunder. Again he was inspired by thought of his pocket atlas, and opened it at the large insert map of Canada. "I'll show you why the wind does that," he explained to her, drawing her to the table and spreading out the map. "See, here is the cabin." He made a little black dot with her pencil, and turning to the four walls of Bram's stronghold made her understand what it meant. "And there's the big Barren," he went on, tracing it out with the pencil-point. "Up here, you see, is the Arctic Ocean, and away over there the Roes Welcome and Hudson's Bay. That's where the storm starts, and when it gets out on the Barren, without a tree or a rock to break its way for five hundred miles--" He told of the twisting air-currents there and how the storm-clouds sometimes swept so low that they almost smothered one. For a few moments he did not look at Celie or he would have seen something in her face which could not have been because of what he was telling her, and which she could at best only partly understand. She had fixed her eyes on the little black dot. THAT was the cabin. For the first time the map told her where she was, and possibly how she had arrived there. Straight down to that dot from the blue space of the ocean far to the north the map-makers had trailed the course of the Coppermine River. Celie gave an excited little cry and caught Philip's arm, stopping him short in his explanation of the human wailings in the storm. Then she placed a forefinger on the river. "There--there it is!" she told him, as plainly as though her voice was speaking to him in his own language. "We came down that river. The Skunnert landed us THERE," and she pointed to the mouth of the Coppermine where it emptied into Coronation Gulf. "And then we came down, down, down--" He repeated the name of the river. "THE COPPERMINE." She nodded, her breath breaking a little in an increasing excitement. She seized the pencil and two-thirds of the distance down the Coppermine made a cross. It was wonderful, he thought, how easily she made him understand. In a low, eager voice she was telling him that where she had put the cross the treacherous Kogmollocks had first attacked them. She described with the pencil their flight away from the river, and after that their return--and a second fight. It was then Bram Johnson had come into the scene. And back there, at the point from which the wolf-man had fled with her, was her FATHER. That was the chief thing she was striving to drive home in his comprehension of the situation. Her FATHER! And she believed he was alive, for it was an excitement instead of hopelessness or grief that possessed her as she talked to him. It gave him a sort of shock. He wanted to tell her, with his arms about her, that it was impossible, and that it was his duty to make her realize the truth. Her father was dead now, even if she had last seen him alive. The little brown men had got him, and had undoubtedly hacked him into small pieces, as was their custom when inspired by war-madness. It was inconceivable to think of him as still being alive even if there had been armed friends with him. There was Olaf Anderson and his five men, for instance. Fighters every one of them. And now they were dead. What chance could this other man have? Her joy when she saw that he understood her added to the uncertainty which was beginning to grip him in spite of all that the day had meant for him. Her faith in him, since that thrilling moment in the darkness, was more than ever like that of a child. She was unafraid of Bram now. She was unafraid of the wolves and the storm and the mysterious pursuers from out of the north. Into his keeping she had placed herself utterly, and while this knowledge filled him with a great happiness he was now disturbed by the fact that, if they escaped from the cabin and the Eskimos, she believed he would return with her down the Coppermine in an effort to find her father. He had already made the plans for their escape and they were sufficiently hazardous. Their one chance was to strike south across the thin arm of the Barren for Pierre Breault's cabin. To go in the opposite direction--farther north without dogs or sledge--would be deliberate suicide. Several times during the afternoon he tried to bring himself to the point of urging on her the naked truth--that her father was dead. There was no doubt of that--not the slightest. But each time he fell a little short. Her confidence in the belief that her father was alive, and that he was where she had marked the cross on the map, puzzled him. Was it conceivable, he asked himself, that the Eskimos had some reason for NOT killing Paul Armin, and that Celie was aware of the fact? If so he failed to discover it. Again and again he made Celie understand that he wanted to know why the Eskimos wanted HER, and each time she answered him with a hopeless little gesture, signifying that she did not know. He did learn that there were two other white men with Paul Armin. Only by looking at his watch did he know when the night closed in. It was seven o'clock when he led Celie to her room and urged her to go to bed. An hour later, listening at her door, he believed that she was asleep. He had waited for that, and quietly he prepared for the hazardous undertaking he had set for himself. He put on his cap and coat and seized the club he had taken from Bram's bed. Then very cautiously he opened the outer door. A moment later he stood outside, the door closed behind him, with the storm pounding in his face. Fifty yards away he could not have heard the shout of a man. And yet he listened, gripping his club hard, every nerve in his body strained to a snapping tension. Somewhere within that small circle of the corral were Bram Johnson's wolves, and as he hesitated with his back to the door he prayed that there would come no lull in the storm during the next few minutes. It was possible that he might evade them with the crash and thunder of the gale about him. They could not see him, or hear him, or even smell him in that tumult of wind unless on his way to the gate he ran into them. In that moment he would have given a year of life to have known where they were. Still listening, still fighting to hear some sound of them in the shriek of the storm, he took his first step out into the pit of darkness. He did not run, but went as cautiously as though the night was a dead calm, the club half poised in his hands. He had measured the distance and the direction of the gate and when at last he touched the saplings of the stockade he knew that he could not be far off in his reckoning. Ten paces to the right he found the gate and his heart gave a sudden jump of relief. Half a minute more and it was open. He propped it securely against the beat of the storm with the club he had taken from Bram Johnson's bed. Then he turned back to the cabin, with the little revolver clutched in his hand, and his face was strained and haggard when he found the door and returned again into the glow of the candle-light. In the center of the room, her face as white as his own, stood Celie. A great fear must have gripped her, for she stood there in her sleeping gown with her hands clutched at her breast, her eyes staring at him in speechless questioning. He explained by opening the door a bit and pantomiming to the gate outside the cabin. "The wolves will be gone in the morning," he said, a ring of triumph in his voice. "I have opened the gate. There is nothing in our way now." She understood. Her eyes were a glory to look into then. Her fingers unclenched at her breast, she gave a short, quick breath and a little cry--and her arms almost reached out to him. He was afraid of himself as he went to her and led her again to the door of her room. And there for a moment they paused, and she looked up into his face. Her hand crept from his and went softly to his shoulder. She said something to him, almost in a whisper, and he could no longer fight against the pride and the joy and the faith he saw in her eyes. He bent down, slowly so that she might draw away from him if she desired, and kissed her upturned lips. And then, with a strange little cry that was like the soft note of a bird, she turned from him and disappeared into the darkness of her room. A great deal of that night's storm passed over his head unheard after that. It was late when he went to bed. He crowded Bram's long box-stove with wood before he extinguished the last candle. And for an hour after that he lay awake, thinking of Celie and of the great happiness that had come into his life all in one day. During that hour he made the plans of a lifetime. Then he, too, fell into sleep--a restless, uneasy slumber filled with many visions. For a time there had come a lull in the gale, but now it broke over the cabin in increased fury. A hand seemed slapping at the window, threatening to break it, 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 Philip's dreams. In all those dreams, and segments of dreams, the girl was present. It was strange that in all of them she should be his wife. And it was strange that the big woods and the deep snows played no part in them. He was back home. And Celie was with him. Once they went for wildflowers and were caught in a thunderstorm, and ran to an old and disused barn in the center of a field for shelter. He could feel Celie 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 early autumn nights when they went 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 Celie was laughing as the smoke persisted in following him about, like a young scamp of a boy bent on tormenting him. The smoke was unusually persistent on this particular night, until at last the laughter went out of the girl's face, and she ran into his arms and covered his eyes with her soft hands. Restlessly 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 Celie's face disappeared. He sneezed again--and awoke. 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 heard then the crackling of burning pitch--a dull and consuming roar, and with a stifled cry he leaped from his bunk and stood on his feet. Dazed by the smoke and flame, he saw that there was not the hundredth part of a second to lose. Shouting Celie's name he ran to her door, where the fire was already beginning to shut him out. His first cry had awakened her and she was facing the lurid glow of the flame as he rushed in. Almost before she could comprehend what was happening he had wrapped one of the heavy bear skins about her and had swept her into his arms. With her face crushed against his breast he lowered his head and dashed back into the fiery holocaust of the outer room. The cabin, with its pitch-filled logs, was like a box made of tinder, and a score of men could not have beat out the fire that was raging now. The wind beating from the west had kept it from reaching the door opening into the corral, but the pitch was hissing and smoking at the threshold as Philip plunged through the blinding pall and fumbled for the latch. Not ten seconds too soon did he stagger with his burden out into the night. As the wind drove in through the open door the flames seemed to burst in a sudden explosion and the cabin was a seething snarl of flame. It burst through the window and out of the chimney and Philip's path to the open gate was illumined by a fiery glow. Not until he had passed beyond the stockade to the edge of the forest did he stop and look back. Over their heads the wind wailed and moaned in the spruce tops, but even above that sound came the roar of the fire. Against his breast Philip heard a sobbing cry, and suddenly he held the girl closer, and crushed his face down against hers, fighting to keep back the horror that was gripping at his heart. Even as he felt her arms creeping up out of the bearskin and clinging about his neck he felt upon him like a weight of lead the hopelessness of a despair as black as the night itself. The cabin was now a pillar of flame, and in it was everything that had made life possible for them. Food, shelter, clothing--all were gone. In this moment he did not think of himself, but of the girl he held in his arms, and he strained her closer and kissed her lips and her eyes and her tumbled hair there in the storm-swept darkness, telling her what he knew was now a lie--that she was safe, that nothing could harm her. Against him he felt the tremble and throb of her soft body, and it was this that filled him with the horror of the thing--the terror of the thought that her one garment was a bearskin. He had felt, a moment before, the chill touch of a naked little foot. And yet he kept saying, with his face against hers: "It's all right, little sweetheart. We'll come out all right--we sure will!" CHAPTER XVI His first impulse, after those few appalling seconds following their escape from the fire, was to save something from the cabin. Still talking to Celie he dropped on his knees and tucked her up warmly in the bearskin, with her back to a tree. He thanked God that it was a big skin and that it enveloped her completely. Leaving her there he ran back through the gate. He no longer feared the wolves. If they had not already escaped into the forest he knew they would not attack him in that hot glare of the one thing above all others they feared--fire. For a space thought of the Eskimos, and the probability of the fire bringing them from wherever they had sought shelter from the storm, was secondary to the alarming necessity which faced him. Because of his restlessness and his desire to be ready for any emergency he had not undressed when he threw himself on his bunk that night, but he was without a coat or cap. And Celie! He cried out aloud in his anguish when he stopped just outside the deadline of the furnace of flame that was once the cabin, and standing there with clenched hands he cursed himself for the carelessness that had brought her face to face with a peril deadlier than the menace of the Eskimos or Bram Johnson's wolves. He alone was responsible. His indiscretion in overfilling the stove had caused the fire, and in that other moment--when he might have snatched up more than the bearskin--his mind had failed to act. In the short space he stood there helplessly in the red heat of the fire the desperateness of the situation seared itself like the hot flame itself in his brain. As prisoners in Bram's cabin, guarded by the wolves and attacked by the Eskimos, they still had shelter, food, clothing--a chance to live, at least the chance to fight. And now-- He put a hand to his bare head and faced the direction of the storm. With the dying away of the wind snow had begun to fall, and with this snow he knew there would come a rising temperature. It was probably twenty degrees below zero, and unless the wind went down completely his ears would freeze in an hour or two. Then he thought of the thick German socks he wore. One of them would do for a cap. His mind worked swiftly after that. There was, after all, a tremendous thrill in the thought of fighting the odds against him, and in the thought of the girl waiting for him in the bearskin, her life depending upon him utterly now. Without him she could not move from the tree where he had left her unless her naked feet buried themselves in the snow. If something happened to him--she would die. Her helplessness filled him suddenly with a wild exultation, the joy of absolute possession that leapt for an instant or two above his fears. She was something more--now--than the woman he loved. She was a little child, to be carried in his arms, to be sheltered from the wind and the cold until the last drop of blood had ceased to flow in his veins. His was the mighty privilege now to mother her until the end came for them both--or some miracle saved them. The last barrier was gone from between them. That he had met her only yesterday was an unimportant incident now. The world had changed, life had changed, a long time had passed. She belonged to him as utterly as the stars belonged to the skies. In his arms she would find life--or death. He was braced for the fight. His mind, riding over its first fears, began to shape itself for action even as he turned back toward the edge of the forest. Until then he had not thought of the other cabin--the cabin which Bram and he had passed on their way in from the Barren. His heart rose up suddenly in his throat and he wanted to shout. That cabin was their salvation! It was not more than eight or ten miles away, and he was positive that he could find it. He ran swiftly through the increasing circle of light made by the burning logs. If the Eskimos had not gone far some one of them would surely see the red glow of the fire, and discovery now meant death. In the edge of the trees, where the shadows were deep, he paused and looked back. His hand fumbled where the left-pocket of his coat would have been, and as he listened to the crackling of the flames and stared into the heart of the red glow there smote him with sudden and sickening force a realization of their deadliest peril. In that twisting inferno of burning pitch was his coat, and in the left-hand pocket of that coat WERE HIS MATCHES! Fire! Out there in the open a seething, twisting mass of it, taunting him with its power, mocking him as pitiless as the mirage mocks a thirst-crazed creature of the desert. In an hour or two it would be gone. He might keep up its embers for a time--until the Eskimos, or starvation, or still greater storm put an end to it. The effort, in any event, would be futile in the end. Their one chance lay in finding the other cabin, and reaching it quickly. When it came to the point of absolute necessity he could at least try to make fire as he had seen an Indian make it once, though at the time he had regarded the achievement as a miracle born of unnumbered generations of practice. He heard the glad note of welcome in Celie's throat when he returned to her. She spoke his name. It seemed to him that there was no note of fear in her voice, but just gladness that he had come back to her in that pit of darkness. He bent down and tucked her snugly in the big bear-skin before he took her up in his arms again. He held her so that her face was snuggled close against his neck, and he kissed her soft mouth again, and whispered to her as he began picking his way through the forest. His voice, whispering, made her understand that they must make no sound. She was tightly imprisoned in the skin, but all at once he felt one of her hands work its way out of the warmth of it and lay against his cheek. It did not move away from his face. Out of her soul and body there passed through that contact of her hand the confession that made him equal to fighting the world. For many minutes after that neither of them spoke. The moan of the wind was growing less and less in the treetops, and once Philip saw a pale break where the clouds had split asunder in the sky. The storm was at an end--and it was almost dawn. In a quarter of an hour the shot like snow of the blizzard had changed to big soft flakes that dropped straight out of the clouds in a white deluge. By the time day came their trail would be completely hidden from the eyes of the Eskimos. Because of that Philip traveled as swiftly as the darkness and the roughness of the forest would allow him. As nearly as he could judge he kept due east. For a considerable time he did not feel the weight of the precious burden in his arms. He believed that they were at least half a mile from the burned cabin before he paused to rest. Even then he spoke to Celie in a low voice. He had stopped where the trunk of a fallen tree lay as high as his waist, and on this he seated the girl, holding her there in the crook of his arm. With his other hand he fumbled to see if the bearskin protected her fully, and in the investigation his hand came in contact again with one of her bare feet. Celie gave a little jump. Then she laughed, and he made sure that the foot was snug and warm before he went on. Twice in the nest half mile he stopped. The third time, a full mile from the cabin, was in a dense growth of spruce through the tops of which snow and wind did not penetrate. Here he made a nest of spruce-boughs for Celie, and they waited for the day. In the black interval that precedes Arctic dawn they listened for sounds that might come to them. Just once came the wailing howl of one of Bram's wolves, and twice Philip fancied that he heard the distant cry of a human voice. The second time Celie's fingers tightened about his own to tell him that she, too, had heard. A little later, leaving Celie alone, Philip went back to the edge of the spruce thicket and examined closely their trail where it had crossed a bit of open. It was not half an hour old, yet the deluge of snow had almost obliterated the signs of their passing. His one hope was that the snowfall would continue for another hour. By that time there would not be a visible track of man or beast, except in the heart of the thickets. But he knew that he was not dealing with white men or Indians now. The Eskimos were night-trackers and night-hunters. For five months out of every twelve their existence depended upon their ability to stalk and kill in darkness. If they had returned to the burning cabin it was possible, even probable, that they were close on their heels now. For a second time he found himself a stout club. He waited, listening, and straining his eyes to penetrate the thick gloom; and then, as his own heart-beats came to him audibly, he felt creeping over him a slow and irresistible foreboding--a premonition of something impending, of a great danger close at hand. His muscles grew tense, and he clutched the club, ready for action. CHAPTER XVII It seemed to Philip, as he stood with the club ready in his hand, that the world had ceased to breathe in its anticipation of the thing for which he was waiting--and listening. The wind had dropped dead. There was not a rustle in the tree-tops, not a sound to break the stillness. The silence, so close after storm, was an Arctic phenomenon which did not astonish him, and yet the effect of it was almost painfully gripping. Minor sounds began to impress themselves on his senses--the soft murmur of the falling snow, his own breath, the pounding of his heart. He tried to throw off the strange feeling that oppressed him, but it was impossible. Out there in the darkness he would have sworn that there were eyes and ears strained as his own were strained. And the darkness was lifting. Shadows began to disentangle themselves from the gray chaos. Trees and bushes took form, and over his head the last heavy windrows of clouds shouldered their way out of the sky. Still, as the twilight of dawn took the place of night, he did not move, except to draw himself a little closer into the shelter of the scrub spruce behind which he had hidden himself. He wondered if Celie would be frightened at his absence. But he could not compel himself to go on--or back. SOMETHING WAS COMING! He was as positive of it as he was of the fact that night was giving place to day. Yet he could see nothing--hear nothing. It was light enough now for him to see movement fifty yards away, and he kept his eyes fastened on the little open across which their trail had come. If Olaf Anderson the Swede had been there he might have told him of another night like this, and another vigil. For Olaf had learned that the Eskimos, like the wolves, trail two by two and four by four, and that--again like the wolves--they pursue not ON the trail but with the trail between them. But it was the trail that Philip watched; and as he kept his vigil--that inexplicable mental undercurrent telling him that his enemies were coming--his mind went back sharply to the girl a hundred yards behind him. The acuteness of the situation sent question after question rushing through his mind, even as he gripped his club, For her he was about to fight. For her he was ready to kill, and not afraid to die. He loved her. And yet--she was a mystery. He had held her in his arms, had felt her heart beating against his breast, had kissed her lips and her eyes and her hair, and her response had been to place herself utterly within the shelter of his arms. She had given herself to him and he was possessed of the strength of one about to fight for his own. And with that strength the questions pounded again in his head. Who was she? And for what reason were mysterious enemies coming after her through the gray dawn? In that moment he heard a sound. His heart stood suddenly still. He held his breath. It was a sound almost indistinguishable from the whisper of the air and the trees and yet it smote upon his senses like the detonation of a thunder-clap. It was more of a PRESENCE than a sound. The trail was clear. He could see to the far side of the open now, and there was no movement. He turned his head--slowly and without movement of his body, and in that instant a gasp rose to his lips, and died there. Scarcely a dozen paces from him stood a poised and hooded figure, a squat, fire-eyed apparition that looked more like monster than man in that first glance. Something acted within him that was swifter than reason--a sub-conscious instinct that works for self-preservation like the flash of powder in a pan. It was this sub-conscious self that received the first photographic impression--the strange poise of the hooded creature, the uplifted arm, the cold, streaky gleam of something in the dawn-light, and in response to that impression Philip's physical self crumpled down in the snow as a javelin hissed through the space where his head and shoulders had been. So infinitesimal was the space of time between the throwing of the javelin and Philip's movement that the Eskimo believed he had transfixed his victim. A scream of triumph rose in his throat. It was the Kogmollock sakootwow--the blood-cry, a single shriek that split the air for a mile. It died in another sort of cry. From where he had dropped Philip was up like a shot. His club swung through the air and before the amazed hooded creature could dart either to one side or the other it had fallen with crushing force. That one blow must have smashed his shoulder to a pulp. As the body lurched downward another blow caught the hooded head squarely and the beginning of a second cry ended in a sickening grunt. The force of the blow carried Philip half off his feet, and before he could recover himself two other figures had rushed upon him from out of the gloom. Their cries as they came at him were like the cries of beasts. Philip had no time to use his club. From his unbalanced position he flung himself upward and at the nearest of his enemies, saving himself from the upraised javelin by clinching. His fist shot out and caught the Eskimo squarely in the mouth. He struck again--and the javelin dropped from the Kogmollock's hand. In that moment, every vein in his body pounding with the rage and excitement of battle, Philip let out a yell. The end of it was stifled by a pair of furry arms. His head snapped back--and he was down. A thrill of horror shot through him. It was the one unconquerable fighting trick of the Eskimos--that neck hold. Caught from behind there was no escape from it. It was the age-old sasaki-wechikun, or sacrifice-hold, an inheritance that came down from father to son--the Arctic jiu-jitsu by which one Kogmollock holds the victim helpless while a second cuts out his heart. Flat on his back, with his head and shoulders bent under him, Philip lay still for a single instant. He heard the shrill command of the Eskimo over him--an exhortation for the other to hurry up with the knife. And then, even as he heard a grunting reply, his hand came in contact with the pocket which held Celie's little revolver. He drew it quickly, cocked it under his back, and twisting his arm until the elbow-joint cracked, he fired. It was a chance shot. The powder-flash burned the murderous, thick-lipped face in the sealskin hood. There was no cry, no sound that Philip heard. But the arms relaxed about his neck. He rolled over and sprang to his feet. Three or four paces from him was the Eskimo he had struck, crawling toward him on his hands and knees, still dazed by the blows he had received. In the snow Philip saw his club. He picked it up and replaced the revolver in his pocket. A single blow as the groggy Eskimo staggered to his feet and the fight was over. It had taken perhaps three or four minutes--no longer than that. His enemies lay in three dark and motionless heaps in the snow. Fate had played a strong hand with him. Almost by a miracle he had escaped and at least two of the Eskimos were dead. He was still watchful, still guarding against a further attack, and suddenly he whirled to face a figure that brought from him a cry of astonishment and alarm. It was Celie. She was standing ten paces from him, and in the wild terror that had brought her to him she had left the bearskin behind. Her naked feet were buried in the snow. Her arms, partly bared, were reaching out to him in the gray Arctic dawn, and then wildly and moaningly there came to him-- "Philip--Philip--" He sprang to her, a choking cry on his own lips. This, after all, was the last proof--when she had thought that their enemies were killing him SHE HAD COME TO HIM. He was sobbing her name like a boy as he ran back with her in his arms. Almost fiercely he wrapped the bearskin about her again, and then crushed her so closely in his arms that he could hear her gasping faintly for breath. In that wild and glorious moment he listened. A cold and leaden day was breaking over the world and as they listened their hearts throbbing against each other, the same sound came to them both. It was the sakootwow--the savage, shrieking blood-cry of the Kogmollocks, a scream that demanded an answer of the three hooded creatures who, a few minutes before, had attacked Philip in the edge of the open. The cry came from perhaps a mile away. And then, faintly, it was answered far to the west. For a moment Philip pressed his face down to Celie's. In his heart was a prayer, for he knew that the fight had only begun. CHAPTER XVIII That the Eskimos both to the east and the west were more than likely to come their way, converging toward the central cry that was now silent, Philip was sure. In the brief interval in which he had to act he determined to make use of his fallen enemies. This he impressed on Celie's alert mind before he ran back to the scene of the fight. He made no more than a swift observation of the field in these first moments--did not even look for weapons. His thought was entirely of Celie. The smallest of the three forms on the snow was the Kogmollock he had struck down with his club. He dropped on his knees and took off first the sealskin bashlyk, or hood. Then he began stripping the dead man of his other garments. From the fur coat to the caribou-skin moccasins they were comparatively new. With them in his arms he hurried back to the girl. It was not a time for fine distinctions. The clothes were a godsend, though they had come from a dead man's back, and an Eskimo's at that. Celie's eyes shone with joy. It amazed him more than ever to see how unafraid she was in this hour of great danger. She was busy with the clothes almost before his back was turned. He returned to the Eskimos. The three were dead. It made him shudder--one with a tiny bullet hole squarely between the eyes, and the others crushed by the blows of the club. His hand fondled Celie's little revolver--the pea-shooter he had laughed at. After all it had saved his life. And the club-- He did not examine too closely there. From the man he had struck with his naked fist he outfitted himself with a hood and temiak, or coat. In the temiak there were no pockets, but at the waist of each of the dead men a narwhal skin pouch which answered for all pockets. He tossed the three pouches in a little heap on the snow before he searched for weapons. He found two knives and half a dozen of the murderous little javelins. One of the knives was still clutched in the hand of the Eskimo who was creeping up to disembowel him when Celie's revolver saved him. He took this knife because it was longer and sharper than the other. On his knees he began to examine the contents of the three pouches. In each was the inevitable roll of babiche, or caribou-skin cord, and a second and smaller waterproof narwhal bag in which were the Kogmollock fire materials. There was no food. This fact was evident proof that the Eskimos were in camp somewhere in the vicinity. He had finished his investigation of the pouches when, looking up from his kneeling posture, he saw Celie approaching. In spite of the grimness of the situation he could not repress a smile as he rose to greet her. At fifty paces, even with her face toward him, one would easily make the error of mistaking her for an Eskimo, as the sealskin bashlyk was so large that it almost entirely concealed her face except when one was very close to her. Philip's first assistance was to roll back the front of the hood. Then he pulled her thick braid out from under the coat and loosed the shining glory of her hair until it enveloped her in a wonderful shimmering mantle. Their enemies could not mistake her for a man NOW, even at a hundred yards. If they ran into an ambuscade she would at least be saved from the javelins. Celie scarcely realized what he was doing. She was staring at the dead men--silent proof of the deadly menace that had threatened them and of the terrific fight Philip must have made. A strange note rose in her throat, and turning toward him suddenly she flung herself into his arms. Her own arms encircled his neck, and for a space she lay shudderingly against his breast, as if sobbing. How many times he kissed her in those moments Philip could not have told. It must have been a great many. He knew only that her arms were clinging tighter and tighter about his neck, and that she was whispering his name, and that his hands were buried in her soft hair. He forgot time, forgot the possible cost of precious seconds lost. It was a small thing that recalled him to his senses. From out of a spruce top a handful of snow fell on his shoulder. It startled him like the touch of a strange hand, and in another moment he was explaining swiftly to Celie that there were other enemies near and that they must lose no time in flight. He fastened one of the pouches at his waist, picked up his club, and--on second thought--one of the Kogmollock javelins. He had no very definite idea of how he might use the latter weapon, as it was too slender to be of much avail as a spear at close quarters. At a dozen paces he might possibly throw it with some degree of accuracy. In a Kogmollock's hand it was a deadly weapon at a hundred paces. With the determination to be at his side when the next fight came Celie possessed herself of a second javelin. With her hand in his Philip set out then due north through the forest. It was in that direction he knew the cabin must lay. After striking the edge of the timber after crossing the Barren Bram Johnson had turned almost directly south, and as he remembered the last lap of the journey Philip was confident that not more than eight or ten miles had separated the two cabins. He regretted now his carelessness in not watching Brain's trail more closely in that last hour or two. His chief hope of finding the cabin was in the discovery of some landmark at the edge of the Barren. He recalled distinctly where they had turned into the forest, and in less than half an hour after that they had come upon the first cabin. Their immediate necessity was not so much the finding of the cabin as escape from the Eskimos. Within half an hour, perhaps even less, he believed that other eyes would know of the fight at the edge of the open. It was inevitable. If the Kogmollocks on either side of them struck the trail before it reached the open they would very soon run upon the dead, and if they came upon footprints in the snow this side of the open they would back-trail swiftly to learn the source and meaning of the cry of triumph that had not repeated itself. Celie's little feet, clad in moccasins twice too big for her, dragged in the snow in a way that would leave no doubt in the Eskimo mind. As Philip saw the situation there was one chance for them, and only one. They could not escape by means of strategy. They could not hide from their pursuers. Hope depended entirely upon the number of their enemies. If there were only three or four of them left they would not attack in the open. In that event he must watch for ambuscade, and dread the night. He looked down at Celie, buried in her furry coat and hood and plodding along courageously at his side with her hand in his. This was not a time in which to question him, and she was obeying his guidance with the faith of a child. It was tremendous, he thought--the most wonderful moment that had ever entered into his life. It is this dependence, this sublime faith and confidence in him of the woman he loves that gives to a man the strength of a giant in the face of a great crisis and makes him put up a tiger's fight for her. For such a woman a man must win. And then Philip noticed how tightly Celie's other hand was gripping the javelin with which she had armed herself. She was ready to fight, too. The thrill of it all made him laugh, and her eyes shot up to him suddenly, filled with a moment's wonder that he should be laughing now. She must have understood, for the big hood hid her face again almost instantly, and her fingers tightened the smallest bit about his. For a matter of a quarter of an hour they traveled as swiftly as Celie could walk. Philip was confident that the Eskimo whose cries they had heard would strike directly for the point whence the first cry had come, and it was his purpose to cover as much distance as possible in the first few minutes that their enemies might be behind them. It was easier to watch the back trail than to guard against ambuscades ahead. Twice in that time he stopped where they would be unseen and looked back, and in advancing he picked out the thinnest timber and evaded whatever might have afforded a hiding place to a javelin-thrower. They had progressed another half mile when suddenly they came upon a snowshoe trail in the snow. It had crossed at right angles to their own course, and as Philip bent over it a sudden lump rose into his throat. The other Eskimos had not worn snowshoes. That in itself had not surprised him, for the snow was hard and easily traveled in moccasins. The fact that amazed him now was that the trail under his eyes had not been made by Eskimo usamuks. The tracks were long and narrow. The web imprint in the snow was not that of the broad narwhal strip, but the finer mesh of babiche. It was possible that an Eskimo was wearing them, but they were A WHITE MAN'S SHOES! And then he made another discovery. For a dozen paces he followed in the trail, allowing six inches with each step he took as the snowshoe handicap. Even at that he could not easily cover the tracks. The man who had made them had taken a longer snowshoe stride than his own by at least nine inches. He could no longer keep the excitement of his discovery from Celie. "The Eskimo never lived who could make that track," he exclaimed. "They can travel fast enough but they're a bunch of runts when it comes to leg-swing. It's a white man--or Bram!" The announcement of the wolf-man's name and Philip's gesture toward the trail drew a quick little cry of understanding from Celie. In a flash she had darted to the snowshoe tracks and was examining them with eager intensity. Then she looked up and shook her head. It wasn't Bram! She pointed to the tail of the shoe and catching up a twig broke it under Philip's eyes. He remembered now. The end of Bram's shoes was snubbed short off. There was no evidence of that defect in the snow. It was not Bram who had passed that way. For a space he stood undecided. He knew that Celie was watching him--that she was trying to learn something of the tremendous significance of that moment from his face. The same unseen force that had compelled him to wait and watch for his foes a short time before seemed urging him now to follow the strange snowshoe trail. Enemy or friend the maker of those tracks would at least be armed. The thought of what a rifle and a few cartridges would mean to him and Celie now brought a low cry of decision from him. He turned quickly to Celie. "He's going east--and we ought to go north to find the cabin," he told her, pointing to the trail. "But we'll follow him. I want his rifle. I want it more than anything else in this world, now that I've got you. We'll follow--" If there had been a shadow of hesitation in his mind it was ended in that moment. From behind them there came a strange hooting cry. It was not a yell such as they had heard before. It was a booming far-reaching note that had in it the intonation of a drum--a sound that made one shiver because of its very strangeness. And then, from farther west, it came-- "Hoom--Hoom--Ho-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m--" In the next half minute it seemed to Philip that the cry was answered from half a dozen different quarters. Then again it came from directly behind them. Celie uttered a little gasp as she clung to his hand again. She understood as well as he. One of the Eskimos had discovered the dead and their foes were gathering in behind them. CHAPTER XIX Before the last of the cries had died away Philip flung far to one side of the trail the javelin he carried, and followed it up with Celie's, impressing on her that every ounce of additional weight meant a handicap for them now. After the javelins went his club. "It's going to be the biggest race I've ever run," he smiled at her. "And we've got to win. If we don't--" Celie's eyes were aglow as she looked at him, He was splendidly calm. There was no longer a trace of excitement in his face, and he was smiling at her even as he picked her up suddenly in his arms. The movement was so unexpected that she gave a little gasp. Then she found herself borne swiftly over the trail. For a distance of a hundred yards Philip ran with her before he placed her on her feet again. In no better way could he have impressed on her that they were partners in a race against death and that every energy must be expended in that race. Scarcely had her feet touched the snow than she was running at his side, her hand clasped in his. Barely a second was lost. With the swift directness of the trained man-hunter Philip had measured his chances of winning. The Eskimos, first of all, would gather about their dead. After one or two formalities they would join in a chattering council, all of which meant precious time for them. The pursuit would be more or less cautious because of the bullet hole in the Kogmollock's forehead. If it had been possible for Celie to ask him just what he expected to gain by following the strange snowshoe trail he would have had difficulty in answering. It was, like his single shot with Celie's little revolver, a chance gamble against big odds. A number of possibilities had suggested themselves to him. It even occurred to him that the man who was hurrying toward the east might be a member of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Of one thing, however, he was confident. The maker of the tracks would not be armed with javelins. He would have a rifle. Friend or foe, he was after that rifle. The trick was to catch sight of him at the earliest possible moment. How much of a lead the stranger had was a matter at which he could guess with considerable accuracy. The freshness of the trail was only slightly dimmed by snow, which was ample proof that it had been made at the very tail-end of the storm. He believed that it was not more than an hour old. For a good two hundred yards Philip set a dog-trot pace for Celie, who ran courageously at his side. At the end of that distance he stopped. Celie was panting for breath. Her hood had slipped back and her face was flushed like a wildflower by her exertion. Her eyes shone like stars, and her lips were parted a little. She was temptingly lovely, but again Philip lost not a second of unnecessary time. He picked her up in his arms again and continued the race. By using every ounce of his own strength and endurance in this way he figured that their progress would be at least a third faster than the Eskimos would follow. The important question was how long he could keep up the pace. Against his breast Celie was beginning to understand his scheme as plainly as if he had explained it to her in words. At the end of the fourth hundred yards she let him know that she was ready to run another lap. He carried her on fifty yards more before he placed her on her feet. In this way they had gone three-quarters of a mile when the trail turned abruptly from its easterly course to a point of the compass due north. So sharp was the turn that Philip paused to investigate the sudden change in direction. The stranger had evidently stood for several minutes at this point, which was close to the blasted stub of a dead spruce. In the snow Philip observed for the first time a number of dark brown spots. "Here is where he took a new bearing--and a chew of tobacco," said Philip, more to himself than to Celie. "And there's no snow in his tracks. By George, I don't believe he's got more than half an hour's start of us this minute!" It was his turn to carry Celie again, and in spite of her protest that she was still good for another run he resumed their pursuit of the stranger with her in his arms. By her quick breathing and the bit of tenseness that had gathered about her mouth he knew that the exertion she had already been put to was having its effect on her. For her little feet and slender body the big moccasins and cumbersome fur garments she wore were a burden in themselves, even at a walk. He found that by holding her higher in his arms, with her own arms encircling his shoulders, it was easier to run with her at the pace he had set for himself. And when he held her in this way her hair covered his breast and shoulders so that now and then his face was smothered in the velvety sweetness of it. The caress of it and the thrill of her arms about him spurred him on. Once he made three hundred yards. But he was gulping for breath when he stopped. That time Celie compelled him to let her run a little farther, and when they paused she was swaying on her feet, and panting. He carried her only a hundred and fifty yards in the interval after that. Both realized what it meant. The pace was telling on them. The strain of it was in Celie's eyes. The flower-like flush of her first exertion was gone from her face. It was pale and a little haggard, and in Philip's face she saw the beginning of the things which she did not realize was betraying itself so plainly in her own. She put her hands up to his cheeks, and smiled. It was tremendous--that moment;--her courage, her splendid pride in him, her manner of telling him that she was not afraid as her little hands lay against his face. For the first time he gave way to his desire to hold her close to him, and kiss the sweet mouth she held up to his as her head nestled on his breast. After a moment or two he looked at his watch. Since striking the strange trail they had traveled forty minutes. In that tine they had covered at least three miles, and were a good four miles from the scene of the fight. It was a big start. The Eskimos were undoubtedly a half that distance behind them, and the stranger whom they were following could not be far ahead. They went on at a walk. For the third time they came to a point in the trail where the stranger had stopped to make observations. It was apparent to Philip that the man he was after was not quite sure of himself. Yet he did not hesitate in the course due north. For half an hour they continued in that direction. Not for an instant now did Philip allow; his caution to lag. Eyes and ears were alert for sound or movement either behind or ahead of them, and more and more frequently he turned to scan the back trail. They were at least five miles from the edge of the open where the fight had occurred when they came to the foot of a ridge, and Philip's heart gave a sudden thump of hope. He remembered that ridge. It was a curiously formed "hog-back"--like a great windrow of snow piled up and frozen. Probably it was miles in length. Somewhere he and Bram had crossed it soon after passing the first cabin. He had not tried to tell Celie of this cabin. Time had been too precious. But now, in the short interval of rest he allowed themselves, he drew a picture of it in the snow and made her understand that it was somewhere close to the ridge and that it looked as though the stranger was making for it. He half carried Celie up the ridge after that. She could not hide from him that her feet were dragging even at a walk. Exhaustion showed in her face, and once when she tried to speak to him her voice broke in a little gasping sob. On the far side of the ridge he took her in his arms and carried her again. "It can't be much farther," he encouraged her. "We've got to overtake him pretty soon, dear. Mighty soon." Her hand pressed gently against his cheek, and he swallowed a thickness that in spite of his effort gathered in his throat. During that last half hour a different look had come into her eyes. It was there now as she lay limply with her head on his breast--a look of unutterable tenderness, and of something else. It was that which brought the thickness into his throat. It was not fear. It was the soft glow of a great love--and of understanding. She knew that even he was almost at the end of his fight. His endurance was giving out. One of two things must happen very soon. She continued to stroke his cheek gently until he placed her on her feet again, and then she held one of his hands close to her breast as they looked behind them, and listened. He could feel the soft throbbing of her heart. If he needed greater courage then it was given to him. They went on. And then, so suddenly that it brought a stifled cry from the girl's lips, they came upon the cabin. It was not a hundred yards from them when they first saw it. It was no longer abandoned. A thin spiral of smoke was rising from the chimney. There was no sign of life other than that. For half a minute Philip stared at it. Here, at last, was the final hope. Life or death, all that the world might hold for him and the girl at his side, was in that cabin. Gently he drew her so that she would be unseen. And then, still looking at the cabin, he drew off his coat and dropped it in the snow. It was the preparation of a man about to fight. The look of it was in his face and the stiffening of his muscles, and when he turned to his little companion she was as white as the snow under her feet. "We're in time," he breathed. "You--you stay here." She understood. Her hands clutched at him as he left her. A gulp rose in her throat. She wanted to call out. She wanted to hold him back--or go with him. Yet she obeyed. She stood with a heart that choked her and watched him go. For she knew, after all, that it was the thing to do. Sobbingly she breathed his name. It was a prayer. For she knew what would happen in the cabin. CHAPTER XX Philip came up behind the windowless end of the cabin. He noticed in passing with Bram that on the opposite side was a trap-window of saplings, and toward this he moved swiftly but with caution. It was still closed when he came where he could see. But with his ear close to the chinks he heard a sound--the movement of some one inside. For an instant he looked over his shoulder. Celia was standing where he had left her. He could almost feel the terrible suspense that was in her eyes as she watched him. He moved around toward the door. There was in him an intense desire to have it over with quickly. His pulse quickened as the thought grew in him that the maker of the strange snowshoe trail might be a friend after all. But how was he to discover that fact? He had decided to take no chances in the matter. Ten seconds of misplaced faith in the stranger might prove fatal. Once he held a gun in his hands he would be in a position to wait for introductions and explanations. But until then, with their Eskimo enemies close at their heels-- His mind did not finish that final argument. The end of it smashed upon him in another way. The door came within his vision. As it swung inward he could not at first see whether it was open or closed. Leaning against the logs close to the door was a pair of long snowshoes and a bundle of javelins. A sickening disappointment swept over him as he stared at the javelins. A giant Eskimo and not a white man had made the trail they had followed. Their race against time had brought them straight to the rendezvous of their foes--and there would be no guns. In that moment when all the hopes he had built up seemed slipping away from under him he could see no other possible significance in the presence of the javelins. Then, for an instant, he held his breath and sniffed the air like a dog getting the wind. The cabin door was open. And out through that door came the mingling aroma of coffee and tobacco! An Eskimo might have tobacco, or even tea. But coffee--never! Every drop of blood in his body pounded like tiny beating fists as he crossed silently and swiftly the short space between the corner of the cabin and the open door. For perhaps half a dozen seconds he closed his eyes to give his snow-strained vision an even chance with the man in the cabin. Then he looked in. It was a small cabin. It was possibly not more than ten feet square inside, and at the far end of it was a fireplace from which rose the chimney through the roof. At first Philip saw nothing except the dim outlines of things. It was a moment or two before he made out the figure of a man stooping over the fire. He stepped over the threshold, making no sound. The occupant of the cabin straightened himself slowly, lifting with, extreme care a pot of coffee from the embers. A glance at his broad back and his giant stature told Philip that he was not an Eskimo. He turned. Even then for an infinitesimal space he did not see Philip as he stood fronting the door with the light in his face. It was a white man's face--a face almost hidden in a thick growth of beard and a tangle of hair that fell to the shoulders. Another instant and he had seen the intruder and stood like one turned suddenly into stone. Philip had leveled Celie's little revolver. "I am Philip Raine of His Majesty's service, the Royal Mounted," he said. "Throw, up your hands!" The moment's tableau was one of rigid amazement on one side, of waiting tenseness on the other. Philip believed that the shadow of his body concealed the size of the tiny revolver in his hand. Anyway it would be effective at that distance, and he expected to see the mysterious stranger's hands go over his head the moment he recovered from the shock that had apparently gone with the command. What did happen he expected least of all. The arm holding the pot of steaming coffee shot out and the boiling deluge hissed straight at Philip's face. He ducked to escape it, and fired. Before he could throw back the hammer of the little single-action weapon for a second shot the stranger was at him. The force of the attack sent them both crashing back against the wall of the cabin, and in the few moments that followed Philip blessed the providential forethought that had made him throw off his fur coat and strip for action. His antagonist was not an ordinary man. A growl like that of a beast rose in his throat as they went to the floor, and in that death-grip Philip thought of Bram. More than once in watching the wolf-man he had planned how he would pit himself against the giant if it came to a fight, and how he would evade the close arm-to-arm grapple that would mean defeat for him. And this man was Bram's equal in size and strength. He realized with the swift judgment of the trained boxer that open fighting and the evasion of the other's crushing brute strength was his one hope. On his knees he flung himself backward, and struck out. The blow caught his antagonist squarely in the face before he had succeeded in getting a firm clinch, and as he bent backward under the force of the blow Philip exerted every ounce of his strength, broke the other's hold, and sprang to his feet. He felt like uttering a shout of triumph. Never had the thrill of mastery and of confidence surged through him more hotly than it did now. On his feet in open fighting he had the agility of a cat. The stranger was scarcely on his feet before he was at him with a straight shoulder blow that landed on the giant's jaw with crushing force. It would have put an ordinary man down in a limp heap. The other's weight saved him. A second blow sent him reeling against the log wall like a sack of grain. And then in the half-gloom of the cabin Philip missed. He put all his effort in that third blow and as his clenched fist shot over the other's shoulder he was carried off his balance and found himself again in the clutch of his enemy's arms. This time a huge hand found his throat. The other he blocked with his left arm, while with his right he drove in short-arm jabs against neck and jaw. Their ineffectiveness amazed him. His guard-arm was broken upward, and to escape the certain result of two hands gripping at his throat he took a sudden foot-lock on his adversary, flung all his weight forward, and again they went to the floor of the cabin. Neither caught a glimpse of the girl standing wide-eyed and terrified in the door. They rolled almost to her feet. Full in the light she saw the battered, bleeding face of the strange giant, and Philip's fist striking it again and again. Then she saw the giant's two hands, and why he was suffering that punishment. They were at Philip's throat--huge hairy hands stained with his own blood. A cry rose to her lips and the blue in her eyes darkened with the fighting fire of her ancestors. She darted across the room to the fire. In an instant she was back with a stick of wood in her hands. Philip saw her then--her streaming hair and white face above them, and the club fell. The hands at his throat relaxed. He swayed to his feet and with dazed eyes and a weird sort of laugh opened his arms. Celie ran into them. He felt her sobbing and panting against him. Then, looking down, he saw that for the present the man who had made the strange snowshoe trail was as good as dead. The air he was taking into his half strangled lungs cleared his head and he drew away from Celie to begin the search of the room. His eyes were more accustomed to the gloom, and suddenly he gave a cry of exultation. Against the end of the mud and stone fireplace stood a rifle and over the muzzle of this hung a belt and holster. In the holster was a revolver. In his excitement and joy his breath was almost a sob as he snatched it from the holster and broke it in the light of the door. It was a big Colt Forty-five--and loaded to the brim. He showed it to Celie, and thrust her to the door. "Watch!" he cried, sweeping his arm to the open. "Just two minutes more. That's all I want--two minutes--and then--" He was counting the cartridges in the belt as he fastened it about his waist. There were at least forty, two-thirds of them soft-nosed rifle. The caliber was .303 and the gun was a Savage. It was modern up to the minute, and as he threw down the lever enough to let him glimpse inside the breech he caught the glisten of cartridges ready for action. He wanted nothing more. The cabin might have held his weight in gold and he would not have turned toward it. With the rifle in his hands he ran past Celie out into the day. For the moment the excitement pounding in his body had got beyond his power of control. His brain was running riot with the joyous knowledge of the might that lay in his hands now and he felt an overmastering desire to shout his triumph in the face of their enemies. "Come on, you devils! Come on, come on," he cried. And then, powerless to restrain what was in him, he let out a yell. From the door Celie was staring at him. A few moments before her face had been dead white. Now a blaze of color was surging back into her cheeks and lips and her eyes shone with the glory of one who was looking on more than triumph. From her own heart welled up a cry, a revelation of that wonderful thing throbbing in her breast which must have reached Philip's ears had there not in that same instant come another sound to startle them both into listening silence. It was not far distant. And it was unmistakably an answer to Philip's challenge. CHAPTER XXI As they listened the cry came again. This time Philip caught in it a note that he had not detected before. It was not a challenge but the long-drawn ma-too-ee of an Eskimo who answers the inquiring hail of a comrade. "He thinks it is the man in the cabin," exclaimed Philip, turning to survey the fringe of forest through which their trail had come. "If the others don't warn him there's going to be one less Eskimo on earth in less than three minutes!" Another sound had drawn Celie back to the door. "When she looked in the man she had stunned with the club was moving. Her call brought Philip, and placing her in the open door to keep watch he set swiftly to work to make sure of their prisoner. With the babiche thong he had taken from his enemies he bound him hand and foot. A shaft of light fell full on the giant's face and naked chest where it had been laid bare in the struggle and Philip was about to rise when a purplish patch, of tattooing caught his eyes. He made out first the crude picture of a shark with huge gaping jaws struggling under the weight of a ship's anchor, and then, directly under this pigment colored tatu, the almost invisible letters of a name. He made them out one by one--B-l-a-k-e. Before the surname was the letter G. "Blake," he repeated, rising to his feet. "GEORGE Blake--a sailor--and a white man!" Blake, returning to consciousness, mumbled incoherently. In the same instant Celie cried out excitedly at the door. "Oo-ee, Philip--Philip! Se det! Se! Se!" She drew back with, a sudden movement and pointed out the door. Concealing himself as much as possible from outside observation Philip peered forth. Not more than a hundred and fifty yards away a dog team was approaching. There were eight dogs and instantly he recognized them as the small fox-faced Eskimo breed from the coast. They were dragging a heavily laden sledge and behind them came the driver, a furred and hooded figure squat of stature and with a voice that came now in the sharp clacking commands that Philip had heard in the company of Bram Johnson. From the floor came a groan, and for an instant Philip turned to find Blake's bloodshot eyes wide open and staring at him. The giant's bleeding lips were gathered in a snarl and he was straining at the babiche thongs that bound him. In that same moment Philip caught a glimpse of Celie. She, too, was staring--and at Blake. Her lips were parted, her eyes were big with amazement and as she looked she clutched her hands convulsively at her breast and uttered a low, strange cry. For the first time she saw Blake's face with the light full upon it. At the sound of her cry Blake's eyes went to her, and for the space of a second the imprisoned beast on the floor and the girl looking down on him made up a tableau that held Philip spellbound. Between them was recognition--an amazed and stone like horror on the girl's part, a sudden and growing glare of bestial exultation in the eyes of the man. Suddenly there came the Eskimo's voice and the yapping of dogs. It was the first Blake had heard. He swung his head toward the door with a great gasp and the babiche cut like whipcord under the strain of his muscles. Swift as a flash Philip thrust the muzzle of the big Colt against his prisoner's head. "Make a sound and you're a dead man, Blake!" he warned. "We need that team, and if you so much as whisper during the next ten seconds I'll scatter your brains over the floor!" They could hear the cold creak of the sledge-runners now, and a moment later the patter of many feet outside the door. In a single leap Philip was at the door. Another and he was outside, and an amazed Eskimo was looking into the round black eye of his revolver. It required no common language to make him understand what was required of him. He backed into the cabin with the revolver within two feet of his breast. Celie had caught up the rifle and was standing guard over Blake as though fearful that he might snap his bonds. Philip laughed joyously when he saw how quickly she understood that she was to level the rifle at the Kogmollock's breast and hold it there until he had made him a prisoner. She was wonderful. She was panting in her excitement. From the floor Blake had noticed that her little white finger was pressing gently against the trigger of the rifle. It had made him shudder. It made the Eskimo cringe a bit now as Philip tied his hands behind him. And Philip saw it, and his heart thumped. Celie was gloriously careless. It was over inside of two minutes, and with an audible sigh of relief she lowered her rifle. Then she leaned it against the wall and ran to Blake. She was tremendously excited as she pointed down into the bloodstained face and tried to explain to Philip the reason for that strange and thrilling recognition he had seen between them. From her he looked at Blake. The look in the prisoner's face sent a cold shiver through him. There was no fear in it. It was filled with a deep and undisguised exultation. Then Blake looked at Philip, and laughed outright. "Can't understand her, eh?" he chuckled. "Well, neither can I. But I know what she's trying to tell you. Damned funny, ain't it?" It was impossible for him to keep his eyes from shifting to the door. There was expectancy in that glance. Then his glance shot almost fiercely at Philip. "So you're Philip Raine, of the R. N. M. P., eh? Well, you've got me guessed out. My name is Blake, but the G don't stand for George. If you'll cut the cord off'n my legs so I can stand up or sit down I'll tell you something. I can't do very much damage with my hands hitched the way they are, and I can't talk layin' down cause of my Adam's apple chokin' me." Philip seized the rifle and placed it again in Celie's hands, stationing her once more at the door. "Watch--and listen," he said. He cut the thongs that bound his prisoner's ankles and Blake struggled to his feet. When he fronted Philip the big Colt was covering his heart. "Now--talk!" commanded Philip. "I'm going to give you half a minute to begin telling me what I want to know, Blake. You've brought the Eskimos down. There's no doubt of that. What do you want of this girl, and what have you done with her people?" He had never looked into the eyes of a cooler man than Blake, whose blood-stained lips curled in a sneering smile even as he finished. "I ain't built to be frightened," he said, taking his time about it. "I know your little games an' I've throwed a good many bluffs of my own in my time. You're lyin' when you say you'll shoot, an' you know you are. I may talk and I may not. Before I make up my mind I'm going to give you a bit of brotherly advice. Take that team out there and hit across the Barren--ALONE. Understand? ALONE. Leave the girl here. It's your one chance of missing what happened to--" He grinned and shrugged his huge shoulders. "You mean Anderson--Olaf Anderson--and the others up at Bathurst Inlet?" questioned Philip chokingly. Blake nodded. Philip wondered if the other could hear the pounding of his heart. He had discovered in this moment what the Department had been trying to learn for two years. It was this man--Blake--who was the mysterious white leader of the Kogmollocks, and responsible for the growing criminal record of the natives along Coronation Gulf. And he had just confessed himself the murderer of Olaf Anderson! His finger trembled for an instant against the trigger of his revolver. Then, staring into Blake's face, he slowly lowered the weapon until it hung at his side. Blake's eyes gleamed as he saw what he thought was his triumph. "IT'S your one chance," he urged. "And there ain't no time to lose." Philip had judged his man, and now he prayed for the precious minutes in which to play out his game. The Kogmollocks who had taken up their trail could not be far from the cabin now. "Maybe you're right, Blake," he said hesitatingly. "I think, after her experience with Bram Johnson that she is about willing to return to her father. Where is he?" Blake made no effort to disguise his eagerness. In the droop of Philip's shoulder, the laxness of the hand that held the revolver and the change in his voice Blake saw in his captor an apparent desire to get out of the mess he was in. A glimpse of Celie's frightened face turned for an instant from the door gave weight to his conviction. "He's down the Coppermine--about a hundred miles. So, Bram Johnson--" His eyes were a sudden blaze of fire. "Took care of her until your little rats waylaid him on the trail and murdered him," interrupted Philip. "See here, Blake. You be square with me and I'll be square with you. I haven't been able to understand a word of her lingo and I'm curious to know a thing or two before I go. Tell me who she is, and why you haven't killed her father, and what you're going to do with her and I won't waste another minute." Blake leaned forward until Philip felt the heat of his breath. "What do I WANT of her?" he demanded slowly. "Why, if you'd been five years without sight of a white woman, an' then you woke up one morning to meet an angel like HER on the trail two thousand miles up in nowhere what would you want of her? I was stunned, plumb stunned, or I'd had her then. And after that, if it hadn't been for that devil with his wolves--" "Bram ran away with her just as you were about to get her into your hands," supplied Philip, fighting to save time. "She didn't even know that you wanted her, Blake, so far as I can find out. It's all a mystery to her. I don't believe she's guessed the truth even now. How the devil did you do it? Playing the friend stunt, eh! And keeping yourself in the background while your Kogmollocks did the work? Was that it?" Blake nodded. His face was darkening as he looked at Philip and the light in his eyes was changing to a deep and steady glare. In that moment Philip had failed to keep the exultation out of his voice. It shone in his face. And Blake saw it. A throaty sound rose out of his thick chest and his lips parted in a snarl as there surged through him a realization that he had been tricked. In that interval Philip spoke. "If I never sent up a real prayer to God before I'm sending it now, Blake," he said. "I'm thanking Him that you didn't have time to harm Celie Armin, an' I'm thanking Him that Bram Johnson had a soul in his body in spite of his warped brain and his misshapen carcass. And now I'm going to keep my word. I'm not going to lose another minute. Come!" "You--you mean--" "No, you haven't guessed it. We're not going over the Barren. We're going back to that cabin on the Coppermine, and you're going with us. And listen to this, Blake--listen hard! There may be fighting. If there is I want you to sort of harden yourself to the fact that the first shot fired is going straight through your gizzard. Do I make myself clear? I'll shoot you deader than a salt mackerel the instant one of your little murderers shows up on the trail. So tell this owl-faced heathen here to spread the glad tidings when his brothers come in--and spread it good. Quick about it! I'm not bluffing now." CHAPTER XXII In Philip's eyes Blake saw his match now. And more. For three-quarters of a minute he talked swiftly to the Eskimo. Philip knew that he was giving the Kogmollock definite instructions as to the manner in which his rescue must be accomplished. But he knew also that Blake would emphasize the fact that it must not be in open attack, no matter how numerous his followers might be. He hurried Blake through the door to the sledge and team. The sledge was heavily laden with the meat of a fresh caribou kill and from the quantity of flesh he dragged off into the snow Philip surmised that the cabin would very soon be the rendezvous of a small army of Eskimo. There was probably a thousand pounds of it, Retaining only a single quarter of this he made Celie comfortable and turned his attention to Blake. With babiche cord he re-secured his prisoner with the "manacle-hitch," which gave him free play of one hand and arm--his left. Then he secured the Eskimo's whip and gave it to Blake. "Now--drive!" he commanded. "Straight for the Coppermine, and by the shortest cut. This is as much your race as mine now, Blake. The moment I see a sign of anything wrong you're a dead man!" "And you--are a fool!" gritted Blake. "Good God, what a fool!" "Drive--and shut up!" Blake snapped his whip and gave a short, angry command in Eskimo. The dogs sprang from their bellies to their feet and at another command were off over the trail. From the door of the cabin the Eskimo's little eyes shone with a watery eagerness as he watched them go. Celie caught a last glimpse of him as she looked back and her hands gripped more firmly the rifle which lay across her lap. Philip had given her the rifle and it had piled upon her a mighty responsibility. He had meant that she should use it if the emergency called for action, and that she was to especially watch Blake. Her eyes did not leave the outlaw's broad back as he ran on a dozen paces ahead of the dogs. She was ready for him if he tried to escape, and she would surely fire. Running close to her side Philip observed the tight grip of her hands on the weapon, and saw one little thumb pinched up against the safety ready for instant action. He laughed, and for a moment she looked up at him, flushing suddenly when she saw the adoration in his face. "Blake's right--I'm a fool," he cried down at her in a low voice that thrilled with his worship of her. "I'm a fool for risking you, sweetheart. By going the other way I'd have you forever. They wouldn't follow far into the south, if at all. Mebby you don't realize what we're doing by hitting back to that father of yours. Do you?" She smiled. "And mebby when we get there we'll find him dead," he added. "Dead or alive, everything is up to Blake now and you must help me watch him." He pantomimed this caution by pointing to Blake and the rifle. Then he dropped behind. Over the length of sledge and team he was thirty paces from Blake. At that distance he could drop him with a single shot from the Colt. They were following the trail already made by the meat-laden sledge, and the direction was northwest. It was evident that Blake was heading at least in the right direction and Philip believed that it would be but a short time before they would strike the Coppermine. Once on the frozen surface of the big stream that flowed into the Arctic and their immediate peril of an ambuscade would be over. Blake was surely aware of that. If he had in mind a plan for escaping it must of necessity take form before they reached the river. "Where the forest thinned out and the edge of the Barren crept in Philip ran at Celie's side, but when the timber thickened and possible hiding places for their enemies appeared in the trail ahead he was always close to Blake, with the big Colt held openly in his hand. At these times Celie watched the back trail. From her vantage on the sledge her alert eyes took in every bush and thicket to right and left of them, and when Philip was near or behind her she was looking at least a rifle-shot ahead of Blake. For three-quarters of an hour they had followed the single sledge trail when Blake suddenly gave a command that stopped the dogs. They had reached a crest which overlooked a narrow finger of the treeless Barren on the far side of which, possibly a third of a mile distant, was a dark fringe of spruce timber. Blake pointed toward this timber. Out of it was rising a dark column of resinous smoke. "It's up to you," he said coolly to Philip. "Our trail crosses through that timber--and you see the smoke. I imagine there are about twenty of Upi's men there feeding on caribou. The herd was close beyond when they made the kill. Now if we go on they're most likely to see us, or their dogs get wind of us--and Upi is a bloodthirsty old cutthroat. I don't want that bullet through my gizzard, so I'm tellin' you." Far back in Blake's eyes there lurked a gleam which Philip did not like. Blake was not a man easily frightened, and yet he had given what appeared to be fair warning to his enemy. He came a step nearer, and said in a lower voice: "Raine, that's just ONE of Upi's crowds. If you go on to the cabin we're heading for there'll be two hundred fighting men after you before the day is over, and they'll get you whether you kill me or not. You've still got the chance I gave you back there. Take it--if you ain't tired of life. Give me the girl--an' you hit out across the Barren with the team." "We're going on," replied Philip, meeting the other's gaze steadily. "You know your little murderers, Blake. If any one can get past them without being seen it's you. And you've got to do it. I'll kill you if you don't. The Eskimos may get us after that, but they won't harm HER in your way. Understand? We're going the limit in this game. And I figure you're putting up the biggest stake. I've got a funny sort of feeling that you're going to cash in before we reach the cabin." For barely an instant the mysterious gleam far back in Blake's eyes died out. There was the hard, low note in Philip's voice which carried conviction and Blake knew he was ready to play the hand which he held. With a grunt and a shrug of his shoulders he stirred up the dogs with a crack of his whip and struck out at their head due west. During the next half hour Philip's eyes and ears were ceaselessly on the alert. He traveled close to Blake, with the big Colt in his hand, watching every hummock and bit of cover as they came to it. He also watched Blake and in the end was convinced that in the back of the outlaw's head was a sinister scheme in which he had the utmost confidence in spite of his threats and the fact that they had successfully got around Upi's camp. Once or twice when their eyes happened to meet he caught in Blake's face a contemptuous coolness, almost a sneering exultation which the other could not quite conceal. It filled him with a scarcely definable uneasiness. He was positive that Blake realized he would carry out his threat at the least sign of treachery or the appearance of an enemy, and yet he could not free himself from the uncomfortable oppression that was beginning to take hold of him. He concealed it from Blake. He tried to fight it out of himself. Yet it persisted. It was something which seemed to hover in the air about him--the FEEL of a danger which he could not see. And then Blake suddenly pointed ahead over an open plain and said: "There is the Coppermine." CHAPTER XXIII A cry from Celie turned his gaze from the broad white trail of ice that was the Coppermine, and as he looked she pointed eagerly toward a huge pinnacle of rock that rose like an oddly placed cenotaph out of the unbroken surface of the plain. Blake grunted out a laugh in his beard and his eyes lit up with an unpleasant fire as they rested on her flushed face. "She's tellin' you that Bram Johnson brought her this way," he chuckled. "Bram was a fool--like you!" He seemed not to expect a reply from Philip, but urged the dogs down the slope into the plain. Fifteen minutes later they were on the surface of the river. Philip drew a deep breath of relief, and he found that same relief in Celie's face when he dropped back to her side. As far as they could see ahead of them there was no forest. The Coppermine itself seemed to be swallowed up in the vast white emptiness of the Barren. There could be no surprise attack here, even at night. And yet there was something in Blake's face which kept alive within him the strange premonition of a near and unseen danger. Again and again he tried to shake off the feeling. He argued with himself against the unreasonableness of the thing that had begun to oppress him. Blake was in his power. It was impossible for him to escape, and the outlaw's life depended utterly upon his success in getting them safely to the cabin. It was not conceivable to suppose that Blake would sacrifice his life merely that they might fall into the hands of the Eskimos. And yet-- He watched Blake--watched him more and more closely as they buried themselves deeper in that unending chaos of the north. And Blake, it seemed to him, was conscious of that increasing watchfulness. He increased his speed. Now and then Philip heard a curious chuckling sound smothered in his beard, and after an hour's travel on the snow-covered ice of the river he could no longer dull his vision to the fact that the farther they progressed into the open country, the more confident Blake was becoming. He did not question him. He realized the futility of attempting to force his prisoner into conversation. In that respect it was Blake who held the whip hand. He could lie or tell the truth, according to the humor of his desire. Blake must have guessed this thought in Philip's mind. They were traveling side by side when he suddenly laughed. There was an unmistakable irony in his voice when he said: "It's funny, Raine, that I should like you, ain't it? A man who's mauled you, an' threatened to kill you! I guess it's because I'm so cussed sorry for you. You're heading straight for the gates of hell, an' they're open--wide open." "And you?" This time Blake's laugh was harsher. "I don't count--now," he said. "Since you've made up your mind not to trade me the girl for your life I've sort of dropped out of the game. I guess you're thinking I can hold Upi's tribe back. Well, I can't--not when you're getting this far up in their country. If we split the difference, and you gave me HER, Upi would meet me half way. God, but you've spoiled a nice dream!" "A dream?" Blake uttered a command to the dogs. "Yes--more'n that. I've got an igloo up there even finer than Upi's--all built of whalebone and ships' timbers. Think of HER in that, Raine--with ME! That's the dream you smashed!" "And her father--and the others--" This time there was a ferocious undercurrent in Blake's guttural laugh, as though Philip had by accident reminded him of something that both amused and enraged him. "Don't you know how these Kogmollock heathen look on a father-in-law?" he asked. "He's sort of walkin' delegate over the whole bloomin' family. A god with two legs. The OTHERS? Why, we killed them. But Upi and his heathen wouldn't see anything happen to the old man when they found I was going to take the girl. That's why he's alive up there in the cabin now. Lord, what a mess you're heading into, Raine! And I'm wondering, after you kill me, and they kill you, WHO'LL HAVE THE GIRL? There's a half-breed in the tribe an' she'll probably go to him. The heathen themselves don't give a flip for women, you know. So it's certain to be the half-breed." He surged on ahead, cracking his whip, and crying out to the dogs. Philip believed that in those few moments he had spoken much that was truth. He had, without hesitation and of his own volition, confessed the murder of the companions of Celie's father, and he had explained in a reasonable way why Armin himself had been spared. These facts alone increased his apprehension. Unless Blake was utterly confident of the final outcome he would not so openly expose himself. He was even more on his guard after this. For several hours after his brief fit of talking Blake made no effort to resume the conversation nor any desire to answer Philip when the latter spoke to him. A number of times it struck Philip that he was going the pace that would tire out both man and beast before night. He knew that in Blake's shaggy head there was a brain keenly and dangerously alive, and he noted the extreme effort he was making to cover distance with a satisfaction that was not unmixed of suspicion. By three o'clock in the afternoon they were thirty-five miles from the cabin in which Blake had become a prisoner. All that distance they had traveled through a treeless barren without a sign of life. It was between three and four when they began to strike timber once more, and Philip asked himself if it had been Blake's scheme to reach this timber before dusk. In places the spruce and banskian pine thickened until they formed dark walls of forest and whenever they approached these patches Philip commanded Blake to take the middle of the river. The width of the stream was a comforting protection. It was seldom less than two hundred yards from shore to shore and frequently twice that distance. From the possible ambuscades they passed only a rifle could be used effectively, and whenever there appeared to be the possibility of that danger Philip traveled close to Blake, with the revolver in his hand. The crack of a rifle even if the bullet should find its way home, meant Blake's life. Of that fact the outlaw could no longer have a doubt. For an hour before the gray dusk of Arctic night began to gather about them Philip began to feel the effect of their strenuous pace. Hours of cramped inactivity on the sledge had brought into Celie's face lines of exhaustion. Since middle-afternoon the dogs had dragged at times in their traces. Now they were dead-tired. Blake, and Blake alone, seemed tireless. It was six o'clock when they entered a country that was mostly plain, with a thin fringe of timber along the shores. They had raced for nine hours, and had traveled fifty miles. It was here, in a wide reach of river, that Philip gave the command to halt. His first caution was to secure Blake hand and foot, with his back resting against a frozen snow-hummock a dozen paces from the sledge. The outlaw accepted the situation with an indifference which seemed to Philip more forced than philosophical. After that, while Celie was walking back and forth to produce a warmer circulation in her numbed body, he hurried to the scrub timber that grew along the shore and returned with a small armful of dry wood. The fire he built was small, and concealed as much as possible by the sledge. Ten minutes sufficed to cook the meat for their supper. Then he stamped out the fire, fed the dogs, and made a comfortable nest of bear skins for himself and Celie, facing Blake. The night had thickened until he could make out only dimly the form of the outlaw against the snow-hummock. His revolver lay ready at his side. In that darkness he drew Celie close up into his arms. Her head lay on his breast. He buried his lips in the smothering sweetness of her hair, and her arms crept gently about his neck. Even then he did not take his eyes from Blake, nor for an instant did he cease to listen for other sounds than the deep breathing of the exhausted dogs. It was only a little while before the stars began to fill the sky. The gloom lifted slowly, and out of darkness rose the white world in a cold, shimmering glory. In that starlight he could see the glisten of Celie's hair as it covered them like a golden veil, and once or twice through the space that separated them he caught the flash of a strange fire in the outlaw's eyes. Both shores were visible. He could have seen the approach of a man two hundred yards away. After a little he observed that Blake's head was drooping upon his chest, and that his breathing had become deeper. His prisoner, he believed, was asleep. And Celie, nestling on his breast, was soon in slumber. He alone was awake,--and watching. The dogs, flat on their bellies, were dead to the world. For an hour he kept his vigil. In that time he could not see that Blake moved. He heard nothing suspicious. And the night grew steadily brighter with the white glow of the stars. He held the revolver in his hand now. The starlight played on it in a steely glitter that could not fail to catch Blake's eyes should he awake. And then Philip found himself fighting--fighting desperately to keep awake. Again and again his eyes closed, and he forced them open with an effort. He had planned that they would rest for two or three hours. The two hours were gone when for the twentieth time his eyes shot open, and he looked at Blake. The outlaw had not moved. His head hung still lower on his breast, and again--slowly--irresistibly--exhaustion closed Philip's eyes. Even then Philip was conscious of fighting against the overmastering desire to sleep. It seemed to him that he was struggling for hours, and all that time his subconsciousness was crying out for him to awake, struggling to rouse him to the nearness of a great danger. It succeeded at last. His eyes opened, and he stared in a dazed and half blinded tray toward Blake. His first sensation was one of vast relief that he had awakened. The stars were brighter. The night was still. And there, a dozen paces from him was the snow-hummock. But Blake--Blake-- His heart leapt into his throat. BLAKE WAS GONE! CHAPTER XXIV The shock of the discovery that Blake had escaped brought Philip half to his knees before he thought of Celie. In an instant the girl was awake. His arm had tightened almost fiercely about her. She caught the gleam of his revolver, and in another moment she saw the empty space where their prisoner had been. Swiftly Philip's eyes traveled over the moonlit spaces about them. Blake had utterly disappeared. Then he saw the rifle, and breathed easier. For some reason the outlaw had not taken that, and it was a moment or two before the significance of the fact broke upon him. Blake must have escaped just as he was making that last tremendous fight to rouse himself. He had had no more than time to slink away into the shadows of the night, and had not paused to hazard a chance of securing the weapon that lay on the snow close to Celie. He had evidently believed that Philip was only half asleep, and in the moonlight he must have seen the gleam of the big revolver leveled over his captor's knee. Leaving Celie huddled in her furs, Philip rose to his feet and slowly approached the snow hummock against which he had left his prisoner. The girl heard the startled exclamation that fell from his lips when he saw what had happened. Blake had not escaped alone. Running straight out from behind the hummock was a furrow in the snow like the trail made by an otter. He had seen such furrows before, where Eskimos had wormed their way foot by foot within striking distance of dozing seals. Assistance had come to Blake in that manner, and he could see where--on their hands and knees--two men instead of one had stolen back through the moonlight. Celie came to his side now, gripping the rifle in her hands. Her eyes were wide and filled with frightened inquiry as she looked from the tell-tale trails in the snow into Philip's face. He was glad that she could not question him in words. He slipped the Colt into its holster and took the rifle from her hands. In the emergency which he anticipated the rifle would be more effective. That something would happen very soon he was positive. If one Eskimo had succeeded in getting ahead of his comrades to Blake's relief others of Upi's tribe must be close behind. And yet he wondered, as he thought of this, why Blake and the Kogmollock had not killed him instead of running away. The truth he told frankly to Celie, thankful that she could not understand. "It was the gun," he said. "They thought I had only closed my eyes, and wasn't asleep. If something hadn't kept that gun leveled over my knee--" He tried to smile, knowing that with every second the end might come for them from out of the gray mist of moonlight and shadow that shrouded the shore. "It was a one-man job, sneaking out like that, and there's sure a bunch of them coming up fast to take a hand in the game. It's up to us to hit the high spots, my dear--an' you might pray God to give us time for a start." If he had hoped to keep from her the full horror of their situation, he knew, as he placed her on the sledge, that he had failed. Her eyes told him that. Intuitively she had guessed at the heart of the thing, and suddenly her arms reached up about his neck as he bent over her and against his breast he heard the sobbing cry that she was trying hard to choke back. Under the cloud of her hair her warm, parted lips lay for a thrilling moment against his own, and then he sprang to the dogs. They had already roused themselves and at his command began sullenly to drag their lame and exhausted bodies into trace formation. As the sledge began to move he sent the long lash of the driving whip curling viciously over the backs of the pack and the pace increased. Straight ahead of them ran the white trail of the Coppermine, and they were soon following this with the eagerness of a team on the homeward stretch. As Philip ran behind he made a fumbling inventory of the loose rifle cartridges in the pocket of his coat, and under his breath prayed to God that the day would come before the Eskimos closed in. Only one thing did he see ahead of him now--a last tremendous fight for Celie, and he wanted the light of dawn to give him accuracy. He had thirty cartridges, and it was possible that he could put up a successful running fight until they reached Armin's cabin. After that fate would decide. He was already hatching a scheme in his brain. If he failed to get Blake early in the fight which he anticipated he would show the white flag, demand a parley with the outlaw under pretense of surrendering Celie, and shoot him dead the moment they stood face to face. With Blake out of the way there might be another way of dealing with Upi and his Kogmollocks. It was Blake who wanted Celie. In Upi's eyes there were other things more precious than a woman. The thought revived in him a new thrill of hope. It recalled to him the incident of Father Breault and the white woman nurse who, farther west, had been held for ransom by the Nanamalutes three years ago. Not a hair of the woman's head had been harmed in nine months of captivity. Olaf Anderson had told him the whole story. There had been no white man there--only the Eskimos, and with the Eskimos he believed that he could deal now if he succeeded in killing Blake. Back at the cabin he could easily have settled the matter, and he felt like cursing himself for his shortsightedness. In spite of the fact that he had missed his main chance he began now to see more than hope in a situation that five minutes before had been one of appalling gloom. If he could keep ahead of his enemies until daybreak he had a ninety percent chance of getting Blake. At some spot where he could keep the Kogmollocks at bay and scatter death among them if they attacked he would barricade himself and Celie behind the sledge and call out his acceptance of Blake's proposition to give up Celie as the price of his own safety. He would demand an interview with Blake, and it was then that his opportunity would come. But ahead of him were the leaden hours of the gray night! Out of that ghostly mist of pale moonlight through which the dogs were traveling like sinuous shadows Upi and his tribe could close in on him silently and swiftly, unseen until they were within striking distance. In that event all would be lost. He urged the dogs on, calling them by the names which he had heard Blake use, and occasionally he sent the long lash of his whip curling over their backs. The surface of the Coppermine was smooth and hard. Now and then they came to stretches of glare ice and at these intervals Philip rode behind Celie, staring back into the white mystery of the night out of which they had come. It was so still that the click, dick, click of the dogs' claws sounded like the swift beat of tiny castanets on the ice. He could hear the panting breath of the beasts. The whalebone runners of the sledge creaked with the shrill protest of steel traveling over frozen snow. Beyond these sounds there were no others, with, the exception of his own breath and the beating of his own heart. Mile after mile of the Coppermine dropped behind them. The last tree and the last fringe of bushes disappeared, and to the east, the north, and the west there was no break in the vast emptiness of the great Arctic plain. Ever afterward the memory of that night seemed like a grotesque and horrible dream to him. Looking back, he could remember how the moon sank out of the sky and utter darkness closed them in and how through that darkness he urged on the tired dogs, tugging with them at the lead-trace, and stopping now and then in his own exhaustion to put his arms about Celie and repeat over and over again that everything was all right. After an eternity the dawn came. What there was to be of day followed swiftly, like the Arctic night. The shadows faded away, the shores loomed up and the illimitable sweep of the plain lifted itself into vision as if from out of a great sea of receding fog. In the quarter hour's phenomenon between the last of darkness and wide day Philip stood straining his eyes southward over the white path of the Coppermine. It was Celie, huddled close at his side, who turned her eyes first from the trail their enemies would follow. She faced the north, and the cry that came from her lips brought Philip about like a shot. His first sensation was one of amazement that they had not yet passed beyond the last line of timber. Not more than a third of a mile distant the river ran into a dark strip of forest that reached in from the western plain like a great finger. Then he saw what Celie had seen. Close up against the timber a spiral of smoke was rising into the air. He made out in another moment the form of a cabin, and the look in Celie's staring face told him the rest. She was sobbing breathless words which he could not understand, but he knew that they had won their race, and that it was Armin's place. And Armin was not dead. He was alive, as Blake had said--and it was about breakfast time. He had held up under the tremendous strain of the night until now--and now he was filled with an uncontrollable desire to laugh. The curious thing about it was that in spite of this desire no sound came from his throat. He continued to stare until Celie turned to him and swayed into his arms. In the moment of their triumph her strength was utterly gone. And then the thing happened which brought the life back into him again with a shock. From far up the black finger of timber where it bellied over the horizon of the plain there floated down to them a chorus of sound. It was a human sound--the yapping, wolfish cry of an Eskimo horde closing in on man or beast. They had heard that same cry close on the heels of the fight in the clearing. Now it was made by many voices instead of two or three. It was accompanied almost instantly by the clear, sharp report of a rifle, and a moment later the single shot was followed by a scattering fusillade. After that there was silence. Quickly Philip bundled Celie on the sledge and drove the dogs ahead, his eyes on a wide opening in the timber three or four hundred yards above the river. Five minutes later the sledge drew up in front of the cabin. In that time they heard no further outcry or sound of gunfire, and from the cabin itself there came no sign of life, unless the smoke meant life. Scarcely had the sledge stopped before Celie was on her feet and running to the door. It was locked, and she beat against it excitedly with her little fists, calling a strange name. Standing close behind her, Philip heard a shuffling movement beyond the log walls, the scraping of a bar, and a man's voice so deep that it had in it the booming note of a drum. To it Celie replied with almost a shriek. The door swung inward, and Philip saw a man's arms open and Celie run into them. He was an old man. His hair and beard were white. This much Philip observed before he turned with a sudden, thrill toward the open in the forest. Only he had heard the cry that had come from that direction, and now, looking back, he saw a figure running swiftly over the plain toward the cabin. Instantly he knew that it was a white man. With his revolver in his hand he advanced to meet him and in a brief space they stood face to face. The stranger was a giant of a man. His long, reddish hair fell to his shoulders. He was bare-headed, and panting as if hard run, and his face was streaming with blood. His eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets as he stared at Philip. And Philip, almost dropping his revolver in his amazement, gasped incredulously: "My God, is it you--Olaf Anderson!" CHAPTER XXV Following that first wild stare of uncertainty and disbelief in the big Swede's eyes came a look of sudden and joyous recognition. He was clutching at Philip's hand like a drowning man before he made an effort to speak, still with his eyes on the other's face as if he was not quite sure they had not betrayed him. Then he grinned. There was only one man in the world who could grin like Olaf Anderson. In spite of blood and swollen features it transformed him. Men loved the red-headed Swede because of that grin. Not a man in the service who knew him but swore that Olaf would die with the grin on his face, because the tighter the hole he was in the more surely would the grin be there. It was the grin that answered Philip's question. "Just in time--to the dot," said Olaf, still pumping Philip's hand, and grinning hard. "All dead but me--Calkins, Harris, and that little Dutchman, O'Flynn, Cold and stiff, Phil, every one of them. I knew an investigating patrol would be coming up pretty soon. Been looking for it every day. How many men you got?" He looked beyond Philip to the cabin and the sledge. The grin slowly went out of his face, and Philip heard the sudden catch in his breath. A swift glance revealed the amazing truth to Olaf. He dropped Philip's hand and stepped back, taking him in suddenly from head to foot. "Alone!" "Yes, alone," nodded Philip. "With the exception of Celie Armin. I brought her back to her father. A fellow named Blake is back there a little way with Upi's tribe. We beat them out, but I'm figuring it won't be long before they show up." The grin was fixed in Olaf's face again. "Lord bless us, but it's funny," he grunted. "They're coming on the next train, so to speak, and right over in that neck of woods is the other half of Upi's tribe chasing their short legs off to get me. And the comical part of it is you're ALONE!" His eyes were fixed suddenly on the revolver. "Ammunition?" he demanded eagerly. "And--grub?" "Thirty or forty rounds of rifle, a dozen Colt, and plenty of meat--" "Then into the cabin, and the dogs with us," almost shouted the Swede. From the edge of the forest came the report of a rifle and over their heads went the humming drone of a bullet. They were back at the cabin in a dozen seconds, tugging at the dogs. It cost an effort to get them through the door, with the sledge after them. Half a dozen shots came from the forest. A bullet spattered against the log wall, found a crevice, and something metallic jingled inside. As Olaf swung the door shut and dropped the wooden bar in place Philip turned for a moment toward Celie. She went to him, her eyes shining in the semi-gloom of the cabin, and put her arms up about his shoulders. The Swede, looking on, stood transfixed, and the white-bearded Armin stared incredulously. On her tip-toes Celie kissed Philip, and then turning with her arms still about him said something to the older man that brought an audible gasp from Olaf. In another moment she had slipped away from Philip and back to her father. The Swede was flattening his face against a two inch crevice between the logs when Philip went to his side. "What did she say, Olaf?" he entreated. "That she's going to marry you if we ever get out of this hell of a fix we're in," grunted Olaf. "Pretty lucky dog, I say, if it's true. Imagine Celie Armin marrying a dub like you! But it will never happen. If you don't believe it fill your eyes with that out there!" Philip glued his eyes to the long crevice between the logs and found the forest and the little finger of plain between straight in his vision. The edge of the timber was alive with men. There must have been half a hundred of them, and they were making no effort to conceal themselves. For the first time Olaf began to give him an understanding of the situation. "This is the fortieth day we've held them off," he said, in the quick-cut, business-like voice he might have used in rendering a report to a superior. "Eighty cartridges to begin with and a month's ration of grub for two. All but the three last cartridges went day before yesterday. Yesterday everything quiet. On the edge of starvation this morning when I went out on scout duty and to take a chance at game. Surprised a couple of them carrying meat and had a tall fight. Others hove into action and I had to use two of my cartridges. One left--and they're showing themselves because they know we don't dare to use ammunition at long range. My caliber is thirty-five. What's yours?" "The same," replied Philip quickly, his blood beginning to thrill with the anticipation of battle. "I'll give you half. I'm on duty from Fort Churchill, off on a tangent of my own." He did not take his eyes from the slit in the wall as he told Anderson in a hundred words what had happened since his meeting with Bram Johnson. "And with forty cartridges we'll give 'em a taste of hell," he added. He caught his breath, and the last word half choked itself from his lips. He knew that Anderson was staring as hard as he. Up from the river and over the level sweep of plain between it and the timber came a sledge, followed by a second, a third, and a fourth. In the trail behind the sledges trotted a score and a half of fur-clad figures. "It's Blake!" exclaimed Philip. Anderson drew himself away from the wall. In his eyes burned a curious greenish flame, and his face was set with the hardness of iron. In that iron was molded indistinctly the terrible smile with which he always went into battle or fronted "his man." Slowly he turned, pointing a long arm at each of the four walls of the cabin. "That's the lay of the fight," he said, making his words short and to the point. "They can come at us on all sides, and so I've made a six-foot gun-crevice in each wall. We can't count on Armin for anything but the use of a club if it comes to close quarters. The walls are built of saplings and they've got guns out there that get through. Outside of that we've got one big advantage. The little devils are superstitious about fighting at night, and even Blake can't force them into it. Blake is the man I was after when I ran across Armin and his people. GAD!" There was an unpleasant snap in his voice as he peered through the gun-hole again. Philip looked across the room to Celie and her father as he divided the cartridges. They were both listening, yet he knew they did not understand what he and Olaf were saying. He dropped a half of the cartridges into the right hand pocket of the Swede's service coat, and advanced then toward Armin with both his hands held out in greeting. Even in that tense moment he saw the sudden flash of pleasure in Celie's eyes. Her lips trembled, and she spoke softly and swiftly to her father, looking at Philip. Armin advanced a step, and their hands met. At first Philip had taken him for an old man. Hair and beard were white, his shoulders were bent, his hands were long and thin. But his eyes, sunken deep in their sockets, had not aged with the rest of him. They were filled with the piercing scrutiny of a hawk's as they looked into his own, measuring him in that moment so far as man can measure man. Then he spoke, and it was the light in Celie's eyes, her parted lips, and the flush that came swiftly into her face that gave him an understanding of what Armin was saying. From the end of the cabin Olaf's voice broke in. With it came the metallic working of his rifle as he filled the chamber with cartridges. He spoke first to Celie and Armin in their own language, then to Philip. "It's a pretty safe gamble we'd better get ready for them," he said. "They'll soon begin. Did you split even on the cartridges?" "Seventeen apiece." Philip examined his rifle, and looked through the gun-crevice toward the forest. He heard Olaf tugging at the dogs as he tied them to the bunk posts; he heard Armin say something in a strained voice, and the Swede's unintelligible reply, followed by a quick, low-voiced interrogation from Celie. In the same moment his heart gave a sudden jump. In the fringe of the forest he saw a long, thin line of moving figures--ADVANCING. He did not call out a warning instantly. For a space in which he might have taken a long breath or two his eyes and brain were centered on the moving figures and the significance of their drawn-out formation. Like a camera-flash his eyes ran over the battleground. Half way between the cabin and that fringe of forest four hundred yards away was a "hogback" in the snow, running a curving parallel with the plain. It formed scarcely more than a three or four foot rise in the surface, and he had given it no special significance until now. His lips formed words as the thrill of understanding leapt upon him. "They're moving!" he called to Olaf. "They're going to make a rush for the little ridge between us and the timber. Good God, Anderson, there's an army of them!" "Not more'n a hundred," replied the Swede calmly, taking his place at the gun-crevice. "Take it easy, Phil. This will be good target practice. We've got to make an eighty percent kill as they come across the open. This is mighty comfortable compared with the trick they turned on us when they got Calkins, Harris and O'Flynn. I got away in the night." The moving line had paused just within the last straggling growth of trees, as if inviting the fire of the defenders. Olaf grunted as he looked along the barrel of his rifle. "Strategy," he mumbled. "They know we're shy of ammunition." In the moments of tense waiting Philip found his first opportunity to question the man at his side. First, he said: "I guess mebby you understand, Olaf. We've gone through a hell together, and I love her. If we get out of this she's going to be my wife. She's promised me that, and yet I swear to Heaven I don't know more than a dozen words of her language. What has happened? Who is she? Why was she with Bram Johnson? You know their language, and have been with them--" "They're taking final orders," interrupted Olaf, as if he had not heard. "There's something more on foot than a rush to the ridge. It's Blake's scheming. See those little groups forming? They're going to bring battering-rams, and make a second rush from the ridge." He drew in a deep breath, and without a change in the even tone of his voice, went on: "Calkins, Harris and O'Flynn went down in a good fight. Tell you about that later. Hit seven days' west, and run on the camp of Armin, his girl, and two white men--Russians--guided by two Kogmollocks from Coronation Gulf. You can guess some of the rest. The little devils had Blake and his gang about us two days after I struck them. Bram Johnson and his wolves came along then--from nowhere--going nowhere. The Kogmollocks think Bram is a great Devil, and that each of his wolves is a Devil. If it hadn't been for that they would have murdered us in a hurry, and Blake would have taken the girl. They were queered by the way Bram would squat on his haunches, and stare at her. The second day I saw him mumbling over something, and looked sharp. He had one of Celie's long hairs, and when he saw me he snarled like an animal, as though he feared I would take it from him. I knew what was coming. I knew Blake was only waiting for Bram to get away from his Kogmollocks--so I told Celie to give Bram a strand of her hair. She did--with her own hands, and from that minute the madman watched her like a dog. I tried to talk with him, but couldn't. I didn't seem to be able to make him understand. And then--" The Swede cut himself short. "They're moving, Phil! Take the men with the battering rams--and let them get half way before you fire! ... You see, Bram and his wolves had to have meat. Blake attacked while he was gone. Russians killed--Armin and I cornered, fighting for the girl behind us, when Bram came back like a burst of thunder. He didn't fight. He grabbed the girl, and was off with her like the wind with his wolf-team. Armin and I got into this cabin, and here--forty days and nights--" His voice stopped ominously. A fraction of a second later it was followed by the roar of his rifle, and at the first shot one of Blake's Kogmollocks crumpled up with a grunt half way between the snow-ridge and the forest. CHAPTER XXVI The Eskimos were advancing at a trot now over the open space. Philip was amazed at their number. There were at least a hundred, and his heart choked with a feeling of despair even as he pulled the trigger for his first shot. He had seen the effect of Olaf's shot, and following the Swede's instructions aimed for his man in the nearest group behind the main line. He did not instantly see the result, as a puff of smoke shut out his vision, but a moment later, aiming again, he saw a dark blotch left in the snow. From his end of the crevice Olaf had seen the man go down, and he grunted his approbation. There were five of the groups bearing tree trunks for battering-rams, and on one of these Philip concentrated the six shots in his rifle. Four of the tree-bearers went down, and the two that were left dropped their burden and joined those ahead of them. Until Philip stepped back to reload his gun he had not noticed Celie. She was close at his side, peering through the gun-hole at the tragedy out on the plain. Once before he had been astounded by the look in her face when they had been confronted by great danger, and as his fingers worked swiftly in refilling the magazine of his rifle he saw it there again. It was not fear, even now. It was a more wonderful thing than that. Her wide-open eyes glowed with a strange, dark luster; in the center of each of her cheeks was a vivid spot of color, and her lips were parted slightly, so that he caught the faintest gleam of her teeth. Wonderful as a fragile flower she stood there with her eyes upon him, her splendid courage and her faith in him flaming within her like a fire. And then he heard Anderson's voice: "They're behind the ridge. We got eight of them." In half a dozen places Philip had seen where bullets had bored the way through the cabin, and leaning his gun against the wall, he sprang to Celie and almost carried her behind the bunk that was built against the logs. "You must stay here," he cried. "Do you understand! HERE!" She nodded, and smiled. It was a wonderful smile--a flash of tenderness telling him that she knew what he was saying, and that she would obey him. She made no effort to detain him with her hands, but in that moment--if life had been the forfeit--Philip would have stolen the precious time in which to take her in his arms. For a space he held her close to him, his lips crushed to hers, and faced the wall again with the throb of her soft breast still beating against his heart. He noticed Armin standing near the door, his hand resting on a huge club which, in turn, rested on the floor. Calmly he was waiting for the final rush. Olaf was peering through the gun-hole again. And then came what he had expected--a rattle of fire from the snow-ridge. The PIT-PIT-PIT of bullets rained against the cabin in a dull tattoo. Through the door came a bullet, sending a splinter close to Armin's face. Almost in the same instant a second followed it, and a third came through the crevice so close to Philip that he felt the hissing breath of it in his face. One of the dogs emitted a wailing howl and flopped among its comrades in uncanny convulsions. Olaf staggered back, and faced Philip. There was no trace of the fighting grin in his face now. It was set like an iron mask. "GET DOWN!" he shouted. "Do you hear, GET DOWN!" He dropped on his knees, crying out the warning to Armin in the other's language. "They've got enough guns to make a sieve of this kennel if their ammunition holds out--and the lower logs are heaviest. Flatten yourself out until they stop firing, with your feet toward 'em, like this," and he stretched himself out on the floor, parallel with the direction of fire. In place of following the Swede's example Philip ran to Celie. Half way a bullet almost got him, flipping the collar of his shirt. He dropped beside her and gathered her up completely in his arms, with his own body between her and the fire. A moment later he thanked God for the protection of the bunk. He heard the ripping of a bullet through the saplings and caught distinctly the thud of it as the spent lead dropped to the floor. Celie's head was close on his breast, her eyes were on his face, her soft lips so near he could feel their breath. He kissed her, unbelieving even then that the end was near for her. It was monstrous--impossible. Lead was finding its way into the cabin like raindrops. He heard the Swede's voice again, crying thickly from the floor: "Hug below the lower log. You've got eight inches. If you rise above that they'll get you." He repeated the warning to Armin. As if to emphasize his words there came a howl of agony from another of the dogs. Still closer Philip held the girl to him. Her hands had crept convulsively to his neck. He crushed his face down against hers, and waited. It came to him suddenly that Blake must be reckoning on this very protection which he was giving Celie. He was gambling on the chance that while the male defenders of the cabin would be wounded or killed Celie would be sheltered until the last moment from their fire. If that was so, the firing would soon cease until Blake learned results. Scarcely had he made this guess when the fusillade ended. Instead of rifle-fire there came a sudden strange howl of voices and Olaf sprang to his feet. Philip had risen, when the Swede's voice came to him in a choking cry. Prepared for the rush he had expected, Olaf was making an observation through the gun-crevice. Suddenly, without turning his head, he yelled back at them: "Good God--it's Bram--Bram Johnson!" Even Celie realized the thrilling import of the Swede's excited words. BRAM JOHNSON! She was only a step behind Philip when he reached the wall. With him she looked out. Out of that finger of forest they were coming--Bram and his wolves! The pack was free, spreading out fan-shape, coming like the wind! Behind them was Bram--a wild and monstrous figure against the whiteness of the plain, bearing in his hand a giant club. His yell came to them. It rose above all other sound, like the cry of a great beast. The wolves came faster, and then-- The truth fell upon those in the cabin with a suddenness that stopped the beating of their hearts. Bram Johnson and his wolves were attacking the Eskimos! From the thrilling spectacle of the giant mad-man charging over the plain behind his ravenous beasts Philip shifted his amazed gaze to the Eskimos. They were no longer concealing themselves. Palsied by a strange terror, they were staring at the onrushing horde and the shrieking wolf-man. In those first appalling moments of horror and stupefaction not a gun was raised or a shot fired. Then there rose from the ranks of the Kogmollocks a strange and terrible cry, and in another moment the plain between the forest and the snow-ridge was alive with fleeing creatures in whose heavy brains surged the monstrous thought that they were attacked not by man and beast, but by devils. And in that same moment it seemed that Bram Johnson and his wolves were among them. From man to man the beasts leapt, driven on by the shrieking voice of their master; and now Philip saw the giant mad-man overtake one after another of the running figures, and saw the crushing force of his club as it fell. Celie swayed back from the wall and stood with her hands to her face. The Swede sprang past her, flung back the bar to the door, and opened it. Philip was a step behind him. Prom the front of the cabin they began firing, and man after man crumpled down under their shots. If Bram and his wolves sensed the shooting in the ferocity of their blood-lust they paid no more attention to it than to the cries for mercy that rose chokingly out of the throats of their enemies. In another sixty seconds the visible part of it was over. The last of the Kogmollocks disappeared into the edge of the forest. After them went the wolf-man and his pack. Philip faced his companion. His gun was hot--and empty. The old grin was in Olaf's face. In spite of it he shuddered. "We won't follow," he said. "Bram and his wolves will attend to the trimmings, and he'll come back when the job is finished. Meanwhile we'll get a little start for home, eh? I'm tired of this cabin. Forty days and nights--UGH! it was HELL. Have you a spare pipeful of tobacco, Phil? If you have--let's see, where did I leave off in that story about Princess Celie and the Duke of Rugni?" "The--the--WHAT?" "Your tobaeco, Phil!" In a dazed fashion Philip handed his tobacco pouch to the Swede. "You said--Princess Celie--the Duke of Rugni--" Olaf nodded as he stuffed his pipe bowl. "That's it. Armin is the Duke of Rugni, whatever Rugni is. He was chased off to Siberia a good many years ago, when Celie was a kid, that somebody else could get hold of the Dukedom. Understand? Millions in it, I suppose. He says some of Rasputin's old friends were behind it, and that for a long time he was kept in the dungeons of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, with the Neva River running over his head. The friends he had, most of them in exile or chased out of the country, thought he was dead, and some of these friends were caring for Celie. Just after Rasputin was killed, and before the Revolution broke out, they learned Armin was alive and dying by inches somewhere up on the Siberian coast. Celie's mother was Danish--died almost before Celie could remember; but some of her relatives and a bunch of Russian exiles in London framed up a scheme to get Armin back, chartered a ship, sailed with Celie on board, and--" Olaf paused to light his pipe. "And they found the Duke," he added. "They escaped with him before they learned of the Revolution, or Armin could have gone home with the rest of the Siberian exiles and claimed his rights. For a lot of reasons they put him aboard an American whaler, and the whaler missed its plans by getting stuck in the ice for the winter up in Coronation Gulf. After that they started out with dogs and sledge and guides. There's a lot more, but that's the meat of it, Phil. I'm going to leave it to you to learn Celie's language and get the details first-hand from her. But she's a right enough princess, old man. And her Dad's a duke. It's up to you to Americanize 'em. Eh, what's that?" Celie had come from the cabin and was standing at Philip's side, looking up into his face, and the light which Olaf saw unhidden in her eyes made him laugh softly: "And you've got the job half done, Phil. The Duke may go back and raise the devil with the people who put him in cold storage, but Lady Celie is going to like America. Yessir, she's going to like it better'n any other place on the face of the earth!" It was late that afternoon, traveling slowly southward over the trail of the Coppermine, when they heard far behind them the wailing cry of Bram Johnson's wolves. The sound came only once, like the swelling surge of a sudden sweep of wind, yet when they camped at the beginning of darkness Philip was confident the madman and his pack were close behind them. Utter exhaustion blotted out the hours for Celie and himself, while Olaf, buried in two heavy Eskimo coats he had foraged from the field of battle, sat on guard through the night. Twice in the stillness of his long vigil he heard strange cries. Once it was the cry of a beast. The second time it was that of a man. The second day, with dogs refreshed, they traveled faster, and it was this night that they camped in the edge of timber and built a huge fire. It was such a fire as illumined the space about them for fifty paces or more, and it was into this light that Bram Johnson stalked, so suddenly and so noiselessly that a sharp little cry sprang from Celie's lips, and Olaf and Philip and the Duke of Rugni stared in wide-eyed amazement. In his right hand the wolf-man bore a strange object. It was an Eskimo coat, tied into the form of a bag, and in the bottom of this improvision was a lump half the size of a water pail. Bram seemed oblivious of all presence but that of Celie. His eyes were on her alone as he advanced and with a weird sound in his throat deposited the bundle at her feet. In another moment he was gone. The Swede rose slowly from where he was sitting, and speaking casually to Celie, took the wolf-man's gift up in his hands. Philip observed the strange look in his face as he turned his back to Celie in the firelight and opened the bag sufficiently to get a look inside. Then he walked out into the darkness, and a moment later returned without the bundle, and with a laugh apologized to Celie for his action. "No need of telling her what it was," he said to Philip then. "I explained that it was foul meat Bram had brought in as a present. As a matter of fact it was Blake's head. You know the Kogmollocks have a pretty habit of pleasing a friend by presenting him with the head of a dead enemy. Nice little package for her to have opened, eh?" After all, there are some very strange happenings in life, and the adventurers of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police come upon their share. The case of Bram Johnson, the mad wolf-man of the Upper Country, happened to be one of them, and filed away in the archives of the Department is a big envelope filled with official and personal documents, signed and sworn to by various people. There is, for instance, the brief and straightforward deposition of Corporal Olaf Anderson, of the Fort Churchill Division, and there is the longer and more detailed testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Raine and the Duke of Rugni; and attached to these depositions is a copy of an official decision pardoning Bram Johnson and making of him a ward of the great Dominion instead of a criminal. He is no longer hunted. "Let Bram Johnson alone" is the word that had gone forth to the man-hunters of the Service. It is a wise and human judgment. Bram's country is big and wild. And he and his wolves still hunt there under the light of the moon and the stars. THE END 
5895	----	THE HONOR OF THE BIG SNOWS By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD Author of "The Danger Trail," "The Courage of Captain Plum," etc. NEW YORK 1911 CHAPTER I THE MUSIC "Listen, John--I hear music--" The words came in a gentle whisper from the woman's lips. One white, thin hand lifted itself weakly to the rough face of the man who was kneeling beside her bed, and the great dark eyes from which he had hidden his own grew luminously bright for a moment, as she whispered again: "John--I hear--music--" A sigh fluttered from her lips. The man's head drooped until it rested very near to her bosom. He felt the quiver of her hand against his cheek, and in its touch there was something which told John Cummins that the end of all life had come for him and for her. His heart beat fiercely, and his great shoulders shook with the agony that was eating at his soul. "Yes, it is the pretty music, my Mélisse," he murmured softly, choking back his sobs. "It is the pretty music in the skies." The hand pressed more tightly against his face. "It's not the music in the skies, John. It is real--REAL music that I hear--" "It's the sky music, my sweet Mélisse! Shall I open the door so that we can hear it better?" The hand slipped from his cheek. Cummins lifted his head, slowly straightening his great shoulders as he looked down upon the white face, from which even the flush of fever was disappearing, as he had seen the pale glow of the northern sun fade before a thickening snow. He stretched his long, gaunt arms straight up to the low roof of the cabin, and for the first time in his life he prayed--prayed to the God who had made for him this world of snow and ice and endless forest very near to the dome of the earth, who had given him this woman, and who was now taking her from him. When he looked again at the woman, her eyes were open, and there glowed in them still the feeble fire of a great love. Her lips, too, pleaded with him in their old, sweet way, which always meant that he was to kiss them, and stroke her hair, and tell her again that she was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. "My Mélisse!" He crushed his face to her, his sobbing breath smothering itself in the soft masses of her hair, while her arms rose weakly and fell around his neck. He heard the quick, gasping struggle for breath within her bosom, and, faintly again, the words: "It--is--the--music--of--my--people!" "It is the music of the angels in the skies, my sweet Mélisse! It is OUR music. I will open the door." The arms had slipped from his shoulders. Gently he ran his rough fingers through the loose glory of the woman's hair, and stroked her face as softly as he might have caressed the cheek of a sleeping child. "I will open the door, Mélisse." His moccasined feet made no sound as he moved across the little room which was their home. At the door he paused and listened; then he opened it, and the floods of the white night poured in upon him as he stood with his eyes turned to where the cold, pale flashes of the aurora were playing over the pole. There came to him the hissing, saddening song of the northern lights--a song of vast, unending loneliness, which they two had come to know as the music of the skies. Beyond that mystery-music there was no sound. To the eyes of John Cummins there was no visible movement of life. And yet he saw signs of it--signs which drew his breath from him in choking gulps, and which sent him out into the night, so that the woman might not hear. It was an hour past midnight at the post, which had the Barren Lands at its back door. It was the hour of deep slumber for its people; but to-night there was no sleep for any of them. Lights burned dimly in the few rough log homes. The company's store was aglow, and the factor's office, a haven for the men of the wilderness, shot one gleaming yellow eye out into the white gloom. The post was awake. It was waiting. It was listening. It was watching. As the woman's door opened, wide and brimful of light, a door of one of the log houses opened, and then another, and out into the night, like dim shadows, trod the moccasined men from the factor's office, and stood there waiting for the word of life or death from John Cummins. In their own fashion these men, who, without knowing it, lived very near to the ways of God, sent mute prayers into the starry heavens that the most beautiful thing in the world might yet be spared to them. It was just two summers before that this beautiful thing had come into Cummins' life, and into the life of the post. 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 Mélisse thither as his bride. Seventeen rough hearts had welcomed her. They had assembled about that little cabin in which the light was shining now, speechless in their adoration of this woman who had come among them, their caps in their hands, their faces shining, their 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 strictly 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 twelvemonth or so. Melisse's hair was brown and soft, and it shone with a sunny glory that reached far back into their conception of things dreamed of but never seen. Her eyes were as blue as the early wild flowers 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 Vandyke. 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, for the devotion of these men was a great, passionless love unhinting of sin. Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to it when they could, and were the happiest pair in all that vast Northland. 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 God and of a home would have done. In her spare hours she began to teach the half-dozen wild little children about the post, and every Sunday she 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 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 degree and the sixtieth--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. A few days before there had come a wonderful event in the history of the company's post. A new life was born into the little cabin of Cummins and his wife. After this the silent, wordless worship of their people was filled with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother! She was one of them now, an indissoluble part of their existence--a part of it as truly as the strange lights for ever 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! Then had come the sudden change, and the gloom, that brought with it the shadow of death, fell like a pall upon the post, stifling its life, and bringing with it a grief that those who lived there had never known before. There came to them no word from Cummins now. He stood for a moment before his lighted door, and then went back, and the word passed softly from one to another that the most beautiful thing in the world was still living her sweet life in that little cabin at the end of the clearing. "You hear the music in the skies--now, my Mélisse?" whispered the man, kneeling beside her again. "It is very pretty to-night!" "It was not that," repeated the woman. She attempted to stroke his face, but Cummins saw nothing of the effort, for the hand lay all but motionless. He saw nothing of the fading softness that glowed in the big, loving eyes, for his own eyes were blinded by a hot film. And the woman saw nothing of the hot film, so torture was saved them both. But suddenly the woman quivered, and Cummins heard a thrilling sound. "It is the music!" she panted. "John, John, it is--the music--of--my--people!" The man straightened himself, his face turned to the open door. He heard it now! Was it the blessed angels coming for his Mélisse? He rose, a sobbing note in his throat, and went, his arms stretched out, to meet them. He had never heard a sound like that--never in all his life in this endless wilderness. He went from the door out into the night, and, step by step, through the snow toward the black edge of the spruce forest. The sobs fell chokingly from his lips, and his arms were still reaching out to greet this messenger of the God of his beloved; for Cummins was a man of the wild and mannerless ways of a savage world, and he knew not what to make of this sweetness that came to them from out of the depths of the black forest. "My Mélisse! My Mélisse!" he sobbed. A figure came from the shadows, and with the figure came the music, sweet and soft and low. John Cummins stopped and turned his face straight up to the sky. His heart died within him. The music ceased, and when he looked again the figure was close to him, staggering as it walked, and a face white and thin and starved came with it. It was a boy's face. "For the museek of the violon--somet'ing to eat!" he heard, and the thin figure swayed and fell almost into his arms. The voice came weak again. "Thees is Jan--Jan Thoreau--and his violon--" The woman's bloodless face and her great staring dark eyes greeted them as they entered the cabin. As the man knelt beside her again, and lifted her head against his breast, she whispered once more: "It is the--music--of my people--the violin!" John Cummins turned his head. "Play!" he breathed. "Ah, the white angel is seek--ver' seek," murmured Jan, and he drew his bow gently across the strings of his violin. From the instrument there came something so soft and sweet that John Cummins closed his eyes as he held the woman against his breast and listened. Not until he opened them again, and felt a strange chill against his cheek, did he know that his beloved's soul had gone from him on the gentle music of Jan Thoreau's violin. CHAPTER II MUKEE'S STORY For many minutes after the last gentle breath had passed from the woman's lips, Jan Thoreau played softly upon his violin. It was the great, heart-broken sob of John Cummins that stopped him. As tenderly as if she had fallen into a sweet sleep from which he feared to awaken her, the man unclasped his arms and lowered his wife's head to the pillow; and with staring black eyes Jan crushed his violin against his ragged breast and watched him as he smoothed back the shimmering hair and looked long and hungrily into the still, white face. Cummins turned to him, and, in the dim light of the cabin, their eyes met. It was then that Jan Thoreau knew what had happened. He forgot his starvation. He crushed his violin closer, and whispered to himself: "The white angel ees--gone!" Cummins rose from the bedside, slowly, like a man who had suddenly grown old. His moccasined feet dragged as he went to the door. They stumbled when he went out into the pale star-glow of the night. Jan followed, swaying weakly, for the last of his strength had gone in the playing of the violin. Midway in the cabin he paused, and his eyes glowed with a wild, strange grief as he gazed down upon the still face of Cummins' wife, beautiful in death as it had been in life, and with the sweet softness of life still lingering there. Some time, ages and ages ago, he had known such a face, and had felt the great clutching love of it. Something drew him to where John Cummins had knelt, and he fell upon his knees and gazed hungrily and longingly where John Cummins had gazed. His pulse was beating feebly, the weakness of seven days' starvation blurred his eyes, and unconsciously he sank over the bed and one of his thin hands touched the soft sweep of the woman's hair. A stifled cry fell from him as he jerked himself rigidly erect; and as if for the desecration of that touch there was but one way of forgiveness, he drew his violin half to his shoulder, and for a few moments played so softly that none but the spirit of the woman and himself could hear. Cummins had partly closed the door after him; but watchers had seen the opening of it. A door opened here, and another there, and paths of yellow light flashed over the hard-trodden snow as shadowy life came forth to greet what message he brought from the little cabin. Beyond those flashes of light there was no other movement, and no sound. Dark figures stood motionless. The lonely howl of a sledge-dog ended in a wail of pain as some one kicked it into terrified silence. The hollow cough of Mukee's father was smothered in the thick fur of his cap as he thrust his head from his little shack in the edge of the forest. A score of eyes watched Cummins as he came out into the snow, and the rough, loyal hearts of those who looked throbbed in fearful anticipation of the word he might be bringing to them. Sometimes a nation ceases to breathe in the last moments of its dying chief, and the black wings of calamity gather over its people, enshrouding them in a strange gloom and a stranger fear; and so, because the greatest of all tragedies had come into their little world, Cummins' people were speechless in their grief and their waiting for the final word. And when the word came to them at last, and passed from lip to lip, and from one grim, tense face to another, the doors closed again, and the lights went out one by one, until there remained only the yellow eye of the factor's office and the faint glow from the little cabin in which John Cummins knelt with his sobbing face crushed close to that of his dead. There was no one who noticed Jan Thoreau when he came through the door of the factor's office. His coat of caribou-skin was in tatters. His feet thrust themselves from the toes of his moccasins. His face was so thin and white that it shone with the pallor of death from its frame of straight dark hair. His eyes gleamed like black diamonds. The madness of hunger was in him. An hour before, death had been gripping at his throat, when he stumbled upon the lights of the post, That night he would have died in the deep snows. Wrapped in its thick coat of bearskin he clutched his violin to his breast, and sank down in a ragged heap beside the hot stove. His eyes traveled about him in fierce demand. There is no beggary among these strong-souled men of the far North, and Jan's lips did not beg. He unwrapped the bearskin, and whispered: "For the museek of the violon--somet'ing to eat!" He played, even as the words fell from him, but only for a moment--for the bow slipped from his nerveless grip and his head sank forward upon his breast. In the half-Cree's eyes there was something of the wild beauty that gleamed in Jan's. For an instant those eyes had met in the savage recognition of blood; and when Jan's head fell weakly, and his violin slipped to the floor, Mukee lifted him in his strong arms and carried him to the shack in the edge of the spruce and balsam. And there was no one who noticed Jan the next day--except Mukee. He was fed. His frozen blood grew warm. As life returned, he felt more and more the pall of gloom that had settled over this spark of life in the heart of the wilderness. He had seen the woman, in life and in death, and he, too, loved her and grieved that she was no more. He said nothing; he asked nothing; but he saw the spirit of adoration in the sad, tense faces of the men. He saw it in the terror-stricken eyes of the wild little children who had grown to worship Cummins' wife. He read it in the slinking stillness of the dogs, in the terrible, pulseless quiet that had settled about him. It was not hard for Jan to understand, for he, too, worshiped the memory of a white, sweet face like the one that he had seen in the cabin. He knew that this worship at Lac Bain was a pure worship, for the honor of the big snows was a part of his soul. It was his religion, and the religion of these others who lived four hundred miles or more from a southern settlement. It meant what civilization could not understand--freezing and slow starvation rather than theft, and respect for the tenth commandment above all other things. It meant that up here, under the cold chill of the northern skies, things were as God meant them to be, and that a few of His creatures could live in a love that was neither possession nor sin. A year after Cummins brought his wife into the North, a man came to the post from Fort Churchill, on Hudson's Bay. He was an Englishman, belonging to the home office of the Hudson's Bay Company in London. He brought with him something new, as the woman had brought something new; only in this instance it was an element of life which Cummins' people could not understand. It breathed of tragedy from the first, to the men of the post. To the Englishman, on the other hand, it promised to be but an incident--a passing adventure in pleasure. Here again was that difference of viewpoint--the eternity of difference between the middle and the end of the earth. Cummins was away for a month on a trap-line that went into the Barren Lands. At these times the woman fell as a heritage to those who remained, and they watched over her as a parent might guard its child. Yet the keenest eyes would not have perceived that this was so. With Cummins gone, the tragedy progressed swiftly toward finality. 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 ways of civilization he sought to breathe its fragrance. In the days and weeks that followed, he talked a great deal, when heated by the warmth of the box stove and by his own thoughts; and this was because he had not yet measured the hearts of Cummins' people. And 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 new-comer, yet ever tempting him with that sweetness which she gave to all alike. As yet there was no suspicion in her soul. She accepted the Englishman's friendship, for he was a stranger among her people. She did not hear the false note, she saw no step that promised evil. Only the men at the post heard, and saw, and understood. 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. If she smiled upon the stranger 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 watched. One day something happened. Cummins' wife came into the company's store; and a quick flush shot into her cheeks, and the glitter of blue diamonds into her eyes, when she saw the stranger 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 wife and womanhood, the living, breathing essence of all that was beautiful in her people's honor of the big snows. That night Mukee, the half-Cree, slunk around in the edge of the forest to see that all was well in Cummins' little home. Once Mukee had suffered a lynx-bite that went clear to the bone, and the woman had saved his hand. After that, the savage in him was enslaved to her like an invisible spirit. He crouched for a few minutes in the snow, looking at the pale filter of light that came through a hole in the curtain of the woman's window; and as he looked something came between him and the light. Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a sneaking 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 woman's home. With the caution of a lynx, his head close to the snow, he peered around the logs. It was the Englishman who stood looking through the tear in that curtained window. Mukee's moccasined feet made no sound. His hand fell as gently as a child's upon the stranger's arm. "Thees is not the honor of the beeg snows," he whispered. "Come!" A sickly pallor filled the other man's face; but Mukee'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. Mukee's teeth gleamed back. The Englishman chuckled. Then Mukee'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. The next day a messenger behind six dogs set out for Fort Churchill, with word for the company's home office that the Englishman had died in the big snow--which was true. Mukee told this to Jan, for there was the bond of blood between them. It was a painting of life, and love, and purity. Deep down in the loneliness of his heart, Jan Thoreau, in his own simple way, thanked the great God that it had been given to him to play his violin as the woman died. CHAPTER III LITTLE MELISSE The passing of Cummins' wife was as quiet as had been her coming. With bare heads, their shaggy hair falling wildly about their faces, their lips set tight to choke back their grief, the few at the post went, one by one, into the little cabin, and gazed for the last time upon her face. There was but one sound other than the gentle tread of their moccasined feet, and that was a catching, sobbing moan that fell from the thick gray beard of Williams, the old factor. After that they carried her to where a clearing had been cut in the edge of the forest; and at the foot of a giant spruce, towering sentinel-like to the sky, they lowered her into the frozen earth. Gaspingly, Williams stumbled over the words on a ragged page that had been torn from a Bible. The rough men who stood about him bowed their wild heads upon their breasts, and sobs broke from them. At last Williams stopped his reading, stretched his long arms above his head, and cried chokingly: "The great God keep Mees Cummins!" As the earth fell, there came from the edge of the forest the low, sweet music of Jan Thoreau's violin. No man in all the world could have told what he played, for it was the music of Jan's soul, wild and whispering of the winds, sweetened by some strange inheritance that had come to him with the picture which he carried in his throbbing heart. He played until only the tall spruce and John Cummins stood over the lone grave. When he stopped, the man turned to him, and they went together to the little cabin where the woman had lived. There was something new in the cabin now--a tiny, white, breathing thing over which an Indian woman watched. The boy stood beside John Cummins, looking down upon it, and trembling. "Ah," he whispered, his great eyes glowing. "It ees the LEETLE white angel!" "It is the little Mélisse," replied the man. He dropped upon his knees, with his sad face close to the new life that was to take the place of the one that had just gone out. Jan felt something tugging in a strange way at his heart, and he, too, fell upon his knees beside John Cummins in this first worship of the child. From this hour of their first kneeling before the little life in the cabin, something sprang up between Jan Thoreau and John Cummins which it would have been hard for man to break. Looking up after many moments' contemplation of the little Mélisse, Jan gazed straight into Cummins' face, and whispered softly the word which in Cree means "father." This was Jan's first word for Mélisse. When he looked back, the baby was wriggling and kicking as he had seen tiny wolf-whelps wriggle and kick before their eyes were open. His beautiful eyes laughed. As cautiously as if he were playing with hot iron, he reached out a thin hand, and when one of his fingers suddenly fell upon something very soft and warm, he jerked it back as quickly as if he had been burned. That night, when Jan picked up his violin to go back to Mukee's cabin, Cummins put his two big hands on the boy's shoulders and said: "Jan, who are you, and where did you come from?" Jan stretched his arm vaguely to the north. "Jan Thoreau," he replied simply. "Thees is my violon. We come alone through the beeg snow." Cummins stared as if he saw a wonderful picture in the boy's eyes. He dropped his hands, and walked to the door. When they stood alone outside, he pointed up to the stars, and to the mist-like veil of silver light that the awakening aurora was spreading over the northern skies. "Get your bearings, and tell me again where you came from, Jan!" Unhesitatingly the boy pointed into the north. "We starve seven day in the beeg snow. My violon keep the wolf off at night." "Look again, Jan! Didn't you come from there, or there, or there?" Cummins turned slowly, facing first to the east and Hudson's Bay, then to the south, and lastly to the west. There was something more than curiosity in the tense face that came back in staring inquiry to Jan Thoreau. The boy hunched his shoulders, and his eyes flashed. "It ees not lie that Jan Thoreau and hees violon come through the beeg snow," he replied softly. "It ees not lie!" There was more than gentleness in John Cummins' touch now. Jan could not understand it, but he yielded to it, and went back into the cabin. There was more than friendship in Cummins' eyes when he placed his hands again upon the boy's shoulders, and Jan could not understand that. "There is plenty of room here--now," said Cummins huskily. "Will you stay with the little Mélisse and me?" "With the leetle Mélisse!" gasped the boy. Softly he sped to the tiny cot and knelt beside it, his thin shoulders hunched over, his long black hair shining lustrously in the lamp-glow, his breath coming in quick, sobbing happiness. "I--I--stay with the leetle white angel for ever and ever!" he whispered, his words meant only for the unhearing ears of the child. "Jan Thoreau will stay, yes--and hees violon! I give it to you--and ze museek!" He laid his precious violin across the foot of the cot. CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM In the days that followed, there came other things which Jan could not understand, and which he made no great effort to understand. He talked little, even to Cummins. He listened, and his eyes would answer, or he would reply with strange, eery little hunches of his shoulders, which ruffled up his hair. To the few simple souls at the post, he brought with him more than his starved body from out of the unknown wilderness. This was the chief cause of those things which he could not understand. No man learned more of him than had Cummins. Even to Mukee, his history was equally simple and short. Always he said that he came from out of the north--which meant the Barren Lands; and the Barren Lands meant death. No man had ever come across them as Jan had come; and at another time, and under other circumstances, Cummins and his people would have believed him mad. But others had listened to that strange, sweet music that came to them from out of the forest on the night when the woman died, and they, like Cummins, had been stirred by thrilling thoughts. They knew little of God, as God is preached; but they knew a great deal about Him in other ways. They knew that Jan Thoreau had come like a messenger from the angels, that the woman's soul had gone out to meet him, and that she had died sweetly on John Cummins' breast while he played. So the boy, with his thin, sensitive face and his great, beautiful eyes, became a part of what the woman had left behind for them to love. As a part of her they accepted him, without further questioning as to who he was or whence he came. In a way, he made up for her loss. The woman had brought something new and sweet into their barren lives, and he brought something new and sweet--the music of his violin. He played for them in the evening, in the factor's office; and at these times they knew that Cummins' wife was very near to them and that she was speaking to them through the things which Jan Thoreau played. Music had long passed out of their lives. Into some, indeed, it had never come. Years ago, Williams had been at a post where there was an accordion. Cummins had heard music when he went down to civilization for his wife, more than two years ago. To the others it was mystery which stirred them to the depths of their souls, and which revealed to them many things that had long been hidden in the dust of the past. These were hours of triumph for Jan in the factor's office. Perched on a box, with his back to the wall, his head thrown back, his black eyes shining, his long hair giving to his face a half savage beauty, he was more than king to the grim-visaged men about him. They listened, movelessly, soundlessly; and when he stopped there was still neither move nor sound until he had wrapped his violin in its bear-skin and had returned to John Cummins and the little Mélisse. Jan understood the silence, and took it for what it meant. But it was the audience in the little cabin that Jan liked best, and, most of all, he loved to have the little Mélisse alone. As the days of early spring trapping approached, and the wilderness for a hundred miles around the post was crisscrossed with the trails of the Cree and Chippewayan fur-seekers, Cummins was absent for days at a time, strengthening the company's friendships, and bargaining for the catch that would be coming to market about eight weeks later. This was a year of intense rivalry, for the Révillons, French competitors of the company, had established a post two hundred miles to the west, and rumor spread that they were to give sixty pounds of flour to the company's forty, and four feet of cloth to the yard. This meant action among Williams and his people, and the factor himself plunged into the wilderness. Mukee, the half-Cree, went among his scattered tribesmen along the edge of the barrens, stirring them by the eloquence of new promises and by fierce condemnation of the interlopers to the west. Old Per-ee, with a strain of Eskimo in him, went boldly behind his dogs to meet the little black people from farther north, who came down after foxes and half-starved polar bears that had been carried beyond their own world on the ice-floes of the preceding spring. Young Williams, the factor's son, followed after Cummins, and the rest of the company's men went into the south and east. The exodus left desolate lifelessness at the post. The windows of the fireless cabins were thick with clinging frost. There was no movement in the factor's office. The dogs were gone, and wolves and lynx sniffed closer each night. In the oppression of this desertion, the few Indian and half-breed children kept indoors, and Williams' Chippewayan wife, fat and lazy, left the company's store securely locked. In this silence and lifelessness Jan Thoreau felt a new and ever-increasing happiness. To him the sound of life was a thing vibrant with harshness; quiet--the dead, pulseless quiet of lifelessness--was beautiful. He dreamed in it, and it was then that his fingers discovered new things in his violin. He often sent Maballa, the Indian woman who cared for Mélisse, to gossip with Williams' wife, so that he was alone a great deal with the baby. At these times, when the door was safely barred against the outside world, it was a different Jan Thoreau who crouched upon his knees beside the cot. His face was aflame with a great, absorbing passion which at other times he concealed. His beautiful eyes glowed with hidden fires, and he whispered soothing, singsong things to the child, and played softly upon his violin, leaning his black head far down so that the baby Mélisse could clutch her appreciative fingers in his hair. "Ah, ze sweet leetle white angel!" he would cry, as she tugged and kicked. "I luf you so--I luf you, an' will stay always, ah' play ze violon! Ah, mon Dieu, you will be ze gr-r-r-eat bea-utiful white angel lak--HER!" He would laugh and coo like a mother, and talk, for at these times Jan Thoreau's tongue was as voluble as his violin. Sometimes Mélisse listened as if she understood the wonderful things he was telling her. She would lie upon her back with her eyes fixed upon him, her little red fists doubled over his bow, or a thumb thrust into her mouth. And the longer she lay like this, gazing at him blankly, the more convinced Jan became that she was understanding him; and his voice grew soft and low, and his eyes shone with a soft mist as he told her those things which John Cummins would have given much to know. "Some day you shall understand why it happened, sweet Mélisse," he whispered, bringing his eyes so near that she reached up an inquiring finger to them. "Then you will luf Jan Thoreau!" There were other times when Jan did not talk, but when the baby Mélisse talked to him; and these were moments of even greater joy. With the baby wriggling and kicking, and making queer noises in her tiny cot, he would sit silently upon his heels, watching her with the pride and happiness of a mother lynx in the first tumbling frolics of her kittens. Once, when Mélisse straightened herself for an instant, and half reached up her tiny arms to him, laughing and cooing into his face, he gave a glad cry, crushed his face down to hers, and did what he had not dared to do before--kissed her. There was something about it that frightened the little Mélisse, and she set up a wailing that sent Jan, in a panic of dismay, for Maballa. It was a long time before he ventured to kiss her again. It was during this fortnight of desolation at the post that Jan discovered the big problem for himself and John Cummins. In the last days of the second week, he spent much of his time skirting the edge of the barrens in search of caribou, that there might be meat in plenty when the dogs and men returned a little later. One afternoon, he returned early, while the pale sun was still in the sky, laden with the meat of a musk-ox. As he came from the edge of the forest, his slender body doubled over under the weight of his pack, a terrifying sight greeted him in the little clearing at the post. Upon her knees in front of their cabin was Maballa, industriously rolling the half-naked little Mélisse about in a soft pile of snow, and doing her work, as she firmly believed, in a most faithful and thorough manner. With a shriek, Jan threw off his pack and darted toward her like a wild thing. "Sacre bleu--you keel--keel ze leetle Mélisse!" he cried shrilly, snatching up the half-frozen child, "Mon Dieu, she ees not papoose! She ees ceevilize--ceevilize!" and he ran swiftly with her into the cabin, flinging back a torrent of Cree anathema at the dumbly bewildered Maballa. Jan left the rest of his musk-ox to the wolves and foxes. He went out into the snow, and found half a dozen other snow-wallows in which the helpless Mélisse had taken her chilling baths. He watched Maballa with a new growing terror, and fifty times a day he said to her: "Mélisse ees not papoose! She ees ceevilize--lak HER!" And he would point to the lonely grave under the guardian spruce. At last Maballa went into an ecstasy of understanding. Mélisse was not to be taken out and rolled in the snow; so she brought in the snow and rolled it over Mélisse! When Jan discovered this, his tongue twisted itself into sounds so terrible, and his face writhed so fiercely, that Maballa began to comprehend that thereafter no snow at all, either out doors or in, was to be used in the physical development of the little Mélisse. This was the beginning of the problem, and it grew and burst forth in all its significance on the day before Cummins came in from the wilderness. For a week Maballa had been dropping sly hints of a wonderful thing which she and the factor's half-breed wife were making for the baby. Jan had visions of a gorgeous garment covered with beads and gaudy braid, which would give the little Mélisse unending delight. On the day before Cummins' arrival, Jan came in from chopping wood, and went to the cot. It was empty. Maballa was gone. A sudden fear thrilled him to the marrow, and he sprang back to the cabin door, ready to shriek out the Indian woman's name. A sound stopped him--the softest, sweetest sound in all the world to Jan Thoreau--and he whirled around like a cat. Mélisse was smiling and making queer, friendly little signals to him from the table. She was standing upright, wedged in a coffin-shaped thing from which only her tiny white face peered out at him; and Jan knew that this was Maballa's surprise, Mélisse was in a papoose-sling! "Mélisse, I say you shall be no papoose!" he cried, running to the table. "You ees ceevilize! You shall be no papoose--not if twen' t'ous'nd devil come tak Jan Thoreau!" And he snatched her from her prison, flung Maballa's handiwork out into the snow, and waited impatiently for the return of John Cummins. CHAPTER V LOVE PATCHES Cummins returned the next day--not that his work among the wild trappers to the south was finished, but because he had suffered a hurt in falling from a slippery ledge. When Jan, from his wood-chopping in the edge of the forest, saw the team race up to the little cabin and a strange Cree half carry the wounded man through the door, he sped swiftly across the open with visions of new misfortune before him. What he saw when he reached the door was reassuring. Cummins was upon his knees beside the cot, his big shoulders hunched over, and Mélisse was welcoming him with her whole vocabulary of sound. The injury to Cummins' leg was not serious; and not being serious, it was accepted as a special incident of Providence by Jan, for the new thoughts that had come into his head were causing him great uneasiness. He lost no time in revealing his fears, after Maballa had been sent to the factor's wife. With graphic gesture he told of what had happened. Cummins hobbled to the door to look upon the wallows in the snow, and hobbled back to the table when Jan ran there in excited imitation of the way in which he had found the little Mélisse in Maballa's sling. "She ees ceevilize!" finished Jan hotly. "She ees not papoose! She mus' be lak--HER!" His great eyes shone, and Cummins felt a thickening in his throat as he looked into them and saw what the boy meant. "Maballa mak papoose out of Mélisse. She grow--know not'ing, lak papoose, talk lak papoose--" Jan's feelings overwhelmed his tongue. His shining hair rumpled thickly about his face as he leaned anxiously toward Cummins; and Cummins, in turn, stared down in dumb perplexity upon the joyful kickings and wrigglings of the growing problem. "Ees she not ceevilize?" demanded Jan ecstatically, bending his black head over her. "Ah, ze sweet Mélisse!" "Yes, she must be like HER, Jan--just as good and just as sweet and just as beautiful," interrupted Cummins gently. There was a quick intaking of his breath as he hobbled back to his own cot, leaving Jan at play with the baby. That night, in the dim, sputtering glow of an oil-lamp, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau solemnly set to work to thrash out the great problem that had suddenly entered into their existence. To these two there was no element of humor in what they were doing, for into their keeping had been given a thing for which God had not schemed them. The woman, had she been there, would have laughed at them, and in a dozen gentle breaths might have told them all that the world held in secret between mother and child; but, leaving them, she had passed on to them something that was life, like herself, and yet mystery. Had fate given Maballa to Mélisse for a mother there would have been no mystery. She would have developed as naturally as a wolf-whelp or a lynx-kitten, a savage breath of life in a savage world, waxing fat in snow-baths, arrow-straight in papoose-slings, a moving, natural thing in a desolation to which generations and centuries of forebears had given it birthright. But Mélisse was like her mother. In the dreams of the two who were planning out her fate, she was to be a reincarnation of her mother. That dream left a ray of comfort in Cummins' breast when his wife died. It stirred happy visions within Jan. And it ended with a serious shock when Maballa brought into their mental perspective of things the possibilities of environment. So far as Cummins knew, there was not a white woman nearer than Fort Churchill, two hundred miles away. In all that region he knew of only two full-white men, and they were Williams and himself. The baby Mélisse was hopelessly lost in a world of savagery; honest, loyal, big-souled savagery--but savagery for all that, and the thought of it brought the shadows of fear and foreboding to the two into whose lives the problem had just come. Long into the night they talked seriously of the matter, while Mélisse slept; and the longer they talked, the greater loomed the problem before them. Cummins fancied that he already began to see signs of the transformation in Mélisse. She was passionately fond of the gaudy things Maballa gave her, which was a sign of savagery. She was charmed by confinement in the papoose-sling, which was another sign of it; and she had not died in the snow-wallows--which was still another. So far back as he could remember, Cummins had never come into finger-touch of a white baby. Jan was as blissfully ignorant; so they determined upon immediate and strenuous action. Maballa would be ceaselessly watched and checked at every turn. The Indian children would not be allowed to come near Mélisse. They two--John Cummins and Jan Thoreau--would make her like the woman who slept under the sentinel spruce. "She ees ceevilize," said Jan with finality, "an' we mus' keep her ceevilize!" Cummins counted back gravely upon his fingers. The little Mélisse was four months and eighteen days old! "To-morrow we will make her one of those things with wheels--like the baby-wagons they have in the South," he said. "She must not go in the papoose-slings!" "An' I will teach her ze museek," whispered Jan, his eyes glowing. "That ees ceevilize!" Suddenly an eager light came into Cummins' face, and he pointed to a calico-covered box standing upon end in a corner of the room. "There are the books--HER books, Jan," he said softly, the trembling thrill of inspiration in his voice. He limped across the room, dropped upon his knees before the box, and drew back the curtain. Jan knelt beside him. "They were HER books," he repeated. There was a sobbing catch in his throat, and his head fell a little upon his breast. "Now--we will give them--to Mélisse." He drew the books out, one by one, his fingers trembling and his breath coming quickly as he touched them--a dozen worn, dusty things, holding within them more than John Cummins would ever know of the woman he had lost. These volumes of dead voices had come with her into the wilderness from that other world she had known. They breathed the pathos of her love from out of their ragged pages, mended in a hundred places to keep them from falling into utter ruin. Slowly the man gathered them against his breast, and held them there silently, as he might have held the woman, fighting hard to keep back his grief. Jan thrust a hand deeper into the box, and brought forth something else--a few magazines and papers, as ragged and worn as the books. In these other treasures there were pictures--pictures of the things in civilization, which Jan had never seen, and which were too wonderful for him to comprehend at first. His eyes burned excitedly as he held up a gaudily covered fashion paper to John Cummins. "Theese are picture for Mélisse!" he whispered tensely. "We teach her--we show her--we mak her know about ceevilize people!" Cummins replaced the books, one at a time, and each he held tenderly for a moment, wiping and blowing away the dust gathered upon it. At the last one of all, which was more ragged and worn than the others, he gazed for a long time. It was a little Bible, his wife's Bible, finger-worn, patched, pathetic in its poverty. The man gulped hard. "She loved this, Jan," he said huskily. "She loved this worn, old book more than anything else, and little Mélisse must love it also. Mélisse must be a Christian." "Ah, yes, ze leetle Mélisse mus' love ze great God!" said Jan softly. Cummins rose to his feet and stood for a moment looking at the sleeping baby. "A missionary is coming over from Fort Churchill to talk to our trappers when they come in. She shall be baptized!" Like a cat Jan was on his feet, his eyes flashing, his long, thin fingers clenched, his body quivering with a terrible excitement. "No--no--not baptize by missioner!" he cried. "She shall be good, an' love ze great God, but not baptize by missioner! No--no--no!" Cummins turned upon him in astonishment. Before him Jan Thoreau stood for a minute like one gone mad, his whole being consumed in a passion terrible to look upon. Lithe giant of muscle and, fearlessness that he was, Cummins involuntarily drew back a step, and the mainspring of instinct within him prompted him to lift a hand, as if to ward off a leaping thing from his breast. Jan noted the backward step, the guarded uplift of hand, and with an agonized cry he buried his face in his hands. In another instant he had turned, and, before Cummins' startled voice found words, had opened the door and run out into the night. The man saw him darting swiftly toward the forest, and called to him, but there was no response. There was a hot fire burning in Jan's brain, a blazing, writhing contortion of things that brought a low moaning from his lips. He ran tirelessly and swiftly until he sank down upon the snow in a silent place far from where he had left John Cummins. His eyes still blazed with their strange fire upon the desolation about him, his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves, digging their nails into his flesh, and he spoke softly to himself, over and over again, the name of the little Mélisse. Painting itself each instant more plainly through the tumult of his emotions was what Jan had come to know as the picture in his brain. Shadowy and indistinct at first, in pale, elusive lines of mental fabric, he saw the picture growing; and in its growth he saw first the soft, sweet outlines of a woman's face, and then great luring eyes, dark like his own--and before these eyes, which gazed upon him with overwhelming love, all else faded away from before Jan Thoreau. The fire went out of his eyes, his fingers relaxed, and after a little while he got up out of the snow, shivering, and went back to the cabin. Cummins asked no questions. He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such an existence of solitude and of strife with nature leaves small room for curiosity. So the nature of John Cummins led him to forget what had happened, as he would have forgotten the senseless running away of a sledge-dog, and its subsequent return. He saw no tragedy, and no promise of tragedy, in the thing that had occurred. There was no recurrence of the strange excitement in Jan. He gave no hint of it in word or action, and the thing seemed to be forgotten between the two. The education of the little Mélisse began at once, while the post was still deserted. It began, first of all, with Maballa. She stared dumbly and with shattered faith at these two creatures who told her of wonderful things in the upbringing of a child--things of which she had never so much as heard rumor before. Her mother instincts were aroused, but with Cree stoicism she made no betrayal of them. The leather-tanned immobility of her face underwent no whit of change when Cummins solemnly declared that the little Mélisse was about to begin teething. She sat grimly and watched them in silence when between them, upon a bearskin stretched on the floor, they tried vainly to persuade Mélisse to use her feet. It was great fun for Mélisse, and she enjoyed it immensely; so that as the days passed, and the post still remained deserted, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau spent much of their time upon their knees. In their eyes, the child's progress was remarkable. They saw in her an unceasing physical growth, and countless symptoms of forthcoming mental development. She delighted to pull the strings of Jan's violin, which was an unmistakable token of her musical genius. She went into ecstasies over the gaudy plates in the fashion paper. She fingered them in suggestive and inquiring silence, or with still more suggestive grunts, and made futile efforts to eat them, which was the greatest token of all. Weeks passed, and Williams came in from the southern forests. Mukee followed him from the edge of the barrens. Per-ee returned from the Eskimo people, three-quarters starved and with half of his dogs stolen. From the north, east, west, and south the post's fur-rangers trailed back. Life was resumed. There was a softness in the air, a growing warmth in the midday sun. The days of the big change were near. And when they came, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau, of all the factor's people, wore patches at their knee. CHAPTER VI DAYS OF TRIUMPH One afternoon, in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at hand--that the wilderness was awakening, and life was drawing near. The entire post rushed out to meet the new-comer--men and dogs, the little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou-gut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde around his heavily laden sledge. Partial order being restored, Mukee and Per-ee took charge of the snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the children knew by the size of the packs on his sledge and by the swagger in his walk. Gravois was usually one of the last to appear at the annual gathering of the wilderness fur-gatherers. He was a big man in reputation, as he was small in stature. He was known as far west as the Peace River, and eastward to Fort Churchill. He loved to make his appearance at the post in a wild and picturesque rush when the rest of the forest rovers were there to look on, and to envy or admire. He was one of the few of his kind who had developed personal vanity along with unerring cunning in the ways of the wild. Everybody liked Gravois, for he had a big soul in him and was as fearless as a lynx; and he liked everybody, including himself. He explained his early arrival by announcing in a nonchalant manner that after he had given his Malemutes a day's rest he was going on to Fort Churchill, to bring back a wife. He hinted, with a punctuating crack of his whip, that he would make a second visit, and a more interesting one, at just about the time when the trappers were there in force. Jan Thoreau listened to him, hunching his shoulders a little at the other's manifest air of importance. In turn, the French-Canadian scrutinized Jan good-naturedly. Neither of them knew the part which Jean de Gravois was to play in Jan's life. Every hour after the half-breed's arrival quickened the pulse of expectancy at the post. For six months it had been a small and solitary unit of life in the heart of a big desolation. The first snow had smothered it in a loneliness that was almost the loneliness of desertion. With that first snow began the harvest days of the people of the wilderness. Far and wide they were busy along their trap-lines, their lonely shacks hidden in the shelter of thick swamps, in deep chasms and dense forests. For six months the short days and the long nights had been days and nights of fur-gathering. During those months the post was silent. It lived and breathed, but that was all. Its life, for Williams and the few people whom the company kept with him, was a life of waiting. Now the change was at hand. It was like the breath of spring to the awakening wilderness. The forest people were moving. Trap-lines were being broken, shacks abandoned, sledge-dogs put to harness. On the day that Jean de Gravois left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort Churchill--seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris. Fearfully Jan Thoreau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven Indians and one white man. Jan thrust himself close to look at the white man. He wore two revolver-holsters and carried an automatic. Unquestionably he was not a missionary, but an agent of the company well prepared to care for the company's treasure. Jan hurried back to the cabin, his heart bubbling with a strange joy. "There ees no missioner, Mélisse!" he cried triumphantly, dropping beside her, his face glowing with the gladness of his tidings. "You shall be good and beautiful, lak HER, but you shall not be baptize by missioner! He has not come!" A few minutes later Cummins came in. One of his hands was torn and bleeding. "Those Eskimo dogs are demons!" he growled. "If they knew how to stand on their legs, they'd eat our huskies alive! Will you help me with this?" Jan was at work in an instant, bandaging the wounded hand. "It ees not deep," he said; and then, without looking up, he added: "The missioner did not come." "No," said Cummins shortly. "Neither has the mail. He is with that." He did not notice the sudden tremble of Jan's fingers, nor did he see the startled look that shot into the boy's down-turned eyes. Jan finished his bandaging without betraying his emotion, and went back with Cummins to the company's store. The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel curs from the south. Thereafter Cummins found but little time to devote to Mélisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily increasing warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers. Mukee's people from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing with them great loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them. From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong inheritance of blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion. All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay. Team after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and darker-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these, fighting, snapping, and snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors, packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides. There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day, and around the campfires at night. There was never an end to the strife between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was stained and trailed with blood, and the scent of it added greater fierceness to the wolf-breeds. Half a dozen battles were fought to the death each day and night. Those that died were chiefly the south-bred curs--mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dogs--and the fatally slow Mackenzie hounds. From its towering height the sentinel spruce frowned down upon the savage life that had come to outrage the grave it guarded. Yet beyond all this discord and bloody strife there was a great, throbbing human happiness--a beating of honest hearts filled to overflowing with the joys of the moment, a welding of new friendships, a renewal of old ones, a closer union of the brotherhood that holds together all things under the cold gray of the northern skies. There were no bickerings among the hunters, no anger of man against man in the fierce voices that emphasized the slashing cuts of the caribou-whips. If the fangs of a Hudson's Bay husky let out the life-blood from the soft throat of a Mackenzie hound, it was a matter of the dogs, and not of their owners. They did not quarrel. One day a fierce Eskimo pack cornered a giant husky under the big spruce, and slew him. When Cummins came from the company's store in the afternoon, he saw a number of men, with bared heads, working about the grave. He drew near enough to see that they were building around it a barricade of saplings; and his breath choked him as he turned to the cabin and Mélisse. He noticed, too, that no fires were built near the spot consecrated to the memory of the dead woman; and to his cabin the paths in the snow became deeper and wider where trod the wild forest men who came to look upon the little Mélisse. These were days of unprecedented prosperity and triumph for the baby, as they were for the company. The cabin was half filled with strange things, for all who came gave something to Mélisse. There were polar bears' teeth, brought down by the little black men who in turn had got them from the coast people; strange gods carved from wood; bits of fur, bushy fox tails, lynx paws, dried fruits, candy bought at fabulous prices in the store, and musk--always and incessantly musk--from Mukee's people of the west barrens. To Jan this homage to Mélisse was more than gratifying. It formed a bond between him and Cummins' people. His heart went out to them, and he went more freely among them, and made friends. CHAPTER VII THE CARIBOU CARNIVAL Jan had not played upon his violin since the coming of Jean de Gravois; but one evening he tuned his strings, and said to Mélisse: "They have been good to you, my Mélisse. I will give them ze museek of ze violon." It was the big night at the post--the night that is known from Athabasca to Hudson's Bay as the night of the caribou roast. A week had passed, and there were no more furs to be disposed of. In the company's ledger each man had received his credit, and in the company's store the furs were piled high and safe. Three caribou had been killed by Per-ee and his hunters; and on this night, when Jan took down his violin from its peg on the wall, a huge fire blazed in the open, and on spits six inches in diameter the caribou were roasting. The air was filled with the sound and odor of the carnival. Above the fighting and snarling of dogs, the forest people lifted their voices in wild celebration, forgetting, in this one holiday of the year, the silence that they would carry back into the solitudes with them. Numbers gave them courage of voice, and in its manifestation there was the savagery of the forests that hemmed them in. Shrill voices rose in meaningless cries above the roaring of the fire. Caribou whips snapped fiercely. Chippewayans, Crees, Eskimos, and breeds crowded in the red glare. The factor's men shouted and sang like mad, for this was the company's annual "good time"--the show that would lure many of these same men back again at the end of another trapping season. Huge boxes of white bread were placed near to the fire. A tub of real butter, brought five thousand miles from across the sea for the occasion, was set on a gun-case thrown where the heat played upon it in yellow glory. In a giant copper kettle, over a smaller fire, bubbled and steamed half a barrel of coffee. The richness of the odors that drifted in the air set the dogs gathering upon their haunches beyond the waiting circle of masters, their lips dripping, their fangs snapping in an eagerness that was not for the flesh of battle. And above it all there gleamed down a billion stars from out of the skies, the aurora flung its banners through the pale night, and softly the smoke rose straight up and then floated into the North, carried there by the gentle breath that spring was luring from out of the South. Jan picked his way through the cordon of dogs and the inner circle of men until he stood with the firelight flashing in his glossy hair and black eyes, and there, seated upon the edge of one of the bread-boxes, he began to play. It was not the low, sweet music of Cummins and the little Mélisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing--saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half-cringing little black men who were squatted in a group a dozen feet away, nothing of the staring amazement in the eyes that were looking upon this miracle he was performing. He knew only that about him there was a deep hush, and after a while his violin sang a lower song, and sweeter; and still softer it became, and more sweet, until he was playing that which he loved most of all--the music that had filled the little cabin when Cummins' wife died. As he continued to play there came an interruption to the silence--a low refrain that was almost like that of the moaning wind. It grew beyond the tense circle of men, until a song of infinite sadness rose from the throats of a hundred dogs in response to Jan Thoreau's violin. To Jan, it was like the song of life. The unending loneliness and grief of it stirred him to the quick of his soul, and unconsciously his voice rose and fell softly with the wailing of the brute chorus. But to the others it was a thing that rose portentous above their understanding, a miracle of mystery that smote them with awe even as they surrendered themselves to the wonderful sweetness of the music. Cummins saw the change in his people, and understood what it meant. He saw the surrounding cordon become thinner as man crushed closer to man, and he saw strained faces turned from the player to where the dogs sat full-throated upon their haunches, with their heads pointed straight to the stars in the sky. Suddenly he burst into a volume of wild song, and made his way through the crouching Eskimos to Jan. "For the love of Heaven, play no more of that!" he cried in the boy's ear. "Play something fast!" Jan lifted his head as if from a dream. In an instant he perceived the strange effect of his music, and his bow raced across the strings of his violin in a rhythm swift and buoyant, his voice rising shrill and clear in words familiar to them all: "Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo, He roas' on high, Jes' under ze sky, Ze beeg white cariboo-oo-oo!" With a yell Cummins joined in, waving his arms and leaping in the firelight. The spell was broken. Williams and Mukee and the rest of the company's men burst forth in song; Jan's violin leaped in crescendos of stirring sound; and where before there had been a silent circle of awestruck men there was now a yelling din of voices. The dogs lowered their heads again, and licked their chops at the odors in the air. With a yell Mukee and three Crees dashed toward the fire, long-hooked poles in their hands; and as the caribou carcasses were turned upon their huge spits, and their dripping fat fell sizzling into the flames, the wild chorus of men and dogs and Jan's violin rose higher, until Cummins' great voice became only a whisper in the tumult. The third caribou had been twice turned upon its spit, and Mukee and his Crees paused in waiting silence, their hooked poles gripping the long bar that rested horizontally across the arms of two stout posts driven into the earth close to the fire. At this signal there was a final outburst from the waiting horde, and then a momentary silence fell as Cummins sprang upon one of the bread-boxes and waved his arms frantically above his head. "Now!" he shouted. "Now! 'Ze cariboo-oo-oo--'" With eyes flashing with excitement, Jan stood before Cummins, and his violin shrieked out the wild tune to a still wilder response of untamed voices. "Now!" yelled Cummins again. The wilderness song, that was known from Athabasca to Hudson's Bay, burst forth in a savage enthusiasm that reached to the skies: "Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo, He roas' on high, Jes' under ze sky, Ze beeg white cariboo-oo-oo!" Cummins drew his revolver and blazed fiercely into the air. "Now!" he shrieked. "Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo, He brown 'n' juice 'n' sweet! Ze cariboo-oo-oo, he ver' polite-- He roas' on high, Jes' under ze sky, He ready now to come 'n' eat!" With yells that rose above the last words of the song, Mukee and his Crees tugged at their poles, and the roasted caribou fell upon the snow. Jan drew back, and with his violin hugged under one arm, watched the wild revelers as, with bared knives flashing in the firelight, they crowded to the feast. Williams, the factor, who was puffing from his vocal exertions, joined him. "Looks like a fight, doesn't it, Jan? Once I saw a fight at a caribou roast." "So did I," said Jan, who had not taken his eyes from the jostling crowd. "It was far to the west and north," continued Williams; "beyond the Great Slave country." "Far beyond," said Jan, lifting his eyes quietly. "It was ver' near to ze Great Bear." The factor stared at him in amazement. "You saw it?" he exclaimed. But Jan turned away, as if he had heard nothing, and passed beyond the packs of waiting dogs to restore his precious violin to its peg on the cabin wall. The factor's words had stirred deep memories within him, and for the first time since he had come to the post he spoke no word to Mélisse when he found her wakeful and friendly in her cot. Neither was it the old Jan Thoreau who returned to the excitement about the great fire. With his long hunting-knife flashing above his head, he plunged into the throng around the caribou, crowding and jostling with the others, his voice rising in shrill cries as he forced himself through to the edge of the fire. Cummins was there, kneeling with turned-up sleeves and greasy hands beside the huge roast, and when he saw Jan he stared at him in wonder. There was neither laughter nor song in Jan Thoreau's voice. It was vibrant with a strange savageness which was more savage than the wildest yells of the half-breed Crees, and his great eyes burned fiercely as they rested for an instant upon Cummins' face. Close behind Cummins stood Williams. Jan saw him, and his knife dropped to his side. Then, so quickly that the startled factor drew back a step, Jan sprang to him. "Ze fight at ze Great Bear!" he cried in swift eagerness. "For who you fight at ze Great Bear?" The factor was silent, and the muscles of his arms grew like steel as he saw the madness in Jan's face. Suddenly he reached out and gripped the boy's wrists. Jan made no effort to evade the clutch. "For who you fight?" he cried again. "For who you fight at ze Great Bear?" "We tried to kill a man, but he got away," said Williams, speaking so low that only Jan heard. "He was--" The factor stopped. "Ze missioner!" panted Jan. The wild light went out of his eyes as he stared up at Williams, and the softer glow which came into them loosened at once the factor's grip on the boy's wrists. "Yes, the missioner!" Jan drew back. He evaded meeting the eyes of Cummins as he made his way among the men. There was a new burst of song as Mukee and his Crees pulled down a second caribou, but the boy paid no attention to the fresh excitement. He thrust his knife into its sheath and ran--ran swiftly through the packs of dogs fighting and snarling over the scraps that had beep thrown to them; past Maballa who was watching the savage banquet around the big fire, and into the little cabin, to Mélisse. Here he flung himself upon his knees, and for the first time he caught the baby in his arms, holding her close to him, and rocking her to and fro, as he cried out sobbingly the words which she did not understand. "An' when I fin' heem an' kill heem, I will come back to you, my angel Mélisse," he whispered. "And then you will luf Jan Thoreau for letting out the blood of a missioner!" He put her back into the little bed, kissed her again, took down his violin from its peg in the wall, and turned to the door. CHAPTER VIII THE FIGHT AT DAWN For a few moments Jan stood with his back to Mélisse and his eyes upon the carnival about the great fire. As he looked, the third caribou was pulled down from its spit, and the multitude of dogs rushed in upon the abandoned carcasses of the other two. He caught his breath quickly as a loud shout and the wailing yelp of a hurt dog rose for an instant above all other sounds. Only one thing was wanting to complete another picture in his brain--a scene which had burned itself into his life for ever, and which he strove to fight back as he stood staring from the doorway. He half expected it to come--the shrill scream of a boyish voice, an instant's sullen quiet, then the low-throated thunder of impending vengeance--and the fight! With marvelous quickness his excited mind reconstructed the scene before him into the scene that had been. He heard the scream again, which had been HIS voice; saw, as if in a dream, the frenzied rush of men and the flash of knives; and then, from where he lay trampled and bleeding in the snow, the long, lean team of swift huskies that had carried in mad flight the one whose life those knives sought. Williams had been there; he had seen the fight--his knife had flashed with the others in its demand for life. And yet he--Jan Thoreau--had not been recognized by the factor out there beside the caribou roast! He hurried toward the fire. Half-way across the open he stopped. From out of the forest opposite Cummins' cabin there trailed slowly a team of dogs. In the shadows of the spruce, hidden from the revelers, the team halted. Jan heard the low voices of men, and a figure detached itself from the gloom, walking slowly and in the manner of one near to exhaustion in the direction of the carnival. It was a new team. It had come from the trails to the east, and Jan's heart gave a sudden jump as he thought of the missionary who was expected with the overdue mail. At first he had a mind to intercept the figure laboring across the open, but without apparent reason he changed his course and approached the sledge. As he came nearer, he observed a second figure, which rose from behind the dogs and advanced to meet him. A dozen paces ahead of the team it stopped and waited. "Our dogs are so near exhaustion that we're afraid to take them any nearer," said a voice. "They'd die like puppies under those packs!" The voice thrilled Jan. He advanced with his back to the fire, so that he could see the stranger. "You come from Churchill?" he asked. His words were hardly a question. They were more of an excuse for him to draw nearer, and he turned a little, so that for an instant the glowing fire flashed in his eyes. "Yes, we started from the Etawney just a week ago to-day." Jan had come very near. The stranger interrupted himself to stare into the thin, fierce face that had grown like a white cameo almost within reach of him. With a startled cry, he drew a step back, and Jan's violin dropped to the snow. For no longer than a breath there was silence. The man wormed himself back into the shadows inch by inch, followed by the white face of the boy. Then there came shrilly from Jan's lips the mad shrieking of a name, and his knife flashed as he leaped at the other's breast. The stranger was quicker than he. With a sudden movement he cleared himself of the blow; and as Jan's arm went past him, the point of the knife ripping his coat-sleeve, he shot out a powerful fist and sent the boy reeling to the ground. Stunned and bleeding, Jan dragged himself to his knees. He saw the dogs turning, heard a low voice urging them to the trail, and saw the sledge disappear into the forest. He staggered from his knees to his feet, and stood swaying in his weakness. Then he followed. He forgot that he was leaving his knife in the snow, forgot that back there about the fire there were other dogs and other men. He only knew that once before he had seen a sledge slip off into the wilderness; that its going had left him a life of hatred and bitterness and desire for vengeance; and that this was the same man who was slipping away from him in the same way again. He followed, sickened by the blow, but gaining strength as he pursued. Ahead of him he could hear the sound of the toboggan and the cautious lashing of a whip over the backs of the tired huskies. The sounds filled him with fierce strength. He wiped away the warm trickle of blood that ran over his cheek, and began to run, slowly at first, swinging in the easy wolf-lope of the forest runner, with his elbows close to his sides. At that pace he could have followed for hours, losing when the pack took a spurt, gaining when they lagged, an insistent Nemesis just behind when the weighted dogs lay down in their traces. But there was neither the coolness of Mukee nor the cleverness of Jean de Gravois in the manner of Jan's running. When he heard the cracking of the whip growing fainter, he dropped his arms straight to his sides and ran more swiftly, his brain reeling with the madness of his desire to reach the sledge--to drag from it the man who had struck him, to choke life from the face that haunted that mental picture of his, grinning at him and gloating always from the shadow world, just beyond the pale, sweet loveliness of the woman who lived in it. That picture came to him now as he ran, more and more vividly, and from out of it the woman urged him on to the vengeance which she demanded of him, her great eyes glowing like fire, her beautiful face torn with the agony which he had last seen in it in life. To Jan Thoreau there seemed almost to come from that face a living voice, crying to him its prayer for retribution, pleading with him to fasten his lithe, brown hands about the throat of the monster upon the sledge ahead, and choke from it all life. It drove reason from him, leaving him with the one thought that the monster was almost within reach; and he replied to the prayer with the breath that came in moaning exhaustion from between his lips. He did not feel the soft, sun-packed snow under the beat of his feet. He received the lash of low-hanging bushes without experiencing the sensation of their sting. Only he knew that he wanted air--more and more air; and to get it he ran with open mouth, struggling and gasping for it, and yet not knowing that Jean de Gravois would have called him a fool for the manner in which he sought it. He heard more and more faintly the run of the sledge. Then he heard it no longer, and even the cracking of the whip died away. His heart swelled in a final bursting effort, and he plunged on, until at last his legs crumpled under him and he pitched face downward in the snow, like a thing stung by sudden death. It was then, with his scratched and bleeding face lying in the snow, that reason began to return to him. After a little while he dragged himself weakly to his knees, still panting from the mad effort he had made to overtake the sledge. From a great distance he heard faintly the noise of shouting, the whispering echo of half a hundred voices, and he knew that the sound came from the revelers at the post. It was proof to him that there had been no interruption to the carnival, and that the scene at the edge of the forest had been witnessed by none. Quickly his mental faculties readjusted themselves. He rose to his feet, and for a few moments stood hesitatingly. He had no weapon; but as his hand rested upon the empty knife-sheath at his belt, there came to him a thought of the way in which Mukee had avenged Cummins' wife, and he turned again upon the trail. He no longer touched the low-hanging bushes. He was no more than a shadow, appearing and disappearing without warning, trailing as the white ermine follows its prey, noiseless, alert, his body responding sinuously and without apparent effort to the working commands of his brain. Where the forest broke into an open, lighted by the stars, he found blood in the footprints of the leading dog. Half-way across the open, he saw where the leader had swung out from the trail and the others of the pack had crowded about him, to be urged on by the lashings of the man's whip. Other signs of the pack's growing exhaustion followed close. The man now traveled beside the sledge where the trail was rough, and rode where it was smooth and hard. The deep imprints of his heeled boots in the soft snow showed that he ran for only a short distance at a time--a hundred yards or less--and that after each running spell he brought the pack to a walk. He was heavy and lacked endurance, and this discovery brought a low cry of exultation to Jan's lips. He fell into a dog-trot. Mile after mile dropped behind him; other miles were ahead of him, an endless wilderness of miles, and through them the tired pack persisted, keeping always beyond sound and vision. The stars began fading out of the skies. The shadows of the forest grew deeper and blacker, and where the aurora had lightened the heavens there crept the somber gray film that preceded dawn by three hours. Jan followed more and more slowly. There was hard-breathing effort now in his running--effort that caused him physical pain and discomfort. His feet stumbled occasionally in the snow; his legs, from thigh to knee, began to ache with the gnawing torment that centers in the marrowbone; and with this beginning of the "runner's cramp" he was filled with a new and poignant terror. Would the dogs beat him out? Sloughing in the trail, bleeding at every foot, would they still drag their burden beyond the reach of his vengeance? The fear fastened itself upon him, urging him to greater effort, and he called upon the last of his strength in a spurt that carried him to where the thick spruce gave place to thin bush, and the bush to the barren and rocky side of a huge ridge, up which the trail climbed strong and well defined. For a few paces he followed it, then slipped and rolled back as the fatal paralysis deadened all power of movement in his limbs. He lay where he fell, moaning out his grief with his wide-staring eyes turned straight up into the cold gray of the starless sky. For a long time he was motionless. From the top of the ridge, where the trail cut over the mountain, he looked like a bit of fire-blackened wood half buried in the snow. Half-way up the ridge a wolf, slinking hungrily, sniffed first up the trail and then down, and broke the stillness of the gray night-end with a mournful howl. It did not stir Jan Thoreau. Long after the wolf had passed on, he moved a little, twisting himself so that his eyes could follow the tracks made by the sledge and dogs. When he came to where the snow-covered backbone of the ridge cut itself in faint outline against the desolate coldness of the sky, there fell from him the first sound of returning life. Up there he was sure that he had seen something move--an object which at first he had taken for a bush, and which he knew was not the wolf. He watched for its reappearance, until all sorts of gray dawn shadows danced before his eyes. Then he began slowly to crawl up the trail. Some of the dull, paralytic ache was gone from his limbs, and as he worked his blood began to warm them into new strength, until he stood up and sniffed like an animal in the wind that was coming over the ridge from the south. There was something in that wind that thrilled him. It stung his nostrils to a quick sensing of the nearness of something that was human. He smelled smoke. In it there was the pungent odor of green balsam, mixed with a faint perfume of pitch pine; and because the odor of pitch grew stronger as he ascended, he knew that it was a small fire that was making the smoke, with none of the fierce, dry woods to burn up the smell. It was a fire hidden among the rocks, a tiny fire, over which the fleeing missioner was cooking his breakfast. Jan almost moaned aloud in his gladness, and the old mad strength returned to his body. Near the summit of the ridge he picked up a club. It was a short, thick club, with the heavy end knotted and twisted. Cautiously he lifted his face over the rocks, and looked out upon a plateau, still deep in snow, swept bare by the winter's winds, and covered with rocks and bushes. His face was so white that at a little distance it might have been taken for a snow hare. It went whiter when, a few yards away, he saw the fire, the man, and the dogs. The man was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. Jan drew himself over the rocks. Once he had seen a big-footed lynx creep upon a wide-awake fox, and like that lynx he crept upon the man beside the fire. One of the tired dogs moved, and his pointed nostrils quivered in the air. Jan lay flat in the snow. Then the dog's muzzle dropped between his paws, and the boy moved on. Inch by inch he advanced. The inches multiplied themselves into a foot, the foot lengthened into yards, and still the man remained hunched over his simmering pot. Jan rose gently from his hands and knees to his feet, a furnace of madness blazing in his eyes. The restless dog raised his head again. He sniffed danger--near, menacing danger--and sprang up with a snarling cry that brought the man over the fire to quick attention. In a flash Jan took the last leap, and his club crashed down upon the missioner's head. The man pitched over like a log, and with a shrill cry the boy was at his throat. "I am Jan Thoreau!" he shrieked. "I am Jan Thoreau--Jan Thoreau--come to keel you!" He dropped his club, and was upon the man's chest, his slender fingers tightening like steel wire about the thick throat of his enemy. "I keel you slow--slow!" he cried, as the missioner struggled weakly. The great thick body heaved under him, and he put all his strength into his hands. Something struck him in the face. Something struck him again and again, but he felt neither the pain nor the force of it, and his voice sobbed out his triumph as he choked. The man's hands reached up and tore at his hair; but Jan saw only the missioner's mottled face growing more mottled, and his eyes staring in greater agony up into his own. "I am Jan Thoreau," he panted again and again. "I am Jan Thoreau, an' I keel you--keel you!" The blood poured from his face. It blinded him until he could no longer see the one from which he was choking life. He bent down his head to escape the blows. The man's body heaved more and more; it turned until he was half under it; but still he hung to the thick throat, as the weasel hangs in tenacious death to the jugular of its prey. The missioner's weight was upon him in crushing force now. His huge hands struck and tore at the boy's head and face, and then they had fastened themselves at his neck. Jan was conscious of a terrible effort to take in breath, but he was not conscious of pain. The clutch did not frighten him. It did not make him loosen his grip. His fingers dug deeper. He strove to cry out still his words of triumph; but he could make no sound, except a gasping like that which came from between the gaping jaws of the man whose life his body and soul were fighting to smother. There was death in each of the two grips; but the man's was the stronger, and his neck was larger and tougher, so that after a time he staggered to his knees and then to his feet, while Jan lay upon his back, his face and hair red with blood, his eyes wide open and with a lifeless glare in them. The missioner looked down upon his victim in horror. As the life that had nearly ebbed out of him poured back into his body, he staggered among the dogs, fastened them to the sledge, and urged them down the mountain into the plain. There was soon no sound of the sledge. From a bush a dozen yards away a wondering moose-bird had watched the terrible struggle. Now he hopped boldly upon Jan's motionless body, and perked his head inquisitively as he examined the strange face, covered with blood and twisted in torture. The gray film of dawn dissolved itself into the white beginning of day. Far to the south, a bit of the red sunrise was creeping into the northern world. CHAPTER IX JEAN AND JAN Half a mile down the ridge, where it sloped up gradually from the forests and swamps of the plain, a team of powerful Malemutes were running at the head of a toboggan. On the sledge was a young half-Cree woman. Now beside the sledge, now at the lead of the dogs, cracking his whip and shouting joyously, ran Jean de Gravois. "Is it not beautiful, my Iowaka?" he cried for the hundredth time, in Cree, leaping over a three-foot boulder in his boundless enthusiasm. "Is this not the glorious world, with the sun just rising off there, and spring only a few days away? It is not like the cold chills at Churchill, which come up with the icebergs and stay there all summer! What do you think of your Jean de Gravois and his country now?" Jean was bringing back with him a splendid young woman, with big, lustrous eyes, and hair that shone with the gloss of a raven's wing in the sun. She laughed at him proudly as he danced and leaped beside her, replying softly in Cree, which is the most beautiful language in the world, to everything that he said. Jean leaped and ran, cracked his caribou whip, and shouted and sang until he was panting and red in the face. Just as Iowaka had called upon him to stop and get a second wind, the Malemutes dropped back upon their haunches where Jan Thoreau lay, twisted and bleeding, in the snow. "What is this?" cried Jean. He caught Jan's limp head and shoulders up in his arms, and called shrilly to Iowaka, who was disentangling herself from the thick furs in which he had wrapped her. "It is the fiddler I told you about, who lives with Williams at Post Lac Bain!" he shouted excitedly in Cree. "He has been murdered! He has been choked to death, and torn to pieces in the face, as if by an animal!" Jean's eyes roved about as Iowaka kneeled beside him. "What a fight!" he gasped. "See the footprints--a big man and a small boy, and the murderer has gone on a sledge!" "He is warm," said Iowaka. "It may be that he is not dead." Jean de Gravois sprang to his feet, his little black eyes flashing with a dangerous fire. In a single leap he was at the side of the sledge, throwing off the furs and bundles and all other objects except his rifle. "He is dead, Iowaka. Look at the purple and black in his face. It is Jean de Gravois who will catch the murderer, and you will stay here and make yourself a camp. Hi-o-o-o-o!" he shouted to the Malemutes. The team twisted sinuously and swiftly in the trail as he sped over the edge of the mountain. Upon the plain below he knelt upon the toboggan, with his rifle in front of him; and at his low, hissing commands, which reached no farther than the dogs' ears, the team stretched their long bodies in pursuit of the missioner and his huskies. Jean knew that whoever was ahead of him was not far away, and he laughed and hunched his shoulders when he saw that his magnificent Malemutes were making three times the speed of the huskies. It was a short chase. It led across the narrow plain and into a dense tangle of swamp, where the huskies had picked their way in aimless wandering until they came out in thick balsam and Banksian pine. Half a mile farther on, and the trail broke into an open which led down to the smooth surface of a lake, and two-thirds across the lake was the fleeing missioner. The Malemute leader flung open his jaws in a deep baying triumph, and with a savage yell Jean cracked his caribou whip over his back. He saw the man ahead of him lean over the end of his sledge as he urged his dogs, but the huskies went no faster; and then he caught the glitter of something that flashed for a moment in the sun. "Ah!" said Jean softly, as a bullet sang over his head. "He fires at Jean de Gravois!" He dropped his whip, and there was the warm glow of happiness in his little dark face as he leveled his rifle over the backs of his Malemutes. "He fires at Jean de Gravois, and it is Jean who can hamstring a caribou at three hundred yards on the run!" For an instant, at the crack of his rifle, there was no movement ahead; then something rolled from the sledge and lay doubled up in the snow. A hundred yards beyond it, the huskies stopped in a rabble and turned to look at the approaching strangers. Beside it Jean stopped; and when he saw the face that stared up at him, he clutched his thin hands in his long black hair and cried out, in shrill amazement and horror: "The saints in Heaven, it is the missioner from Churchill!" He turned the man over, and found where his bullet had entered under one arm and come out from under the other. There was no spark of life left. The missioner was already dead. "The missioner from Churchill!" he gasped again. He looked up at the warm sun, and kicked the melting snow under his moccasined feet. "It will thaw very soon," he said to himself, looking again at the dead man, "and then he will go into the lake." He headed his Malemutes back to the forest. Then he ran out and cut the traces of the exhausted huskies, and with his whip scattered them in freedom over the ice. "Go to the wolves!" he shouted in Cree. "Hide yourselves from the post, or Jean de Gravois will cut out your tongues and take your skins off alive!" When he came back to the top of the mountain, Jean found Iowaka making hot coffee, while Jan was bundled up in furs near the fire. "It is as I said," she called. "He is alive!" Thus it happened that the return of Jean de Gravois to the post was even more dramatic than he had schemed it to be, for he brought back with him not only a beautiful wife from Churchill, but also the half dead Jan Thoreau from the scene of battle on the mountain. And in the mystery of it all he reveled for two days; for Jean de Gravois said not a word about the dead man on the lake beyond the forest, nor did the huskies come back into their bondage to give a hint of the missing missionary. CHAPTER X RED SNOW-FLOWERS From the day after the caribou roast the fur-gatherers began scattering. The Eskimos left the next morning. On the second day Mukee's people from the west set off along the edge of the barrens. Most of the others left by ones and twos into the wildernesses to the south and east. Less than a dozen still put off their return to the late spring trapping, and among these were Jean de Gravois and his wife. Jean waited until the third day. Then he went to see Jan. The boy was bolstered up in his cot, with Cummins balancing the little Mélisse on the edge of the bed when he came in. For a time Jean sat and watched them in silence; then he made a sign to Cummins, who joined him at the door. "I am going the Athabasca way to-day," he said. "I wish to talk with the boy before I go. I have a word to say to him which no ears should hear but his own. Will it be right?" "Talk to him as long as you like," said Cummins, "but don't worry him about the missionary. You'll not get a word from him." Jan's eyes spoke with a devotion greater than words as Jean de Gravois came and sat close beside him. He knew that it was Jean who had brought him alive into the post, and now there was something in the suggestive grimacing of the Frenchman's face, and in the eagerness with which he looked over his shoulder, as if he was not quite sure but that the walls held ears, that caused the boy's heart to beat a little faster as he speculated upon what Jean was going to say. For a few moments Jean looked at the other steadily, with his thin, black face propped in his hands and a curious smile on his lips. He twisted his face into a dozen expressions of a language as voluble as that of his tongue, hunched his shoulders up to his ears as he grinned at Jan, and chuckled between his grimaces. "Ah, it was wan be-e-a-u-tiful fight!" he said softly. "You are a brave boy, Jan Thoreau!" "You did not see it?" asked Jan. Unconsciously the words came from him in French. Jean caught one of his thin hands and laughed joyfully, for the spirit of him was French to the bottom of his soul. "I see it? No, neither I nor Iowaka; but there it was in the snow, as plain as the eyes in your face. And did I not follow the trail that staggered down the mountain, while Iowaka brought you back to life? And when I came to the lake, did I not see something black out upon it, like a charred log? And when I came to it, was it not the dead body of the missioner from Churchill? Eh, Jan Thoreau?" Jan sat up in his bed with a sharp cry. "Sh-h-h-h-h!" admonished Jean, pressing him back gently. "There is no need of telling what is out there on the lake. Only the Blessed Virgin made me dream last night that you would like to see with your own eyes that the missioner is dead. The thaw will open up the lake in a few days. Then he will go down in the first slush. And"--Jean looked about him cautiously again, and whispered low--"if you see anything about the dead missioner that you do not understand--THINK OF JEAN DE GRAVOIS!" He rose to his feet and bent over Jan's white face. "I am going the Athabasca way to-day," he finished. "Perhaps, Jan Thoreau, you will hear after a time that it would be best for Jean de Gravois never to return again to this Post Lac Bain. If so, you will find him between Fond du Lac and the Beaver River, and you can make it in four days by driving your dogs close to the scrub-edge of the barrens, keeping always where you can see the musk-ox to the north." He turned to the door, and hesitated there for a moment, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. "Jean de Gravois wonders if Jan Thoreau understands?" he said, and passed out. When Cummins returned, he found Jan's cheeks flushed and the boy in a fever. "Devil take that Gravois!" he growled. "He has been a brother to me," said Jan simply. "I love him." On the second day after the Frenchman's departure, Jan rose free of the fever which had threatened him for a time, and in the afternoon he harnessed Cummins' dogs. The last of the trappers had started from the post that morning, their sledges and dogs sinking heavily in the deepening slush; and Jan set off over the smooth toboggan trail made by the company's agent in his return to Fort Churchill. This trail followed close along the base of the ridge upon which he had fought the missionary, joining that of Jean de Gravois miles beyond. Jan climbed the ridge. From where he had made his attack, he followed the almost obliterated trail of the Frenchman and his Malemutes until he came to the lake; and then he knew that Jean de Gravois had spoken the truth, for he found the missionary with his face half buried in the slush, stark dead. He no longer had to guess at the meaning of Jean's words. The bullet-hole under the dead man's arms was too large to escape eyes like Jan's. Into the little hidden world which he treasured in his heart there came another face, to remain always with him--the face of the courageous little forest dandy who was hurrying with his bride back into the country of the Athabasca. Jan allowed his dogs to walk all the way back to the post, and it was dusk before they arrived. Maballa had prepared supper, and Cummins was waiting for him. He glanced sharply at the boy. There was a smile on Jan's lips, and there was something in his eyes which Cummins had never seen there before. From that night they were no longer filled with the nervous, glittering flashes which at times had given him an appearance almost of madness. In place of their searching suspicions, there was a warmer and more companionable glow, and Cummins felt the effect of the change as he ate his caribou steak and talked once more entirely of Mélisse. A Cree trapper had found Jan's violin in the snow, and had brought it to Maballa. Before Cummins finished his supper, the boy began to play, and he continued to play until the lights at the post went out and both the man and the child were deep in sleep. Then Jan stopped. There was the fire of a keen wakefulness in his eyes as he carefully unfastened the strings of his instrument, and held it close to the oil lamp, so that he could peer down through the narrow aperture in the box. He looked again at Cummins. The man was sleeping with his face to the wall. With the hooked wire which he used for cleaning his revolver Jan fished gently at the very end of the box, and after three or four efforts the wire caught in something soft, which he pulled toward him. Through the bulge in the F-hole he dragged forth a small, tightly rolled cylinder of faded red cloth. For a few moments he sat watching the deep breathing of Cummins, unrolling the cloth as he watched, until he had spread out upon the table before him a number of closely written pages of paper. He weighted them at one end with his violin, and held them down at the other with his hands. The writing was in French. Several of the pages were in a heavy masculine hand, the words running one upon another so closely that in places they seemed to be connected; and from them Jan took his fingers, so that they rolled up like a spring. Over the others he bent his head, and there came from him a low, sobbing breath. On these pages the writing was that of a woman, and from the paper there still rose a faint, sweet scent of heliotrope. For half an hour Jan gazed upon them, reading the words slowly, until he came to the last page. When there came a movement from over against the wall, he lifted for an instant a pair of startled eyes. Cummins was turning in his sleep. Soundlessly Jan tiptoed across the floor, opened the door, without disturbing the slumbering man and went out into the night. In the south and east there glowed a soft blaze of fire where the big spring moon was coming up over the forest. As Jan turned his face toward it, a new and strange longing crept into his heart. He stretched out his arms, with the papers and his violin clutched in his hands, as if from out of that growing glory a wonderful spirit was calling to him. For the first time in his lonely life it came to him--this call of the great world beyond the wilderness; and suddenly he crushed the woman's letter to his lips, and his voice burst from him in whispering, thrilling eagerness: "I will come to you--some day--w'en ze leetle Mélisse come too!" He rolled the written pages together, wrapped them in the faded red cloth, and concealed them again in the box of his violin before he reentered the cabin. The next morning Cummins stood in the door, and said: "How warm the sun is! The snow and ice are going, Jan. It's spring. We'll house the sledges to-day, and begin feeding the dogs on fish." Each day thereafter the sun rose earlier, the day was longer, and the air was warmer; and with the warmth there now came the sweet scents of the budding earth and the myriad sounds of the deep, unseen life of the forest, awakening from its long slumber in its bed of snow. Moose-birds chirped their mating songs and flirted from morning until night in bough and air; ravens fluffed themselves in the sun; and snowbirds--little black-and-white beauties that were wont to whisk about like so many flashing gems--changed their color from day to day until they became new creatures in a new world. The poplar buds swelled in their joy until they split like over fat peas. The mother bears come out of their winter dens, accompanied by little ones born weeks before, and taught them how to pull down the slender saplings for these same buds. The moose returned from the blizzardy tops of the great ridges, where for good reasons they had passed the winter, followed by the wolves who fed upon their weak and sick. Everywhere were the rushing torrents of melting snow, the crackle of crumbling ice, the dying frost-cries of rock and earth and tree; and each night the pale glow of the aurora borealis crept farther and farther toward the pole in its fading glory. The post fell back into its old ways. Now and then a visitor came in from out of the forest, but he remained for only a day or two, taking back into the solitude with him a few of the necessaries of life. Williams was busy preparing his books for the coming of the company's chief agent from London, and Cummins, who was helping the factor, had a good deal of extra time on his hands. Before the last of the snow was gone, he and Jan began dragging in logs for an addition which they planned for the little cabin. Basking out in the sun, with a huge bearskin for a floor, Mélisse looked upon the new home-building with wonderful demonstrations of interest. Cummins' face glowed with pleasure as she kicked and scrambled on the bearskin and gave shrill-voiced approval of their efforts. Jan was the happiest youth in the world. It was certain that the little Mélisse understood what they were doing, and the word passed from Cummins and Jan to the others at the post, so that it happened frequently during the building operations that Mukee and Per-ee, and even Williams himself, would squat for an hour at a time in the snow near Mélisse, marveling at the early knowledge which the great God saw fit to put into a white baby's brain. This miracle came to be a matter of deep discussion, in which there were the few words but much thought of men born to silence. One day Mukee brought two little Indian babies and set them on the bearskin, where they continued to sit in stoic indifference--a clear proof of the superior development of Mélisse. "I wouldn't be surprised to hear her begin talking at any time," confided Cummins to Jan, one evening when the boy was tuning his violin. "She is nearly six months old." "Do you suppose she would begin in French?" asked Jan, suddenly stopping the tightening of his strings. Cummins stared. "Why?" Jan dropped his voice to an impressive whisper. "Because I have heard her many times say, 'Bon-bon--bonbon--bonbon'--which means candee; and always I have given her candee, an' now ze leetle Mélisse say 'Bonbon' all of ze time." "Well," said Cummins, eying him in half belief. "Could it happen?" Like a shot Jan replied: "I began in Engleesh, an' Jan Thoreau is French!" He began playing, but Cummins did not hear much of the music. He went to the door, and stared in lonely grief at the top of the tall spruce over the grave. Later he said to Jan: "It would be bad if that were so. Give her no more sweet stuff when she says 'Bonbon,' Jan. She must forget!" The next day Jan tore down the sapling barricade around the woman's grave, and from noon until almost sunset he skirted the sunny side of a great ridge to the south. When he came back he brought with him a basket of the early red snow-flowers, with earth clinging to their roots. These he planted thickly over the mound under the spruce, and around its edge he put rows of the young shoots of Labrador tea and backneesh. As the weather grew warmer, and spring changed into summer, he took Mélisse upon short excursions with him into the forests, and together they picked great armfuls of flowers and Arctic ferns. The grave was never without fresh offerings, and the cabin, with its new addition complete, was always filled with the beautiful things that spring up out of the earth. Jan and Mélisse were happy; and in the joys of these two there was pleasure for the others of the post, as there had been happiness in the presence of the woman. Only upon Cummins had there settled a deep grief. The changes of spring and summer, bringing with them all that this desolate world held of warmth and beauty, filled him with the excruciating pain of his great grief, as if the woman had died but yesterday. When he first saw the red flowers glowing upon her grave, he buried his head in his arms and sobbed like a child. The woman had loved them. She had always watched for the first red blooms to shoot up out of the wet earth. A hundred times he had gone with her to search for them, and had fastened the first flower in the soft beauty of her hair. Those were the days when, like happy children, they had romped and laughed together out there beyond the black spruce. Often he had caught her up in his strong arms and carried her, tired and hungry but gloriously happy, back to their little home in the clearing, where she would sit and laugh at him as he clumsily prepared their supper. Thoughts and pictures like these choked him and drove him off alone into the depths of the wilderness. When this spirit impelled him his moccasined feet would softly tread the paths they had taken in their wanderings; and at every turn a new memory would spring up before him, and he longed to fling himself down there with the sweet spirit of the woman and die. Little did he dream, at these times, that Jan and Mélisse were to cherish these same paths, that out of the old, dead joys there were to spring new joys, and that the new joys were to wither and die, even as his own--for a time. Beyond his own great sorrow he saw nothing in the future. He gave up Mélisse to Jan. At last, his gaunt frame thinned by sleepless nights and days of mental torture, he said that the company's business was calling him to Churchill, and early in August he left for the bay. CHAPTER XI FOR HER Upon Jan now fell a great responsibility. Mélisse was his own. Days passed before he could realize the fullness of his possession. He had meant to go by the Athabasca water route to see Jean de Gravois, leaving Mélisse to Cummins for a fortnight or so. Now he gave this up. Day and night he guarded the child; and to Jan's great joy it soon came to pass that whenever he was compelled to leave her for a short time, Mélisse would cry for him. At least Maballa assured him that this was so, and Mélisse gave evidence of it by her ecstatic joy when he returned. When Cummins came back from Fort Churchill in the autumn, he brought with him a pack full of things for Mélisse, including new books and papers, for which he had spent a share of his season's earnings. As he was freeing these treasures from their wrapping of soft caribou skin, with Jan and Mélisse both looking on, he stopped suddenly and glanced from his knees up at the boy. "They're wondering over at Churchill what became of the missionary who left with the mail, Jan. They say he was last seen at the Etawney." "And not here?" replied Jan quickly. "Not that they know of," said Cummins, still keeping his eyes on the boy. "The man who drove him never got back to Churchill. They're wondering where the driver went, too. A company officer has gone up to the Etawney, and it is possible he may come over to Lac Bain. I don't believe he'll find the missionary." "Neither do I," said Jan quite coolly. "He is probably dead, and the wolves and foxes have eaten him before this--or mebby ze feesh!" Cummins resumed his task of unpacking, and among the books which he brought forth there were two which he gave to Jan. "The supply ship from London came in while I was at Churchill, and those came with it," he explained. "They're school-books. There's going to be a school at Churchill next winter, and the winter after that it will be at York Factory, down on the Hayes." He settled back on his heels and looked at Jan. "It's the first school that has ever come nearer than four hundred miles of us. That's at Prince Albert." For many succeeding days Jan took long walks alone in the forest trails, and silently thrashed out the two problems which Cummins had brought back from Churchill for him. Should he warn Jean de Gravois that a company officer was investigating the disappearance of the missionary? At first his impulse was to go at once into Jean's haunts beyond the Fond du Lac, and give him the news. But even if the officer did come to Post Lac Bain, how would he know that the missionary was at the bottom of the lake, and that Jean de Gravois was accountable for it? So in the end Jan decided that it would be folly to stir up the little hunter's fears, and he thought no more of the company's investigator who had gone up to the Etawney. But the second problem was one whose perplexities troubled him. Cummins' word of the school at Churchill had put a new and thrilling thought into his head, and always with that thought he coupled visions of the growing Mélisse. This year the school would be at Churchill, and the next at York Factory, and after that it might be gone for ever, so that when Mélisse grew up there would be none nearer than what Jan looked upon as the other end of the world. Why could not he go to school for Mélisse, and store up treasures which in time he might turn over to her? The scheme was a colossal one, by all odds the largest that had ever entered into his dreams of what life held for him--that he, Jan Thoreau, should learn to read and write, and do other things like the people of the far South, so that he might help to make the little creature in the cabin like her who slept under the watchful spruce. He was stirred to the depths of his soul, now with fear, again with hope and desire and ambition; and it was not until the first cold chills of approaching winter crept down from the north and east that the ultimate test came, and he told Cummins of his intention. Once his mind was settled, Jan lost no time in putting his plans into action. Mukee knew the trail to Churchill, and agreed to leave with him on the third day--which gave Williams' wife time to make him a new coat of caribou skin. On the second evening he played for the last time in the little cabin; and after Mélisse had fallen asleep he took her up gently in his arms and held her there for a long time, while Cummins looked on in silence. When he replaced her in the little bed against the wall, Cummins put one of his long arms about the boy's shoulders and led him to the door, where they stood looking out upon the grim desolation of the forest that rose black and silent against the starlit background of the sky. High above the thick tops of the spruce rose the lone tree over the grave, like a dark finger pointing up into the night, and Cummins' eyes rested there. "She heard you first that night, Jan," he spoke softly. "She knew that you were coming long before I could hear anything but the crackling in the skies. I believe--she knows--now--" The arm about Jan's shoulder tightened, and Cummins' head dropped until his rough cheek rested upon the boy's hair. There was something of the gentleness of love in what he did, and in response to it Jan caught the hand that was hanging over his shoulder in both his own. "Boy, won't you tell me who you are, and why you came that night?" "I will tell you, now, that I come from ze Great Bear," whispered Jan. "I am only Jan Thoreau, an' ze great God made me come that night because"--his heart throbbed with sudden inspiration as he looked up into his companion's face--"because ze leetle Mélisse was here," he finished. For a time Cummins made no move or sound; then he drew the boy back into the cabin, and from the little gingham-covered box in the corner he took a buckskin bag. "You are going to Churchill for Mélisse and for HER" he said in a voice pitched low that it might not awaken the baby. "Take this." Jan drew a step back. "No, I fin' work with ze compan-ee at Churchill. That is ze gold for Mélisse when she grow up. Jan Thoreau is no--what you call heem?" His teeth gleamed in a smile, but it lasted only for an instant. Cummins' face darkened, and he caught him firmly, almost roughly, by the arm. "Then Jan Thoreau will never come back to Mélisse," he exclaimed with finality. "You are going to Churchill to be at school, and not to work with your hands. THEY are sending you. Do you understand, boy? THEY!" There was a fierce tremor in his voice. "Which will it be? Will you take the bag, or will you never again come back to Lac Bain?" Dumbly Jan reached out and took the buckskin pouch. A dull flush burned in his cheeks. Cummins looked in wonder upon the strange look that came into his eyes. "I pay back this gold to you and Mélisse a hundred times!" he cried tensely. "I swear it, an' I swear that Jan Thoreau mak' no lie!" Unconsciously, with the buckskin bag clutched in one hand, he had stretched out his other arm to the violin hanging against the wall. Cummins turned to look. When he faced him again the boy's arm had fallen to his side and his cheeks were white. The next day he left. No one heard his last words to Mélisse, or witnessed his final leave-taking of her, for Cummins sympathized with the boy's grief and went out of the cabin an hour before Mukee was ready with his pack. The last that he heard was Jan's violin playing low, sweet music to the child. Three weeks later, when Mukee returned to Lac Bain, he said that Jan had traveled to Churchill like one who had lost his tongue, and that far into the nights he had played lonely dirges upon his violin. CHAPTER XII A RUMOR FROM THE SOUTH It was a long winter for Cummins and Mélisse. It was a longer one for Jan. He had taken with him a letter from the factor at Lac Bain to the factor at Churchill, and he found quarters with the chief clerk's assistant at the post--a young, red-faced man who had come over on the ship from England. He was a cheerful, good-natured young fellow, and when he learned that his new associate had tramped all the way from the Barren Lands to attend the new public school, he at once invested himself with the responsibilities of a private tutor. He taught Jan, first of all, to say "is" in place of "ees." It was a tremendous lesson for Jan, but he struggled with it manfully, and a week after his arrival, when one evening he was tuning his violin to play for young MacDonald, he said with eager gravity: "Ah, I have it now, Mr. MacDonald. It ees not 'EES,' it ees 'EES!'" MacDonald roared, but persisted, and in time Jan began to get the twist out of his tongue. The school opened in November, and Jan found himself one of twenty or so, gathered there from forty thousand square miles of wilderness. Two white youths and a half-breed had come from the Etawney; the factor at Nelson House sent up his son, and from the upper waters of the Little Churchill there came three others. From the first, Jan's music found him a premier place in the interest of the tutor sent over by the company. He studied by night as well as by day, and by the end of the second month his only competitor was the youth from Nelson House. His greatest source of knowledge was not the teacher, but MacDonald. There was in him no inherent desire for the learning of the people to the south. That he was storing away, like a faithful machine, for the use of Mélisse. But MacDonald gave him that for which his soul longed--a picture of life as it existed in the wonderful world beyond the wilderness, to which some strange spirit within him, growing stronger as the weeks and months passed, seemed projecting his hopes and his ambitions. Between his thoughts of Mélisse and Lac Bain, he dreamed of that other world; and several times during the winter he took the little roll from the box of his violin, and read again and again the written pages that it contained. "Some time I will go," he assured himself always. "Some time, when Mélisse is a little older, and can go too." To young MacDonald, the boy from Lac Bain was a "find." The Scottish youth was filled with an immense longing for home; and as his homesickness grew, he poured more and more into Jan's attentive ears his knowledge of the world from which he had come. He told him the history of the old brass cannon that lay abandoned among the vines and bushes, where a fort had stood at Churchill many years before. He described the coming of the first ship into the great bay; told of Hudson and his men, of great wars that his listener had never dreamed of, of kings and queens and strange nations. At night he read a great deal to Jan out of books that he had brought over with him. As the weeks and months passed, the strange spirit that was calling to the forest boy out of that other world stirred more restlessly within him. At times it urged him to confide in MacDonald what was hidden away in the box of his violin. The secret nearly burst from him one Sunday, when MacDonald said: "I'm going home on the ship that comes over next summer. What do you say to going back with me, Jan?" The spirit surged through Jan in a hot flood, and it was only an accident that kept him from saying what was in his heart. They were standing with the icy bay stretching off in interminable miles toward the pole. A little way from them, the restless tide was beating up through the broken ice, and eating deeper into the frozen shore. From out of the bank there projected, here and there, the ends of dark, box-like objects, which, in the earlier days of the company, had been gun-cases. In them were the bones of men who had lived and died an age ago; and as Jan looked at the silent coffins, now falling into the sea, another spirit--the spirit that bound him to Mélisse--entered into him, and he shuddered as he thought of what might happen in the passing of a year. It was this spirit that won. In the spring, Jan went back to Lac Bain with the company's supplies. The next autumn he followed the school to York Factory, and the third year he joined it at Nelson House. Then the company's teacher died, and no one came to fill his place. In midwinter of this third year, Jan returned to Lac Bain, and, hugging the delighted Mélisse close in his arms, he told her that never again would he go away without her. Mélisse, tightening her arms around his neck, made his promise sacred by offering her little rosebud of a mouth for him to kiss. Later, the restless spirit slumbering within his breast urged him to speak to Cummins. "When Mélisse is a little older, should we not go with her into the South?" he said. "She must not live for ever in a place like this." Cummins looked at him for an instant as if he did not understand. When Jan's meaning struck home, his eyes hardened, and there was the vibrant ring of steel in his quiet voice. "Her mother will be out there under the old spruce until the end of time," he said slowly; "and we will never leave her--unless, some day, Mélisse goes alone." From that hour Jan no longer looked into the box of his violin. He struggled against the desire that had grown with his years until he believed that he had crushed it and stamped it out of his existence. In his life there came to be but one rising and one setting of the sun. Mélisse was his universe. She crowded his heart until beyond her he began to lose visions of any other world. Each day added to his joy. He called her "my little sister," and with sweet gravity Mélisse called him "brother Jan," and returned in full measure his boundless love. He marked the slow turning of her flaxen hair into sunny gold, and month by month watched joyfully the deepening of that gold into warm shades of brown. She was to be like her mother! Jan's soul rejoiced, and in his silent way Cummins offered up wordless prayers of thankfulness. So matters stood at Post Lac Bain in the beginning of Mélisse's ninth year, when up from the south there came a rumor. As civil war spreads its deepest gloom, as the struggle of father against son and brother against brother stifles the breathing of nations, so this rumor set creeping a deep pall over the forest people. Rumor grew into rumor. From the east, the south and the west they multiplied, until on all sides the Paul Reveres of the wilderness carried news that the Red Terror was at their heels, and the chill of a great fear swept like a shivering wind from the edge of civilization to the bay. CHAPTER XIII THE RED TERROR Nineteen years before these same rumors had come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of it still remained with the forest people; for a thousand unmarked graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the toll it demanded. From DuBrochet, on Reindeer Lake, authentic word first came to Lac Bain early in the winter. Henderson was factor there, and he passed up the warning that had come to him from Nelson House and the country to the southeast. "There's smallpox on the Nelson," his messenger informed Williams, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. God only knows what it is doing to the bay Indians, but we hear that it is wiping out the Chippewayans between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same day with his winded dogs. "I'm off for the Révillon people to the west, with the compliments of our company," he explained. Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's servants and her majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thick face went as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill factor. "It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can make!" He read the paper aloud to the men at Lac Bain, and every available man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory. There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out was a roll of red cotton cloth. Williams' face was still white as he passed these rolls out from the company's store. They were ominous of death, lurid signals of pestilence and horror, and the touch of them sent shuddering chills through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people. Jan went over the Churchill trail, and then swung southward along the Hasabala, where the country was crisscrossed with trap-lines of the half-breeds and the French. First, he struck the cabin of Croisset and his wife, and left part of his cloth. Then he turned westward, while Croisset harnessed his dogs and hurried with a quarter of the roll to the south. Between the Hasabala and Klokol Lake, Jan found three other cabins, and at each he left a bit of the red cotton. Forty miles to the south, somewhere on the Porcupine, were the lines of Henry Langlois, the post's greatest fox-hunter. On the morning of the third day, Jan set off in search of Langlois; and late in the afternoon of the same day he came upon a well-beaten snow-shoe trail. On this he camped until morning. When dawn came he began following it. He passed half a dozen of Langlois' trap-houses. In none of them was there bait. In three the traps were sprung. In the seventh he found the remains of a red fox that had been eaten until there was little but the bones left. Two houses beyond there was an ermine in a trap, with its head eaten off. With growing perplexity, Jan examined the snow-shoe trails in the snow. The most recent of them were days old. He urged on his dogs, stopping no more at the trap-houses, until, with a shrieking command, he brought them to a halt at the edge of a clearing cut in the forest. A dozen rods ahead of him was the trapper's cabin. Over it, hanging limply to a sapling pole, was the red signal of horror. With a terrified cry to the dogs, Jan ran back, and the team turned about and followed him in a tangled mass. Then he stopped. There was no smoke rising from the clay chimney on the little cabin. Its one window was white with frost. Again and again he shouted, but no sign of life responded to his cries. He fired his rifle twice, and waited with his mittened hand over his mouth and nostrils. There was no reply. Then, abandoning hope, he turned back into the north, and gave his dogs no rest until he had reached Lac Bain. His team came in half dead. Both Cummins and Williams rushed out to meet him as he drove up before the company's store. "The red flag is over Langlois' cabin!" he cried. "I fired my rifle and shouted. There is no life! Langlois is dead!" "Great God!" groaned Williams. His red face changed to a sickly pallor, and he stood with his thick hands clenched, while Cummins took charge of the dogs and Jan went into the store for something to eat. Mukee and Per-ee returned to the post the next day. Young Williams followed close after them, filled with terror. He had found the plague among the Crees of the Waterfound. Each day added to the gloom at Lac Bain. For a time Jan could not fully understand, and he still played his violin and romped joyfully with Mélisse in the little cabin. He had not lived through the plague of nineteen years before. Most of the others had, even to Mukee, the youngest of them all. Jan did not know that it was this Red Terror that came like a Nemesis of the gods to cut down the people of the great Northland, until they were fewer in number than those of the Sahara desert. But he learned quickly. In February, the Crees along Wollaston Lake were practically wiped out. Red flags marked the trail of the Nelson. Death leaped from cabin to cabin in the wilderness to the west. By the middle of the month, Lac Bain was hemmed in by the plague on all sides but the north. The post's trap-lines had been shortened; now they were abandoned entirely, and the great fight began. Williams assembled his men, and told them how that same battle had been fought nearly two decades before. For sixty miles about the post every cabin and wigwam that floated a red flag must be visited--and burned if the occupants were dead. In learning whether life or death existed in these places lay the peril for those who undertook the task. It was a dangerous mission. It meant facing a death from which those who listened to the old factor shrank with dread; yet, when the call came, they responded to a man. Cummins and Jan ate their last supper together, with Mélisse sitting between them and wondering at their silence. When it was over, the two went outside. "Mukee wasn't at the store," said Cummins in a thick, strained voice, halting Jan in the gloom behind the cabin. "Williams thought he was off to the south with his dogs. But he isn't. I saw him drag himself into his shack, like a sick dog, an hour before dusk. There'll be a red flag over Lac Bain in the morning." Jan stifled the sharp cry on his lips. "Ah, there's a light!" cried Cummins. "It's a pitch torch burning in front of his door!" A shrill, quavering cry came from the direction of Mukee's cabin, and the two recognized it as the voice of the half-breed's father--a wordless cry, rising and dying away again and again, like the wailing of a dog. Sudden lights flashed into the night, as they had flashed years ago when Cummins staggered forth from his home with word of the woman's death. He gripped Jan's arm in a sudden spasm of horror. "The flag is up NOW!" he whispered huskily. "Go back to Mélisse. There is food in the house for a month, and you can bring the wood in to-night. Bar the door. Open only the back window for air. Stay inside--with her--until it is all over. Go!" "To the red flags, that is where I will go!" cried Jan fiercely, wrenching his arm free. "It is your place to stay with Mélisse!" "My place is with the men." "And mine?" Jan drew himself up rigid. "One of us must shut himself up with her," pleaded Cummins. "It must be you." His face gleamed white in the darkness. "You came--that night--because Mélisse was here. SOMETHING sent you--SOMETHING--don't you understand? And since then she has never been near to death until now. You must stay with Mélisse--WITH YOUR VIOLIN!" "Mélisse herself shall choose," replied Jan. "We will go into the cabin, and the one to whom she comes first goes among the red flags. The other shuts himself in the cabin until the plague is gone." He turned swiftly back to the door. As he opened it, he stepped aside to let Cummins enter first, and behind the other's broad back he leaped quickly to one side, his eyes glowing, his white teeth gleaming in a smile. Unseen by Cummins, he stretched out his arms to Mélisse, who was playing with the strings of his violin on the table. He had done this a thousand times, and Mélisse knew what it meant--a kiss and a joyous toss halfway to the ceiling. She jumped from her stool and ran to him; but this time, instead of hoisting her above his head, he hugged her up close to his breast, and buried his face in her soft hair. His eyes looked over her in triumph to Cummins. "Up, Jan, up--'way up!" cried Mélisse. He tossed her until she half turned in midair, kissed her again as he caught her in his arms, and set her, laughing and happy, on the edge of the table. "I am going down among the sick Crees in Cummins' place," said Jan to Williams, half an hour later. "Now that the plague has come to Lac Bain, he must stay with Mélisse." CHAPTER XIV A LONG WAITING The next morning Jan struck out over his old trail to the Hasabala. The Crees were gone. He spent a day swinging east and west, and found old trails leading into the north. "They have gone up among the Eskimos," he said to himself. "Ah, Kazan, what in the name of the saints is that?" The leading dog dropped upon his haunches with a menacing growl as a lone figure staggered across the snow toward them. It was Croisset. With a groan, he dropped upon the sledge. "I am sick and starving!" he wailed. "The fiend himself has got into my cabin, and for three days I've had nothing but snow and a raw whisky-jack!" "Sick!" cried Jan, drawing a step away from him. "Yes, sick from an empty belly, and this, and this!" He showed a forearm done up in a bloody rag, and pointed to his neck, from which the skin was peeling. "I was gone ten days with that red cloth you gave me; and when I came back, if there wasn't the horror itself grinning at me from the top of my own shanty! I tried to get in, but my wife barred the door, and said that she would shoot me if I didn't get back into the woods. I tried to steal in at night through a window, and she drenched me in hot water. I built a wigwam at the edge of the forest, and stayed there for five days. Hon-gree! Blessed saints, I had no matches, no grub; and when I got close enough to yell these things to her, she kept her word and plunked me through a crack in the door, so that I lost a pint of blood from this arm." "I'll give you something to eat," laughed Jan, undoing his pack. "How long has the red flag been up?" "I've lost all count of time, but it's twelve days, if an hour, and I swear it's going to take all winter to get it down!" "It's not the plague. Go back and tell your wife so." "And get shot for my pains!" groaned Croisset, digging into meat and biscuit. "I'm bound for Lac Bain, if you'll give me a dozen matches. That whisky-jack will remain with me until I die, for when I ate him I forgot to take out his insides!" "You're a lucky man, Croisset. It's good proof that she loves you." "If bullets and hot water and an empty belly are proofs, she loves me a great deal, Jan Thoreau! Though I don't believe she meant to hit me. It was a woman's bad aim." Jan left him beside a good fire, and turned into the southwest to burn Langlois and his cabin. The red flag still floated where he had seen it weeks before. The windows were thicker with frost. He shouted, beat upon the door with the butt of his rifle and broke in the windows. The silence of death quickened the beating of his heart when he stopped to listen. There was no doubt that Langlois lay dead in his little home. Jan brought dry brushwood from the forest, and piled it high against the logs. Upon his sledge he sat and watched the fire until the cabin was a furnace of leaping flame. He continued westward. At the head of the Porcupine he found the remains of three burned wigwams, and from one of them he dug out charred bones. Down the Porcupine he went slowly, doubling to the east and west, until, at its junction with Gray Otter Creek, he met a Cree, who told him that twenty miles farther on there was an abandoned village of six teepees. Toward these he boldly set forth, praying as he went that the angels were guarding Mélisse at Post Lac Bain. Croisset reached the post forty-eight hours after he had encountered Jan. "The red flag is everywhere!" he cried, catching sight of the signal over Mukee's cabin. "It is to the east and west of the Hasabala as thick as jays in springtime!" The Cree from the Gray Otter drove in on his way north. "Six wigwams with dead in them," he reported in his own language to Williams. "A company man, with a one-eyed leader and four trailers, left the Gray Otter to burn them." Williams took down his birch-bark moose-horn and bellowed a weird signal to Cummins, who opened a crack of his door to listen, with Mélisse close beside him. "Thoreau is in the thick of it to the south," he called. "There's too much of it for him, and I'm going down with the dogs. Croisset will stay in the store for a few days." Mélisse heard the words, and her eyes were big with fear when her father turned from closing and bolting the door. In more than a childish way, she knew that Jan had gone forth to face a great danger. The grim laws of the savage world in which she lived had already begun to fix their influence upon her, quickening her instinct and reason, just as they hastened the lives of Indian children into the responsibilities of men and women before they had reached fifteen. She knew what the red flag over Mukee's cabin meant. She knew that the air of this world of hers had become filled with peril to those who breathed it, and that people were dying out in the forests; that all about them there was a terrible, unseen thing which her father called the plague, and that Jan had gone forth to fight it, to breathe it, and, perhaps, to die in it. Their own door was locked and bolted against it. She dared not even thrust her head from the window which was opened for a short time each day; and until Cummins assured her that there was no danger in the sunshine, she shunned the few pale rays that shot through the cabin-window at midday. Unconsciously, Cummins added to her fears in more ways than one, and as he answered her questions truthfully, her knowledge increased day by day. She thought more and more of Jan. She watched for him through the two windows of her home. Every sound from outside brought her to them with eager hope; and always, her heart sank with disappointment, and the tears would come very near to her eyes, when she saw nothing but the terrible red flag clinging to the pole over Mukee's cabin. In the little Bible which her mother had left there was written, on the ragged fly-leaf, a simple prayer. Each night, as she knelt beside her cot and repeated this prayer, she paused at the end, and added: "Dear Father in Heaven, please take care of Jan!" The days brought quick changes now. One morning the moose-horn called Cummins to the door. It was the fifth day after Williams had gone south. "There was no smoke this morning, and I looked through the window," shouted Croisset. "Mukee and the old man are both dead. I'm going to burn the cabin." A stifled groan of anguish fell from Cummins' lips as he went like a dazed man to his cot and flung himself face downward upon it. Mélisse could see his strong frame shaking, as if he were crying like a child; and twining her arms tightly about his neck, she sobbed out her passionate grief against his rough cheek. She did not know the part that Mukee had played in the life of the sweet woman who had once lived in this same little cabin; she knew only that he was dead; that the terrible thing had killed him and that, next to her father and Jan, she had loved him more than any one else in the world. Soon she heard a strange sound, and ran to the window. Mukee's cabin was in flames. Wild-eyed and tearless with horror, she watched the fire as it burst through the broken windows and leaped high up among the black spruce. In those flames was Mukee! She screamed, and her father sprang to her with a strange cry, running with her from the window into the little room where she slept. The next morning, when Cummins went to awaken her, his face went as white as death. Mélisse was not asleep. Her eyes were wide open and staring at him, and her soft cheeks burned with the hot glow of fire. "You are sick, Mélisse," he whispered hoarsely. "You are sick!" He fell upon his knees beside her, and lifted her face in his hands. The touch of it sent a chill to his heart--such as he had not felt since many years ago, in that other room a few steps away. "I want Jan," she pleaded. "I want Jan to come back to me!" "I will send for him, dear. He will come back soon. I will go out and send Croisset." He hid his face from her as he dragged himself away. Croisset saw him coming, and came out of the store to meet him. A hundred yards away Cummins stopped. "Croisset, for the love of God, take a team and go after Jan Thoreau," he called "Tell him that Mélisse is dying of the plague. Hurry, hurry!" "Night and day!" shouted Croisset. Twenty minutes later, from the cabin window, Cummins saw him start. "Jan will be here very soon, Mélisse," he said, running his fingers gently through her hair. It fell out upon the pillow in thick brown waves, and the sight of it choked him with the memory of another vision which would remain with him until the end of time. It was her mother's hair, shining softly in the dim light; her mother's eyes looked up at him as he sat beside her through all this long day. Toward evening there came a change. The fever left the child's cheeks. Her eyes closed, and she fell asleep. Through the night Cummins sat near the door, but in the gray dawn, overcome by his long vigil, his head dropped upon his breast, and he slumbered. When he awoke the cabin was filled with light He heard a sound, and, startled, sprang to his feet. Mélisse was at the stove building a fire! "I'm better this morning, father. Why didn't you sleep until breakfast was ready?" Cummins stared. Then he gave a shout, made a rush for her, and catching her up in his arms, danced about the cabin like a great bear, overturning the chairs, and allowing the room to fill with smoke in his wild joy. "It's what you saw through the window that made you sick, Mélisse," he cried, putting her down at last. "I thought--" He paused, and added, his voice trembling: "I thought you were going to be sick for more than one day, my sweet little woman!" He opened one of the windows to let in the fresh air of the morning. When Croisset returned, he did not find a red flag over Cummins' cabin; nor did he bring word of Jan. For three days he had followed the trails to the south without finding the boy. But he brought back other news. Williams was sick with the plague in a Cree wigwam on the lower Porcupine. It was the last they ever heard of the factor, except that he died some time in March, and was burned by the Crees. Croisset went back over the Churchill trail, and found his wife ready to greet him with open arms. After that he joined Per-ee, who came in from the north, in another search for Jan. They found neither trace nor word of him after passing the Gray Otter, and Cummins gave up hope. It was not for long that their fears could be kept from Mélisse. This first bitter grief that had come into her life fell upon her with a force which alarmed Cummins, and cast him into deep gloom. She no longer loved to play with her things in the cabin. For days at a time she would not touch the books which Jan had brought from Churchill, and which he had taught her to read. She found little to interest her in the things which had been her life a few weeks before. With growing despair, Cummins saw his own efforts fail. As the days passed Mélisse mingled more and more with the Indian and half-breed children, and spent much of her time at the company's store, listening to the talk of the men, silent, attentive, unresponsive to any efforts they might make to engage her smiles. From her own heart she looked out upon a world that had become a void for her. Jan had been mother, brother, and everything that was tender and sweet to her--and he was gone. Mukee, whom she had loved, was gone. Williams was gone. The world was changed, terribly and suddenly, and it added years to her perspective of things. Each day, as the weeks went on, and the spring sun began to soften the snow, she became a little more like the wild children at Lac Bain and in the forest. For Jan, she had kept her hair soft and bright, because he praised her for it and told her it was pretty. Now it hung in tangles down her back. There came a night when she forgot her prayer, and Cummins did not notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next. Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was unobservant of many other things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled the life of the little cabin. They were eating dinner, one day in the early spring, with the sunshine flooding in upon them, when a quick, low footfall caused Mélisse to lift her eyes in the direction of the open door. A strange figure stood there, with bloodless face, staring eyes, and garments hanging in tatters--but its arms were stretched out, as those same arms had been held out to her a thousand times before, and, with the old glad cry, Mélisse darted with the swiftness of a sun-shadow beyond Cummins, crying: "Jan, Jan--my Jan!" Words choked in Cummins' throat when he saw the white-faced figure clutching Mélisse to its breast. At last he gasped "Jan!" and threw out his arms, so that both were caught in their embrace. For an instant Jan turned his face up to the light The other stared and understood. "You have been sick," he said, "but it has left no marks." "Thank God!" breathed Jan. Mélisse raised her head, and stroked his cheeks with her two hands. That night she remembered her prayer, and at its end she added: "Dear Father in Heaven, thank you for sending back Jan!" CHAPTER XV ALMOST A WOMAN Peace followed in the blighted trails of the Red Terror. Again the forest world breathed without fear; but from Hudson's Bay to Athabasca, and as far south as the thousand waters of the Reindeer country, the winds whispered of a terrible grief that would remain until babes were men and men went to their graves. Life had been torn and broken in a cataclysm more fearful than that which levels cities and disrupts the earth. Slowly it began its readjustment. There was no other life to give aid or sympathy; and just as they had suffered alone, so now the forest people struggled back into life alone, building up from the wreck of what had been, the things that were to be. For months the Crees wailed their death dirges as they sought out the bones of their dead. Men dragged themselves into the posts, wifeless and childless, leaving deep in the wilderness all that they had known to love and give them comfort. Now and then came a woman, and around the black scars of burned cabins and teepees dogs howled mournfully for masters that were gone. The plague had taken a thousand souls, and yet the laughing, dancing millions in that other big world beyond the edge of the wilderness caught only a passing rumor of what had happened. Lac Bain suffered least of the far northern posts, with the exception of Churchill, where the icy winds down-pouring from the Arctic had sent the Red Terror shivering to the westward. In the late snows, word came that Cummins was to take Williams' place as factor, and Per-ee at once set off for the Fond du Lac to bring back Jean de Gravois as "chief man." Croisset gave up his fox-hunting to fill Mukee's place. The changes brought new happiness to Mélisse. Croisset's wife was a good woman who had spent her girlhood in Montreal, and Iowaka, now the mother of a fire-eating little Jean and a handsome daughter, was a soft-voiced young Venus who had grown sweeter and prettier with her years--which is not usually the case with half-breed women. "But it's good blood in her, beautiful blood," vaunted Jean proudly, whenever the opportunity came. "Her mother was a princess, and her father a pure Frenchman, whose father's father was a chef de bataillon. What better than that, eh? I say, what better could there be than that?" So, for the first time in her life, Mélisse discovered the joys of companionship with those of her own kind. This new companionship, pleasant as it was, did not come between her and Jan. If anything, they were more to each other than ever. The terrible months through which they had passed had changed them both, and had given them, according to their years, the fruits which are often ripened in the black gloom of disaster rather than in the sunshine of prosperity. To Mélisse they had opened up a new world of thought, a new vision of the things that existed about her. The sternest teacher of all had brought to her the knowledge that comes of grief, of terror, and of death, and she had passed beyond her years, just as the cumulative processes of generations made the Indian children pass beyond theirs. She no longer looked upon Jan as a mere playmate, a being whose diversion was to amuse and to love her. He had become a man. In her eyes he was a hero, who had gone forth to fight the death of which she still heard word and whisper all about her. Croisset's wife and Iowaka told her that he had done the bravest thing that a man might do on earth. She spoke proudly of him to the Indian children, who called him the "torch-bearer." She noticed that he was as tall as Croisset, and taller by half a head than Jean, and that he lifted her now with one arm as easily as if she were no heavier than a stick of wood. Together they resumed their studies, devoting hours to them each day, and through all that summer he taught her to play upon his violin. The warm months were a time of idleness at Lac Bain, and Jan made the most of them in his teaching of Mélisse. She learned to read the books which he had used at Fort Churchill, and by midsummer she could read those which he had used at York Factory. At night they wrote letters to each other and delivered them across the table in the cabin, while Cummins looked on and smoked, laughing happily at what they read aloud to him. One night, late enough in the season for a fire to be crackling merrily in the stove, Jan was reading one of these letters, when Mélisse cried: "Stop, Jan--stop THERE!" Jan caught himself, and he blushed mightily when he read the next lines: "'I think you have beautiful eyes. I love them.'" "What is it?" cried Cummins interestedly. "Read on, Jan." "Don't!" commanded Mélisse, springing to her feet and running around the table. "I didn't mean you to read that!" She snatched the paper from Jan's hand and threw it into the fire. Jan's blood filled with pleasure, and at the bottom of his next letter he wrote back: "I think you have beautiful hair. I love it." That winter Jan was appointed post hunter, and this gave him much time at home, for meat was plentiful along the edge of the barrens. The two continued at their books until they came to the end of what Jan knew in them. After that, like searchers in strange places, they felt their way onward, slowly and with caution. During the next summer they labored through all the books which were in the little box in the corner of the cabin. It was Mélisse who now played most on the violin, and Jan listened, his eyes glowing proudly as he saw how cleverly her little fingers danced over the strings, his face flushed with a joy that was growing stronger in him every day. One day she looked curiously into the F-hole of the instrument, and her pretty mouth puckered itself into a round, red "O" of astonishment when Jan quickly snatched the violin from her hands. "Excuses-moi, ma belle Mélisse," he laughed at her in French. "I am going to play you something new!" That same day he took the little cloth-covered roll from the violin and gave it another hiding-place. It recalled to him the strange spirit which had once moved him at Fort Churchill, and which had remained with him for a time at Lac Bain. That spirit was now gone, luring him no longer. Time had drawn a softening veil over things that had passed. He was happy. The wilderness became more beautiful to him as Mélisse grew older. Each summer increased his happiness; each succeeding winter made it larger and more complete. Every fiber of his being sang in joyful response as he watched Mélisse pass from childhood into young girlhood. He marked every turn in her development, the slightest change in her transformation, as if she had been a beautiful flower. He possessed none of the quick impetuosity of Jean de Gravois. Years gave the silence of the North to his tongue, and his exultation was quiet and deep in his own heart. With an eagerness which no one guessed he watched the growing beauty of her hair, marked its brightening luster when he saw it falling in thick waves over her shoulders, and he knew that at last it had come to be like the woman's. The changing lights in her eyes fascinated him, and he rejoiced again when he saw that they were deepening into the violet blue of the bakneesh flowers that bloomed on the tops of the ridges. To him, Mélisse was growing into everything that was beautiful. She was his world, his life, and at Post Lac Bain there was nothing to come between the two. Jan noticed that in her thirteenth year she could barely stand under his outstretched arm. The next year she had grown so tall that she could not stand there at all. Very soon she would be a woman! The thought leaped from his heart, and he spoke it aloud. It was on the girl's fifteenth birthday. They had come up to the top of the ridge on which he had fought the missionary, to gather red sprigs of the bakneesh for the festival that they were to have in the cabin that night. High up on the face of a jagged rock, Jan saw a bit of the crimson vine thrusting itself out into the sun, and, with Mélisse laughing and encouraging him from below, he climbed up until he had secured it. He tossed it down to her. "It's the last one," she cried, seeing his disadvantage, "and I'm going home. You can't catch me!" She darted away swiftly along the snow-covered ridge, taunting him with merry laughter as she left him clambering in cautious descent down the rock. Jan followed in pursuit, shouting to her in French, in Cree, and in English, and their two voices echoed happily in their wild frolic. Jan slackened his steps. It was a joy to see Mélisse springing from rock to rock and darting across the thin openings close ahead of him, her hair loosening and sweeping out in the sun, her slender figure fleeing with the lightness of the pale sun-shadows that ran up and down the mountain. He would not have overtaken her of his own choosing, but at the foot of the ridge Mélisse gave up. She returned toward him, panting and laughing, shimmering like a sea-naiad under the glistening veil of her disheveled hair. Her face glowed with excitement; her eyes, filled with the light of the sun, dazzled Jan in their laughing defiance. Before her he stopped, and made no effort to catch her. Never had he seen her so beautiful, still daring him with her laugh, quivering and panting, flinging back her hair. Half reaching out his arms, he cried: "Mélisse, you are beautiful--you are almost a woman!" The flush deepened in her cheeks, and there was no longer the sweet, taunting mischief in her eyes. She made no effort to run from him when he came to her. "Do you think so, Brother Jan?" "If you did your hair up like the pictures we have in the books, you would be a woman," he answered softly. "You are more beautiful than the pictures!" He drew a step back, and her eyes flashed at him again with the sparkle of the old fun in them. "You say that I am pretty, and that I am almost a woman," she pouted. "And yet--" She shrugged her shoulders at him in mock disdain. "Jan Thoreau, this is the third time in the last week that you have not played the game right! I won't play with you any more!" In a flash he was at her side, her face between his two hands and, bending down, he kissed her upon the mouth. "There," she said, as he released her. "Isn't that the way we have played it ever since I can remember? Whenever you catch me, you may have that!" "I am afraid, Mélisse," he said seriously. "You are growing so tall and so pretty that I am afraid." "Afraid! My brother afraid to kiss me! And what will you do when I get to be a woman, Jan--which will be very soon, you say?" "I don't know, Mélisse." She turned her back to him and flung out her hair; and Jan, who had done this same thing for her a hundred times before, divided the silken mass into three strands and plaited them into a braid. "I don't believe that you care for me as much as you used to, Jan. I wish I were a woman, so that I might know if you are going to forget me entirely!" Her shoulders trembled; and when he had finished his task, he found that she was laughing, and that her eyes were swimming with a new mischief which she was trying to hide from him. In that laugh there was something which was not like Mélisse. Slight as the change was, he noticed it; but instead of displeasing him, it set a vague sensation of pleasure trilling like a new song within him. When they reached the post, Mélisse went to the cabin with her bakneesh, and Jan to the company's store. Tossing the vines upon the table, Mélisse ran back to the door and watched him until he disappeared. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips half parted in excitement; and no sooner had he gone from view than she hurried to Iowaka's home across the clearing. It was fully three quarters of an hour later when Jan saw Mélisse, with Iowaka's red shawl over her head, walking slowly and with extreme precision of step back to the cabin. "I wonder if she has the earache," he said to himself, watching her curiously. "That is Iowaka's shawl, and she has it all about her head." "A clear half-inch of the rarest wool from London," added the cheery voice of Jean de Gravois, whose moccasins had made no sound behind him. He always spoke in French to Jan. "There is but one person in the world who looks better in it than your Mélisse, Jan Thoreau, and that is Iowaka, my wife. Blessed saints, man, but is she not growing more beautiful every day?" "Yes," said Jan. "She will soon be a woman." "A woman!" shouted Jean, who, not having his caribou whip, jumped up and down to emphasize his words. "She will soon be a woman, did you say, Jan Thoreau? And if she is not a woman at thirty, with two children--God send others like them!--when will she be, I ask you?" "I meant Mélisse," laughed Jan. "And I meant Iowaka," said Jean. "Ah, there she is now, come out to see if her Jean de Gravois is on his way home with the sugar for which she sent him something like an hour ago; for you know she is chef de cuisine of this affair to-night. Ah, she sees me not, and she turns back heartily disappointed, I'll swear by all the saints in the calendar! Did you ever see a figure like that, Jan Thoreau? And did you ever see hair that shines so, like the top-feathers of a raven who's nibbling at himself in the hottest bit of sunshine he can find? Deliver us, but I'll go with the sugar this minute!" The happy Jean hopped out, like a cricket over-burdened with life, calling loudly to his wife, who came to meet him. A few minutes later Jan thrust his head in at their door, as he was passing. "I knew I should get a beating, or something worse, for forgetting that sugar," cried the little Frenchman, holding up his bared arms. "Dough--dough--dough--I'm rolling dough--dough for the bread, dough for the cakes, dough for the pies--dough, Jan Thoreau, just common flour and water mixed and swabbed--I, Jean de Gravois, chief man at Post Lac Bain, am mixing dough! She is as beautiful as an angel and sweeter than sugar--my Iowaka, I mean; but there is more flesh in her earthly tabernacle than in mine, so I am compelled to mix this dough, mon ami. Iowaka, my dear, tell Jan what you were telling me, about Mélisse and--" "Hush!" cried Iowaka in her sweet Cree. "That is for Jan to find out for himself." "So--so it is," exclaimed the irrepressible Jean, plunging himself to the elbows in his pan of dough. "Then hurry to the cabin, Jan, and see what sort of a birthday gift Mélisse has got for you." CHAPTER XVI BIRTHDAYS The big room was empty when Jan came quietly through the open door. He stopped to listen, and caught a faint laugh from the other room, and then another; and to give warning of his presence, he coughed loudly and scraped a chair along the floor. A moment's silence followed. The farther door opened a little, and then it opened wide, and Mélisse came out. "Now what do you think of me, brother Jan?" She stood in the light of the window through which came the afternoon sun, her hair piled in glistening coils upon the crown of her head, as they had seen them in the pictures, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing questioningly at Jan. "Do I look--as you thought--I would, Jan?" she persisted, a little doubtful at his silence. She turned, so that he saw the cluster of soft curls that fell upon her shoulder, with sprigs of bakneesh half smothered in them. "Do I?" "You are prettier than I have ever seen you, Mélisse," he replied softly. There was a seriousness in his voice that made her come to him in her old impulsive, half-childish way. She lifted her hands and rested them on his shoulders, as she had always done when inviting him to toss her above his head. "If I am prettier--and you like me this way--why don't you--" She finished with a sweet, upturned pouting of her mouth, and, with a sudden, laughing cry, Jan caught her in his arms and kissed the lips she held up to him. It was but an instant, and he freed her, a hot blush burning in his brown cheeks. "My dear brother!" she laughed at him, gathering up the bakneesh on the table. "I love to have you kiss me, and now I have to make you do it. Father kisses me every morning when he goes to the store. I remember when you used to kiss me every time you came home, but now you forget to do it at all. Do brothers love their sisters less as they grow older?" "Sometimes they love the SISTER less and the OTHER GIRL more, ma belle Mélisse," came a quick voice from the door, and Jean de Gravois bounded in like a playful cat, scraping and bowing before Mélisse until his head nearly touched the floor. "Lovely saints, Jan Thoreau, but she IS a woman, just as my Iowaka told me! And the cakes--the bread--the pies! You must delay the supper my lady, for the good Lord deliver me if I haven't spilled all the dough on the floor! Swas-s-s-s-h--such a mess! And my Iowaka did nothing but laugh and call me a clumsy dear!" "You're terribly in love, Jean," cried Mélisse, laughing until her eyes were wet; "just like some of the people in the books which Jan and I read." "And I always shall be, my dear, so long as the daughter of a princess and the great-granddaughter of a chef de bataillon allows me to mix her dough!" Mélisse flung the red shawl over her head, still laughing. "I will go and help her, Jean." "Mon Dieu!" gasped Gravois, looking searchingly at Jan, when she had left. "Shall I give you my best wishes, Jan Thoreau? Does it signify?" "Signify--what?" The little Frenchman's eyes snapped. "Why, when our pretty Cree maiden becomes engaged, she puts up her hair for the first time, that is all, my dear Jan. When I asked my blessed Iowaka to be my wife, she answered by running away from me, taunting me until I thought my heart had shriveled into a bit of salt blubber; but she came back to me before I had completely died, with her braids done up on the top of her head!" He stopped suddenly, startled into silence by the strange look that had come into the other's face. For a full minute Jan stood as if the power of movement had gone from him. He was staring over the Frenchman's head, a ghastly pallor growing in his cheeks. "No--it--means--nothing," he said finally, speaking as if the words were forced from him one by one. He dropped into a chair beside the table like one whose senses had been dulled by an unexpected blow. With a great sighing breath that was almost a sob, he bowed his head upon his arms. "Jan Thoreau," whispered Jean softly, "have you forgotten that it was I who killed the missioner for you, and that through all of these years Jean de Gravois has never questioned you about the fight on the mountain top?" There was in his voice, as gentle as a woman's, the vibrant note of a comradeship which is next to love--the comradeship of man for man in a world where friendship is neither bought nor sold. "Have you forgotten, Jan Thoreau? If there is anything Jean de Gravois can do?" He sat down opposite Jan, his thin, eager face propped in his hands, and watched silently until the other lifted his head. Their eyes met, steady, unflinching, and in that look there were the oath and the seal of all that the honor of the big snows held for those two. Still without words, Jan reached within his breast and drew forth the little roll which he had taken from his violin. One by one he handed the pages over to Jean de Gravois. "Mon Dieu!" said Jean, when he had finished reading. He spoke no other words. White-faced, the two men stared, Jan's throat twitching, Gravois' brown fingers crushing the rolls he held. "That was why I tried to kill the missioner," said Jan at last. He pointed to the more coarsely written pages under Jean's hand. "And that--that--is why it could not signify that Mélisse has done up her hair." He rose to his feet, straining to keep his voice even, and gathered up the papers so that they shot back into the little cylinder-shaped roll again. "Now do you understand?" "I understand," replied Jean in a low voice, but his eyes glittered like dancing dragon-flies as he raised his elbows slowly from the table and stretched his arms above his head. "I understand, Jan Thoreau, and I praise the blessed Virgin that it was Jean de Gravois who killed the missioner out upon the ice of Lac Bain!" "But the other," persisted Jan, "the other, which says that I--" "Stop!" cried Jean sharply. He came around the table and seized Jan's hands in the iron grip of his lithe, brown fingers. "That is something for you to forget. It means nothing--nothing at all, Jan Thoreau! Does any one know but you and me?" "No one. I intended that some day Mélisse and her father should know; but I waited too long. I waited until I was afraid, until the horror of telling her frightened me. I made myself forget, burying it deeper each year, until to-day--on the mountain--" "And to-day, in this cabin, you will forget again, and you will bury it so deep that it will never come back. I am proud of you, Jan Thoreau. I love you, and it is the first time that Jean de Gravois has ever said this to a man. Ah, I hear them coming!" With an absurd bow in the direction of the laughing voices which they now heard, the melodramatic little Frenchman pulled Jan to the door. Half-way across the open were Mélisse and Iowaka, carrying a large Indian basket between them, and making merry over the task. When they saw Gravois and Jan, they set down their burden and waved an invitation for the two men to come to their assistance. "You should be the second happiest man in the world, Jan Thoreau," exclaimed Jean. "The first is Jean de Gravois!" He set off like a bolt from a spring-gun in the direction of the two who were waiting for them. He had hoisted the basket upon his shoulder by the time Jan arrived. "Are you growing old, too, Jan?" bantered Mélisse, as she dropped a few steps behind Jean and his wife. "You come so slowly!" "I think I'm twenty-nine." "You think!" Her dancing eyes shot up to his, bubbling over with the mischief which she had been unable to suppress that day. "Why, Jan--" He had never spoken to Mélisse as he did now. "I was born some time in the winter, Mélisse--like you. Perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it is to-morrow. That is all I know." He looked at her steadily, the grief which he was fighting to keep back tightening the muscles about his mouth. Like the quick passing of sunshine, the fun swept from her face, leaving her blue eyes staring up at him, filled with a pain which he had never seen in them before. In a moment he knew that she had understood him, and he could have cut out his tongue. Her hand reached his arm, and she stopped him, her face lifted pleadingly, the tears slowly gathering in her eyes. "Forgive me!" she whispered, her voice breaking into a sob. "Dear, dear Jan, forgive me!" She caught one of his hands in both her own, and for an instant held it so that he could feel the throbbing of her heart. "To-day is your birthday, Jan--yours and mine, mine and yours--and we will always have it that way--always--won't we, Jan?" CHAPTER XVII THE RENUNCIATION Jan was glad when the evening came, and was gone. Not until Jean and Iowaka had said good night with Croisset and his wife, and both Cummins and Mélisse had gone to their rooms, did he find himself relieved of the tension under which he had struggled during all of that night's merry-making in the cabin. From the first he knew that his nerves were strung by some strange and indefinable sensation that was growing within him--something which he could hardly have explained at first, but which swiftly took form and meaning, and oppressed him more as the hours flew by. Almost fiercely he strove to fight back the signs of it from his face and voice. Never had he played as on this night. His violin leaped with life, his voice rose high in the wild forest songs of Jean de Gravois and Croisset, he sprang aloft in the caribou dance until the tips of his fingers touched the log beams overhead; and yet there was none of the flush of excitement in his face, no joyous fire flashing from his eyes upon Mélisse. She saw this, and wondered. A dozen times her eyes encountered his, straight and questioning, when the others were not looking. She saw in response only a dull, lusterless glow that was not like the Jan who had pursued her that day on the mountain-top. Jan was unaware of what was lacking in him. He smiled when she gave him these glances; deep down in him his heart trembled at the beauty of her flushed cheeks, the luster of her coiled hair, the swimming depths of her clear eyes; but the mask of the thing at which she wondered still remained. After the others had gone, Cummins sat up to smoke a pipe. When he had finished, he went to his room. Jan was now sleeping in a room at the company's store, and after a time he rose silently to take down his cap and coat. He opened the outer door quietly, so as not to arouse Mélisse, who had gone to bed half an hour before. As he was about to go out, there came a sound--a low, gentle, whispered word. "Jan!" He turned. Mélisse stood in her door. She had not undressed, and her hair was still done up in its soft coils, with the crimson bakneesh shining in it. She came to him hesitatingly, until she stood with her two hands upon his arm, gazing into his tense face with that same question in her eyes. "Jan, you were not pleased with me to-night," she whispered. "Tell me, why?" "I was pleased with you, Mélisse," he replied. He took one of the hands that was clinging to his arm, and turned his face to the open night. Countless stars gleamed in the sky, as they had shone on another night fifteen years ago. From where they stood they saw the pale flicker of the aurora, sending its shivering arrows out over the dome of the earth, with the same lonely song that it had played when the woman died. Gaunt and solitary, the tall spruce loomed up against the silver glow, its thick head sighing faintly in the night wind, as if in wailing answer to that far-away music in the skies. Suddenly there leaped up from Jan Thoreau's breast a breath that burst from his lips in a low cry. "Mélisse, Mélisse, it was just fifteen years ago that I came in through that forest out there, starved and dying, and played my violin when your mother died. You were a little baby then, and since that night you have never pleased me more than now!" He dropped her hand and turned squarely to the door, to hide what he knew had come into his face. He heard a soft, heart-broken little sob behind him, and something fell rustling upon his arm. "Jan, dear Jan!" Mélisse crowded herself into his arms, her hair torn down and tumbling about her shoulders. In her eyes there were the old pride and the old love, the love and pride of what seemed to Jan to be, years ago, the old, childish pleading for his comradeship, for the fun of his strong arms, the frolic of his laugh. Irresistibly they called to him, and in the old glad way he tightened his arms about her shoulders, his eyes glowing, and life leaping back, flushed and full, into his face. She laughed, happy and trembling, her lips held up to him. "I didn't please you to-day," she whispered. "I will never do up my hair again!" He kissed her, and his arms dropped from her shoulders. "Never, never again--until you have forgotten to love me," she repeated. "Good night, Brother Jan!" Across the open, through the thinned edge of the black spruce, deeper and deeper into the cold, unquivering lifelessness of the forest, Jan went from the door that closed between him and Mélisse, her last words still whispering in his ears, the warm touch of her hair on his cheeks--and the knowledge of what this day had meant for him swiftly surging upon him, bringing with it a torment which racked him to the soul. Fifteen years ago! He stopped and looked up, the starlight whitening his face. There was no change in this night from that other one of ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning prayers on that night when he had staggered into Lac Bain. He went on until he came to where the beaten trail swept up and away from a swamp. As vividly as if it had happened but yesterday, he remembered how he had dragged himself through this swamp, bleeding and starving, his violin clutched to his breast, guided by the barking of dogs, which seemed to come from a million miles away. He plunged into it now, picking his tangled way until he stood upon a giant ridge, from which he looked out through the white night into the limitless barrens to the north. Along the edge of those barrens he had come, daring the hundred deaths between hunter's cabin and Indian wigwam, starving at times, almost dying of cold, building fires to keep the wolves back, and playing--always playing to keep up his courage, until he found Mélisse. Fifteen years had passed since then, and the cumulative force of the things that had grown out of those years had fallen upon him this day. He had felt it first when Mélisse turned upon him at the foot of the mountain; and after that in the cabin, in every breath he drew, in every look that he gave her. For him she had changed for all time. She was no longer the little Mélisse, his sister. And yet-- He was almost saying her last words aloud: "Good night, Brother Jan!" She had come to him that day to let him kiss her, as she had come to him a thousand times before; but he had not kissed her in the old way. It was a different love that his lips had given, and even now the hot blood surged again into his face as he thought of what he had done. His was a different idea of honor from that held by men born to the ways of passion. In that which had stirred his blood, thrilling him with strange joy as he held her in his arms, he saw more than the shadow of sin--sacrilege against a thing which was more precious to him than life. Mélisse came to him still as his sister, abiding in her glorious faith in him, unaware of his temptation; while he, Jan Thoreau-- He thrust a hand inside his coat and clutched at the papers that Jean de Gravois had read. Then he drew them forth, slowly, and held them crumpled in his fingers, while for many minutes he stared straight out into the gray gloom of the treeless plain. His eyes shifted. Searchingly they traveled up the face of the crags behind him. They hunted where the starlight made deep pits of gloom in the twisting edge of the mountains. They went from rock to rock and from tree to tree until at last they rested upon a giant spruce which hung out over the precipitous wall of the ridge, its thick top beckoning and sighing to the black rocks that shot up out of the snow five hundred feet below. It was a strange tree, weird and black, free of stub or bough for a hundred feet, and from far out on the barrens those who traveled their solitary ways east and west knew that it was a monument shaped by men. Mukee had told Jan its story. In the first autumn of the woman's life at Lac Bain, he and Per-ee had climbed the old spruce, lopping off its branches until only the black cap remained; and after that it was known far and wide as the "lobstick" of Cummins' wife. It was a voiceless cenotaph which signified that all the honor and love known to the wilderness people had been given to her. To it went Jan, the papers still held in his hand. He had seen a pair of whisky-jacks storing food in the butt of the tree, two or three summers before, and now his fingers groped for the hole. When he found it, he thrust in the papers, crowded them down, and filled the hole with chunks of bark. "Always my sister--and never anything more to Jan Thoreau," he said gently in French, as if he were speaking to a spirit in the old tree. "That is the honor of these snows; it is what the great God means us to be." The strife had gone from his voice; it rose strong and clear as he stretched his arms high up along the shorn side of the spruce, his eyes upon the silent plume that heard his oath. "I swear that Jan Thoreau will never do wrong to the little Mélisse!" With a face white and set in its determination, he turned slowly away from the tree. Far away, from the lonely depths of the swamp, there came the wailing howl of a wolf--a cry of hungerful savageness that died away in echoes of infinite sadness. It was like the howling of a dog at the door of a cabin in which his master lay dead, and the sound of it swept a flood of loneliness into Jan's heart. It was the death-wail of his own last hope, which had gone out of him for ever that night. He listened, and it came again; but in the middle of it, when the long, moaning grief of the voice was rising to its full despair, there broke in a sharp interruption--a shrieking, yelping cry, such as a dog makes when it is suddenly struck. In another moment the forest thrilled with the deep-throated pack-call of the wolf who has started a fresh kill. Hardly had its echoes died away when, from deeper in the swamp, there came another cry, and still another from the mountain; and up and out of the desolation rose the calls of others of the scattered pack, in quick response to the comrade who had first found meat. All the cries were alike, filled with that first wailing grief, except that of the swelling throat which was sending forth the call to food. A few minutes, and another of the mournful howls changed into the fierce hunt-cry; then a second, a third, and a fourth, and the sound of the chase swept swiftly from the swamp to the mountain, up the mountain and down into the barrens. "A caribou!" cried Jan softly. "A caribou, and he is going into the barrens. There is no water, and he is lost!" He ran and leaned over beside the old tree, so that the great plain stretched out below him. Into the west turned the pack, the hunt-cry growing fainter until it almost died away. Then, slowly, it grew again in volume, swinging into the north, then to the east--approaching nearer and nearer until Jan saw a dark, swiftly moving blot in the white gloom. The caribou passed by within half a rifle-shot of him; another half rifle-shot behind followed the wolves, flung out fan-shape, their gray bodies moving like specters in a half-moon cordon, and their leaders almost abreast the caribou a dozen rods to each side. There was no sound now. Below him, Jan could see the pale glimmer of ice and snow, where in summer there was a small lake. Desperately the caribou made an effort to reach this lake. The wolves drew in. The moon-shape of their bodies shrunk until it was nearer a circle. From the plain side the leading wolf closed until he was running at the caribou's forelegs. The mountain wolf responded on the opposite side. Then came the end, quick, decisive, and without sound. After a few moments there came faintly the snapping of jaws and the crunching of bones. Torn and bleeding, and yet quivering with life, the caribou was given up to the feast. Jan turned away from the scene. Torn and bleeding at his own heart, he went back to Lac Bain. CHAPTER XVIII BROTHER JAN When he came into the cabin for breakfast that morning, Jan's face showed signs of the struggle through which he had gone. Cummins had already finished, and he found Mélisse alone. Her hair was brushed back in its old, smooth way; and when she heard him, she flung her long braid over her shoulder, so that it fell down in front of her. He saw the movement, and smiled his thanks without speaking. "You don't look well, Jan," she said anxiously. "You are pale, and your eyes are bloodshot." "I am not feeling right," he admitted, trying to appear cheerful, "but this coffee will make a new man of me. You make the best coffee in the world, Mélisse?" "How do you know, brother?" she asked. "Have you drunk any other than mine since years ago at Churchill and York Factory?" "Only Iowaka's. But I know that yours is best, from what I remember of the coffee at the bay." "It was a long time ago, wasn't it?" she asked gently, looking at him across the table. "I dreamed of those days last night, Jan, though I don't remember anything about your going to Churchill. I must have been too young; but I remember when you went to Nelson House, and how lonely I was. Last night I dreamed that we both went, and that we stood together, looking out over the bay, where the tides are washing away the gun case coffins. I saw the ship that you described to me, too, and thought that we wanted to go out to it, but couldn't. Do you suppose we'll ever go to Churchill together, Jan, and ride on a wonderful ship like that?" "It may be, Mélisse." "And then I dreamed that you were gone, and I was alone; and some one else came to me, whom I didn't like at all, and tried to MAKE me go to the ship. Wasn't that strange?" She laughed softly, as she rose to give him another cup of coffee. "What did you mean, Jan Thoreau, by running away from me like that?" "To get even with you for running away from me on the mountain," he replied quickly. She paused, the cup half filled, and Jan, looking up, caught her eyes full of mock astonishment. "And were you sorry I ran away from you?" Despite himself, his pale cheeks flushed. "Do you think I was?" he replied equivocally. "I--don't--know," she answered slowly, filling his cup. "What are you going to do to-day, Jan?" "Drive out on the Churchill trail. Ledoq wants supplies, and he's too busy with his trap-lines to come in." "Will you take me?" "I'm afraid not, Mélisse. It's a twelve-mile run and a heavy load." "Very well. I'll get ready immediately." She jumped up from the table, darting fun at him with her eyes, and ran to her room. "It's too far, Mélisse," he called after her. "It's too far, and I've a heavy load--" "Didn't I take that twenty-mile run with you over to--Oh, dear! Jan, have you seen my new lynx-skin cap?" "It's out here, hanging on the wall," replied Jan, falling into her humor despite himself. "But I say, Mélisse--" "Are the dogs ready?" she called. "If they're not, I'll be dressed before you can harness them, Jan." "They'll be here within fifteen minutes," he replied, surrendering to her. Her merry face, laughing triumph at him through the partly open door, destroyed the last vestige of his opposition, and he left her with something of his old cheeriness of manner, whistling a gay forest tune as he hurried toward the store. When he returned with the team, Mélisse was waiting for him, a gray thing of silvery lynx fur, with her cheeks, lips and eyes aglow, her trim little feet clad in soft caribou boots that came to her knees, and with a bunch of the brilliant bakneesh fastened jauntily in her cap. "I've made room for you," he said in greeting, pointing to the sledge. "Which I'm not going to fill for five miles, at least," declared Mélisse. "Isn't it a glorious morning, Jan? I feel as if I can run from here to Ledoq's!" With a crack of his whip and a shout, Jan swung the dogs across the open, with Mélisse running lightly at his side. From their cabin Jean and Iowaka called out shrill adieus. "The day is not far off when they two will be as you and I, my Iowaka," said Jean in his poetic Cree. "I wager you that it will be before her next birthday!" And Mélisse was saying: "I wonder if there are many people as happy as Jean and Iowaka!" She caught her breath, and Jan cracked on the dogs in a spurt that left her panting, a full dozen rods behind him. With a wild halloo he stopped the team, and waited. "That's unfair, Jan! You'll have to put me on the sledge." He tucked her in among the furs, and the dogs strained at their traces, with Jan's whip curling and snapping over their backs, until they were leaping swiftly and with unbroken rhythm of motion over the smooth trail. Then Jan gathered in his whip and ran close to the leader, his moccasined feet taking the short, quick, light steps of the trained forest runner, his chest thrown a little out, his eyes upon the twisting trail ahead. It was a glorious ride, and Mélisse's eyes danced with joy. Her blood thrilled to the tireless effort of the grayish-yellow pack of magnificent brutes ahead of her. She watched the muscular play of their backs and legs, the eager outreaching of their wolfish heads, and their half-gaping jaws--and from them she looked to Jan. There was no effort in his running. His pale cheeks were flushed, his black hair swept back from the gray of his cap, gleaming in the sun. Like the dogs, there was music in his movement, there was the beauty of strength, of endurance, of manhood born to the forests. Her eyes shone proudly; the color deepened in her cheeks as she looked at him, wondering if there was another man in the world like Jan Thoreau. Mile after mile slipped behind, and not until they reached the mountain on which he had fought the missionary did Jan bring his dogs to a walk. Mélisse jumped from the sledge and ran quickly to his side. "I can beat you to the top now!" she cried. "If you catch me--" There was the old witching challenge in her eyes. She sped up the side of the ridge. Panting and breathless, Jan pursued with the dogs. Her advantage was too great for him to overcome this time, and she stood laughing down at him when he came to the top of the ridge. "You're as pretty as a fairy, Mélisse!" he exclaimed, his eyes shining with admiration. "Prettier than the fairy in the book!" "Thank you, brother! The one with golden hair?" "Yes, all of them." "I can't imagine how a girl would look with golden hair; can you, Jan?" Before he could answer she added mischievously: "Did you see any fairies at Churchill or York Factory?" "None that could compare with you, Mélisse." "Thank you again, brother mine! I believe you DO still love me a little." "More than ever in my life," replied Jan quickly, though he tried to hold his tongue. As they went on to Ledoq's, he found that the joyousness of the morning was giving way again to the old gloom and heartache. Brother Jan, Brother Jan, Brother Jan! The words pounded themselves incessantly in his brain until they seemed to keep time with his steps beside the sledge. They drove him back into his thoughts of the preceding night, and he felt a sense of relief when they reached the trapper's. Ledoq was stripping the hair-fat from a fox-skin when the team pulled up in front of his cabin. When he saw the daughter of the factor at Lac Bain with Jan, he jumped briskly to his feet, flung his cap through the door of the shack, and began bowing and scraping to her with all his might. It was well known in the province of Lac Bain that many years before Jean de Gravois had lost a little brother, who had disappeared one day in the woods; and there were those who hinted that Ledoq was that brother, for Jean and he were as like as two peas in the ready use of their tongues, and were of the same build and the same briskness. Mélisse laughed merrily as Ledoq continued to bow before her, rattling away in a delighted torrent of French. "Ah, thes ees wan gr-r-reat compleeman, M'selle Mélisse," he finished at last, breaking for an instant into English. He straightened like a spring and turned, to Jan. "Did you meet the strange team?" "We met no team." Ledoq looked puzzled. Half a mile away, the top of a snow-covered ridge was visible from the cabin. He pointed to it. "An hour ago I saw it going westward along the mountain--three men and six dogs. Whom have you out from Lac Bain?" "No one," replied Jan. "It must have been the new agent from Churchill. We expect him early this winter. Shall we hurry back, Mélisse, and see if he has brought our books and violin-strings?" "You must have dinner with me," objected Ledoq. Jan caught a quick signal from Mélisse. "Not to-day, Ledoq. It's early, and we have a lunch for the trail. What do you say, Mélisse?" "If you're not tired, Jan." "Tired!" He tossed the last package from the sledge and cracked his long whip over the dogs' backs as they both cried out their farewell to the little Frenchman. "Tired!" he repeated, running close beside her as the team swung lightly back into the trail, and laughing down into her face. "How could I ever get tired with you watching me run, Mélisse?" "I wouldn't mind if you did--just a little, Jan. Isn't there room for two?" She gave a coquettish little shrug of her shoulders, and Jan leaped upon the moving sledge, kneeling close behind her. "Always, always, I have to ask you!" she pouted. "You needn't get too near, you know, if you don't want to!" The old, sweet challenge in her voice was irresistible, and for a moment Jan felt himself surrendering to it. He leaned forward until his chin was buried in the silken lynx fur of her coat, and for a single breath he felt the soft touch of her cheek against his own. Then he gave a sudden shout to the dogs--so loud that it startled her--and his whip writhed and snapped twenty feet above their heads, like a thing filled with life. He sprang from the sledge and again ran with the team, urging them on faster and faster until they dropped into a panting walk when they came to the ridge along which Ledoq, two hours before, had seen the strangers hurrying toward Lac Bain. "Stop!" cried Mélisse, taking this first opportunity to scramble from the sledge. "You're cruel to the dogs, Jan! Look at their jaws--see them pant! Jan Thoreau, I've never seen you drive like that since the night we were chased in from the barrens by the wolves!" "And did you ever see me run any faster?" He struggled, dropping exhausted upon the sledge. "I remember only one other time." He took a long breath, flinging back his arms to bring greater volume of air into his lungs. "Wasn't that the night we heard the wolves howling behind us?" Mélisse asked. "No, it was many years ago, when I heard, far to the south, that my little Mélisse was dying of the plague." Mélisse sat down upon the sledge beside him without speaking, and nestled one of her hands a little timidly in one of his big, brown palms. "Tell me about it, Jan." "That was all--I ran." "You wouldn't run as fast for me now, would you?" He looked at her boldly, and saw that there was not half of the brilliant flush in her cheeks. "I ran for you, just now--and you didn't like it," he replied. "I don't mean that." She looked up at him, and her fingers tightened round his own. "Away back--years and years and years ago, Jan--you went out to fight the plague, and nearly died in it, for me. Would you do that much again?" "I would do more, Mélisse." She looked at him doubtfully, her eyes searching him as if in quest of something in his face which she scarce believed in his words. Slowly he rose to his feet, lifting her with him; and when he had done this he took her face between his two hands and looked straight into her eyes. "Some day I will do a great deal more for you than that, Mélisse, and then--" "What?" she questioned, as he hesitated. "Then you will know whether I love you as much now as I did years and years and years ago," he finished, gently repeating her words. There was something in his voice that held Mélisse silent as he turned to straighten out the dogs; but when he came back, making her comfortable on the sledge, she whispered: "I wish you would do it SOON, Brother Jan!" CHAPTER XIX THE NEW AGENT AND HIS SON They did not lunch on the trail, but drove into the post in time for dinner. Jean de Gravois and Croisset came forth from the store to meet them. "You have company, my dear!" cried Jean to Mélisse. "Two gentlemen fresh from London on the last boat, and one of them younger and handsomer than your own Jan Thoreau. They are waiting for you in the cabin, where mon pere is getting them dinner, and telling them how beautifully you would have made the coffee if you were there." "Two!" said Jan, as Mélisse left them. "Who are they?" "The new agent, M. Timothy Dixon, as red as the plague, and fatter than a spawning fish! And his son, who has come along for fun, he says; and I believe he will get what he's after if he remains here very long, Jan Thoreau, for he looked a little too boldly at my Iowaka when she came into the store just now!" "Mon Dieu!" laughed Jan, as Gravois took in the four quarters of the earth with a terrible gesture. "Can you blame him, Jean? I tell you that I look at Iowaka whenever I get the chance!" "Is she not worth it?" cried Jean in rapture. "You are welcome to every look that you can get, Jan Thoreau. But the foreigner--I will skin him alive and spit him with devil-thorn if he so much as peeps at her out of the wrong way of his eye!" Croisset spoke. "There was once a foreigner who came. You remember?" "I remember," said Jan. He looked to the white cross which marked Mukee's grave in the edge of the forest, where the shadow of the big spruce fell across it at the end of summer evenings. "And--he--died," said Jean de Gravois, his dark hands clenched. "God forgive me, but I hate these red-necked men from across the sea." Croisset shrugged his shoulders. "Breeders of two-legged carrion-eaters!" he exclaimed fiercely. "La charogne! There are two at Nelson House, and two on the Wholdaia, and one--" A sharp cry fell from Jan's lips. When Croisset whirled toward him, he stood among his dogs, as white as death, his black eyes blazing as if just beyond him he saw something which filled him with terror. As the man turned, startled by the look, Jean sprang to his side. "Saints preserve us, but that was an ugly twist of the hand!" he cried shrilly. "Next time, turn your sledge by the rib instead of the nose, when your dogs are still in the traces!" Under his breath he whispered, as he made pretense of looking at Jan's hand: "Le diable, do you want to tell HIM?" Jan tried to laugh as Croisset came to see what had happened. "Will you care for the dogs, Henri?" asked Jean. "It's only a trifling sprain of the wrist, which Iowaka can cure with one dose of her liniment." As they walked away, Jan's face still as pallid as the gray snow under their feet, Gravois added: "You're a fool, Jan Thoreau. There's a crowd at your cabin, and you'll have dinner with me." "La charogne!" muttered Jan. "Les bêtes de charogne!" Jean gripped him by the arm. "I tell you that it means nothing--nothing!" he said, repeating his words of the previous day in the cabin. "You are a man. You must fight it down, and forget. No one knows but you and me." "You will never tell what you read in the papers?" cried Jan quickly. "You swear it?" "By the blessed Virgin, I swear it!" "Then," said Jan softly, "Mélisse will never know!" "Never," said Jean. His dark face flashed joyously as Iowaka's sweet voice came to them, singing a Cree lullaby in the little home. "Some day Mélisse will be singing that same way over there; and it will be for you, Jan Thoreau, as my Iowaka is now singing for me!" An hour later Jan went slowly across the open to Cummins' cabin. As he paused for an instant at the door he heard a laugh that was strange to him, and when he opened it to enter he stood perplexed and undecided. Mélisse had risen from the table at the sound of his approach, and his eyes quickly passed from her flushed face to the young man who was sitting opposite her. He caught a nervous tremble in her voice when she said: "Mr. Dixon, this is my brother, Jan." The stranger jumped to his feet and held out a hand. "I'm glad to know you, Cummins." "Thoreau," corrected Jan quietly, as he took the extended hand. "Jan Thoreau." "Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought--" He turned inquiringly to Mélisse. The flush deepened in her cheeks as she began to gather up the dishes. "We are of no relation," continued Jan, something impelling him to speak the words with cool precision. "Only we have lived under the same roof since she was a baby, and so we have come to be like brother and sister." "Miss Mélisse has been telling me about your wonderful run this morning," exclaimed the young Englishman, his face reddening slightly as he detected the girl's embarrassment. "I wish I had seen it!" "There will be plenty of it very soon," replied Jan, caught by the frankness of the other's manner. "Our runners will be going out among the trappers within a fortnight." "And will they take me?" "You may go with me, if you can run. I leave the day after to-morrow." "Thanks," said Dixon, moving toward the door. Mélisse did not lift her head as he went out. Faintly she said: "I've kept your dinner for you, Jan. Why didn't you come sooner?" "I had dinner with Gravois," he replied. "Jean said that you would hardly be prepared for five, Mélisse, so I accepted his invitation." He took down from the wall a fur sledge-coat, in which Mélisse had mended a rent a day or two before, and, throwing it over his arm, turned to leave. "Jan!" He faced her slowly, knowing that in spite of himself there was a strangeness in his manner which she would not understand. "Why are you going away the day after to-morrow--two weeks before the others? You didn't tell me." "I'm going a hundred miles into the South," he answered. "Over the Nelson House trail?" "Yes." "Oh!" Her lips curled slightly as she looked at him. Then she laughed, and a bright spot leaped into either cheek. "I understand, brother," she said softly. "Pardon me for questioning you so. I had forgotten that the MacVeigh girl lives on the Nelson trail. Iowaka says that she is as sweet as a wild flower. I wish you would have her come up and visit us some time, Jan." Jan's face went red, then white, but Mélisse saw only the first effect of her random shot, and was briskly gathering up the dishes. "I turn off into the Cree Lake country before I reach MacVeighs'." he was on the point of saying; but the words hung upon his lips, and he remained silent. A few minutes later he was talking with Jean de Gravois. The little Frenchman's face was ominously dark, and he puffed furiously upon his pipe when Jan told him why he was leaving at once for the South. "Running away!" he repeated for the tenth time in French, his thin lips curling in a sneer. "I am sorry that I gave you my oath, Jan Thoreau, else I would go myself and tell Mélisse what I read in the papers. Pish! Why can't you forget?" "I may--some day," said Jan. "That is why I am going into the South two weeks early, and I shall be gone until after the big roast. If I remain here another week, I shall tell Mélisse, and then--" He shrugged his shoulders despairingly. "And then--what?" "I should go away for ever." Jean snapped his fingers with a low laugh. "Then remain another week, Jan Thoreau, and if it turns out as you say, I swear I will abandon my two Iowakas and little Jean to the wolves!" "I am going the day after to-morrow." The next morning Iowaka complained to Mélisse that Gravois was as surly as a bear. "A wonderful change has come over him," she said. "He does nothing but shrug his shoulders and say 'Le diable!' and 'The fool!' Last night I could hardly sleep because of his growling. I wonder what bad spirit has come into my Jean?" Mélisse was wondering the same of Jan. She saw little of him during the day. At noon, Dixon told her that he had made up his mind not to accompany Thoreau on the trip south. The following morning, before she was up, Jan had gone. She was deeply hurt. Never before had he left on one of his long trips without spending his last moments with her. She had purposely told her father to entertain the agent and his son at the store that evening, so that Jan might have an opportunity of bidding her good-by alone. Outside of her thoughts of Jan, the days and evenings that followed were pleasant ones for her. The new agent was as jolly as he was fat, and took an immense liking to Mélisse. Young Dixon was good-looking and brimming with life, and spent a great deal of his time in her company. For hours at a time she listened to his stories of the wonderful world across the sea. As MacDonald had described that life to Jan at Fort Churchill, so he told of it to Mélisse, filling her with visions of great cities, painting picture after picture, until her imagination was riot with the beauty and the marvel of it all, and she listened, with flaming cheeks and glowing eyes. One day, a week after Jan had gone, he told her about the women in the world which had come to be a fairy-land to Mélisse. "They are all beautiful over there?" she asked wonderingly, when he had finished. "Many of them are beautiful, but none so beautiful as you, Mélisse," he replied, leaning near to her, his eyes shining. "Do you know that you are beautiful?" His words frightened her so much that she bowed her head to hide the signs of it in her face. Jan had often spoken those same words--a thousand times he had told her that she was beautiful--but there bad never been this fluttering of her heart before. There were few things which Iowaka and she did not hold in secret between them, and a day or two later Mélisse told her friend what Dixon had said. For the first time Iowaka abused the confidence placed in her, and told Jean. "Le diable!" gritted Jean, his face blackening. He said no more until night, when the children were asleep. Then he drew Iowaka close beside him on a bench near the stove, and asked carelessly: "Mon ange, if one makes an oath to the blessed Virgin, and breaks it, what happens?" He evaded the startled look in his wife's big black eyes. "It means that one will be for ever damned unless he confesses to a priest soon after, doesn't it ma chérie? And if there is no priest nearer than four hundred miles, it is a dangerous thing to do, is it not? But--" He did not wait for an answer. "If one might have the oath broken, and not do it himself, what then?" "I don't know," said Iowaka simply, staring at him in amazed questioning. "Nor do I," said Jean, lighting his pipe. "But there is enough of the devil in Jean de Gravois to make him break a thousand oaths if it was for you, my Iowaka!" Her eyes glowed upon him softly. "A maiden's soul leaves her body when she becomes the wife of the man she loves," she whispered tenderly in Cree, resting her dark head on Jean's shoulder. "That is what my people believe, Jean; and if I have given my soul to you, why should I not break oath for you?" "For me alone, Iowaka?" "For you alone." "And not for a friend?" "For no one else in the world, Jean. You are the only one to whom the god of my people bids me make all sacrifice." "But you do not believe in that god, Iowaka!" "Sometimes it is better to believe in the god of my people than in yours," she replied gently. "I believed in him fifteen years ago at Churchill. Do you wish me to take back what I gave to you then?" With a low cry of happiness Jean crushed his face against her soft cheek. "Believe in him always, my Iowaka, and Jean de Gravois will cut the throat of any missioner who says you will not go to Paradise! But--this other. You are sure that you would break oath for none but me?" "And the children. They are a part of you, Jean." A fierce snarling and barking of dogs brought Gravois to the door. They could hear Croisset's raucous voice and the loud cracking of his big whip. "I'll be back soon," said Jean, closing the door after him; but instead of approaching Croisset and the fighting dogs he went in the direction of Cummins' cabin. "Devil take an oath!" he growled under his breath. "Neither one God nor the other will let me break it, and Iowaka least of all!" He gritted his teeth as young Dixon's laugh sounded loudly in the cabin. "Two fools!" he went on communing with himself. "Cummins--Jan Thoreau--both fools!" CHAPTER XX A KISS AND THE CONSEQUENCES During the week that followed, Jean's little black eyes were never far distant from Cummins' cabin. Without being observed, he watched Mélisse and Dixon, and not even to Iowaka did he give hint of his growing suspicions. Dixon was a man whom most other men liked. There were a fascinating frankness in his voice and manner, strength in his broad shoulders, and a general air of comradeship about him which won all but Jean. The trap-line runners began leaving the post at the end of the second week, and after this Mélisse and the young Englishman were more together than ever. Dixon showed no inclination to accompany the sledges, and when they were gone he and Mélisse began taking walks in the forest, when the sun was high and warm. It was on one of these days that Jean had gone along the edge of the caribou swamp that lay between the barrens and the higher forest. As he stopped to examine a fresh lynx trail that cut across the path beaten down by dog and sledge, he heard the sound of voices ahead of him; and a moment later he recognized them as those of Mélisse and Dixon. His face clouded, and his eyes snapped fire. "Ah, if I was only Jan Thoreau--a Jan Thoreau with the heart of Jean de Gravois--what a surprise I'd give that foreigner!" he said to himself, leaping quickly from the trail into the thicket. He peered forth from the bushes, his loyal heart beating a wrathful tattoo when he saw that Dixon dared put his hand on Mélisse�s arm. They were coming very slowly, the Englishman bending low over the girl's bowed head, talking to her with strange earnestness. Suddenly he stopped, and before Jean could comprehend what had happened he had bent down and kissed her. With a low cry, Mélisse tore herself free. For an instant she faced Dixon, who stood laughing into her blazing eyes. Then she turned and ran swiftly down the trail. A second cry fell from her startled lips when she found herself face to face with Jean de Gravois. The little Frenchman was smiling. His eyes glittered like black diamonds. "Jean, Jean!" she sobbed, running to him. "He has insulted you," he said softly, smiling into her white face. "Run along to the post, ma belle Mélisse." He watched her, half turned from the astonished Englishman, until she disappeared in a twist of the trail a hundred yards away. Then he faced Dixon. "It is the first time that our Mélisse has ever suffered insult," he said, speaking as coolly as if to a child. "If Jan Thoreau were here, he would kill you. He is gone, and I will kill you in his place!" He advanced, his white teeth still gleaming in a smile, and not until he launched himself like a cat at Dixon's throat was the Englishman convinced that he meant attack. In a flash Dixon stepped a little to one side, and sent out a crashing blow that caught Jean on the side of the head and sent him flat upon his back in the trail. Half stunned, Gravois came to his feet. He did not hear the shrill cry of terror from the twist in the trail. He did not look back to see Mélisse standing there. But Dixon both saw and heard, and he laughed tauntingly over Jean's head as the little Frenchman came toward him again, more cautiously than before. It was the first time that Jean had ever come into contact with science. He darted in again, in his quick, cat-like way, and received a blow that dazed him. This time he held to his feet. "Bah, this is like striking a baby!" exclaimed Dixon. "What are you fighting about, Gravois? Is it a crime up here to kiss a pretty girl?" "I am going to kill you!" said Jean as coolly as before. There was something terribly calm and decisive in his voice. He was not excited. He was not afraid. His fingers did not go near the long knife in his belt. Slowly the laugh faded from Dixon's face, and tense lines gathered around his mouth as Jean circled about him. "Come, we don't want trouble like this," he urged. "I'm sorry--if Mélisse didn't like it." "I am going to kill you!" repeated Jean. There was an appalling confidence in his eyes. From those eyes Dixon found himself retreating rather than from the man. They followed him, never taking themselves from his face. The fire in them grew deeper. Two dull red spots began to glow in Jean's cheeks, and he laughed softly when he suddenly leaped in so that the Englishman struck at him--and missed. It was the science of the forest man pitted against that of another world. For sport Jean had played with wounded lynx; his was the quickness of sight, of instinct--without the other's science; the quickness of the great loon that had often played this same game with his rifle-fire, of the sledge-dog whose ripping fangs carried death so quickly that eyes could not follow. A third and a fourth time he came within striking distance, and escaped. He half drew his knife, and at the movement Dixon sprang back until his shoulders touched the brush. Smilingly Gravois unsheathed the blade and tossed it behind him in the trail. His eyes were like a serpent's in their steadiness, and the muscles of his body were drawn as tight as steel springs, ready to loose themselves when the chance came. There were tricks in his fighting as well as in the other's, and a dawning of it began to grow upon Dixon. He dropped his arms to his side, inviting Jean within reach. Suddenly the little Frenchman straightened. His glittering eyes shot from the Englishman's face to the brush behind him, and a piercing yell burst from his lips. Involuntarily Dixon started, half turning his face, and before he had come to his guard Gravois flung himself under his arms, striking with the full force of his body against his antagonist's knees. Together they went down in the trail. There was only one science now--that of the forest man. The lithe, brown fingers, that could have crushed the life of a lynx, fastened themselves around the Englishman's man's throat, and there came one gasping, quickly throttled cry as they tightened in their neck-breaking grip. "I will kill you!" said Jean again. Dixon's arms fell limply to his side. His eyes bulged from their sockets, his mouth was agape, but Jean did not see. His face was buried on the other's shoulder, the whole life of him in the grip. He would not have raised his head for a full minute longer had there not come a sudden interruption--the terrified voice of Mélisse, the frantic tearing of her hands at his hands. "He is dead!" she shrieked. "You have killed him, Jean!" He loosed his fingers and sat up. Mélisse staggered back, clutching with her hands at her breast, her face as white as the snow. "You have killed him!" Jean looked into Dixon's eyes. "He is not dead," he said, rising and going to her side. "Come, ma chère, run home to Iowaka. I will not kill him." Her slender form shook with agonized sobs as he led her to the turn in the trail. "Run home to Iowaka," he repeated gently. "I will not kill him, Mélisse." He went back to Dixon and rubbed snow over the man's face. "Mon Dieu, but it was near to it!" he exclaimed, as there came a flicker of life into the eyes. "A little more, and he would have been with the missioner!" He dragged the Englishman to the side of the trail, and set his back to a tree. When he saw that fallen foeman's breath was coming more strongly, he followed slowly after Mélisse. Unobserved, he went into the store and washed the blood from his face, chuckling with huge satisfaction when he looked at himself in the little glass which hung over the wash-basin. "Ah, my sweet Iowaka, but would you guess now that Jean de Gravois had received two clouts on the side of the head that almost sent him into the blessed hereafter? I would not have had you see it for all the gold in this world!" A little later he went to the cabin. Iowaka and the children were at Croisset's, and he sat down to smoke a pipe. Scarce had he begun sending up blue clouds of smoke when the door opened and Mélisse came in. "Hello, ma chère," he cried gaily, laughing at her with a wave of his pipe. In an instant she had flung the shawl from her head and was upon her knees at his feet, her white face turned up to him pleadingly, her breath falling upon him in panting, sobbing excitement. "Jean, Jean!" she whispered, stretching up her hands to his face. "Please tell me that you will never tell Jan--please tell me that you never will, Jean--never, never, never!" "I will say nothing, Mélisse." "Never, Jean?" "Never." For a sobbing breath she dropped her head upon his knees. Then, suddenly, she drew down his face and kissed him. "Thank you, Jean, for what you have done!" "Mon Dieu!" gasped Jean when she had gone. "What if Iowaka had been here then?" CHAPTER XXI A BROKEN HEART The day following the fight in the forest, Dixon found Jean de Gravois alone, and came up to him. "Gravois, will you shake hands with me?" he said. "I want to thank you for what you did to me yesterday. I deserved it. I have asked Miss Mélisse to forgive me--and I want to shake hands with you." Jean was thunderstruck. He had never met this kind of man. "Que diantre!" he ejaculated, when he had come to his senses. "Yes, I will shake hands!" For several days after this Jean could see that Mélisse made an effort to evade him. She did not visit Iowaka when he was in the cabin. Neither did she and Dixon go again into the forest. The young Englishman spent more of his time at the store; and just before the trappers began coming in, he went on a three-days' sledge-trip with Croisset. The change delighted Jean. The first time he met Mélisse after the fight, his eyes flashed pleasure. "Jan will surely be coming home soon," he greeted her. "What if the birds tell him what happened out there on the trail?" She flushed scarlet. "Perhaps the same birds will tell us what has happened down on the Nelson House trail, Jean," she retorted. "Pouf! Jan Thoreau doesn't give the snap of his small finger for the MacVeigh girl!" Jean replied, warm in defense of his friend. "She is pretty," laughed Mélisse, "and I have just learned that is why men like to--like them, I mean." Jean strutted before her like a peacock. "Am I pretty, Mélisse?" "No-o-o-o." "Then why"--he shrugged his shoulders suggestively--"in the cabin--" "Because you were brave, Jean. I love brave men!" "You were glad that I pummeled the stranger, then?" Mélisse did not answer, but he caught a laughing sparkle in the corner of her eye as she left him. "Come home, Jan Thoreau," he hummed softly, as he went to the store. "Come home, come home, come home, for the little Mélisse has grown into a woman, and is learning to use her eyes!" Among the first of the trappers to come in with his furs was MacVeigh. He brought word that Jan had gone south, to spend the annual holiday at Nelson House, and Cummings told Mélisse whence the message came. He did not observe the slight change that came into her face, and went on: "I don't understand this in Jan. He is needed here for the carnival. Did you know that he was going to Nelson House?" Mélisse shook her head. "MacVeigh says they have made him an offer to go down there as chief man," continued the factor. "It is strange that he has sent no explanation to me!" It was a week after the big caribou roast before Jan returned to Lac Bain. Mélisse saw him drive in from the Churchill trail; but while her heart fluttered excitedly, she steeled herself to meet him with at least an equal show of the calm indifference with which he had left her six weeks before. The coolness of his leave-taking still rankled bitterly in her bosom. He had not kissed her; he had not even passed his last evening with her. But she was not prepared for the changed Jan Thoreau who came slowly through the cabin door. His hair and beard had grown, covering the smooth cheeks which he had always kept closely shaven. His eyes glowed with dull pleasure as she stood waiting for him, but there was none of the old flash and fire in them. There was a strangeness in his manner, an uneasiness in the shifting of his eyes, which caused the half-defiant flush to fade slowly from her cheeks before either had spoken. She had never known this Jan before, and her fortitude left her as she approached him, wonderingly, silent, her hands reaching out to him. "Jan!" she said. Her voice trembled; her lips quivered. There was the old glorious pleading in her eyes, and before it Jan bowed his unkempt head, and crushed her hands tightly in his own. For a half-minute there was silence, and in that half-minute there came a century between them. At last Jan spoke. "I'm glad to see you again, Mélisse. It has seemed like a very long time!" He lifted his eyes. Before them the girl involuntarily shrank back, and Jan freed her hands. In them she saw none of the old love-glow, nothing of their old comradeship. Inscrutable, reflecting no visible emotion, they passed from her to the violin hanging on the wall. "I have not played in so long," he said, turning from her, "that I believe I have forgotten." He took down the instrument, and his fingers traveled clumsily over the strings. His teeth gleamed at her from out his half-inch growth of beard, as he said: "Ah, you must play for me now, Mélisse! It has surely gone from Jan Thoreau." He held out the violin to her. "Not now, Jan," she said tremulously. "I will play for you to-night." She went to the door of her room, hesitating for a moment, with her back to him. "You will come to supper, Jan?" "Surely, Mélisse, if you are prepared." He hung up the violin as she closed the door, and went from the cabin. Jean de Gravois and Iowaka were watching for him, and Jean hurried across the open to meet him. "I am coming to offer you the loan of my razor," he cried gaily. "Iowaka says that you will be taken for a bear if the trappers see you." "A beard is good to keep off the black flies," replied Jan. "It is approaching summer, and the black flies love to feast upon me. Let us go down the trail, Jean. I want to speak with you." Where there had been wood-cutting in the deep spruce they sat down, facing each other. Jan spoke in French. "I have traveled far since leaving Lac Bain," he said. "I went first to Nelson House, and from here to the Wholdaia. I found them at Nelson House, but not on the Wholdaia." "What?" asked Jean, though he knew well what the other meant. "My brothers, Jean de Gravois," answered Jan, drawing his lips until his teeth gleamed in a sneering smile. "My brothers, les bêtes de charogne!" "Devil take Croisset for telling you where they were!" muttered Jean under his breath. "I saw the two at Nelson House," continued Jan. "One of them is a half-wit, and the other"--he hunched his shoulders--"is worse. Petraud, one of the two who were at Wholdaia, was killed by a Cree father last winter for dishonoring his daughter. The other disappeared." Jean was silent, his head leaning forward, his face resting in his hands. "So you see, Jean de Gravois, what sort of creature is your friend Jan Thoreau!" Jean raised his head until his eyes were on a level with those of his companion. "I see that you are a bigger fool than ever," he said quietly. "Jan Thoreau, what if I should break my oath--and tell Mélisse?" Unflinching the men's eyes met. A dull glare came into Jan's. Slowly he unsheathed his long knife, and placed it upon the snow between his feet, with the gleaming end of the blade pointing toward Gravois. With a low cry Jean sprang to his feet. "Do you mean that, Jan Thoreau? Do you mean to give the knife-challenge to one who has staked his life for you and who loves you as a brother?" "Yes," said Jan deliberately. "I love you, Jean more than any other man in the world; and yet I will kill you if you betray me to Mélisse!" He rose to his feet and stretched out his hands to the little Frenchman. "Jean, wouldn't you do as I am doing? Wouldn't you have done as much for Iowaka?" For a moment Gravois was silent. "I would not have taken her love without telling her," he said then. "That is not what you and I know as honor, Jan Thoreau. But I would have gone to her, as you should now go to Mélisse, and she would have opened her arms to me, as Mélisse would opens hers to you. That is what I would have done." "And that is what I shall never do," said Jan decisively, turning toward the post. "I could kill myself more easily. That is what I wanted to tell you, Jean. No one but you and I must ever know!" "I would like to choke that fool of a Croisset for sending you to hunt up those people at Nelson House and Wholdaia!" grumbled Jean. "It was best for me." They saw Mélisse leaving Iowaka's home when they came from the forest. Both waved their hands to her, and Jan cut across the open to the store. Jean went to the Cummins cabin as soon as he was sure that he was not observed. There was little of the old vivacity in his manner as he greeted Mélisse. He noted, too, that the girl was not her natural self. There was a redness under her eyes which told him that she had been crying. "Mélisse," he said at last, speaking to her with his eyes fixed on the cap he was twisting in his fingers, "there has come a great change over Jan." "A very great change, Jean. If I were to guess, I should say that his heart has been broken down on the Nelson trail." Gravois caught the sharp meaning in her voice, which trembled a little as she spoke. He was before her in an instant, his cap fallen to the floor, his eyes blazing as he caught her by the arms. "Yes, the heart of Jan Thoreau is broken!" he cried. "But it has been broken by nothing that lives on the Nelson House trail. It is broken because of--YOU!" "I!" Mélisse drew back from him with a breathless cry. "I--I have broken--" "I did not say that," interrupted Jean. "I say that it is broken because of you. Mon Dieu, if only I might tell you!" "Do-DO, Jean! Please tell me!" She put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes implored him. "Tell me what I have done--what I can do, Jean!" "I can say that much to you, and no more," he said quietly. "Only know this, ma chère--that there is a great grief eating at the soul of Jan Thoreau, and that because of this grief he is changed. I know what this grief is, but I am pledged never to reveal it. It is for you to find out, and to do this, above all else--let him know that you love him!" The color had faded from her startled face, but now it came back again in a swift flood. "That I love him?" "Yes. Not as a sister any longer, Mélisse, but as a WOMAN!" CHAPTER XXII HER PROMISE Gravois did not stay to see the effect of his last words. Only he knew, as he went through the door, that her eyes were following him, and that if he looked at her she would call him back. So he shut the door quickly behind him, fearing that he had already said too much. Cummins and Jan came in together at suppertime. The factor was in high humor. An Indian from the Porcupine had brought in two silver fox that morning, and he was immensely pleased at Jan's return--a combination of incidents which put him in the best of moods. Mélisse sat opposite Jan at the table. She had twisted a sprig of red bakneesh into her glossy braid, and a cluster of it nestled at her throat, but Jan gave no sign that he had noticed this little favor, which was meant entirely for him. He smiled at her, but there was a clear coolness in the depths of his dark eyes which checked any of the old familiarity on her part. "Has MacVeigh put in his new trap-line?" Cummins inquired, after asking Jan many questions about his trip. "I don't know," replied Jan. "I didn't go to MacVeighs'." Purposely he held his eyes from Mélisse. She understood his effort, and a quick flush gathered in her cheeks. "It was MacVeigh who brought in word of you," persisted the factor, oblivious of the effect of his questions. "I met him in the Cree Lake country, but he said nothing of his trap-lines." He rose from the table with Cummins, and started to follow him from the cabin. Mélisse came between. For a moment her hand rested upon his arm. "You are going to stay with me, Jan," she smiled. "I want your help with the dishes, and then we're going to play on the violin." She pulled him into a chair as Cummins left, and tied an apron about his shoulders. "Close your eyes--and don't move!" she commanded, laughing into his surprised face as she ran into her room. A moment later she returned with one hand held behind her back. The hot blood surged through Jan's veins when he felt her fingers running gently through his long hair. There came the snip of scissors, a little nervous laugh close to his head, and then again the snip, snip, snip of the scissors. "It's terribly long, Jan!" Her soft hand brushed his bearded cheek. "Ugh!" she shuddered. "You must take that off your face. If you don't--" "Why?" he asked, through lack of anything else to say. She lowered her head until her cheek pressed against his own. "Because it feels like bristles," she whispered. She reddened fiercely when he remained silent, and the scissors snipped more rapidly between her fingers. "I'm going to prospect the big swamp along the edge of the Barrens this summer," he explained soon, laughing to relieve the tension. "A beard will protect me from the black flies." "You can grow another." She took the apron from about his shoulders, and held it so that he could see the result of her work. He looked up, smiling. "Thank you, Mélisse. Do you remember when you last cut my hair?" "Yes--it was over on the mountain. We had taken the scissors along for cutting bakneesh, and you looked so like a wild Indian that I made you sit on a rock and let me trim it." "And you cut my ear," he reminded. "For which you made me pay," she retorted quickly, almost under her breath. She went to the cupboard behind the stove, and brought out her father's shaving-mug and razor. "I insist that you shall use them," she said, stirring the soap into a lather, and noting the indecision in his face. "I am afraid of you!" "Afraid of me?" He stood for a moment in front of the little mirror, turning his face from side to side. Mélisse handed him the razor and cup. "You don't seem like the Jan that I used to know once upon a time. There has been a great change in you since--since--" She hesitated. "Since when, Mélisse?" "Since the day we came in from the mountain and I put up my hair." With timid sweetness she added: "I haven't had it up again, Jan." She caught a glimpse of his lathered face in the glass, staring at her with big, seeking eyes. He turned them quickly away when he saw that she was looking, and Mélisse set to work at the dishes. She had washed them before he finished shaving. Then she took down the old violin from the wall and began to play, her low, sweet voice accompanying the instrument in a Cree melody which Iowaka had taught her during Jan's absence at Nelson House and the Wholdaia. Surprised, he faced her, his eyes glowing as there fell from her lips the gentle love-song of a heart-broken Indian maiden, filled with its infinite sadness and despair. He knew the song. It was a lyric of the Crees. He had heard it before, but never as it came to him now, sobbing its grief in the low notes of the violin, speaking to him with immeasurable pathos from the trembling throat of Mélisse. He stood silent until she had finished, staring down upon her bowed head. When she lifted her eyes to him, he saw that her long lashes were wet and glistening in the lamp-glow. "It is wonderful, Mélisse! You have made beautiful music for it." "Thank you, Jan." She played again, her voice humming with exquisite sweetness the wordless music which he had taught her. At last she gave him the violin. "Now you must play for me." "I have forgotten a great deal, Mélisse." She was astonished to see how clumsily his brown fingers traveled over the strings. As she watched him, her heart thrilled uneasily. It was not the old Jan who was playing for her now, but a new Jan, whose eyes shone dull and passionless, in whom there was no stir of the old spirit of the violin. He wandered listlessly from one thing to another, and after a few minutes gave her the instrument again. Without speaking, she rose from her chair and hung the violin upon the wall. "You must practise a great deal," she said quietly. At her movement he, too, rose from his seat; and when she turned to him again he had his cap in his hand. A flash of surprise shot into her eyes. "Are you going so soon, Jan?" "I am tired," he said in excuse. "It has been two days since I have slept, Mélisse. Good night!" He smiled at her from the door, but the "Good night" which fell from her lips was lifeless and unmeaning. Jan shivered when he went out. Under the cold stars he clenched his hands, knowing that he had come from the cabin none too soon. Choking back the grief of this last meeting with Mélisse, he crossed to the company store. It was late when Cummins returned home. Mélisse was still up. He looked at her sharply over his shoulder as he hung up his coat and hat. "Has anything come between you and Jan?" he asked suddenly. "Why have you been crying?" "Sometimes the tears come when I am playing the violin, father. I know of nothing that has come between Jan and me, only I--I don't understand--" She stopped, struggling hard to keep back the sobs that were trembling in her throat. "Neither do I understand," exclaimed the factor, going to the stove to light his pipe. "He gave me his resignation as a paid servant of the company tonight!" "He is not going--to leave--the post?" breathed Mélisse. "He is leaving the service," reiterated her father. "That means he can not long live at Lac Bain. He says he is going into the woods, perhaps into Jean's country of the Athabasca. Has he told you more?" "Nothing," said Mélisse. She was upon her knees in front of the little bookcase. A blinding film burned in her eyes. She caught her breath, struggling hard to master herself before she faced her father again. For a moment the factor went into his room, and she took this opportunity of slipping into her own, calling "Good night" to him from the partly closed door. The next day it was Croisset who went along the edge of the Barrens for meat. Gravois found Jan filling a new shoulder-pack with supplies. It was their first encounter since he had learned that Jan had given up the service. "Diable!" he fairly hissed, standing over him as he packed his flour and salt in a rubber bag. "Diable, I say, M. Jan Thoreau!" Jan looked up, smiling, to see the little Frenchman fairly quivering with rage. "Bon jour, M. Jean de Gravois!" he laughed back. "You see I am going out among the foxes." "The devils!" snapped Jean. "No, the foxes, my dear Jean. I am tired of the post. I can make better wage for my time in the swamps to the west. Think of it, Jean! It has been many years since you have trapped there, and the foxes must be eating up the country!" Jean's thin lips were almost snarling. "Blessed saints, and it was I who--" He spun upon his heels without another word, and went straight to Mélisse. "Jan Thoreau is going to leave the post," he announced fiercely, throwing out his chest and glaring at her accusingly. "So father has told me," said Mélisse. Her cheeks were colorless, and there were purplish lines under her eyes, but she spoke with exceeding calmness. "Mon Dieu!" exclaimed Jean, whirling again, "you take it coolly!" A little later Mélisse saw Jan coming from the store. When he entered the cabin his dark face betrayed the strain under which he was laboring, but his voice was unnaturally calm. "I have come to say good-by, Mélisse," he said. "I am going to prospect for a good trap-line among the Barrens." "I hope you will have good luck, Jan." In her voice, too, was a firmness almost metallic. For the first time in his life Jan held out his hand to her. She started, and for an instant the blood surged from her heart to her face. Then she gave him her own and looked him squarely and unflinchingly in the eyes. "Will you wait a moment?" she asked. She hurried into her room, and scarcely had she gone before she reappeared again, this time with a flush burning in her cheeks and her eyes shining brightly. She had unbraided her hair, and it lay coiled upon the crown of her head, glistening with crimson sprigs of bakneesh. She came to him a second time, and once more gave him her hand. "I don't suppose you care now," she said coldly, and yet laughing in his face. "I have not broken my promise. It was silly, wasn't it?" He felt as if his blood had been suddenly chilled to water, and he fought to choke back the thick throbbing in his throat. "You promised--" He could not go further. "I promised that I would not do up my hair again until you had forgotten to love me," she finished for him. "I will do it up now." He bowed his head, and she could see his shoulders quiver under their thick caribou coat. Her tense lips parted, and she raised her arms as if on the point of stretching them out to him; but his voice came evenly, without a quiver, yet filled with the dispassionate truth of what he spoke. "I have not forgotten to love you, Mélisse. I shall never cease to love my little sister. But you are older now, and it is time for you to do up your hair." He turned, without looking at her again, leaving her standing with her arms still half stretched out to him, and went from the cabin. "Good-by, Jan!" The words fell in a sobbing whisper from her, but he had gone too far to hear. Through the window she saw him shake hands with Cummins in front of the company's store. She watched him as he went to the cabin of Iowaka and Jean. Then she saw him shoulder his pack, and, with bowed head, disappear slowly into the depths of the black spruce forest. CHAPTER XXIII JAN RETURNS All that spring and summer Jan spent in the thick caribou swamps and low ridge-mountains along the Barrens. It was two months before he appeared at the post again, and then he remained only long enough to patch himself up and secure fresh supplies. Mélisse had suffered quietly during these two months, a grief and loneliness filling her heart which none knew but herself. Even from Iowaka she kept her unhappiness a secret; and yet when the gloom had settled heaviest upon her, she was still buoyed up by a persistent hope. Until Jan's last visit to Lac Bain this hope never quite went out. The first evening after his arrival from the swamps to the west, he came to the cabin. His beard had grown again. His hair was long and shaggy, and fell in shining dishevelment upon his shoulders. The sensitive beauty of his great eyes, once responsive to every passing humor in Mélisse, flashing fun at her laughter, glowing softly in their devotion, was gone. His face was filled with the age-old silence of the forest man. Firmly and yet gently, it repelled whatever of the old things she might have said and done, holding her away from him as if by power of a strong hand. This time Mélisse knew that there was left not even the last comforting spark of hope within her bosom. Jan had gone out of her life for ever, leaving to her, as a haunting ghost of what they two had once been to each other, the old violin on the cabin wall. After he went away again, the violin became more and more to her what it had once been to him. She played it as he had played it, sobbing her loneliness and her heart-break through its strings, in lone hours clasping it to her breast and speaking to it as Jan had talked to it in years gone by. "If you could only tell me--if you only could!" she whispered to it one day, when the autumn was drawing near. "If you could tell me about him, and what I might do--dear old violin!" Once during the autumn Jan came in for supplies and traps, and his dogs and sledge. He was planning to spend the winter two hundred miles to the west, in the country of the Athabasca. He was at Lac Bain for a week, and during this time a mail-runner came in from Fort Churchill. The runner brought a new experience into the life of Mélisse--her first letter. It was from young Dixon--twenty or more closely written pages of it, in which he informed her that he was going to spend a part of the approaching winter at Lac Bain. She was reading the last page when Jan came into the cabin. Her cheeks were slightly flushed by this new excitement, which was reflected in her eyes as she looked at Jan. "A letter!" she cried, holding out her two hands filled with the pages. "A letter--to me, Jan, all the way from Fort Churchill!" "Who in the world--" he began, smiling at her; and stopped. "It's from Mr. Dixon," she said, the flush deepening in her cheeks. "He's going to spend part of the winter with us." "I'm glad of that, Mélisse," said Jan quietly. "I like him, and would like to know him better. I hope he will bring you some more books--and strings." He glanced at the old violin. "Do you play much?" "A great deal," she replied. "Won't you play for me, Jan?" "My hands are too rough; and besides, I've forgotten all that I ever knew." "Even the things you played when I was a baby?" "I think I have, Mélisse. But you must never forget them." "I shall remember them--always," she answered softly. "Some day it may be that I will teach them to you again." He did not see her again until six months later, when he came in to the caribou roast, with his furs. Then he learned that another letter had come to Mélisse, and that Dixon had gone to London instead of coming to Lac Bain. The day after the carnival he went back into the country of the Athabasca. Spring did not see him at Lac Bain. Early summer brought no news of him. In the floods, Jean went by the water-way to the Athabasca, and found Thoreau's cabin abandoned. There had not been life in it for a long time. The Indians said that since the melting snows they had not seen Jan. A half-breed whom Jean met at Fond du Lac said that he had found the bones of a white man on the Beaver, with a Hudson's Bay gun and a horn-handled knife beside them. Jean came back to Lac Bain heavy at heart. "There is no doubt but that he is dead," he told Iowaka. "I do not believe that it will hurt very much if you tell Mélisse." One day early in September a lone figure came in to the post at noon, when the company people were at dinner. He carried a pack, and six dogs trailed at his heels. It was Jan Thoreau. "I have been down to civilization," was his explanation. "I have returned to spend this winter at Lac Bain." CHAPTER XXIV THE RESCUE On the first snow came young Dixon from Fort Churchill. Jean de Gravois met him on the trail near Ledoq's. When the Englishman recognized the little Frenchman he leaped from his sledge and advanced with outstretched hand, his face lighting up with pleasure. "Bless me, if it isn't my old friend, Jean!" he cried. "I was just thinking of you, Gravois, and how you trimmed me to a finish two winters ago. I've learned a lot about you people up here in the snows since then, and I'll never do anything like that again." He laughed into Jean's face as they shook hands, and his voice was filled with unbounded sincerity. "How is Mrs. Gravois, and the little Gravois--and Mélisse?" he added, before Jean had spoken. "All well, M'seur Dixon," replied Jean. "Only the little Gravois have almost grown into a man and woman." An hour or so later he said to Iowaka: "I can't help liking this man Dixon, and yet I don't want to. Why is it, do you suppose?" "Is it because you are afraid that Mélisse will like him?" asked his wife, smiling over her shoulder. "Blessed saints, I believe that it is!" said Jean frankly. "I hate foreigners--and Mélisse belongs to Jan." "She did, once, but that was a long time ago, Jean." "It may be, and yet I doubt it, ma bien aimée. If Jan would tell her--" "A woman will not wait always," interrupted Iowaka softly. "Jan Thoreau has waited too long!" A week later, as they stood together in front of their door, they saw Dixon and Mélisse walking slowly in the edge of the forest. The woman laughed into Jean's face. "Did I not say that Jan had waited too long?" Jean's face was black with disapprobation. "Then you would have taken up with some foreigner if I had remained in the Athabasca country another year or two?" he demanded questioningly. "Very likely," retorted Iowaka mischievously, running into the cabin. "The devil!" said Jean sourly, stalking in the direction of the store. He was angered at the coolness with which Jan accepted the situation. "This Dixon is with Mélisse afternoon and evening, and they walk together every day in the bush," he said to him. "Soon there will be a wedding at Lac Bain!" "Mélisse deserves a good man," replied Jan, unmoved. "I like Dixon." Deep down in his soul he knew that each day was bringing the end of it all much nearer for him. He did not tell Mélisse that he had returned to Lac Bain to be near her once more, nor did he confide in Jean. He had anticipated that this winter at the post would be filled with a certain painful pleasure for him--but he had not anticipated Dixon. Day after day he saw Mélisse and the Englishman together, and while they awakened in him none of the fiery jealousy which might have rankled in the bosom of Jean de Gravois, the knowledge that the girl was at last passing from him for ever added a deeper grief to that which was already eating at his heart. Dixon made no effort to conceal his feelings. He loved Mélisse. Frankly he told this to Jean one day, when they were on the Churchill trail. In his honest way he said things which broke down the last of Jean's hereditary prejudices, and compelled him to admit that this was a different sort of foreigner than he had ever known before. "Diable, I like him," he said to himself; "and yet I would rather see him in the blessed hereafter than have him take Mélisse from Jan!" The big snow decided. It came early in December. Dixon had set out alone for Ledoq's early in the morning. By noon the sky was a leaden black, and a little later one could not see a dozen paces ahead of him for the snow. The Englishman did not return that day. The next day he was still gone, and Gravois drove along the top of the mountain ridge until he came to the Frenchman's, where he found that Dixon had started for Lac Bain the preceding afternoon. He brought word back to the post. Then he went to Mélisse. "It is as good as death to go out in search of him," he said. "We can no longer use the dogs. Snowshoes will sink like leaden bullets by morning, and to go ten miles from the post means that there will be bones to be picked by the foxes when the crust comes!" It was dark when Jan came into the cabin. Mélisse started to her feet with a little cry when he entered, covered white with the snow. A light pack was strapped to his back, and he carried his rifle in his hand. "I am going to hunt for him," he said softly. "If he is alive, I will bring him back to you." She came to him slowly, and the beating of Jan's heart sounded to him like the distant thrumming of partridge-wings. Ah, would he ever forget that look? The old glory was in her eyes, her arms were reaching out, her lips parted. Jan knew how the Great Spirit had once appeared to Mukee, and how a white mist, like a snow-veil, had come between the half-breed's eyes and the wondrous Thing he beheld. That same veil drifted between Jan and the girl. As in a vision, he saw her face so near to him that he felt the touch of her sweet breath, and he knew that one of his rough hands was clasped in both of her own, and that after a moment it was crushed tightly against her bosom. "Jan, my hero--" He struggled back, almost sobbing, as he plunged out into the night again. He heard her voice crying after him, but the wild wailing of the spruce, and the storm in his brain, drowned its words. He had seen the glorious light of love in her eyes--her love for Dixon! And he would find him! At last he, Jan Thoreau, would prove that the old love was not dead within him; he would do for Mélisse this night--to-morrow--the next day, and until he fell down to die--what he had promised to do on their sledge-ride to Ledoq's. And then-- He went to Ledoq's now, following the top of the mountain, and reached his cabin in the late dawn. The Frenchman stared at him in amazement when he learned that he was about to set out on a search for Dixon. "You will not find him," he said slowly in French; "but if you are determined to go, I will hunt with you. It is a big chance that we will not come back." "I don't want you to go," objected Jan. "One will do as much as two, unless we search alone. I came your way to find if it had begun to snow before Dixon left." "An hour after he had gone, you could not see your hand before your face," replied Ledoq, preparing his pack. "There is no doubt but that he circled out over Lac Bain. We will go that far together, and then search alone." They went back over the mountain, and stopped when instinct told them that they were opposite the spruce forests of the lake. There they separated, Jan going as nearly as he could guess into the northwest, Ledoq trailing slowly and hopelessly into the south. It was no great sacrifice for Jan, this struggle with the big snows for the happiness of Mélisse. What it was to Ledoq no man ever guessed or knew, for it was not until the late spring snows had gone that the people at Lac Bain found what the foxes and the wolves had left of him, far to the south. Fearlessly Jan plunged into the white world of the lake. 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. 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. Day came, only a little lighter than the night. He crossed the lake, his snow-shoes sinking ankle-deep at every step, and once each half-hour he fired a single shot from his rifle. He heard shots to the south, and knew that it was Ledoq; each report coming to him more faintly than the last, until they had died away entirely. Across the lake he struck the forest again, and his shouts echoed in futile inquiry in its weird depths. About him there was no sign of life, no sound except the faint fluttering of falling snow. Under five feet of this snow the four-footed creatures of the wilderness were snugly buried; close against the trunks of the spruces, sheltered within their tent-like coverings, the birds waited like lifeless things for the breaking of the storm. At noon Jan stopped and ate his lunch. Then he went on, carrying his rifle always upon his right shoulder, so that the steps of his right leg would be shortened, and he would travel in a circle, as he believed Dixon had done. The storm thickened with the falling of night, and he burrowed himself a great hole in the soft snow and filled it with balsam boughs for a bed. When he awakened, hours later, he stood up, and thrust out his head, and found himself buried to the arm-pits. With the aid of his broad snow-shoes he drew himself out, until he stood knee-deep in the surface. He lifted his pack. As he swung it before him, one arm thrust through a strap, he gave a startled cry. Half of one side of the pack was eaten away! He thrust his hands through the breach, and a moan of despair sobbed on his lips when he found that his food was gone. A thin trickle of flour ran through his fingers upon the snow. He pulled out a gnawed pound of bacon, a little tea--and that was all. Frantically he ripped the rent wider in his search, and when he stood up, his wild face staring into the chaos about him, he held only the bit of bacon in his hand. In it were the imprints of tiny teeth--sharp little razor-edged teeth that told him what had happened. While he had slept a mink had robbed him of his food! With one of his shoes he began digging furiously in the snow. He tore his balsam bed to pieces. Somewhere--somewhere not very far away--the little animal must have cached its theft. He dug down until he came to the frozen earth. For an hour he worked and found nothing. Then he stopped. Over a small fire he melted snow for tea and broiled a slice of the bacon, which he ate with the few biscuit crumbs he found in the pack. Every particle of flour that he could find he scraped up with his knife and put into one of the deep pockets of his caribou coat. After that he set cut in the direction in which he thought he would find Lac Bain. Still he shouted for Dixon, and fired an occasional shot from his rifle. By noon he should have struck the lake. Noon came and passed; the gloom of a second night fell upon him. He built himself a fire, and ate two-thirds of what remained of the bacon. The handful of flour in his pocket he did not disturb. It was still night when he broke his rest and struggled on. His first fears were gone. In place of them, there filled him now a grim sort of pleasure. A second time he was battling with death for Mélisse. And this, after all, was not a very hard fight for him. He had feared death in the red plague, but he did not fear the thought of this death that threatened him in the big snows. It thrilled him, instead, with a strange sort of exhilaration. If he died, it would be for Mélisse, and for all time she would remember him for what he had done. When he ate the last bit of his bacon, he made up his mind what he would do when the end came. In the stock of his rifle he would scratch a few last words to Mélisse. He even arranged the words in his brain--four of them--"Mélisse, I love you." He repeated them to himself as he staggered on, and that night, beside the fire he built, he began by carving her name. "To-morrow," he said softly, "I will do the rest." He was growing very hungry, but he did not touch the flour. For six hours he slept, and then drank his fill of hot tea. "We will travel until day, Jan Thoreau," he informed himself, "and then, if nothing turns up, we will build our last camp, and eat the flour. It will be the last of us, for there will be no meat above this snow for days." His snow-shoes were an impediment now, and he left them behind, along with one of his two blankets, which had grown to be like lead upon his shoulders. He counted his cartridges--ten of them. One of these he fired into the air. Was that an echo he heard? A sudden thrill shot through him. He strained his ears to catch a repetition of the sound. In a moment it came again--clearly no echo this time. "Ledoq!" he cried aloud. He fired again. Back to him came the distant, splitting crack of a rifle. He forced his way toward it. After a little he heard the signal again, much nearer than before, and he fired in response. A few hundred yards farther on he came to a low mountain ridge, and lifted his voice in a loud shout. A shot came from just over the mountain. Waist deep in the light snow he began the ascent, dragging himself up by the tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half-stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew that it was very near. "Something has happened to Ledoq," he told himself, "but he surely has food, and we can live it out until the storm is over." It was easier going down the ridge, and he went quickly in the direction from which the voice had come, until a mass of huge boulders loomed up before him. There was a faint odor of smoke in the air, and he followed it in among the rocks, where it grew stronger. "Ho, Ledoq!" he shouted. A voice replied a dozen yards away. Slowly, as he advanced, he made out the dim shadow of life in the white gloom--a bit of smoke climbing weakly in the storm, the black opening of a brush shelter--and then, between the opening and the spiral of smoke, a living thing that came creeping toward him on all fours, like an animal. He plunged toward it, and the shadow staggered upward, and would have fallen had it not been for the support of the deep snow. Another step, and a sharp cry fell from Jan's lips. It was not Ledoq, but Dixon, who stood there with white, starved face and staring eyes in the snow gloom! "My God, I am starving--and dying for a drink of water!" gasped the Englishman chokingly, thrusting out his arms. "Thoreau, God be praised--" He staggered, and fell in the snow. Jan dragged him back to the shelter. "I will have water for you--and something to eat--very soon," he said. His voice sounded unreal. There was a mistiness before his eyes which was not caused by the storm, a twisting of strange shadows that bothered his vision, and made him sway dizzily when he threw off his pack to stir the fire. He suspended his two small pails over the embers, which he coaxed into a blaze. Both he filled with snow; into one he emptied the handful of flour that he had carried in his pocket--into the other he put tea. Fifteen minutes later he carried them to the Englishman. Dixon sat up, a glazed passion filling his eyes. He drank the hot tea greedily, and as greedily ate the boiled flour-pudding. Jan watched him hungrily until the last crumb of it was gone. He refilled the pails with snow, added more tea, and then rejoined the Englishman. New life was already shining in Dixon's eyes. "Not a moment too soon, Thoreau," he said thankfully, reaching over to grip the other's hand. "Another night and--" Suddenly he stopped. "Great Heaven, what is the matter?" He noticed for the first time the pinched torture in his companion's face. Jan's head dropped weakly upon his breast. His hands were icy cold. "Nothing," he murmured drowsily, "only--I'm starving, too, Dixon!" He recovered himself with an effort, and smiled into Dixon's startled face. "There is nothing to eat," he continued, as he saw the other direct his gaze toward the pack. "I gave you the last of the flour. There is nothing--but salt and tea." He rolled over upon the balsam boughs with a restful sigh. "Let me sleep!" Dixon went to the pack. One by one, in his search for food, he took out the few articles that it contained. After that he drank more tea, crawled back into the balsam shelter, and lay down beside Jan. It was broad day when he awoke, and he called hoarsely to his companion when he saw that the snow had ceased falling. Jan did not stir. For a moment Dixon leaned over to listen to his breathing, and then dragged himself slowly and painfully out into the day. The fire was out. A leaden blackness still filled the sky; deep, silent gloom hung in the wake of the storm. Suddenly there came to Dixon's ears a sound. It was a sound that would have been unheard in the gentle whispering of a wind, in the swaying of the spruce-tops; but in this silence it fell upon the starving man's hearing with a distinctness that drew his muscles rigid and set his eyes staring about him in wild search. Just beyond the hanging pails a moose-bird hopped out upon the snow. It chirped hungrily, its big, owl-like eyes scrutinizing Dixon. The man stared back, fearing to move. Slowly he forced his right foot through the snow to the rear of his left, and as cautiously brought his left behind his right, working himself backward step by step until he reached the shelter. Just inside was his rifle. He drew it out and sank upon his knees in the snow to aim. At the report of the rifle, Jan stirred but did not open his eyes; he made no movement when Dixon called out in shrill joy that he had killed meat. He heard, he strove to arouse himself, but something more powerful than his own will seemed pulling him down into oblivion. It seemed an eternity before he was conscious of a voice again. He felt himself lifted, and opened his eyes with his head resting against the Englishman's shoulder. "Drink this, Thoreau," he heard. He drank, and knew that it was not tea that ran down his throat. "Whisky-jack soup," he heard again. "How is it?" He became wide-awake. Dixon was offering him a dozen small bits of meat on a tin plate, and he ate without questioning. Suddenly, when there were only two or three of the smallest scraps left, he stopped. "Mon Dieu, it was whisky-jack!" he cried. "I have eaten it all!" The young Englishman's white face grinned at him. "I've got the flour inside of me, Thoreau--you've got the moose-bird. Isn't that fair?" The plate dropped between them. Over it their hands met in a great, clutching grip, and up from Jan's heart there welled words which almost burst from his lips in voice, words which rang in his brain, and which were an unspoken prayer--"Mélisse, I thank the great God that it is this man whom you love!" But it was in silence that he staggered to his feet and went out into the gloom. "This may be only a lull in the storm," he said. "We must lose no time. How long did you travel before you made this camp?" "About ten hours," said Dixon. "I made due west by compass until I knew that I had passed Lac Bain, and then struck north." "Ah, you have the compass," cried Jan, his eyes lighting up. "M'seur Dixon, we are very near to the post if you camped so soon! Tell me which is north." "That is north." "Then we go south--south and east. If you traveled ten hours, first west and then north, we are northwest of Lac Bain." Jan spoke no more, but got his rifle from the shelter and put only the tea and two pails in his pack; leaving the remaining blanket upon the snow. The Englishman followed close behind him, bending weakly under the weight of his gun. Tediously they struggled to the top of the ridge, and as Jan stopped to look through the gray day about him, Dixon sank down into the snow. When the other turned toward him he grinned up feebly into his face. "Bushed," he gasped. "Don't believe I can make it through this snow, Thoreau." There was no fear in his eyes; there was even a cheerful ring in his voice. A sudden glow leaped into Jan's face. "I know this ridge," he exclaimed. "It runs within a mile of Lac Bain. You'd better leave your rifle behind." Dixon made an effort to rise and Jan helped him. They went on slowly, resting every few hundred yards, and each time that he rose from these periods of rest, Dixon's face was twisted with pain. "It's the flour and water anchored amidships," he smiled grimly. "Cramps--Ugh!" "We'll make it by supper-time," assured Jan cheerfully. Dixon leaned heavily on his arm. "I wish you'd go on alone," he urged. "You could send help--" "I promised Mélisse that I would bring you back if I found you," replied Jan, his face turned away. "If the storm broke again, you would be lost." "Tell me--tell me--" he heard Dixon pant eagerly, "did she send you to hunt for me, Thoreau?" Something in the Englishman's voice drew his eyes to him. There was an excited flush in his starved cheeks; his eyes shone. "Did she send you?" Jan struggled hard to speak calmly. "Not in words, M'seur Dixon. But I know that if I get you safely back to Lac Bain she will be very happy." Something came in Dixon's sobbing breath which Jan did not hear. A little later he stopped and built a fire over which he melted more snow and boiled tea. The drink stimulated them, and they went on. A little later still and Jan hung his rifle in the crotch of a sapling. "We will return for the guns in a day or so," he said. Dixon leaned upon him more heavily now, and the distances they traveled between resting periods became shorter and shorter. Three times they stopped to build fires and cook tea. It was night when they descended from the ridge to the snow-covered ice of Lac Bain. It was past midnight when Jan dragged Dixon from the spruce forest into the opening at the post. There were no lights burning, and he went with his half-conscious burden to the company's store. He awakened Croisset, who let them in. "Take care of Dixon," said Jan, "and don't arouse any of the people to-night. It will be time enough to tell what has happened in the morning." Over the stove in his own room he cooked meat and coffee, and for a long time sat silent before the fire. He had brought back Dixon. In the morning Mélisse would know. First she would go to the Englishman, then--then--she would come to him! He rose and went to the rude board table in the corner of his room. "No, Mélisse must not come to me in the morning," he whispered to himself. "She must never again look upon Jan Thoreau." He took pencil and paper and wrote. Page after page he crumpled in his hand and flung into the fire. At last, swiftly and despairingly, he ended with half a dozen lines. What he said came from his heart, in French: "I have brought him back to you, my Mélisse, and pray that the good God may give you happiness. I leave you the old violin, and always when you play, it will tell you of the love of Jan Thoreau." He folded the page and sealed it in one of the company's envelopes. Very quietly he went from his room down into the deserted store. Without striking a light he found a new pack, a few articles of food, and ammunition. The envelope, addressed to Mélisse, he left where Croisset or the factor would find it in the morning. His dogs were housed in a shack behind the store, and he called out their names softly and warningly as he went among them. As stealthily as their master they trailed behind him to the edge of the forest, and close under the old spruce that guarded the grave Jan stopped, and silently he stretched out his arms to the little cabin. The dogs watched him. Kazan, the one-eyed leader, glared from him into the dimness of the night, whining softly. A low, mourning wind swept through the spruce tops, and from Jan's throat there burst sobbingly words which he had heard beside this same grave more than seventeen years before, when Williams' choking voice had risen in a last prayer for the woman. "May the great God care for Mélisse!" He turned into the trail upon which Jean de Gravois had fought the Englishman, led his dogs and sledge in a twisting path through the caribou swamp, and stood at last beside the lob-stick tree that leaned out over the edge of the white barrens. With his knife he dug out the papers which he had concealed in that whisky-jack hole. It was near dawn when he recovered the rifle which he had abandoned on the mountain top. A little later it began to snow. He was glad, for it would conceal his trail. For thirteen days he forced his dogs through the deep snows into the south. On the fourteenth they came to Le Pas, which is the edge of civilization. It was night when he came out of the forest, so that he could see the faint glow of lights beyond the Saskatchewan. For a few moments, before crossing, he stopped his tired dogs and turned his face back into the grim desolation of the North, where the aurora was playing feebly in the skies, and beckoning to him, and telling him that the old life of centuries and centuries ago would wait for him always at the dome of the earth. "The good God bless you, and keep you, and care for you ever more, my Mélisse," he whispered; and he walked slowly ahead of his dogs, across the river, and into the Other World. CHAPTER XXV JACK THORNTON There was music that night in Le Pas. Jan heard it before he came to the first of the scattered lights, and the dogs pricked up their ears. Kazan, the one-eyed, whined under his breath, and the weight at Jan's heart grew heavier as the dog turned up his head to him in the starlight. It was strange music, nothing like Jan had ever heard. It was strange to Kazan, and set him whining, and he thrust his muzzle up to his master's touch inquiringly. They passed on like shadows, close to a big, lighted log building from which the music came, and with it a tumult of laughter, of shuffling and stamping feet, of coarse singing and loud voices. A door opened and a man and a woman came out. The man was cursing, and the woman was laughing at him--laughing as Jan had never heard a woman laugh before, and he held his breath as he listened to the taunting mockery in it. Others followed the first man and the first woman. Some passed quietly. A woman, escorted between two men, screamed with merriment as she flung toward his shadowy figure an object which fell with a crash against the sledge. It was a bottle. Kazan snarled. The trace-dogs slunk close to the leader's heels. With a low word Jan led them on. Close down to the river, where the Saskatchewan swung in a half-moon to the south and west, he found a low, squat building with a light hung over the door illuminating a bit of humor in the form of a printed legend which said that it was "King Edward's Hotel." The scrub bush of the forest grew within a hundred yards of it, and in this bush Jan tied his dogs and left his sledge. It did not occur to him that now, when he had entered civilization, he had come also into the land of lock and bolt, of robbers and thieves. It was loneliness, and not suspicion, that sent him back to unleash Kazan and take him with him. They entered the hotel, Kazan with suspicious caution. The door opened into a big room lighted by an oil lamp, turned low. The room was empty except for a solitary figure sitting in a chair, facing a wide window which looked into the north. Making no sound, that he might not disturb this other occupant, Jan also seated himself before the window. Kazan laid his wolfish head across his master's knees, his one eye upon him steadily and questioningly. Never in all his years of life had Jan felt the depth of loneliness that swept upon him now, as he looked into the North. Below him the Saskatchewan lay white and silent; beyond it he could see the dark edge of the forest, and far, far, beyond that, hovering low in the sky, the polar star. It burned faintly now, almost like a thousand other stars that he saw, and the aurora was only a fading glow. Something rose up in Jan's throat and choked him, and he closed his eyes, with his fingers clutching Kazan's head. In spite of the battle that he had fought, his mind swept back--back through the endless silent spaces, over mountains and through forests, swift, resistless, until once more the polar star flashed in all its glory over his head, and he was at Lac Bain. He did not know that he was surrendering to hunger, exhaustion, the cumulative effects of his thirteen days' fight in the forests. He was with Mélisse again, with the old violin, with the things that they had loved. He forgot in these moments that there was another in the room; he heard no sound as the man shifted his position so that he looked steadily at him and Kazan. It was the low, heart-broken sob of grief that fell from his own lips that awakened him again to a consciousness of the present. He jerked himself erect, and found Kazan with his fangs gleaming. The stranger had risen. He was standing close to him, leaning down, staring at him in the dim lamplight, and as Jan lifted his own eyes he knew that in the pale, eager face of the man above him there was written a grief which might have been a reflection of his own. For a full breath or two they looked, neither speaking, and the hair along Kazan's spine stood stiff. Something reached out to Jan and set his tired blood tingling. He knew that this man was not a forest man. He was not of his people. His face bore the stamp of the people to the south, of civilization. And yet something passed between them, leaped all barriers, and made them friends before they had spoken. The stranger reached down his hand, and Jan reached up his. All of the loneliness, the clinging to hope, the starving desire of two men for companionship, passed in the long grip of their hands. "You have just come down," said the man, half questioningly. "That was your sledge--out there?" "Yes," said Jan. The stranger sat down in the chair next to Jan. "From the camps?" he questioned eagerly. "What camps, m'sieur?" "The railroad camps, where they are putting the new line through, beyond Wekusko." "I know of no camps," said Jan simply. "I know of no railroad, except this that comes to Le Pas. I come from Lac Bain, on the edge of the barren lands." "You have never been down before?" asked the stranger softly. Jan wondered at the light in his eyes. "A long time ago," he said, "for a day. I have passed all of my life--up there." Jan pointed to the north, and the other's eyes turned to where the polar star was fading low in the sky. "And I have passed all of my life DOWN THERE," he replied, nodding his head to the south. "A year ago I came up here for--for health and happiness," he laughed nervously. "I found them both. But I'm leaving them. I'm going back to-morrow. My name is Thornton," he added, holding out his hand again. "I come from Chicago." "My name is Thoreau--Jan Thoreau," said Jan. "I have read of Chicago in a book, and have seen pictures of it. Is it larger than the city that is called Winnipeg?" He looked at Thornton, and Thornton turned his head a little so that the light did not shine in his face. The grip of his fingers tightened about Jan's hand. "Yes, it is larger." "The officers of the great company are at Winnipeg, and Le Commissionaire, are they not, m'sieur?" "Of the Hudson's Bay Company--yes." "And if there was business to do--important business, m'sieur, would it not be best to go to Le Commissionaire?" questioned Jan. Thornton looked hard at the tense eagerness in Jan's face. "There are nearer headquarters, at Prince Albert," he said. "That is not far," exclaimed Jan, rising. "And they would do business there--important business?" He dropped his hand to Kazan's head, and half turned toward the door. "Perhaps better than the Commissioner," replied Thornton. "It might depend--on what your business is." To them, as each stood for a moment in silence, there came the low wailing of a dog out in the night. "They are calling for Kazan," said Jan quietly, as though he had not read the question in Thornton's last words. "Good night, m'sieur!" The dogs were sitting upon their haunches, waiting, when Jan and Kazan went back to them. Jan drew them farther back, where the thick spruce shut them out from the clearing, and built a fire. Over this he hung his coffee-pail and a big chunk of frozen caribou meat, and tossed frozen fish to the hungry dogs. Then he pulled down spruce boughs and spread his heavy blankets out near the fire, and waited for the coffee and meat to cook. The huskies were through when he began eating, and they lay on their bellies, close about his feet, ready to snap at the scraps which he threw them. Jan noticed, as he ate, that there was left in them none of the old, fierce, fighting spirit. They did not snap or snarl. There was no quarreling when he threw bits of meat to them, and he found himself wondering if they, too, were filled with the sickness which was eating at his own heart. With this sickness, this deathly feeling of loneliness and heartache, there had entered into Jan now a strange sensation that was almost excitement--an eagerness to fasten the dogs in their traces, to hurry on, in spite of his exhaustion, to that place which Thornton had told him of--Prince Albert, and to free himself there, for all time, of the thing which had oppressed him since that night many years ago, when he had staggered into Lac Bain to play his violin as Cummins' wife died. He reached inside his skin coat and there he felt papers which he had taken from the hole in the lob-stick tree. They were safe. For twenty years he had guarded them. To-morrow he would take them to the great company at Prince Albert. And after that--after he had done this thing, what would there remain in life for Jan Thoreau? Perhaps the company might take him, and he would remain in civilization. That would be best--for him. He would fight against the call of his forests as years and years ago he had fought against that call of the Other World that had filled him with unrest for a time. He had killed THAT. If he DID return to his forests, he would go far to the west, or far to the east. No one that had ever known him would hear again of Jan Thoreau. Kazan had crept to his blanket, daring to encroach upon it inch by inch, until his great wolf-head lay upon Jan's arm. It was ten years ago that Jan had taken Kazan, a little half-blind puppy that he and Mélisse had chosen from a litter of half a dozen stronger brothers and sisters. Kazan was all that was left to him now. He loved the other dogs, but they were not like Kazan. He tightened his arm about the dog's head. Exhaustion, and the warmth of the fire, made him drowsy, and, after a time, he slept, with his head thrown back against the tree. Something awoke him, hours afterward. He opened his eyes, and found that the fire was still burning brightly. On the far side of it, beyond the dogs, sat Thornton. A look at the sky, where the stars were dying, and Jan knew that it was just before the gray break of dawn. He sat upright. Thornton laughed softly at him, and puffed out clouds of smoke from his pipe. "You were freezing," he said, as Jan stared, "and sleeping like a dead man. I waited for you back there, and then hunted you up. You know--I thought--" He hesitated, and knocked the ash from his pipe bowl. Then he looked frankly and squarely at Jan. "See here, old man, if you're hard up--had trouble of any sort--bad luck--got no money--won't you let me help you out?" "Thank you, m'sieur--I have money," said Jan. "I prefer to sleep outside with the dogs. Mon Dieu, I guess I would have been stiff with the frost if you had not come. You have been here--all night?" Thornton nodded. "And it is morning," exclaimed Jan, rising and looking above the spruce tops. "You are kind, m'sieur. I wish I might do as much for you." "You can," said Thornton quietly. "Where are you going--from here?" "To the company's offices at Prince Albert. We will start within an hour." "Will you take me with you?" Thornton asked. "With pleasure!" cried Jan. "But it will be a hard journey, m'sieur. I must hurry, and you may not be accustomed to running behind the dogs." Thornton rose and stretched out a hand. "It can't be too hard for me," he said. "I wish--" He stopped, and something in his low voice made Jan look straight into his eyes. For a moment they gazed at each other in silence, and again Jan saw in Thornton's face the look of loneliness and grief which he had first seen in the half gloom of the hotel. It was the suppressed note in Thornton's voice, of despair almost, that struck him deepest, and made him hold the other's hand a moment longer. Then he turned to his pack upon the sledge. "I've got meat and coffee and hard biscuits," he said. "Will you have breakfast with me?" That day Jan and Thornton made fifty miles westward over the level surface of the Saskeram, and camped again on the Saskatchewan. The second day they followed the river, passed the Sipanock, and struck south and west over the snow-covered ice for Prince Albert. It was early afternoon of the fourth day when at last they came to the town. "We will go to the offices of the great company," said Jan. "We will lose no time." It was Thornton now who guided him to the century-old building at the west edge of the town. It was Thornton who led him into an office filled mostly with young women, who were laboring at clicking machines; and it was Thornton who presented a square bit of white card to a gray-haired man at a desk, who, after reading it, rose from his chair, bowed, and shook hands with him. And a few moments later a door opened, and Jan Thoreau, alone, passed through it, his heart quivering, his breath choking him, his hand clutching at the papers in his breast pocket. Outside Thornton waited. An hour passed and still the door did not reopen. The man at the desk glanced curiously at Thornton. Two girls at typewriters exchanged whispered opinions as to who might be this wild-looking creature from the north who was taking up an hour of the sub-commissioner's time. Nearly two hours passed before Jan appeared. Thornton, still patient, rose as the door opened. His eyes first encountered the staring face of the sub-commissioner. Then Jan came out. He had aged five years in two hours. There was a tired stoop to his shoulders, a strange pallor in his cheeks. To Thornton his thin face seemed to have grown thinner. With bowed head, looking nowhere but ahead of him, Jan passed on, and as the last door opened to let them out into the pale winter sun, Thornton heard the muffled sobbing of his breath. His fingers gripped Jan's arm, his eyes were blazing. "If you're getting the wrong end of anything up there," he cried fiercely; "if you're in trouble, and they're taking the blood out of you--tell me and I'll put the clamps on 'em, so 'elp me God! They'll buck the devil when they buck Jack Thornton, and if it needs money to show 'em so, I've got half a million to teach 'em the game!" "Thanks, m'sieur," struggled Jan, striving to keep a lump out of his throat. "It's nothing like that. I don't need money. Half a million would just about buy--what I've given away up there." He clutched his hand for an instant to the empty pocket where the papers had been. CHAPTER XXVI TEMPTATION That night, leaving Thornton still at supper in the little old Windsor Hotel, Jan slipped away, and with Kazan at his heels, crossed the frozen Saskatchewan to the spruce forest on the north shore. He wanted to be alone, to think, to fight with himself against a desire which was almost overpowering him. Once, long ago, he had laid his soul bare to Jean de Gravois, and Jean had given him comfort. To-night he longed to go to Thornton, as he had gone to Jean, and to tell him the same story, and what had passed that day in the office of the sub-commissioner. In his heart there had grown something for Thornton that was stronger than friendship--something that would have made him fight for him, and die for him, as he would have fought and died for Jean de Gravois. It was a feeling cemented by a belief that something was troubling Thornton--that he, too, was filled with a loneliness and a grief which he was trying to conceal. And yet he fought to restrain himself from confiding in his new friend. It would do no good, he knew, except by relieving him of a part of his mental burden. He walked along the shore of the river and recrossed it again near the company's offices. All were dark with the exception of the sub-commissioner's room. In that there glowed a light. The sub-commissioner was keeping his promise. He was working. He worked until late, for Jan came back two hours after and saw the light still there. A week--it might be ten days, the sub-commissioner had told him, and it would be over. Always something in the north drew Jan's eyes, and he looked there now, wondering what would happen to him after that week was over. Lights were out and people were in bed when he and Kazan returned to the hotel. But Thornton was up, sitting by himself in the gloom, as Jan had first seen him at Le Pas. Jan sat down beside him. There was an uneasy tremor in Thornton's voice when he said: "Jan, did you ever love a woman--love her until you were ready and willing to die for her?" The suddenness of the question wrung the truth from Jan's lips in a low, choking voice. For an instant he thought that Thornton must have guessed his secret. "Yes, m'sieur." Thornton leaned toward him, gripping his knees, and the misery in his face was deeper than Jan had ever seen it before. "I love a woman--like that," he went on tensely. "A girl--not a woman, and she is one of your people, Jan--of the north, as innocent as a flower, more beautiful to ME than--than all the women I have ever seen before. She is at Oxford House. I am going home to--to save myself." "Save yourself!" cried Jan. "Mon Dieu, m'sieur--does she not love you?" "She would follow me to the end of the earth!" "Then--" Thornton straightened himself and wiped his pale face. Suddenly he rose to his feet and motioned for Jan to follow him. He walked swiftly out into the night, and still faster after that, until they passed beyond the town. From where he stopped they could look over the forests far into the pale light of the south. "THAT'S hell for me!" said Thornton, pointing. "It's what we call civilization--but it's mostly hell, and it's all hell for me. It's a hell of big cities, of strife, of blood-letting, of wickedness. I never knew how great a hell it was until I came up here--among YOU. I wish to God I could stay--always!" "You love her," breathed Jan. "You can stay." "I can't," groaned Thornton. "I can't--unless--" "What, m'sieur?" "Unless I lose everything--but her." Jan's fingers trembled as they sought Thornton's hand. "And everything is--is--nothing when you give it for love and happiness," he urged. "The great God, I know--" "Everything," cried Thornton. "Don't you understand? I said EVERYTHING!" He turned almost fiercely upon his companion. "I'd give up my name--for HER. I'd bury myself back there in the forests and never go out of them--for HER. I'd give up fortune, friends, lose myself for ever--for HER. But I can't. Good God, don't you understand?" Jan stared. His eyes grew large and dark. "I've spent ten years of WORSE than hell down there--with a woman," went on Thornton. "It happens among us--frequently, this sort of hell. I came up here to get out of it for a time. You know--now. There is a woman down there who--who is my wife. She would be glad if I never returned. She is happy now, when I am away, and I have been happy--for a time. I know what love is. I have felt it. I have lived it. God forgive me, but I am almost tempted to go back--to HER!" He stopped at the change which had come in Jan, who stood as straight and as still as the blank spruce behind them, with only his eyes showing that there was life in him. Those eyes held Thornton's. They burned upon him through the gray gloom as he had never seen human eyes burn before. He waited, half startled, and Jan spoke. In his voice there was nothing of that which Thornton saw in his eyes. It was low, and soft, and though it had that which rung like steel, Thornton could not have understood or feared it more. "M'sieur, how far have you gone--WITH HER?" Thornton understood and advanced with his hands reaching out to Jan. "Only as far as one might go with the purest thing on earth," he said. "I have sinned--in loving her, and in letting her love me, but that is all, Jan Thoreau. I swear that is all!" "And you are going back into the south?" "Yes, I am going back into the south." The next day Thornton did not go. He made no sign of going on the second day. So it was with the third, the fourth, and the fifth. On each of these days Jan went once, in the afternoon, to the office of the sub-commissioner, and Thornton always accompanied him. At times, when Jan was not looking, there was a hungry light in his eyes as he followed the other's movements, and once or twice Jan caught what was left of this look when he turned unexpectedly. He knew what was in Thornton's mind, and he pitied him, grieved with him in his own heart until his own secret almost wrung itself from his lips. Somehow, in a way that he could not understand, Thornton's sacrifice to honor, and his despair, gave Jan strength, and a hundred times he asked himself if a confession of his own misery would do as much for the other. He repeated this thought to himself again and again on the afternoon of the ninth day, when he went to the sub-commissioner's office alone. This time Thornton had remained behind. He had left him in a gloomy corner of the hotel room from which he had not looked up when Jan went out with Kazan. This ninth day was the last day for Jan Thoreau. In a dazed sort of way he listened as the sub-commissioner told him that the work was ended. They shook hands. It was dark when Jan came out from the company's offices, dark with a pale gloom through which the stars were beginning to glow--with a ghostly gloom, lightened still more in the north with the rising fires of the northern lights. Alone Jan stood for a few moments close down to the river. Across from him was the forest, silent, black, reaching to the end of the earth, and over it, like a signal light, beckoning him back to his world, the aurora sent out its shafts of red and gold. And as he listened there came to him faintly a distant wailing sound that he knew was the voice from that world, and at the sound the hair rose along Kazan's spine, and he whined deep down in his throat. Jan's breath grew quicker, his blood warmer. Over there--across the river--his world was calling to him, and he, Jan Thoreau, was now free to go. This very night he would bury himself in the forest again, and when he lay down to sleep it would be with his beloved stars above him, and the winds whispering sympathy and brotherhood to him in the spruce tops. He would go--NOW. He would say good-by to Thornton--and GO. He found himself running, and Kazan ran beside him. He was breathless when he came to the one lighted street of the town. He hurried to the hotel and found Thornton sitting where he had left him. "It is ended, m'sieur," he cried in a low voice. "It is over, and I am going. I am going to-night." Thornton rose. "To-night," he repeated. "Yes, to-night--now. I am going to pick up my things. Will you come?" He went ahead of Thornton to the bare little room in which he had slept while at the hotel. He did not notice the change in Thornton until he had lighted a lamp. Thornton was looking at him doggedly. There was an unpleasant look in his face, a flush about his eyes, a rigid tenseness in the muscles of his jaws. "And I--I, too, am going to-night," he said. "Into the South, m'sieur?" "No, into the NORTH." There was a fierceness in Thornton's emphasis. He stood opposite Jan, leaning over the table on which the light was placed. "I've broken loose," he went on. "I'm not going south--back to that hell of mine. I'm never going south again. I'm dead down there--dead for all time. They'll never hear of me again. They can have my fortune--everything. I'm going North. I'm going to live with YOU people--and God--AND HER!" Jan sank into a chair, Thornton sat down in one across from him. "I am going back to her," he repeated. "No one will ever know." He could not account for the look in Jan's eyes nor for the nervous twitching of the lithe brown hands that reached half across the table. But Kazan's one eye told him more than Thornton could guess, and in response to it that ominous shivering wave rose along his spine. Thornton would never know that Jan's fingers twitched for an instant in their old mad desire to leap at a human throat. "You will not do that," he said quietly. "Yes, I will," replied Thornton. "I have made up my mind. Nothing can stop me but--death." "There is one other thing that can stop you, and will, m'sieur," said Jan as quietly as before. "I, Jan Thoreau, will stop you." Thornton rose slowly, staring down into Jan's face. The flush about his eyes grew deeper. "I will stop you," repeated Jan, rising also. "And I am not death." He went to Thornton and placed his two hands upon his shoulders, and in his eyes there glowed now that gentle light which had made Thornton love him as he had loved no other man on earth. "M'sieur, I will stop you," he said again, speaking as though to a brother. "Sit down. I am going to tell you something. And when I have told you this you will take my hand, and you will say, 'Jan Thoreau, I thank the Great God that something like this has happened before, and that it has come to my ears in time to save the one I love.' Sit down, m'sieur." CHAPTER XXVII JAN'S STORY Jan had aged five years during those two hours in the office of the sub-commissioner; he aged now as Thornton looked at him. There came the same tired, hopeless glow into his eyes, the same tense lines in his face. And yet, quickly, he changed as he had not changed on that afternoon. Two livid spots began to burn in his cheeks as he sat down opposite Thornton. He turned the light low, and his eyes glowed more darkly and with an animal-like luster in the half gloom. Something in him now, a quivering, struggling passion that lay behind those eyes, held Thornton white and silent. "M'sieur," he began in the low voice which Thornton was beginning to understand, "I am going to tell you something which I have told to but two other human beings. It is the story of another man--a man from civilization, like you, who came up into this country of ours years and years ago, and who met a woman, as you have met this girl at Oxford House, and who loved her as you love this one, and perhaps more. It is singular that the case should be so similar, m'sieur, and it is because of this that I believe Our Blessed Lady gives me courage to tell it to you. For this man, like you, left a wife--and two children--when he came into the North. M'sieur, I pray the Great God to forgive him, for he left a third child--unborn." Jan leaned upon his hand so that it shaded his face. "It is not so much of THAT as of what followed that I am going to tell you, m'sieur," he went on. "It was a beautiful love--on the woman's part, and it would have been a beautiful love on the man's part if it had been pure. For her he gave up everything, even his God--as you would give up everything--and your God--for this girl at Oxford House. M'sieur, I will speak mostly of the woman now. She was beautiful. She was one of the three most beautiful things that God ever placed in our world, and she loved this man. She married him, believed in him, was ready to die for him, to follow him to the ends of the earth, as our women will do for the men they love. God in Heaven, can you not guess what happened, m'sieur? A CHILD WAS BORN!" So fiercely did Jan cry out the words that Thornton jerked back as though a blow had been struck at him from out of the gloom. "A child was born!" repeated Jan, and Thornton heard his nails digging in the table. "That was the first curse of God--a child! La Charogne--les bêtes de charogne--that is what we call them--beasts of carrion and carrion eaters, breeders of devils and sin! Mon Dieu, that is what happened! A child was born, with the curse of God upon him!" Jan stopped, his nails digging deeper, his breath escaping from him as though he had been running. "Down in YOUR world he would have grown up a MAN," he continued, speaking more calmly. "I have heard that--since. It is common down there to be a two-legged carrion--a man or a woman born out of wedlock. I have been told so, and that it is a curse not without hope. But here it is different. The curse never dies. It follows, day after day, year after year. And this child--more unfortunate than the wild things, was born one of them. Do you understand, m'sieur? If the winds had whispered the secret nothing would have come near him--the Indian women would sooner have touched the plague--he would have been an outcast, despised as he grew older, pointed at and taunted, called names which are worse than those called to the lowest and meanest dogs. THAT is what it means to be born under that curse--up here." He waited for Thornton to speak, but the other sat silent and moveless across the table. "The curse worked swiftly, m'sieur. It came first--in remorse--to the man. It gnawed at his soul, ate him alive, and drove him from place to place with the woman and the child. The purity and love of the woman added to his suffering, and at last he came to know that the hand of God had fallen upon his head. The woman saw his grief but did not know the reason for it. And so the curse first came to her. They went north--far north, above the Barren Lands, and the curse followed there. It gnawed at his life until--he died. That was seven years after the child was born." The oil lamp sputtered and began to smoke, and with a quick movement Jan turned the wick down until they were left in darkness. "M'sieur, it was then that the curse began to fall upon the woman and the child. Do you not believe that about the sins of the fathers falling upon others? Mon Dieu, it is so--it is so. It came in many small ways--and then--the curse--it came suddenly--LIKE THIS." Jan's voice came in a hissing whisper now. Thornton could feel his hot breath as he leaned over the table, and in the darkness Jan's eyes shone like two coals of fire. "It came like THIS!" panted Jan. "There was a new missioner at the post--a--a Christian from the South, and he was a great friend to the woman, and preached God, and she BELIEVED him. The boy was very young, and saw things, but did not understand at first. He knew, afterward, that the missioner loved his mother's beauty, and that he tried hard to win it--and failed, for the woman, until death, would love only the one to whom she had given herself first. Great God, it happened THEN--one night when every soul was about the big fires at the caribou roast, and there was no one near the lonely little cabin where the boy and his mother lived. The boy was at the feast, but he ran home--with a bit of dripping meat as a gift for his mother--and he heard her cries, and ran in to be struck down by the missioner. It happened THEN, and even the boy knew, and followed the man, shrieking that he had killed his mother." There was a terrible calmness now in Jan's voice. "M'sieur, it was true. She wasted away like a flower after that night. She died, and left the boy alone with the curse. And that boy, m'sieur, was Jan Thoreau. The woman was his mother." There was silence now, a dead, pulseless quiet, broken after a moment by a movement. It was Thornton, groping across the table. Jan felt his hands touch his arm. They groped farther in the darkness, until Jan Thoreau's hands were clasped tightly in Thornton's. "And that--is all?" he questioned hoarsely. "No, it is but the beginning," said Jan softly. "The curse has followed me, m'sieur, until I am the unhappiest man in the world. To-day I have done all that is to be done. When my father died he left papers which my mother was to give to me when I had attained manhood. When she died they came to me. She knew nothing of that which was in them, and I am glad. For they told the story that I have told to you, m'sieur, and from his grave my father prayed to me to make what restitution I could. When he came into the North for good he brought with him most of his fortune--which was large, m'sieur--and placed it where no one would ever find it--in the stock of the Great Company. A half of it, he said, should be mine. The other half he asked me to return to his children, and to his real wife, if she were living. I have done more than that, m'sieur. I have given up all--for none of it is mine. A half will go to the two children whom he deserted. The other half will go to the child that was unborn. The mother--is--dead." After a time Thornton said, "There is more, Jan." "Yes, there is more, m'sieur," said Jan. "So much more that if I were to tell it to you it would not be hard for you to understand why Jan Thoreau is the unhappiest man in the world. I have told you that this is but the beginning. I have not told you of how the curse has followed me and robbed me of all that is greatest in life--how it has haunted me day and night, m'sieur, like a black spirit, destroying my hopes, turning me at last into an outcast, without people, without friends, without--that--which you, too, will give up in this girl at Oxford House. M'sieur, am I right? You will not go back to her. You will go south, and some day the Great God will reward you." He heard Thornton rising in the dark. "Shall I strike a light, m'sieur?" "No," said Thornton close to him. In the gloom their hands met. There was a change in the other's voice now, something of pride, of triumph, of a glory just achieved. "Jan," he said softly, "I thank you for bringing me face to face with a God like yours. I have never met Him before. We send missionaries up to save you, we look upon you as wild and savage and with only half a soul--and we are blind. You have taught me more than has ever been preached into me, and this great, glorious world of yours is sending me back a better man for having come into it. I am going--south. Some day I will return, and I will be one of this world, and one of your people. I will come, and I will bring no curse. If I could send this word to HER, ask her forgiveness, tell her what I have almost been and that I still have hope--faith--I could go easier down into that other world." "You can," said Jan. "I will take this word for you, m'sieur, and I will take more, for I will tell her what it has been the kind fate for Jan Thoreau to find in the heart of M'sieur Thornton. She is one of my people, and she will forgive, and love you more for what you have done. For this, m'sieur, is what the Cree god has given to his people as the honor of the great snows. She will still love you, and if there is to be hope it will burn in HER breast, too. M'sieur--" Something like a sob broke through Thornton's lips as he moved back through the darkness. "And you--I will find you again?" "They will know where I go from Oxford House. I will leave word--with HER," said Jan. "Good-by," said Thornton huskily. Jan listened until his footsteps had died away, and for a long time after that he sat with his head buried in his arms upon the little table. And Kazan, whining softly, seemed to know that in the darkened room had come to pass the thing which broke at last his master's overburdened heart. CHAPTER XXVIII THE MUSIC AGAIN That night Jan Thoreau passed for the last time back into the shelter of his forests; and all that night he traveled, and with each mile that he left behind him something larger and bolder grew in his breast until he cracked his whip in the old way, and shouted to the dogs in the old way, and the blood in him sang to the wild spirit of the wilderness. Once more he was home. To him the forest had always been home, filled with the low voice of whispering winds and trees, and to-night it was more his home than ever. Lonely and sick at heart, with no other desire than to bury himself deeper and deeper into it, he felt the life, and sympathy, and love of it creeping into his heart, grieving with him in his grief, warming him with its hope, pledging him again the eternal friendship of its trees, its mountains, and all of the wild that it held therein. And from above him the stars looked down like a billion tiny fires kindled by loving hands to light his way--the stars that had given him music, peace, since he could remember, and that had taught him more of the silent power of God than the lips of man could ever tell. From this time forth Jan Thoreau knew that these things would be his life, his god. A thousand times in fanciful play he had given life and form to the star-shadows about him, to the shadows of the tall spruce, the twisted shrub, the rocks and even the mountains. And now it was no longer play. With each hour that passed this night, and with each day and night that followed, they became more real to him, and his fires in the black gloom painted him pictures as they had never painted them before, and the trees and the rocks and the twisted shrub comforted him more and more in his loneliness, and gave to him the presence of life in their movement, in the coming and going of their shadow-forms. Everywhere they were the same old friends, unvarying and changeless. The spruce-shadow of to-night, nodding to him in its silent way, was the same that had nodded to him last night--a hundred nights ago; the stars were the same, the winds whispering to him in the tree-tops were the same, everything was as it was yesterday--years ago--unchanged, never leaving him, never growing cold in their devotion. He had loved the forest--NOW he worshipped it. In its vast silence he still possessed Mélisse. It whispered to him still of her old love, of their days and years of happiness, and with his forest he lived these days over and over again, and when he slept with his forest he dreamed of them. Nearly a month passed before he reached Oxford House and found the sweet-faced girl whom Thornton loved. He did as Thornton had asked, and went on--into the north and east. He had no mission now, except to roam in his forests. He went down the Hayes, getting his few supplies at Indian camps, and stopped at last, with the beginning of spring, far up on the Cutaway. Here he built himself a camp and lived for a time, setting dead-falls for bear. Then he struck north again, and still east--keeping always away from Lac Bain. When the first chill winds of the bay brought warning of winter down to him he was filled for a time with a longing to strike north--and WEST, to go once more back to his Barren Lands. But, instead, he went south, and so it came to pass that a year after he had left Lac Bain he built himself a cabin deep in the forest of God's River, fifty miles from Oxford House, and trapped once more for the company. He had not forgotten his promise to Thornton, and at Oxford House left word where he could be found if the man from civilization should return. In late mid-winter Jan returned to Oxford House with his furs. It was on the night of the day that he came into the post that he heard a Frenchman who had come down from the north speak of Lac Bain. None noticed the change in Jan's face as he hung back in the shadows of the company's store. A little later he followed the Frenchman outside, and stopped him where there were no others near to overhear. "M'sieur, you spoke of Lac Bain," he said in French. "You have been there?" "Yes," replied the other, "I was there for a week waiting for the first sledge snow." "It is my old home," said Jan, trying to keep his voice natural. "I have wondered--if there are changes. You saw--Cummins--the factor?" "Yes, he was there." "And--and Jean de Gravois, the chief man?" "He was away. Mon Dieu, listen to that! The dogs are fighting out there!" "A moment, m'sieur," begged Jan, as the Frenchman made a movement as if to run in the direction of the tumult. "The factor had a daughter--Mélisse--" "She left Lac Bain a long time ago, m'sieur," interrupted the trapper, making a tremendous effort to be polite as he edged toward the sound of battle. "M'sieur Cummins told me that he had not seen her in a long time--I believe it was almost a year. Sacre, listen to that! They are tearing one another to bits, and they are MY dogs, m'sieur, for I can tell their voices among a thousand!" He sprang through the darkness and Jan made a movement to follow. Then he stopped, and turned instead to the company's store. He took his pack to the sledge and dogs in the edge of the spruce, and Kazan leaped to greet him at the end of his babiche. This night as Jan traveled through the forest he did not notice the stars or the friendly shadows. "A year," he repeated to himself, again and again, and once, when Kazan rubbed against his leg and looked up into his face, he said, "Ah, Kazan, our Mélisse went away with the Englishman. May the Great God give them happiness!" The forest claimed him more than ever after this. He did not go back to Oxford House in the spring but sold his furs to a passing half-breed, and wandered through all of that spring and summer in the country to the west. It was January when he returned to his cabin, when the snows were deepest, and three days later he set out to outfit at the Hudson's Bay post on God's Lake instead of at Oxford House. It was while they were crossing a part of the lake that Kazan leaped aside for an instant in his traces and snapped at something in the snow. Jan saw the movement but gave no attention to it until a little later, when Kazan stopped and fell upon his belly, biting at the harness and whining in pain. The thought of Kazan's sudden snap at the snow came to him then like a knife-thrust, and with a low cry of horror and fear he fell upon his knees beside the dog. Kazan whimpered and his bushy tail swept the snow as Jan lifted his great wolfish head between his two hands. No other sound came from Jan's lips now, and slowly he drew the dog up to him until he held him in his arms as he might have held a child, Kazan stilled the whimpering sounds in his throat. His one eye rested on his master's face, faithful, watching for some sign--for some language there, even as the burning fires of a strange torture gnawed at his life, and in that eye Jan saw the deepening reddish film which he had seen a hundred times before in the eyes of foxes and wolves killed by poison bait. A moan of anguish burst from Jan's lips and he held his face close down against Kazan's head, and sobbed now like a child, while Kazan rubbed his hot muzzle against his cheek and his muscles hardened in a last desire to give battle to whatever was giving his master grief. It was a long time before Jan lifted his face from the shaggy head, and when he did he knew that the last of all love, of all companionship, of all that bound him to flesh and blood in his lonely world, was gone. Kazan was dead. From the sledge he took a blanket and wrapped Kazan in it, and carried him a hundred yards back from the trail. With bowed head he came behind his four dogs into God's House. Half an hour later he turned back into the wilderness with his supplies. It was dark when he returned to where he had left Kazan. He placed him upon the sledge and the four huskies whined as they dragged on their burden, from which the smell of death came to them. They stopped in the deep forests beyond the lake and Jan built a fire. This night, as on all nights in his lonely life, Jan drew Kazan close to him, and he shivered as the other dogs slunk back from him suspiciously and the fire and the spruce tops broke the stillness of the forest. He looked at the crackling flames, at the fitful shadows which they set dancing and grimacing about him, and it seemed to him now that they were no longer friends, but were taunting him--gloating in Kazan's death, and telling him that he was alone, alone, alone. He let the fire die down, stirring it into life only when the cold stiffened him, and when at last he fell into an unquiet slumber it was still to hear the spruce tops whispering to him that Kazan was dead, and that in dying he had broken the last fragile link between Jan Thoreau and Mélisse. He went on at dawn, with Kazan wrapped in his blanket on the sledge. He planned to reach the cabin that night, and the next day he would bury his old comrade. It was dark when he came to the narrow plain that lay between him and the river. The sky was brilliant with stars when he slowly climbed the big, barren ridge at the foot of which was his home. At the summit he stopped and seated himself on the edge of a rock, with nothing but a thousand miles of space between him and the pale glow of the northern lights. At his feet lay the forest, black and silent, and he looked down to where he knew his cabin was waiting for him, black and silent, too. For the first time it came upon him that THIS was home--that the forest, and the silence, and the little cabin hidden under the spruce tops below held a deeper meaning for him than a few hours before, when Kazan was a leaping, living comrade at his side. Kazan was dead. Down there he would bury him. And he had loved Kazan;--he knew, now, as he clutched his hands to his aching breast, that he would have fought for Kazan--given up his life for him--as he would have done for a brother. Down there, under the silent spruce, he would bury the last that had remained to him of the old life, and there swelled up in his heart a longing, almost a prayer, that Mélisse might know that he, Jan Thoreau, would have nothing left to him to-morrow but a grave, and that in that grave was their old chum, their old playmate--Kazan. Hot tears blinded Jan's eyes and he covered his face with his hands, and sobbed as he had sobbed years before, when in the southern wilderness word came to him that Mélisse was dying. "Mélisse--Mélisse--" He moaned her name aloud, and stared through the hot film in his eyes away into the north, sobbing to her, calling to her in his grief, and looking through that thousand miles of starlit space as though from out of it her sweet face would come to him once more. And as he called there seemed to come to him from out of that space a sound, so sweet, and low, and tender that his heart stood still and he stood up straight and stretched his arms up to Heaven, for Jan Thoreau knew that it was the sound of a violin that came to him from out of the north--that Mélisse, an infinity away, had heard his call, his prayer, and was playing for him and Kazan! And suddenly, as he listened, his arms fell to his sides, and there shot into his eyes all of the concentrated light of the stars, for the music came nearer and nearer, and still nearer to him, until he caught Kazan in his arms and ran with him down the side of the mountain. It died now in the forest--then rose again, softer and more distant it seemed to him, luring him on into the forest gloom. For a few moments consciousness of all else but that sound remained with him only in a dazed, half real way, and as John Cummins had called upon the angels at Lac Bain many years ago when he, too, had gone out into the night to meet this wonderful music, so Jan Thoreau's soul cried to them now as he clutched Kazan to him, and stumbled on. Then, suddenly, he came upon the cabin, and in the cabin there was a light! Gently he laid Kazan down upon the snow, and for a full minute he stood and listened, and heard, lower and sweeter still, the gentle music, of the violin. Some one was in his cabin--living hands were playing! After all it was not the spirit of Mélisse that had come to him in the hour of his deepest grief, and a sob rose in his throat. He went on, step by step, and at the door he stopped again, wondering if he was mad, if the spirits of the forest were taunting him still, if--if-- One step more-- The Great God, he heard it now--the low, sweet music of the old Cree love song, played in the old, old way, with all of its old sadness, its whispering joy, its weeping song of life, of death, of love! With a great cry he flung open the door and leaped in, with his arms reaching out, his eyes blinded for a moment by the sudden light--and with a cry as piercing as his own, something ran through that light to meet him--Mélisse, the old, glorious Mélisse, crushing her arms about his neck, sobbing his name, pleading with him in her old, sweet voice to kiss her, kiss her, kiss her--while Jan Thoreau for the first time in his life felt sweeping over him a resistless weakness, and in this vision he knew that Jean de Gravois came to him, too, and held him in his arms, and that as the light faded away from about him he still heard Mélisse calling to him, felt her arms about him, her face crushed to his own. And as the deep gloom enveloped him more densely, and he felt himself slipping down through it, he whispered to the faces which he could no longer see, "Kazan--died--to-night--" For a long time Jan fought to throw off the darkness, and when he succeeded, and opened his eyes again, he knew that it was Mélisse who was sitting beside him, and that it was Mélisse who flung her arms about him when he awoke from his strange sleep, and held his wild head pressed against her bosom--Mélisse, with her glorious hair flowing about her as he had loved it in their old days, and with the old love shining in her eyes, only more glorious now, as he heard her voice. "Jan--Jan--we have been hunting for you--so long," she cried softly. "We have been searching--ever since you left Lac Bain. Jan, dear Jan, I loved you so--and you almost broke my heart. Dear, dear Jan," she sobbed, stroking his face now, "I know why you ran away--I know, and I love you so that--that I will die if--you go away again." "You know!" breathed Jan. He was in his cot, and raised himself, clasping her beautiful face between his two hands, staring at her with the old horror in his eyes. "You know--and you come--to me!" "I love you," said Mélisse. She slipped up to him and laid her face upon his breast, and with her fingers clutched in his long hair she leaned over to him and kissed him. "I love you!" Jan's arms closed about her, and he bowed his face so that it was smothered in her hair and he felt against it the joyous tremble of her bosom. "I love you," she whispered again, and under her cloud of hair their lips met, and she whispered again, with her sweet breath still upon his lips, "I love you." Outside Jean de Gravois was dancing up and down in the starlit edge of the forest, and Iowaka was looking at him. "And NOW what do you think of your Jean de Gravois?" cried Jean for the hundredth time at least. "NOW what do you think of him, my beautiful one?" and he caught Iowaka's head in his arms, for the hundredth time, too, and kissed her until she pushed him away. "Was it not right for me to break my oath to the Blessed Virgin and tell Mélisse why Jan Thoreau had gone mad? Was it not right, I say? And did not Mélisse do as I told that fool of a Jan that she WOULD do? And didn't she HATE the Englishman all of the time? Eh? Can you not speak, my raven-haired angel?" He hugged Iowaka again in his arms, and this time he did not let her go, but turned her face so that the starlight fell upon it. "And NOW what if Jan Thoreau still feels that the curse is upon him?" he asked softly. "Ho, ho, we have fixed that--you, my sweet Iowaka, and your husband, Jean de Gravois. I have it--here--in my pocket--the letter signed by the sub-commissioner at Prince Albert, to whom I told Jan's story when I followed his trail down there--the letter which says that the other woman died BEFORE the man who was to be Jan Thoreau's father married the woman who was to be his mother. And NOW do you understand why I did not tell Mélisse of this letter, ma chérie? It was to prove to that fool of a Jan Thoreau that she loved him--WHATEVER HE WAS. NOW what do you think of Jean de Gravois, you daughter of a princess, you--you--" "Wife of the greatest man in the world," laughed Iowaka softly. "Come, my foolish Jean, we can not stand out for ever. I am growing cold. And besides, do you not suppose that Jan would like to see ME?" "Foolish--foolish--foolish--" murmured Jean as they walked hand in hand through the starlight. "She, my Iowaka, my beloved, says that I am foolish--AND AFTER THIS! Mon Dieu, what can a man do to make himself great in the eyes of his wife?" THE END 
29406	----	[Frontispiece: "We'll make it, Peter," she whispered.] THE COUNTRY BEYOND A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE FLAMING FOREST, ETC. JTABLE 5 23 1 List of Illustrations "We'll make it, Peter," she whispered. . . . . . . _Frontispiece_ "I've come to tell you things, Nada. I've been living a lie." They hurried to the camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news. "--a squaw named Yellow Bird sent word that you would be welcome." _A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the history of human lives; yet these things Peter did not know._ THE COUNTRY BEYOND CHAPTER I Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior, and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the Rainy River waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart of a wilderness world--and in that paradise "a little corner of hell." That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing out the shame and the agony of it to herself. That was before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life. But the hell was still there. One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top of Cragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the whiteness of winter one could look off over a hundred square miles of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black spruce and cedar and balsam--a country of storm, of deep snows, and men and women whose blood ran red with the thrill that the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the wild. But this was spring. And such a spring as had not come to the Canadian north country in many years. Until three days ago there had been a deluge of warm rains, and since then the sun had inundated the land with the golden warmth of summer. The last chill was gone from the air, and the last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of bursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of yellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances like the billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running waters, the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice of all mating creatures. Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May, rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the velvety splashes of timber. In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter. The love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his most desperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and down the white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still remained in the sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering vastness of the water, and at the white gulls circling near him in quest of dead fish flung ashore. Peter was three months old. Yesterday he had been a timid pup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of everything about him; but today he had braved the lake trail on his own nerve, and nothing had dared to come near him in spite of his yipping, so that a great courage and a great desire were born in him. Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great clump of balsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp little eyes leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows. The bit of forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possibly half a rifle-shot distance from end to end--but to Peter it was as vast as life itself. And something urged him to go in. And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery within him, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than his own were working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and that on his decision to go in or not to go in--on the triumph of courage or cowardice--there rested the fates of lives greater than his own, of men, and women, and of little children still unborn. A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the history of human lives, yet these things Peter did not know--nor that his greatest hour had come. At last he rose from his squatting posture, and stood upon his feet. He was not a beautiful pup, this Peter _Pied-Bot_--or Peter Club-foot, as Jolly Roger McKay--who lived over in the big cedar swamp--had named him when he gave Peter to the girl. He was, in a way, an accident and a homely one at that. His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale who had broken from his kennel long enough to commit a _mesalliance_ with a huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound--and Peter was the result. He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale father at the age of three months; his ears were flappy and big, his tail was knotted, and his legs were ungainly and loose, with huge feet at the end of them--so big and heavy that he stumbled frequently, and fell on his nose. One pitied him at first--and then loved him. For Peter, in spite of his homeliness, had the two best bloods of all dog creation in his veins. Yet in a way it was like mixing nitro-glycerin with olive oil, or dynamite and saltpeter with milk and honey. Peter's heart was thumping rapidly as he took a step toward the deeper shadows. He swallowed hard, as if to clear a knot out of his scrawny throat. But he had made up his mind. Something was compelling him, and he would go in. Slowly the gloom engulfed him, and once again the whimsical spirit of fatalism had chosen a trivial thing to work out its ends in the romance and tragedy of human lives. Grim shadows began to surround Peter, and his ears shot up, and a scraggly brush stood out along his spine. But he did not bark, as he had barked along the shore of the lake, and in the green opens. Twice he looked back to the shimmer of sunshine that was growing more and more indistinct. As long as he could see this, and knew that his retreat was open, there still remained a bit of that courage which was swiftly ebbing in the thickening darkness. But the third time he looked back the light of the sun was utterly gone! For an instant the knot rose up in his throat and choked him, and his eyes popped, and grew like little balls of fire in his intense desire to see through the gloom. Even the girl, who was afraid of only one thing in the world, would have paused where Peter stood, with a little quickening of her heart. For all the light of the day, it seemed to Peter, had suddenly died out. Over his head the spruce and cedar and balsam tops grew so thick they were like a canopy of night. Through them the snow never came in winter, and under them the light of a blazing sun was only a ghostly twilight. And now, as he stood there, his whole soul burning with a desire to see his way out, Peter began to hear strange sounds. Strangest of all, and most fearsome, was a hissing that came and went, sometimes very near to him, and always accompanied by a grating noise that curdled his blood. Twice after that he saw the shadow of the great owl as it swooped over him, and he flattened himself down, the knot in his throat growing bigger and more choking. And then he heard the soft and uncanny movement of huge feathered bodies in the thick shroud of boughs overhead, and slowly and cautiously he wormed himself around, determined to get back to sunshine and day as quickly as he could. It was not until he had made this movement that the real chill of horror gripped at his heart. Straight behind him, directly in the path he had traveled, he saw two little green balls of flame! It was instinct, and not reason or experience, which told Peter there was menace and peril in these two tiny spots blazing in the gloom. He did not know that his own eyes, popping half out of his head, were equally terrifying in that pit of silence, nor that from him emanated a still more terrifying thing--the scent of dog. He trembled on his wobbly legs as the green eyes stared at him, and his back seemed to break in the middle, so that he sank helplessly down upon the soft spruce needles, waiting for his doom. In another flash the twin balls of green fire were gone. In a moment they appeared again, a little farther away. Then a second time they were gone, and a third time they flashed back at him--so distant they appeared like needle-points in the darkness. Something stupendous rose up in Peter. It was the soul of his Airedale father, telling him the other thing was running away! And in the joy of triumph Peter let out a yelp. In that night-infested place, alive with hiding things, the yelp set loose weird rustlings in the tangled treetops, strange murmurings of chortling voices, and the nasty snapping of beaks that held in them the power to rend Peter's skinny body into a hundred bits. From deeper in the thicket came the sudden crash of a heavy body, and with it the chuckling notes of a porcupine, and a _hoo-hoo-hoo-ee_ of startled inquiry that at first Peter took for a human voice. And again he lay shivering close to the foot-deep carpet of needles under him, while his heart thumped against his ribs, and his whiskers stood out in mortal fear. There followed a weird and appalling silence, and in that stillness Peter quested vainly for the sunlight he had lost. And then, indistinctly, but bringing with it a new thrill, he heard another sound. It was a soft and distant rippling of running water. He knew that sound. It was friendly. He had played among the rocks and pebbles and sand where it was made. His courage came back, and he rose up on his legs, and made his way toward it. Something inside him told him to go quietly, but his feet were big and clumsy, and half a dozen times in the next two minutes he stumbled on his nose. At last he came to the stream, scarcely wider than a man might have reached across, rippling and plashing its way through the naked roots of trees. And ahead of him Peter saw light. He quickened his pace, until at the last he was running when he came out into the edge of the meadowy plain, with its sweetness of flowers and green grass and song of birds, and its glory of blue sky and sun. If he had ever been afraid, Peter forgot it now. The choking went out of his throat, his heart fell back in its place, and the fierce conviction that he had vanquished everything in the world possessed him. He peered back into the dark cavern of evergreen out of which the streamlet gurgled, and then trotted straight away from it, growling back his defiance as he ran. At a safe distance he stopped, and faced about. Nothing was following him, and the importance of his achievements grew upon him. He began to swell; his fore-legs he planted pugnaciously, he hollowed his back, and began to bark with all the puppyish ferocity that was in him. And though he continued to yelp, and pounded the earth with his paws, and tore up the green grass with his sharp little teeth, nothing dared to come out of the black forest in answer to his challenge! His head was high and his ears cocked jauntily as he trotted up the slope, and for the first time in his three months of existence he yearned to give battle to something that was alive. He was a changed Peter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing sticks or stones or mauling a rabbit skin. At the crest of the slope he stopped, and yelped down, almost determined to go back to that black patch of forest and chase out everything that was in it. Then he turned toward Cragg's Ridge, and what he saw seemed slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousness that was in him, and his stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end of it touched the ground. Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-like paradise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a spiral of white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter heard also the chopping of axe. It made him shiver, and yet he made his way toward it. He was not old enough--nor was it in the gentle blood of his Mackenzie mother--to know the meaning of hate; but something was growing swiftly in Peter's shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger whenever he heard the sound of the axe. For always there was associated with that sound the cat-like, thin-faced man with the red bristle on his upper lip, and the one eye that never opened but was always closed. And Peter had come to fear this one eyed man more than he feared any of the ghostly monsters hidden in the black pit of the forest he had braved that day. But the owls, and the porcupine, and the fiery-eyed fox that had run away from him, had put into Peter something which was not in him yesterday, and he did not slink on his belly when he came to the edge of the cup between the broken ridge, but stood up boldly on his crooked legs and looked ahead of him. At the far edge of the cup, under the western shoulder of the ridge, was a thick scattering of tall cedars and green poplars and white birch, and in the shelter of these was a cabin built of logs. A lovelier spot could not have been chosen for the home of man. The hollow, from where Peter stood, was a velvety carpet of green, thickly strewn with flowers and ferns, sweet with the scent of violets and wild honey-suckle, and filled with the song of birds. Through the middle of it purled a tiny creek which disappeared between the ragged shoulders of rock, and close to this creek stood the cabin, its log walls smothered under a luxuriant growth of wood-vine. But Peter's quizzical little eyes were not measuring the beauty of the place, nor were his ears listening to the singing of birds, or the chattering of a red-squirrel on a stub a few yards away. He was looking beyond the cabin, to a chalk-white mass of rock that rose like a giant mushroom in the edge of the trees--and he was listening to the ringing of the axe, and straining his ears to catch the sound of a voice. It was the voice he wanted most of all, and when this did not come he choked back a whimper in his throat, and went down to the creek, and waded through it, and came up cautiously behind the cabin, his eyes and ears alert and his loosely jointed legs ready for flight at a sign of danger. He wanted to set up his sharp yipping signal for the girl, but the menace of the axe choked back his desire. At the very end of the cabin, where the wood-vine grew thick and dense, Peter had burrowed himself a hiding-place, and into this he skulked with the quickness of a rat getting away from its enemies. From this protecting screen he cautiously poked forth his whiskered face, to make what inventory he could of his chances for supper and a safe home-coming. And as he looked forth his heart gave a sudden jump. It was the girl, and not the man who was using the axe today. At the big wood-pile half a stone's throw away he saw the shimmer of her brown curls in the sun, and a glimpse of her white face as it was turned for an instant toward the cabin. In his gladness he would have leaped out, but the curse of a voice he had learned to dread held him back. A man had come out of the cabin, and close behind the man, a woman. The man was a long, lean, cadaverous-faced creature, and Peter knew that the devil was in him as he stood there at the cabin door. His breath, if one had stood close enough to smell it, was heavy with whiskey. Tobacco juice stained the corners of his mouth, and his one eye gleamed with an animal-like exultation as he nodded toward the girl with the shining curls "Mooney says he'll pay seven-fifty for her when he gets his tie-money from the Government, an' he paid me fifty down," he said. "It'll help pay for the brat's board these last ten years--an' mebby, when it comes to a show-down, I can stick him for a thousand." The woman made no answer. She was, in a way, past answering with a mind of her own. The man, as he stood there, was wicked and cruel, every line in his ugly face and angular body a line of sin. The woman was bent, broken, a wreck. In her face there was no sign of a living soul. Her eyes were dull, her heart burned out, her hands gnarled with toil under the slavedom of a beast. Yet even Peter, quiet as a mouse where he lay, sensed the difference between them. He had seen the girl and this woman sobbing in each other's arms. And often he had crawled to the woman's feet, and occasionally her hand had touched him, and frequently she had given him things to eat. But it was seldom he heard her voice when the man was near. The man was biting off a chunk of black tobacco. Suddenly he asked, "How old is she, Liz?" And the woman answered in a strange and husky voice. "Seventeen the twelfth day of this month." The man spat. "Mooney ought to pay a thousand. We've had her better'n ten years--an' Mooney's crazy as a loon to git her. He'll pay!" "Jed--" The woman's voice rose above its hoarseness. "Jed--it ain't right!" The man laughed. He opened his mouth wide, until his yellow fangs gleamed in the sun, and the girl with the axe paused for a moment in her work, and flung back her head, staring at the two before the cabin door. "Right?" jeered the man. "Right? That's what you been preachin' me these last ten years 'bout whiskey-runnin,' but it ain't made me stop sellin' whiskey, has it? An' I guess it ain't a word that'll come between Mooney and me--not if Mooney gits his thousand." Suddenly he turned upon her, a hand half raised to strike. "An' if you whisper a word to her--if y' double-cross me so much as the length of your little finger--I'll break every bone in your body, so help me God! You understand? You won't say anything to her?" The woman's uneven shoulders drooped lower. "I won't say ennything, Jed. I--promise." The man dropped his uplifted hand with a harsh grunt. "I'll kill y' if you do," he warned. The girl had dropped her axe, and was coming toward them. She was a slim, bird-like creature, with a poise to her head and an up-tilt to her chin which warned that the man had not yet beaten her to the level of the woman. She was dressed in a faded calico, frayed at the bottom, and with the sleeves bobbed off just above the elbows of her slim white arms. Her stockings were mottled with patches and mends, and her shoes were old, and worn out at the toes. But to Peter, worshipping her from his hiding place, she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Jolly Roger had said the same thing, and most men--and women, too--would have agreed that this slip of a girl possessed a beauty which it would take a long time for unhappiness and torture to crush entirely out of her. Her eyes were as blue as the violets Peter had thrust his nose among that day. And her hair was a glory, loosed by her exertion from its bondage of faded ribbon, and falling about her shoulders and nearly to her waist in a mass of curling brown tresses that at times had made even Jed Hawkins' one eye light of with admiration. And yet, even in those times, he hated her, and more than once his bony fingers had closed viciously in that mass of radiant hair, but seldom could he wring a scream of pain from Nada. Even now, when she could see the light of the devil in his one gleaming eye, it was only her flesh--and not her soul--that was afraid. But the strain had begun to show its mark. In the blue of her eyes was the look of one who was never free of haunting visions, her cheeks were pallid, and a little too thin, and the vivid redness of her lips was not of health and happiness, but a touch of the color which should have been in her face, and which until now had refused to die. She faced the man, a little out of the reach of his arm. "I told you never again to raise your hand to strike her," she cried in a fierce, suppressed little voice, her blue eyes flaming loathing and hatred at him. "If you hit her once more--something is going to happen. If you want to hit anyone, hit me. I kin stand it. But--look at her! You've broken her shoulder, you've crippled her--an' you oughta die!" The man advanced half a step, his eye ablaze. Deep down in him Peter felt something he had never felt before. For the first time in his life he had no desire to run away from the man. Something rose up from his bony little chest, and grew in his throat, until it was a babyish snarl so low that no human ears could hear it. And in his hiding-place his needle-like fangs gleamed under snarling lips. But the man did not strike, nor did he reach out to grip his fingers in the silken mass of Nada's hair. He laughed, as if something was choking him, and turned away with a toss of his arms. "You ain't seein' me hit her any more, are you, Nady?" he said, and disappeared around the end of the cabin. The girl laid a hand on the woman's arm. Her eyes softened, but she was trembling. "I've told him what'll happen, an' he won't dare hit you any more," she comforted. "If he does, I'll end him. I will! I'll bring the police. I'll show 'em the places where he hides his whiskey. I'll--I'll put him in jail, if I die for it!" The woman's bony hands clutched at one of Nada's. "No, no, you mustn't do that," she pleaded. "He was good to me once, a long time ago, Nada. It ain't Jed that's bad--it's the whiskey. You mustn't tell on him, Nada--you mustn't!" "I've promised you I won't--if he don't hit you any more. He kin shake me by the hair if he wants to. But if he hits you--" She drew a deep breath, and also passed around the end of the cabin. For a few moments Peter listened. Then he slipped back through the tunnel he had made under the wood-vine, and saw Nada walking swiftly toward the break in the ridge. He followed, so quietly that she was through the break, and was picking her way among the tumbled masses of rock along the farther foot of the ridge, before she discovered his presence. With a glad cry she caught him up in her arms and hugged him against her breast. "Peter, Peter, where have you been?" she demanded. "I thought something had happened to you, and I've been huntin' for you, and so has Roger--I mean Mister Jolly Roger." Peter was hugged tighter, and he hung limply until his mistress came to a thick little clump of dwarf balsams hidden among the rocks. It was their "secret place," and Peter had come to sense the fact that its mystery was not to be disclosed. Here Nada had made her little bower, and she sat down now upon a thick rug of balsam boughs, and held Peter out in front of her, squatted on his haunches. A new light had come into her eyes, and they were shining like stars. There was a flush in her cheeks, her red lips were parted, and Peter, looking up--and being just dog--could scarcely measure the beauty of her. But he knew that something had happened, and he tried hard to understand. "Peter, he was here ag'in today--Mister Roger--Mister Jolly Roger," she cried softly, the pink in her cheeks growing brighter. "And he told me I was pretty!" She drew a deep breath, and looked out over the rocks to the valley and the black forest beyond. And her fingers, under Peter's scrawny armpits, tightened until he grunted. "And he asked me if he could touch my hair--mind you he asked me that, Peter!--And when I said 'yes' he just put his hand on it, as if he was afraid, and he said it was beautiful, and that I must take wonderful care of it!" Peter saw a throbbing in her throat. "Peter--he said he didn't want to do anything wrong to me, that he'd cut off his hand first. He said that! And then he said--if I didn't think it was wrong--he'd like to kiss me--" She hugged Peter up close to her again. "And--I told him I guessed it wasn't wrong, because I liked him, and nobody else had ever kissed me, and--Peter--he didn't kiss me! And when he went away he looked so queer--so white-like--and somethin' inside me has been singing ever since. I don't know what it is, Peter. But it's there!" And then, after a moment. "Peter," she whispered, "I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!" The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frown between her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked over the valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger's cabin. "It's funny he don't want anybody to know he's there, ain't it--I mean--isn't it, Peter?" she mused. "He's livin' in the old shack Indian Tom died in last winter, and I've promised not to tell. He says it's a great secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at Sucker Creek know anything about it. I'd like to go over and clean up the shack for him. I sure would." Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of fire that came slowly into the blue of the girl's eyes. She was looking at her ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her faded dress, and her fingers clenched in her lap. "I'd do it--I'd go away--somewhere--and never come back, if it wasn't for her," she breathed. "She treats me like a witch most of the time, but Jed Hawkins made her that way. I kin remember--" Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so that her hair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came up the valley. "Some day, I'll kill 'im," she cried to the black forest across the plain. "Some day--I will!" CHAPTER II She followed Peter. For a long time the storm had been gathering in her brain, a storm which she had held back, smothered under her unhappiness, so that only Peter had seen the lightning-flashes of it. But today the betrayal had forced itself from her lips, and in a hard little voice she had told Jolly Roger--the stranger who had come into the black forest--how her mother and father had died of the same plague more than ten years ago, and how Jed Hawkins and his woman had promised to keep her for three silver fox skins which her father had caught before the sickness came. That much the woman had confided in her, for she was only six when it happened. And she had not dared to look at Jolly Roger when she told him of what had passed since then, so she saw little of the hardening in his face as he listened. But he had blown his nose--hard. It was a way with Jolly Roger, and she had not known him long enough to understand what it meant. And a little later he had asked her if he might touch her hair--and his big hand had lain for a moment on her head, as gently as a woman's. Like a warm glow in her heart still remained the touch of that hand. It had given her a new courage, and a new thrill, just as Peter's vanquishment of unknown monsters that day had done the same for him. Peter was no longer afraid, and the girl was no longer afraid, and together they went along the slope of the ridge, until they came to a dried-up coulee which was choked with a wild upheaval of rock. Here Peter suddenly stopped, with his nose to the ground, and then his legs stiffened, and for the first time the girl heard the babyish growl in his throat. For a moment she stood very still, and listened, and faintly there came to her a sound, as if someone was scraping rock against rock. The girl drew in a quick breath; she stood straighter, and Peter--looking up--saw her eyes flashing, and her lips apart. And then she bent down, and picked up a jagged stick. "We'll go up, Peter," she whispered. "It's one of his hiding-places!" There was a wonderful thrill in the knowledge that she was no longer afraid, and the same thrill was in Peter's swiftly beating little heart as he followed her. They went very quietly, the girl on tip-toe, and Peter making no sound with his soft footpads, so that Jed Hawkins was still on his knees, with his back toward them, when they came out into a square of pebbles and sand between two giant masses of rock. Yesterday, or the day before, both Peter and Nada would have slunk back, for Jed was at his devil's work, and only evil could come to the one who discovered him at it. He had scooped out a pile of sand from under the edge of the biggest rock, and was filling half a dozen grimy leather flasks from a jug which he had pulled from the hole. And then he paused to drink. They could hear the liquor gurgling down his throat. Nada tapped the end of her stick against the rock, and like a shot the man whirled about to face them. His face turned livid when he saw who it was, and he drew himself up until he stood on his feet, his two big fists clenched, his yellow teeth snarling at her. "You damned--spy!" he cried chokingly. "If you was a man--I'd kill you!" The girl did not shrink. Her face did not whiten. Two bright spots flamed in her cheeks, and Hawkins saw the triumph shining in her eyes. And there was a new thing in the odd twist of her red lips, as she said tauntingly. "If I was a man, Jed Hawkins--you'd run!" He took a step toward her. "You'd run," she repeated, meeting him squarely, and taking a tighter grip of her stick. "I ain't ever seen you hit anything but a woman, an' a girl, or some poor animal that didn't dare bite back. You're a coward, Jed Hawkins, a low-down, sneakin,' whiskey-sellin' coward--and you oughta die!" Even Peter sensed the cataclysmic change that had come in this moment between the two big rocks. It held something in the air, like the impending crash of dynamite, or the falling down of the world. He forgot himself, and looked up at his mistress, a wonderful, slim little thing standing there at last unafraid before the future--and in his dog heart and soul a part of the truth came to him, and he planted his big feet squarely in front of Jed Hawkins, and snarled at him as he had never snarled before in his life. And the bootlegger, for a moment, was stunned, For a while back he had humored the girl a little, to hold her in peace and without suspicion until Mooney was able to turn over her body-money. After that--after he had delivered her to the other's shack--it would all be up to Mooney, he figured. And this was what had come of his peace-loving efforts! She was taking advantage of him, defying him, spying upon him--the brat he had fed and brought up for ten years! Her beauty as she stood there did not hold him back. It was punishment she needed, a beating, a hair-pulling, until there was no breath left in her impudent body. He sprang forward, and Peter let out a wild yip as he saw Nada raise her stick. But she was a moment too slow. The man's hand caught it, and his right hand shot forward and buried itself in the thick, soft mass of her hair. It was then that something broke loose in Peter. For this day, this hour, this minute the gods of destiny had given him birth. All things in the world were blotted out for him except one--the six inches of naked shank between the bootlegger's trouser-leg and his shoe. He dove in. His white teeth, sharp as stiletto-points, sank into it. And a wild and terrible yell came from Jed Hawkins as he loosed the girl's hair. Peter heard the yell, and his teeth sank deeper in the flesh of the first thing he had ever hated. It was the girl, more than Peter, who realized the horror of what followed. The man bent down and his powerful fingers closed round Peter's scrawny neck, and Peter felt his wind suddenly shut off, and his mouth opened. Then Jed Hawkins drew back the arm that held him, as he would have drawn it back to fling a stone. With a scream the girl tore at him as his arm straightened out, and Peter went hurtling through the air. Her stick struck him fiercely across the face, and in that same moment there was a sickening, crushing thud as Peter's loosely-jointed little body struck against the face of the great rock. When Nada turned Peter was groveling in the sand, his hips and back broken down, but his bright eyes were on her, and without a whimper or a whine he was struggling to drag himself toward her. Only Jolly Roger could tell the story of how Peter's mother had died for a woman, and in this moment it must have been that her spirit entered into Peter's soul, for the pain of his terrible hurt was forgotten in his desire to drag himself back to the feet of the girl, and die facing her enemy--the man. He did not know that he was dragging his broken body only an inch at a time through the sand. But the girl saw the terrible truth, and with a cry of agony which all of Hawkin's torture could not have wrung from her she ran to him, and fell upon her knees, and gathered him tenderly in her arms. Then, in a flash, she was on her feet, facing Jed Hawkins like a little demon. "For that--I'll kill you!" she panted. "I will. I'll kill you!" The blow of her stick had half blinded the bootlegger's one eye, but he was coming toward her. Swift as a bird Nada turned and ran, and as the man's footsteps crunched in the gravel and rock behind her a wild fear possessed her--fear for Peter, and not for herself. Very soon Hawkins was left behind, cursing at the futility of the pursuit, and at the fate that had robbed him of an eye. Down the coulee and out into the green meadowland of the plain ran Nada, her hair streaming brightly in the sun, her arms clutching Peter to her breast. Peter was whimpering now, crying softly and piteously, just as once upon a time she had heard a baby cry--a little baby that was dying. And her soul cried out in agony, for she knew that Peter, too, was dying. And as she stumbled onward--on toward the black forest, she put her face down to Peter and sobbed over and over again his name. "Peter--Peter--Peter--" And Peter, joyous and grateful for her love and the sound of her voice even in these moments, thrust out his tongue and caressed her cheek, and the girl's breath came in a great sob as she staggered on. "It's all right now, Peter," she crooned. "It's all right, baby. He won't hurt you any more, an' we're goin' across the creek to Mister Roger's cabin, an' you'll be happy there. You'll be happy--" Her voice choked full, and her mother-heart seemed to break inside her, just as life had gone out of that other mother's heart when the baby died. For their grief, in God's reckoning of things, was the same; and little Peter, sensing the greatness of this thing that had made them one in flesh and blood, snuggled his wiry face closer in her neck, crying softly to her, and content to die there close to the warmth of the creature he loved. "Don't cry, baby," she soothed. "Don't cry, Peter, dear. It'll soon be all right--all right--" And the sob came again into her throat, and clung there like a choking fist, until they came to the edge of the big forest. She looked down, and saw that Peter's eyes were closed; and not until then did the miracle of understanding come upon her fully that there was no difference at all between the dying baby's face and dying Peter's, except that one had been white and soft, and Peter's was different--and covered with hair. "God'll take care o' you, Peter," she whispered. "He will--God, 'n' me, and Mister Roger--" She knew there was untruth in what she was saying for no one, not even God, would ever take care of Peter again--in life. His still little face and the terrible grief in her own heart told her that. For Peter's back was broken, and he was going--going even now--as she ran moaningly with him through the deep aisles of the forest. But before he died, before his heart stopped beating in her arms, she wanted to reach Jolly Roger's friendly cabin, in the big swamp beyond the creek. It was not that he could save Peter, but something told her that Jolly Roger's presence would make Peter's dying easier, both for Peter and for her, for in this first glad spring of her existence the stranger in the forest shack had brought sunshine and hope and new dreams into her life; and they had set him up, she and Peter, as they would have set up a god on a shrine. So she ran for the fording place on Sucker Creek, which was a good half mile above the shack in which the stranger was living. She was staggering, and short of wind, when she came to the ford, and when she saw the whirl and rush of water ahead of her she remembered what Jolly Roger had said about the flooding of the creek, and her eyes widened. Then she looked down at Peter, piteously limp and still in her arms, and she drew a quick breath and made up her mind. She knew that at this shallow place the water could not be more than up to her waist, even at the flood-tide. But it was running like a mill-race. She put her lips down to Peter's fuzzy little face, and held them there for a moment, and kissed him. "We'll make it, Peter," she whispered. "We ain't afraid, are we, baby? We'll make it--sure--sure--we'll make it--" She set out bravely, and the current swished about her ankles, to her knees, to her hips. And then, suddenly, unseen hands under the water seemed to rouse themselves, and she felt them pulling and tugging at her as the water deepened to her waist. In another moment she was fighting, fighting to hold her feet, struggling to keep the forces from driving her downstream. And then came the supreme moment, close to the shore for which she was striving. She felt herself giving away, and she cried out brokenly for Peter not to be afraid. And then something drove pitilessly against her body, and she flung out one arm, holding Peter close with the other--and caught hold of a bit of stub that protruded like a handle from the black and slippery log the flood-water had brought down upon her. "We're all right, Peter," she cried, even in that moment when she knew she had lost. "We're all ri--" And then suddenly the bright glory of her head went down, and with her went Peter, still held to her breast under the sweeping rush of the flood. Even then it was thought of Peter that filled her brain. Somehow she was not afraid. She was not terrified, as she had often been of the flood-rush of waters that smashed down the creeks in springtime. An inundating roar was over her, under her, and all about her; it beat in a hissing thunder against the drums of her ears, yet it did not frighten her as she had sometimes been frightened. Even in that black chaos which was swiftly suffocating the life from her, unspoken words of cheer for Peter formed in her heart, and she struggled to hold him to her, while with her other hand she fought to raise herself by the stub of the log to which she clung. For she was not thinking of him as Peter, the dog, but as something greater--something that had fought for her that day, and because of her had died. Suddenly she felt a force pulling her from above. It was the big log, turning again to that point of equilibrium which for a space her weight had destroyed. In the edge of a quieter pool where the water swirled but did not rush, her brown head appeared, and then her white face, and with a last mighty effort she thrust up Peter so that his dripping body was on the log. Sobbingly she filled her lungs with air. But the drench of water and her hair blinded her so that she could not see. And she found all at once that the strength had gone from her body. Vainly she tried to drag herself up beside Peter, and in the struggle she raised herself a little, so that a low-hanging branch of a tree swept her like a mighty arm from the log. With a cry she reached out for Peter. But he was gone, the log was gone, and she felt a vicious pulling at her hair, as Jed Hawkins himself had often pulled it, and for a few moments the current pounded against her body and the tree-limb swayed back and forth as it held her there by her hair. If there was pain from that tugging, Nada did not feel it. She could see now, and thirty yards below her was a wide, quiet pool into which the log was drifting. Peter was gone. And then, suddenly, her heart seemed to stop its beating, and her eyes widened, and in that moment of astounding miracle she forgot that she was hanging by her hair in the ugly lip of the flood, with slippery hands beating and pulling at her from below. For she saw Peter--Peter in the edge of the pool--making his way toward the shore! For a space she could not believe. It must be his dead body drifting. It could not be Peter--swimming! And yet--his head was above the water--he was moving shoreward--he was struggling-- Frantically she tore at the detaining clutch above her. Something gave way. She felt the sharp sting of it, and then she plunged into the current, and swept down with it, and in the edge of the pool struck out with all her last strength until her feet touched bottom, and she could stand. She wiped the water from her eyes, sobbing in her breathless fear--her mighty hope. Peter had reached the shore. He had dragged himself out, and had crumpled down in a broken heap--but he was facing her, his bright eyes wide open and questing for her. Slowly Nada went to him. Until now, when it was all over, she had not realized how helplessly weak she was. Something was turning round and round in her head, and she was so dizzy that the shore swam before her eyes, and it seemed quite right to her that Peter should be alive--and not dead. She was still in a foot of water when she fell on her knees and dragged herself the rest of the way to him, and gathered him in her arms again, close up against her wet, choking breast. And there the sun shone down upon them, without the shade of a twig overhead; and the water that a little while before had sung of death rippled with its old musical joy, and about them the birds sang, and very near to them a pair of mating red-squirrels chattered and played in a mountain-ash tree. And Nada's hair brightened in the sun, and began to ripple into curls at the end, and Peter's bristling whiskers grew dry--so that half an hour after she had dragged herself out of the water there was a new light in the girl's eyes, and a color in her cheeks that was like the first dawning of summer pink in the heart of a rose. "We're a'most dry enough to go to Mister Jolly Roger, Peter," she whispered, a little thrill in her voice. She stood up, and shook out her half dry hair, and then picked up Peter--and winced when he gave a little moan. "He'll fix you, Peter," she comforted. "An' it'll be so nice over here--with him." Her eyes were looking ahead, down through the glory of the sun-filled forest, and the song of birds and the beauty of the world filled her soul, and a new and wonderful freedom seemed to thrill in the touch of the soft earth under her feet. "Flowers," she cried softly. "Flowers, an' birds, an' the sun, Peter--" She paused a moment, as if listening to the throb of light and life about her. And then, "I guess we'll go to Mister Jolly Roger now," she said. She shook her hair again, so that it shone in a soft and rebellious glory about her, and the violet light grew a little darker in her eyes, and the color a bit deeper in her cheeks as she walked on into the forest over the faintly worn foot-trail that led to the old cabin where Jolly Roger was keeping himself away from the eyes of men. CHAPTER III From the little old cabin of dead Indian Tom, built in a grassy glade close to the shore of Sucker Creek, came the sound of a man's laughter. In this late afternoon the last flooding gold of the sun filled the open door of the poplar shack. The man's laughter, like the sun on the mottled tapestry of the poplar-wood, was a heart-lightening thing there on the edge of the great swamp that swept back for miles to the north and west. It was the sort of laughter one seldom hears from a man, not riotous of over-bold, but a big, clean laughter that came from the soul out. It was an infectious thing. It drove the gloom out of the blackest night. It dispelled fear, and if ever there were devils lurking in the edge of old Indian Tom's swamp they slunk away at the sound of it. And more than once, as those who lived in tepee and cabin and far-away shack could testify, that laugh had driven back death itself. In the shack, this last day of May afternoon, stood leaning over a rough table the man of the laugh--Roger McKay, known as Jolly Roger, outlaw extraordinary, and sought by the men of every Royal Northwest Mounted Police patrol north of the Height of Land. It was incongruous and inconceivable to think of him as an outlaw, as he stood there in the last glow of the sun--an outlaw with the weirdest and strangest record in all the northland hung up against his name. He was not tall, and neither was he short, and he was as plump as an apple and as rosy as its ripest side. There was something cherubic in the smoothness and the fullness of his face, the clear gray of his eyes, the fine-spun blond of his short-cropped hair, and the plumpness of his hands and half-bared arms. He was a priestly, well-fed looking man, was this Jolly Roger, rotund and convivial in all his proportions, and some in great error would have called him fat. But it was a strange kind of fatness, as many a man on the trail could swear to. And as for sin, or one sign of outlawry, it could not be found in any mark upon him--unless one closed his eyes to all else and guessed it by the belt and revolver holster which he wore about his rotund waist. In every other respect Jolly Roger appeared to be not only a harmless creature, but one especially designed by the Creator of things to spread cheer and good-will wherever he went. His age, if he had seen fit to disclose it, was thirty-four. There seemed, at first, to be nothing that even a contented man might laugh at in the cabin, and even less to bring merriment from one on whose head a price was set--unless it was the delicious aroma of a supper just about ready to be served. On a little stove in the farthest corner of the shack the breasts of two spruce partridges were turning golden brown in a skittle, and from the broken neck of a coffee pot a rich perfume was rising with the steam. Piping hot in the open oven half a dozen baked potatoes were waiting in their crisp brown jackets. From the table Jolly Roger turned, rubbing his hands and chuckling as he went for a third time to a low shelf built against the cabin wall. There he carefully raised a mass of old papers from a box, and at the movement there came a protesting squeak, and a little brown mouse popped up to the edge of it and peered at him with a pair of bright little questioning eyes. "You little devil!" he exulted. "You nervy little devil!" He raised the papers higher, and again looked upon his discovery of half an hour ago. In a soft nest lay four tiny mice, still naked and blind, and as he lowered the mass of papers the mother burrowed back to them, and he could hear her squeaking and chirruping to the little ones, as if she was trying to tell them not to be afraid of this man, for she knew him very well, and it wasn't in his mind to hurt them. And Jolly Roger, as he returned to the setting of his table, laughed again--and the laugh rolled out into the golden sunset, and from the top of a spruce at the edge of the creek a big blue-jay answered it in a riotous challenge. But at the bottom of that laugh, if one could have looked a bit deeper, was something more than the naked little mice in the nest of torn-up paper. Today happiness had strangely come this gay-hearted freebooter's way, and he might have reached out, and seized it, and have kept it for his own. But in the hour of his opportunity he had refused it--because he was an outlaw--because strong within him was a peculiar code of honor all his own. There was nothing of man-made religion in the soul of Roger McKay. Nature was his god; its manifestations, its life, and the air it gave him to breathe were the pages which made up the Book that guided him. And within the last hour, since the sun had begun to drop behind the tips of the tallest trees, these things had told him that he was a fool for turning away from the one great thing in all life--simply because his own humors of existence had made him an outcast and hunted by the laws of men. So the change had come, and for a space his soul was filled with the thrill of song and laughter. Half an hour ago he believed that he had definitely made up his mind. He had forced himself into forgetfulness of laws he had broken, and the scarlet-coated men who were ever on the watch for his trail. They would never seek him here, in the wilderness country close to the edge of civilization, and time, he had told himself in that moment of optimism, would blot out both his identity and his danger. Tomorrow he would go over to Cragg's Ridge again, and then-- His mind was crowded with a vision of blue eyes, of brown curls glowing in the pale sun, of a wistful, wide-eyed little face turned up to him, and red lips that said falteringly, "I don't think it's wrong for you to kiss me--if you want to, Mister Jolly Roger!" Boldly he had talked about it to the bright-eyed little mother-mouse who peered at him now and then over the edge of her box. "You're a little devil of iniquity yourself," he told her. "You're a regular Mrs. Captain Kidd, and you've eaten my cheese, and chawed my snowshoe laces, and robbed me of a sock to make your nest. I ought to catch you in a trap, or blow your head off. But I don't. I let you live--and have a fam'ly. And it's you who have given me the Big Idea, Mrs. Captain Kidd. You sure have! You've told me I've got a right to have a nest of my own, and I'm going to have it--an' in that nest is going to be the sweetest, prettiest little angel that God Almighty ever forgot to make into a flower! Yessir. And if the law comes--" And then, suddenly, the vision clouded, and there came into Jolly Roger's face the look of a man who knew--when he stood the truth out naked--that he was facing a world with his back to the wall. And now, as the sun went down, and his supper waited--that cloud which came to blot out his picture grew deeper and more sinister, and the chill of it entered his heart. He turned from his table to the open door, and his fingers drew themselves slowly into clenched fists, and he looked out quietly and steadily into his world. The darkening depths of the forest reached out before his eyes, mottled and painted in the fading glory of the sun. It was his world, his everything--father, mother, God. In it he was born, and in it he knew that some day he would die. He loved it, understood it, and night and day, in sunshine and storm, its mighty spirit was the spirit that kept him company. But it held no message for him now. And his ears scarcely heard the raucous scolding of the blue-jay in the fire-tipped crest of the tall black spruce. And then that something which was bigger than desire came up within him, and forced itself in words between his grimly set lips. "She's only a--a kid," he said, a fierce, low note of defiance in his voice. "And I--I'm a damned pirate, and there's jails waiting for me, and they'll get me sooner or later, sure as God lets me live!" He turned from the sun to his shadowing cabin, and for a moment a ghost of a smile played in his face as he heard the little mother-mouse rustling among her papers. "We can't do it," he said. "We simply can't do it, Mrs. Captain Kidd. She's had hell enough without me taking her into another. And it'd be that, sooner or later. It sure would, Mrs. Captain Kidd. But I'm glad, mighty glad, to think she'd let me kiss her--if I wanted to. Think of that, Mrs. Captain Kidd!--if I wanted to. Oh, Lord!" And the humor of it crept in alongside the tragedy in Jolly Roger's heart, and he chuckled as he bent over his partridge breasts. "If I wanted to," he repeated. "Why, if I had a life to give, I'd give it--to kiss her just once! But, as it happens, Mrs. Captain Kidd--" Jolly Roger's breath cut itself suddenly short, and for an instant he grew tense as he bent over the stove. His philosophy had taught him one thing above all others, that he was a survival of the fittest--only so long as he survived. And he was always guarding against the end. His brain was keen, his ears quick, and every fibre in him trained to its duty of watchfulness. And he knew, without turning his head, that someone was standing in the doorway behind him. There had come a faint noise, a shadowing of the fading sun-glow on the wall, the electrical disturbance of another presence, gazing at him quietly, without motion, and without sound. After that first telegraphic shock of warning he stabbed his fork into a partridge breast, flopped it over, chuckled loudly--and then with a lightning movement was facing the door, his forty-four Colt leveled waist-high at the intruder. Almost in the same movement his gun-arm dropped limply to his side. "Well, I'll be--" He stared. And the face in the doorway stared back at him. "Nada!" he gasped. "Good Lord, I thought--I thought--" He swallowed as he tried to lie. "I thought--it might be a bear!" He did not, at first, see that the slim, calico-dressed little figure of Jed Hawkins' foster-girl was almost dripping wet. Her blue eyes were shining at him, wide and startled. Her cheeks were flushed. A strange look had frozen on her parted red lips, and her hair was falling loose in a cloud of curling brown tresses about her shoulders. Jolly Roger, dreaming of her in his insane happiness of a few minutes ago, sensed nothing beyond the beauty and the unexpectedness of her in this first moment. Then--swiftly--he saw the other thing. The last glow of the sun glistened in her wet hair, her dress was sodden and clinging, and little pools of water were widening slowly about her ragged shoes. These things he might have expected, for she had to cross the creek. But it was the look in her eyes that startled him, as she stood there with Peter, the mongrel pup, clasped tightly in her arms. "Nada, what's happened?" he asked, laying his gun on the table. "You fell in the creek--" "It--it's Peter," she cried, with a sobbing break in her voice. "We come on Jed Hawkins when he was diggin' up some of his whiskey, and he was mad, and pulled my hair, and Peter bit him--and then he picked up Peter and threw him against a rock--and he's terribly hurt! Oh, Mister Jolly Roger--" She held out the pup to him, and Peter whimpered as Jolly Roger took his wiry little face between his hands, and then lifted him gently. The girl was sobbing, with passionate little catches in her breath, but there were no tears in her eyes as they turned for an instant from Peter to the gun on the table. "If I'd had that," she cried, "I'd hev killed him!" Jolly Roger's face was coldly gray as he knelt down on the floor and bent over Peter. "He--pulled your hair, you say?" "I--forgot," she whispered, close at his shoulder. "I wasn't goin' to tell you that. But it didn't hurt. It was Peter--" He felt the damp caress of her curls upon his neck as she bent over him. "Please tell me, Mister Jolly Roger--is he hurt--bad?" With the tenderness of a woman Jolly Roger worked his fingers over Peter's scrawny little body. And Peter, whimpering softly, felt the infinite consolation of their touch. He was no longer afraid of Jed Hawkins, or of pain, or of death. The soul of a dog is simple in its measurement of blessings, and to Peter it was a great happiness to lie here, broken and in pain, with the face of his beloved mistress over him and Jolly Roger's hands working to mend his hurt. He whimpered when Jolly Roger found the broken place, and he cried out like a little child when there came the sudden quick snapping of a bone--but even then he turned his head so that he could thrust out his hot tongue against the back of his man-friend's hand. And Jolly Roger, as he worked, was giving instructions to the girl, who was quick as a bird to bring him cloth which she tore into bandages, so that at the end of ten minutes Peter's right hind leg was trussed up so tightly that it was as stiff and as useless as a piece of wood. "His hip was dislocated and his leg-bone broken," said Jolly Roger when he had finished. "He is all right now, and inside of three weeks will be on his feet again." He lifted Peter gently, and made him a nest among the blankets in his bunk. And then, still with that strange, gray look in his face, he turned to Nada. She was standing partly facing the door, her eyes straight on him. And Jolly Roger saw in them that wonderful something which had given his storm-beaten soul a glimpse of paradise earlier that day. They were blue, so blue that he had never seen violets like them--and he knew that in her heart there was no guile behind which she could hide the secret they were betraying. A yearning such as had never before come into his life urged him to open his arms to her, and he knew that she would have come into them; but a still mightier will held them tense and throbbing at his side. Her cheeks were aflame as she looked at him, and he told himself that God could not have made a lovelier thing, as she stood there in her worn dress and her ragged shoes, with that light of glory in her face, and her damp hair waving and curling about her in the last light of the day. "I knew you'd fix him, Mister-Roger," she whispered, a great pride and faith and worship in the low thrill of her voice. "I knew it!" Something choked Jolly Roger, and he turned to the stove and began spearing the crisp brown potatoes on the end of a fork. And he said, with his back toward her, "You came just in time for supper, Nada. We'll eat--and then I'll go home with you, as far as the Ridge." Peter watched them. His pain was gone, and it was nice and comfortable in Jolly Roger's blanket, and with his whiskered face on his fore-paws his bright eyes followed every movement of these two who so completely made up his world. He heard that sweet little laugh which came only now and then from Nada's lips, when for a moment she was happy; he saw her shake out her hair in the glow of the lamp which Jolly Roger lighted, and he observed Jolly Roger standing at the stove--looking at her as she did it--a worship in his face which changed the instant her eyes turned toward him. In Peter's active little brain this gave birth to nothing of definite understanding, except that in it all he sensed happiness, for--somehow--there was always that feeling when they were with Jolly Roger, no matter whether the sun was shining or the day was dark and filled with gloom. Many times in his short life he had seen grief and tears in Nada's face, and had seen her cringe and hide herself at the vile cursing and witch-like voice of the man and woman back in the other cabin. But there was nothing like that in Jolly Roger's company. He had two eyes, and he was not always cursing, and he did not pull Nada's hair--and Peter loved him from the bottom of his soul. And he knew that his mistress loved him, for she had told him so, and there was always a different look in her eyes when she was with Jolly Roger, and it was only then that she laughed in that glad little way--as she was laughing now. Jolly Roger was seated at the table, and Nada stood behind him, her face flushed joyously at the wonderful privilege of pouring his coffee. And then she sat down, and Jolly Roger gave her the nicest of the partridge breasts, and tried hard to keep his eyes calm and quiet as he looked at the adorable sweetness of her across the table from him. To Nada there was nothing of shame in what lay behind the happiness in the violet radiance of her eyes. Jolly Roger had brought to her the only happiness that had ever come into her life. Next to her God, which Jed Hawkins and his witch-woman had not destroyed within her, she thought of this stranger who for three months had been hiding in Indian Tom's cabin. And, like Peter, she loved him. The innocence of it lay naked in her eyes. "Nada," said Jolly Roger. "You're seventeen--" "Goin' on eighteen," she corrected quickly. "I was seventeen two weeks ago!" The quick, undefined little note of eagerness in her voice made his heart thump. He nodded, and smiled. "Yes, going on eighteen," he said. "And pretty soon some young fellow will come along, and see you, and marry you--" "O-o-o-h-h-h!" It was a little, strange cry that came to her lips, and Jolly Roger saw a quick throbbing in her bare throat, and her eyes were so wide-open and startled as she looked at him that he felt, for a moment, as if the resolution in his soul was giving way. "Where are you goin', Mister Roger?" "Me? Oh, I'm not going anywhere--not for a time, at least. But you--you'll surely be going away with some one--some day." "I won't," she denied hotly. "I hate men! I hate all but you, Mister Jolly Roger. And if you go away--" "Yes, if I go away-- "I'll kill Jed Hawkins!" Involuntarily she reached out a slim hand to the big gun on the corner of the table. "I'll kill 'im, if you go away," she threatened again, "He's broken his wife, and crippled her, and if it wasn't for her I'd have gone long ago. But I've promised, and I'm goin' to stay--until something happens. And if you go--now--" At the choking throb in her throat and the sudden quiver that came to her lips, Jolly Roger jumped up for the coffee pot, though his cup was still half full. "I won't go, Nada," he cried, trying to laugh. "I promise--cross my heart and hope to die! I won't go--until you tell me I can." And then, feeling that something had almost gone wrong for a moment, Peter yipped from his nest in the bunk, and the gladness in Nada's eyes thanked Jolly Roger for his promise when he came back with the coffee pot. Standing behind her, he made pretense of refilling her cup, though she had scarcely touched it, and all the time his eyes were looking at her beautiful head, and he saw again the dampness in her hair. "What happened in the creek, Nada?" he asked. She told him, and at the mention of his name Peter drew his bristling little head erect, and waited expectantly. He could see Jolly Roger's face, now staring and a bit shocked, and then with a quick smile flashing over it; and when Nada had finished, Jolly Roger leaned a little toward her in the lampglow, and said, "You've got to promise me something, Nada. If Jed Hawkins ever hits you again, or pulls your hair, or even threatens to do it--will you tell me?" Nada hesitated. "If you don't--I'll take back my promise, and won't stay," he added. "Then--I'll promise," she said. "If he does it, I'll tell you. But I ain't--I mean I am not afraid, except for Peter. Jed Hawkins will sure kill him if I take him back, Mister Roger. Will you keep him here? And--o-o-o-h!--if I could only stay, too--" The words came from her in a frightened breath, and in an instant a flood of color rushed like fire into her cheeks. But Jolly Roger turned again to the stove, and made as if he had not seen the blush or heard her last words, so that the shame of her embarrassment was gone as quickly as it had come. "Yes, I'll keep Peter," he said over his shoulder. And in his heart another voice which she could not hear, was crying, "And I'd give my life if I could keep you!" Devouring his bits of partridge breast, Peter watched Jolly Roger and Nada out of the corner of his eye as they left the cabin half an hour later. It was dark when they went, and Jolly Roger closed only the mosquito-screen, leaving the door wide open, and Peter could hear their footsteps disappearing slowly into the deep gloom of the forest. It was a little before moonrise, and under the spruce and cedar and thick balsam the world was like a black pit. It was very still, and except for the soft tread of their own feet and the musical ripple of water in the creek there was scarcely a sound in this first hour of the night. In Jolly Roger there rose something of exultation, for Nada's warm little hand lay in his as he guided her through the darkness, and her fingers had clasped themselves tightly round his thumb. She was very close to him when he paused to make sure of the unseen trail, so close that her cheek rested against his arm, and--bending a little--his lips touched the soft ripples of her hair. But he could not see her in the gloom, and his heart pounded fiercely all the way to the ford. Then he laughed a strange little laugh that was not at all like Jolly Roger. "I'll try and not let you get wet again, Nada," he said. Her fingers still held to his thumb, as if she was afraid of losing him there in the blackness that lay about them like a great ink-blotch. And she crept closer to him, saying nothing, and all the power in his soul fought in Jolly Roger to keep him from putting his arms about her slim little body and crying out the worship that was in him. "I ain't--I mean I'm not afraid of gettin' wet," he heard her whisper then. "You're so big and strong, Mister Roger--" Gently he freed his thumb from her fingers, and picked her up, and held her high, so that she was against his breast and above the deepest of the water. Lightly at first Nada's arms lay about his shoulders, but as the flood began to rush higher and she felt him straining against it,--her arms tightened, until the clasp of them was warm and thrilling round Jolly Roger's neck. She gave a big gasp of relief when he stood her safely down upon her feet on the other side. And then again she reached out, and found his hand, and twined her fingers about his big thumb--and Jolly Roger went on with her over the plain toward Cragg's Ridge, dripping wet, just as the rim of the moon began to rise over the edge of the eastern forests. CHAPTER IV It seemed an interminable wait to Peter, back in the cabin. Jolly Roger had put out the light, and when the moon came up the glow of it did not come into the dark room where Peter lay, for the open door was to the west, and curtains were drawn closely at both windows. But through the door he could see the first mellowing of the night, and after that the swift coming of a soft, golden radiance which swallowed all darkness and filled his world with the ghostly shadows which seemed alive, yet never made a sound. It was a big, splendid moon this night, and Peter loved the moon, though he had seen it only a few times in his three months of life. It fascinated him more than the sun, for it was always light when the sun came, and he had never seen the sun eat up darkness, as the moon did. Its mystery awed him, but did not frighten. He could not quite understand the strange, still shadows which were always unreal when he nosed into them, and it puzzled him why the birds did not fly about in the moon glow, and sing as they did in the day-time. And something deep in him, many generations older than himself, made his blood run faster when this thing that ate up darkness came creeping through the sky, and he was filled with a yearning to adventure out into the strange glow of it, quietly and stealthily, watching and listening for things he had never seen or heard. In the gloom of the cabin his eyes remained fixed steadily upon the open door, and for a long time he listened only for the returning footsteps of Jolly Roger and Nada. Twice he made efforts to drag himself to the edge of the bunk, but the movement sent such a cutting pain through him that he did not make a third. And outside, after a time, he heard the Night People rousing themselves. They were very cautious, these Night People, for unlike the creatures of the dawn, waking to greet the sun with song and happiness, most of them were sharp-fanged and long-clawed-rovers and pirates of the great wilderness, ready to kill. And this, too, Peter sensed through the generations of northland dog that was in him. He heard a wolf howl, coming faintly through the night from miles away, and something told him it was not a dog. From nearer came the call of a moose, and that same sense told him he had heard a monster bear which his eyes had never seen. He did not know of the soft-footed, night-eyed creatures of prey--the fox, the lynx, the fisher-cat, the mink and the ermine, nor of the round-eyed, feathered murderers in the tree-tops--yet that same something told him they were out there among the shadows, under the luring glow of the moon. And a thing happened, all at once, to stab the truth home to him. A baby snowshoe rabbit, a third grown, hopped out into the open close to the cabin door, and as it nibbled at the green grass, a gray catapult of claw and feathers shot out of the air, and Peter heard the crying agony of the rabbit as the owl bore it off into the thick spruce tops. Even then--unafraid--Peter wanted to go out into the moon glow! At last, there was an end to his wait. He heard footsteps, and Jolly Roger came from out of the yellow moon-mist of the night and stopped in front of the door. There he stood, making no sound, and looking into the west, where the sky was ablaze with stars over the tree-tops. There was a glad little yip in Peter's throat, but he choked it back. Jolly Roger was strangely quiet, and Peter could not hear Nada, and as he sniffed, and gulped the lump in his throat, he seemed to catch the breath of something impending in the air. Then Jolly Roger came in, and sat down in darkness near the table, and for a long time Peter kept his eyes fixed on the shadowy blotch of him there in the gloom, and listened to his breathing, until he could stand it no longer, and whined. The sound stirred Jolly Roger. He got up, struck a match--and then blew the match out, and came and sat down beside Peter, and stroked him with his hand. "Peter," he said in a low voice, "I guess we've got a job on our hands. You began it today--and I've got to finish it. We're goin' to kill Jed Hawkins!" Peter snuggled closer. "Mebby I'm bad, and mebby the law ought to have me," Jolly Roger went on in the darkness, "but until tonight I never made up my mind to kill a man. I'm ready--now. If Jed Hawkins hurts her again we're goin' to kill him! Understand, _Pied-Bot_?" He got up, and Peter could hear him undressing. Then he made a nest for Peter on the floor, and stretched himself out in the bunk; and after that, for a long time, there seemed to be something heavier than the gloom of night in the cabin for Peter, and he listened and waited and prayed in his dog way for Nada's return, and wondered why it was that she left him so long. And the Night People held high carnival under the yellow moon, and there was flight and terror and slaughter in the glow of it--and Jolly Roger slept, and the wolf howled nearer, and the creek chortled its incessant song of running water, and in the end Peter's eyes closed, and a red-eyed ermine peeped over the sill into the man-and dog-scented stillness of the outlaw's cabin. For many days after this first night in the cabin, Peter did not see Nada. There was more rain, and the creek flooded higher, so that each time Jolly Roger went over to Cragg's Ridge he took his life in his hands in fording the stream. Peter saw no one but Jolly Roger, and at the end of the second week he was going about on his mended leg. But there would always be a limp in his gait, and always his right hind-foot would leave a peculiar mark in the trail. These two weeks of helplessness were an education in Peter's life and were destined to leave their mark upon him always. He learned to know Jolly Roger, not alone from seeing events, but through an intuitive instinct that grew swiftly somewhere in his shrewd head. This instinct, given widest scope in these weeks of helplessness, developed faster than any other in him, until in the end, he could judge Jolly Roger's humor by the sound of his approaching footsteps. Never was there a waking hour in which he was not fighting to comprehend the mystery of the change that had come over his life. He knew that Nada was gone, and each day that passed put her farther away from him, yet he also sensed the fact that Jolly Roger went to her, and when the outlaw returned to the cabin Peter was filled with a yearning hope that Nada was returning with him. But gradually Peter came to think less about Nada, and more about Jolly Roger, until at last his heart beat with a love for this man which was greater than all other things in his world. And in these days Jolly Roger found in Peter's comradeship and growing understanding a comforting outlet for the things which at times consumed him. Peter saw it all--hours when Jolly Roger's voice and laughter filled the cabin with cheer and happiness, and others when his face was set in grim lines, with that hard, far-away look in his eyes that Peter could never quite make out. It was at such times, when Jolly Roger held a choking grip on the love in his heart, that he told Peter things which he had never revealed to a human soul. In the dusk of one evening, as he sat wet with the fording of the creek, he said to Peter, "We ought to go, Peter. We ought to pack up--and go tonight. Because--sometimes I'm afraid of myself, _Pied-Bot_. I'd kill for her. I'd die for her. I'd give up the whole world, and live in a prison cell--if I could have her with me. And that's dangerous, Peter, because we can't have her. It's impossible, boy. She doesn't guess why I'm here. She doesn't know I've been outlawin' it for years, and that I'm hiding here because the Police would never think of looking for Jolly Roger McKay this close to civilization. If I told her, she would think I was worse than Jed Hawkins, and she wouldn't believe me if I told her I've outlawed with my wits instead of a gun, and that I've never criminally hurt a person in my life. No, she wouldn't believe that, Peter. And she--she cares for me, _Pied-Bot_. That's the hell of it! And she's got faith in me, and would go with me to the Missioner's tomorrow. I know it. I can see it, feel it, and I--" His fingers tightened in the loose hide of Peter's neck. "Peter," he whispered in the thickening darkness. "I believe there's a God, but He's a different sort of God than most people believe in. He lives in the trees out there, in the flowers, in the birds, the sky, in everything--and I hope that God will strike me dead if I do what isn't right with her, Peter! I do. I hope he strikes me dead!" And that night Peter knew that Jolly Roger tossed about restlessly in his bunk, and slept but little. But the next morning he was singing, and the warm sun flooding over the wilderness was not more cheerful than his voice as he cooked their breakfast. That, to Peter, was the most puzzling thing about this man. With gloom and oppression fastened upon him he would rise up suddenly, and start whistling or singing, and once he said to Peter, "I take my cue from the sun, Peter Clubfoot. It's always shining, no matter if the clouds are so thick underneath that we can't see it. A laugh never hurts a man, unless he's got a frozen lung." Jolly Roger did not cross the ford that day. CHAPTER V It was in the third week after his hurt that Peter saw Nada. By that time he could easily follow Jolly Roger as far as the fording-place, and there he would wait, sometimes hours at a stretch, while his comrade and master went over to Cragg's Ridge. But frequently Jolly Roger would not cross, but remained with Peter, and would lie on his back at the edge of a grassy knoll they had found, reading one of the little old-fashioned red books which Peter knew were very precious to him. Often he wondered what was between the faded red covers that was so interesting, and if he could have read he would have seen such titles as "Margaret of Anjou," "History of Napoleon," "History of Peter the Great," "Caesar," "Columbus the Discoverer," and so on through the twenty volumes which Jolly Roger had taken from a wilderness mail two years before, and which he now prized next to his life. This afternoon, as they lay in the sleepy quiet of June, Jolly Roger answered the questioning inquisitiveness in Peter's face and eyes. "You see, _Pied-Bot_, it was this way," he said, beginning a little apologetically. "I was dying for something to read, and I figgered there'd be something on the Mail--newspapers, you know. So I stopped it, and tied up the driver, and found these. And I swear I didn't take anything else--that time. There's twenty of them, and they weigh nine pounds, and in the last two years I've toted them five thousand miles. I wouldn't trade them for my weight in gold, and I'm pretty heavy. I named you after one of them--Peter. I pretty near called you Christopher Columbus. And some day we've got to take these books to the man they were going to, Peter. I've promised myself that. It seems sort of like stealing the soul out of someone. I just borrowed them, that's all. And I've kept the address of the owner, away up on the edge of the Barrens. Some day we're going to make a special trip to take the books home." Peter, all at once, had become interested in something else, and following the direction of his pointed nose Jolly Roger saw Nada standing quietly on the opposite side of the stream, looking at them. In a moment Peter knew her, and he was trembling in every muscle when Jolly Roger caught him up under his arm, and with a happy laugh plunged through the creek with him. For a good five minutes after that Jolly Roger stood aside watching Peter and Nada, and there was a glisten of dampness in his eyes when he saw the wet on Nada's cheeks, and the whimpering joy of Peter as he caressed her face and hands. Three weeks had been a long time to Peter, but he could see no difference in the little mistress he worshipped. There were still the radiant curls to hide his nose in, the gentle hands, the sweet voice, the warm thrill of her body as she hugged him in her arms. He did not know that she had new shoes and a new dress, and that some of the color had gone from her red lips, and that her cheeks were paler, and that she could no longer hide the old haunted look in her eyes. But Jolly Roger saw the look, and the growing pallor, and had noted them for two weeks past. And later that afternoon, when Nada returned to Cragg's Ridge, and he re-crossed the stream with Peter, there was a hard and terrible look in his eyes which Peter had caught there more and more frequently of late. And that evening, in the twilight of their cabin, Jolly Roger said, "It's coming soon, Peter. I'm expecting it. Something is happening which she won't tell us about. She is afraid for me. I know it. But I'm going to find out--soon. And then, _Pied-Bot_, I think we'll probably kill Jed Hawkins, and hit for the North." The gloom of foreboding that was in Jolly Roger's voice and words seemed to settle over the cabin for many days after that, and more than ever Peter sensed the thrill and warning of that mysterious something which was impending. He was developing swiftly, in flesh and bone and instinct, and there began to possess him now the beginning of that subtle caution and shrewdness which were to mean so much to him later on. An instinct greater than reason, if it was not reason itself, told him that his master was constantly watching for something which did not come. And that same instinct, or reason, impinged upon him the fact that it was a thing to be guarded against. He did not go blindly into the mystery of things now. He circumvented them, and came up from behind. Craft and cunning replaced mere curiosity and puppyish egoism. He was quick to learn, and Jolly Roger's word became his law, so that only once or twice was he told a thing, and it became a part of his understanding. While the keen, shrewd brain of his Airedale father developed inside Peter's head, the flesh and blood development of his big, gentle, soft-footed Mackenzie hound mother kept pace in his body. His legs and feet began to lose their grotesqueness. Flesh began to cover the knots in his tail. His head, bristling fiercely with wiry whiskers, seemed to pause for a space to give his lanky body a chance to catch up with it. And in spite of his big feet, so clumsy that a few weeks ago they had stumbled over everything in his way, he could now travel without making a sound. So it came to pass, after a time, that when Peter heard footsteps approaching the cabin he made no effort to reveal himself until he knew it was Jolly Roger who was coming. And this was strangely in spite of the fact that in the five weeks since Nada had brought him from Cragg's Ridge no one but Jolly Roger and Nada had set foot within sight of the shack. It was an inborn caution, growing stronger in him each day. There came one early evening when Peter made a discovery. He had returned with Jolly Roger from a fishing trip farther down the creek, and scarcely had he set nose to the little clearing about the cabin when he caught the presence of a strange scent. He investigated it swiftly, and found it all about the cabin, and very strong close up against the cabin door. There were no doubts in Peter's mind. A man had been there, and this man had gone around and around the cabin, and had opened the door, and had even gone inside, for Peter found the scent of him on the floor. He tried, in a way, to tell Jolly Roger. He bristled, and whined, and looked searchingly into the darkening edge of the forest. Jolly Roger quested with him for a few moments, and when he failed to find marks in the ground he began cleaning a fish for supper, and said. "Probably a wolverine, _Pied-Bot_. The rascal came to see what he could find while we were away." But Peter was not satisfied. He was restless all that night. Sounds which had been familiar now held a new significance for him. The next day he was filled with a quiet but brooding expectancy. He resented the intrusion of the strange footprints. It was, in his process of instinctive reasoning, an encroachment upon the property rights of his master, and he was--true to the law of his species--the guardian of those rights. The fourth evening after the stranger's visit to the cabin Jolly Roger was later than usual in returning from Cragg's Ridge. Peter had been on a hunting adventure of his own, and came to the cabin at sunset. But he never came out of cover now without standing quietly for a few moments, getting the wind, and listening. And tonight, poking his head between some balsams twenty yards from the shack, he was treated to a sudden thrill. The cabin door was open. And standing close to this door, looking quietly and cautiously about, stood a stranger. He was not like Jed Hawkins, was Peter's first impression. He was tall, with a wide-brimmed hat, and wore boots with striped trousers tucked into them, and on his coat were bits of metal which caught the last gleams of the sun. Peter knew nothing of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. But he sensed danger, and he remained very quiet, without moving a muscle of his head or body, while the stranger looked about, with a hand on his unbuttoned pistol holster. Not until he entered the cabin, and closed the door after him, did Peter move back into the deeper gloom of the forest. And then, silent as a fox, he skulked through cover to the foot-trail, and down the trail to the ford, across which Jolly Roger would come from Cragg's Ridge. There was still half an hour of daylight when Jolly Roger arrived. Peter did not, as usual, run to the edge of the bank to meet him. He remained sitting stolidly on his haunches, with his ears flattened, and in his whole attitude no sign of gladness at his master's coming. With every instinct of caution developed to the highest degree within him, Jolly Roger was lightning quick to observe the significance of small things. He spoke to Peter, caressed him with his hand, and moved on along the foot-trail toward the cabin. Peter fell in behind him moodily, and after a few moments stopped, and squatted on his haunches again. Jolly Roger was puzzled. "What is it, Peter?" he asked. "Are you afraid of that wolverine--" Peter whined softly; but even as he whined, his ears were flat, and his eyes filled with a red light as they glared down the trail beyond the outlaw. Jolly Roger turned and went on, until he disappeared around a twist in the path. There he stopped, and peered back. Peter was not following him, but still sat where he had left him. A quicker breath came to Jolly Roger's lips, and he went back to Peter. For fully a minute he stood beside him, watching and listening, and not once did the reddish glare in Peter's eyes leave the direction of the cabin. Jolly Roger's eyes had grown very bright, and suddenly he dropped on his knees beside Peter, and spoke softly, close up to his flattened ear. "You say it isn't a wolverine, Peter? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" Peter's teeth clicked, and he whimpered, never taking his eyes from ahead. There was a cold light in Jolly Roger's eyes as he rose to his feet, and he turned swiftly and quietly into the edge of the forest, and in the gloom that was gathering there his hand carried the big automatic. Peter followed him now, and Jolly Roger swung in a wide circle, so that they came up on that forest side of the cabin where there was no window. And here Jolly Roger knelt down beside Peter again, and whispered to him. "You stay here, _Pied-Bot_. Understand? You stay here." He pressed him down gently with his hand, so that Peter understood. Then, slinking low, and swift as a cat, Jolly Roger ran to the end of the cabin where there was no window. With his head close to the ground he peered out cautiously at the door. It was closed. Then he looked at the windows. To the west the curtains were up, as he had left them. And to the east-- A whimsical smile played at the corners of his mouth. Those curtains he had kept tightly drawn. One of them was down now. But the other was raised two inches, so that one hidden within the cabin could watch the approach from the trail! He drew back, and under his breath he chuckled. He recognized the sheer nerve of the thing, the clever handiwork of it. Someone was inside the cabin, and he was ready to stake his life it was Cassidy, the Irish bloodhound of "M" Division. If anyone ferreted him out way down here on the edge of civilization he had gambled with himself that it would be Cassidy. And Cassidy had come--Cassidy, who had hung like a wolf to his trails for three years, who had chased him across the Barren Lands, who had followed him up the Mackenzie, and back again--who had fought with him, and starved with him, and froze with him, yet had never brought him to prison. Deep down in his heart Jolly Roger loved Cassidy. They had played, and were still playing, a thrilling game, and to win that game had become the life's ambition of each. And now Cassidy was in there, confident that at last he had his man, and waiting for him to step into the trap. To Jolly Roger, in the face of its possible tragedy, there was a deep-seated humor in the situation. Three times in the last year and a half had he turned the tables on Cassidy, leaving him floundering in the cleverly woven webs which the man-hunter had placed for his victim. This was the fourth time. And Cassidy would be tremendously upset! Praying that Peter would remain quiet, Jolly Roger took off his shoes. After that he made no more sound than a ferret as he crept to the door. An inch at a time he raised himself, until he was standing up, with his ear half an inch from the crack that ran lengthwise of the frame. Holding his breath, he listened. For an interminable time, it seemed to him, there was no sound from within. He guessed what Cassidy was doing--peering through that slit of window under the curtain. But he was not absolutely sure. And he knew the necessity of making no error, with Cassidy in there, gripping the butt of his gun. Suddenly he heard a movement. A man's steps, subdued and yet distinct, were moving from the window toward the door. Half way they paused, and turned to one of the windows looking westward. But it was evident the watcher was not expecting his game from that direction, for after a moment's silence he returned to the window through which he could see the trail. This time Jolly Roger was sure. Cassidy was again peering through the window, with his back toward him, and every muscle in the forest rover's body gathered for instant action. In another moment he had flung open the door, and the watcher at the window whirled about to find himself looking straight into the muzzle of Jolly Roger's gun. For several minutes after that last swift movement of Jolly Roger's, Peter lay where his master had left him, his eyes fairly popping from his head in his eagerness to see what was happening. He heard voices, and then the wild thrill of Jolly Roger's laughter, and restraining himself no longer he trotted cautiously to the open door of the cabin. In a chair sat the stranger with the broad-brimmed hat and high boots, with his hands securely tied behind him. And Jolly Roger was hustling about, filling a shoulder-pack in the last light of the day. "Cassidy, I oughta kill you," Jolly Roger was saying as he worked, an exultant chuckle in his voice. "You don't give me any peace. No matter where I go you're sure to come, and I can't remember that I ever invited you. I oughta put you out of the way, and plant flowers over you, now that I've got the chance. But I'm too chicken-hearted. Besides, I like you. By the time you get tired of chasing me you should be a pretty good man-hunter. But just now you lack finesse, Cassidy--you lack finesse." And Jolly Roger's chuckle broke into another laugh. Cassidy heaved out a grunt. "It's luck--just damned luck!" he growled. "If it is, I hope it keeps up," said Jolly Roger. "Now, look here, Cassidy! Let's make a man's bet of it. If you don't get me next time--if you fail, and I turn the trick on you once more--will you quit?" Cassidy's eyes gleamed in the thickening dusk. "If I don't get you next time--I'll hand in my resignation!" The laughter went out of Jolly Roger's voice. "I believe you, Cassidy. You've played square--always. And now--if I free your hands--will you swear to give me a two hours' start before you leave this cabin?" "I'll give you the start," said Cassidy. His lean face was growing indistinct in the gloom. Jolly Roger came up behind him. There was the slash of a knife. Then he picked up his shoulder-pack. At the door he paused. "Look at your watch when I'm gone, Cassidy, and be sure you make it a full two hours." "I'll make it two hours and five minutes," said Cassidy. "Hittin' north are you, Jolly Roger?" "I'm hittin'--bushward," replied the outlaw. "I'm going where it's plenty thick and hard to travel, Cassidy. Goodby--" He was gone. He hit straight north, making noise as he went, but once in the timber he swung southward, and plunged through the creek with Peter under his arm. Not until they had traveled a good half mile over the plain did Jolly Roger speak. Then he said, speaking directly at Peter, "Cassidy thinks I'll sure hit for the North country again, _Pied-Bot_. But we're foolin' him. I've sort of planned on something like this happening, and right now we're hittin' for the tail-end of Cragg's Ridge where there's a mess of rock that the devil himself can hardly get into. We've got to do it, boy. We can't leave the girl--just now. We can't leave--her--" Jolly Roger's voice choked. Then he paused for a moment, and bent over to put his hand on Peter. "If it hadn't been for you, Peter--Cassidy would have got me--sure. And I'm wondering, Peter--I'm wondering--why did God forget to give a dog speech?" Peter whined in answer, and through the darkness of the night they went on together. CHAPTER VI A frosty mist dulled the light of the stars, but this cleared away as Jolly Roger and Peter crossed the plain between the creek and Cragg's Ridge. They did not hurry, for McKay had faith in Cassidy's word. He knew the red-headed man-hunter would not break his promise--he would wait the full two hours in Indian Tom's cabin, and another five minutes after that. In Jolly Roger, as the minutes passed, exultation at his achievement died away, and there filled him again the old loneliness--the loneliness which called out against the fate which had made of Cassidy an enemy instead of a friend. And yet--what an enemy! He reached down, and touched Peter's bushy head with his hand. "Why didn't the Law give another man the assignment to run us down," he protested. "Someone we could have hated, and who would have hated us! Why did they send Cassidy--the fairest and squarest man that ever wore red? We can't do him a dirty turn--we can't hurt him, _Pied-Bot_, even at the worst. And if ever he takes us in to Headquarters, and looks at us through the bars, I feel it's going to be like a knife in his heart. But he'll do it, Peter, if he can. It's his job. And he's honest. We've got to say that of Cassidy." The Ridge loomed up at the edge of the level plain, and for a few moments Jolly Roger paused, while he looked off through the eastward gloom. A mile in that direction, beyond the cleft that ran like a great furrow through the Ridge, was Jed Hawkins' cabin, still and dark under the faint glow of the stars. And in that cabin was Nada. He felt that she was sitting at her little window, looking out into the night, thinking of him--and a great desire gripped at his heart, tugging him in its direction. But he turned toward the west. "We can't let her know what has happened, boy," he said, feeling the urge of caution. "For a little while we must let her think we have left the country. If Cassidy sees her, and talks with her, something in those blue-flower eyes of hers might give us away if she knew we were hiding up among the rocks of the Stew-Kettle. But I'm hopin' God A'mighty won't let her see Cassidy. And I'm thinking He won't, _Pied-Bot_, because I've a pretty good hunch He wants us to settle with Jed Hawkins before we go." It was a habit of his years of aloneness, this talking to a creature that could make no answer. But even in the darkness he sensed the understanding of Peter. Rocks grew thicker and heavier under their feet, and they went more slowly, and occasionally stumbled in the gloom. But, after a fashion, they knew their way even in darkness. More than once Peter had wondered why his master had so carefully explored this useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg's Ridge. They had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-blasted sterility. It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of an evil thing. And now darkness added to its mystery and its unfriendliness as Peter nosed close at his master's heels. Up and up they picked their way, over and between ragged upheavals of rock, twisting into this broken path and that, feeling their way, partly sensing it, and always ascending toward the stars. Roger McKay did not speak again to Peter. Each time he came out where the sky was clear he looked toward the solitary dark pinnacle, far up and ahead, strangely resembling a giant tombstone in the star-glow, that was their guide. And after many minutes of strange climbing, in which it seemed to Jolly Roger the nail-heads in the soles of his boots made weirdly loud noises on the rocks, they came near to the top. There they stopped, and in a deeply shadowed place where there was a carpet of soft sand, with walls of rock close on either side, Jolly Roger spread out his blankets. Then he went out from the black shadow, so that a million stars seemed not far away over their heads. Here he sat down, and began to smoke, thinking of what tomorrow would hold for him, and of the many days destined to follow that tomorrow. Nowhere in the world was there to be--for him--the peace of an absolute certainty. Not until he felt the cold steel of iron bars with his two hands, and the fatal game had been played to the end. There was no corrosive bitterness of the vengeful in Jolly Roger's heart. For that reason even his enemies, the Police, had fallen into the habit of using the nickname which the wilderness people had given him. He did not hate these police. Curiously, he loved them. Their type was to him the living flesh and blood of the finest manhood since the Crusaders. And he did not hate the law. At times the Law, as personified in all of its unswerving majesty, amused him. It was so terribly serious over such trivial things--like himself, for instance. It could not seem to sleep or rest until a man was hanged, or snugly put behind hard steel, no matter how well that man loved his human-kind--and the world. And Jolly Roger loved both. In his heart he believed he had not committed a crime by achieving justice where otherwise there would have been no justice. Yet outwardly he cursed himself for a lawbreaker. And he loved life. He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight. He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed--he loved the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he loved all the world. But most of all, more than his own life or all that a thousand lives might hold for him, he loved the violet-eyed girl who had come into his life from the desolation and unhappiness of Jed Hawkins' cabin. Forgetting the law, forgetting all but her, he went at last into the dungeon-like gloom between the rocks, and after Peter had wallowed himself a bed in the carpet of sand they fell asleep. They awoke with the dawn. But for three days thereafter they went forth only at night, and for three days did not show themselves above the barricade of rocks. The Stew-Kettle was what Jolly Roger had called it, and when the sun was straight above, or descending with the last half of the day, the name fitted. It was a hot place, so hot that at a distance its piled-up masses of white rock seemed to simmer and broil in the blazing heat of the July sun. Neither man nor beast would look into the heart of it, Jolly Roger had assured Peter, unless the one was half-witted and the other a fool. Looking at it from the meadowy green plain that lay between the Ridge and the forest their temporary retreat was anything but a temptation to the eye. Something had happened there a few thousand centuries before, and in a moment of evident spleen and vexation the earth had vomited up that pile of rock debris, and Jolly Roger good humoredly told himself and Peter that it was an act of Providence especially intended for them, though planned and erupted some years before they were born. The third afternoon of their hiding, Jolly Roger decided upon action. This afternoon all of the caloric guns of an unclouded sun had seemed to concentrate themselves on the gigantic rock-pile. Though it was now almost sunset, a swirling and dizzying incandescence still hovered about it. The huge masses of stone were like baked things to the touch of hand and foot, and one breathed a smoldering air in between their gray and white walls. Thus forbidding looked the Stew-Kettle, when viewed from the plain. But from the top-most crag of the mass, which rose a hundred feet high at the end of the Ridge, one might find his reward for a blistering climb. On all sides, a paradise of green and yellow and gold, stretched the vast wilderness, studded with shimmering lakes that gleamed here and there from out of their rich dark frames of spruce and cedar and balsam. And half way between the edge of the plain and this highest pinnacle of rock, utterly hidden from the eyes of both man and beast, nestled the hiding place which Jolly Roger and Peter had found. It was a cool and cavernous spot, in spite of the Sahara-like heat of the great pile. In the very heart of it two gigantic masses of rock had put their shoulders together, like Gog and Magog, so that under their ten thousand tons of weight was a crypt-like tunnel as high as a man's head, into which the light and the glare of the sun never came. Peter, now that he had grown accustomed to the deadness of it, liked this change from Indian Tom's cabin. He liked his wallow of soft sand during the day, and he liked still more the aloneness and the aloofness of their ramparted stronghold when the cool of evening came. He did not, of course, understand just what their escape from Cassidy had meant, but instinct was shrewdly at work within him, and no wolf could have guarded the place more carefully than he. And he had all creation in mind when he guarded the rock-pile. All but Nada. Many times he whimpered for her, just as the great call for her was in Jolly Roger's own heart. And on this third afternoon, as the hot July sun dipped half way to the western forests, both Peter and his master were looking yearningly, and with the same thought, toward the east, where over the back-bone of Cragg's Ridge Jed Hawkins' cabin lay. "We'll let her know tonight," Roger McKay said at last, with something very slow and deliberate in his voice. "We'll take the chance--and let her know." Peter's bristling Airedale whiskers, standing out like a bunch of broom splints about his face, quivered sympathetically, and he thumped his tail in the sand. He was an artful hypocrite, was Peter, because he always looked as if he understood, whether he did or not. And Jolly Roger, staring at the gray rock-backs outside their tunnel door, went on. "We must play square with her, _Pied-Bot_, and it's a crime worse than murder not to let her know the truth. If she wasn't a kid, Peter! But she's that--just a kid--the sweetest, purest thing God A'mighty ever made, and it isn't fair to live this lie any longer, no matter how we love her. And we do love her, Peter." Peter lay very quiet, watching the strange gray look that had settled in Jolly Roger's face. "I've got to tell her that I'm a damned highwayman," he added, in a moment. "And she won't understand, Peter. She can't. But I'm going to do it. I'm going to tell her--today. And then--I think we'll be hittin' north pretty soon, _Pied-Bot_. If it wasn't for Jed Hawkins--" He rose up out of the sand, his hands clenched. "We ought to kill Jed Hawkins before we go. It would be safer for her," he finished. He went out, forgetting Peter, and climbed a rock-splintered path until he stood on the knob of a mighty boulder, looking off into the northern wilderness. Off there, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand miles--was home. It was ALL his home, from Hudson's Bay to the Rockies, from the Height of Land to the Arctic plains, and in it he had lived the thrill of life according to his own peculiar code. He knew that he had loved life as few had ever loved it. He had worshipped the sun and the moon and the stars. The world had been a glorious place in which to live, in spite of its ceaseless peril for him. But there was nothing of cheer left in his heart now as he stood in the blaze of the setting sun. Paradise had come to him for a little while, and because of it he had lived a lie. He had not told Jed Hawkins' foster-girl that he was an outlaw, and that he had come to the edge of civilization because he thought it was the last place the Royal Mounted would look for him. When he went to her this evening it would probably be for the last time. He would tell her the truth. He would tell her the police were after him from one end of the Canadian northland to the other. And that same night, with Peter, he would hit the trail for the Barren Lands, a thousand miles away. He was sure of himself now--sure--even as the dark wall of the forest across the plain faded out, and gave place to a pale, girlish face with eyes blue as flowers, and brown curls filled with the lustre of the sun--a face that had taken the place of mother, sister and God deep down in his soul. Yes, he was sure of himself--even with that face rising lo give battle to his last great test of honor. He was an outlaw, and the police wanted him, but-- Peter was troubled by the grimness that settled in his master's face. They waited for dusk, and when deep shadows had gathered in the valley McKay led the way out of the rock-pile. An hour later they came cautiously through the darkness that lay between the broken shoulders of Cragg's Ridge. There was a light in the cabin, but Nada's window was dark. Peter crouched down under the warning pressure of McKay's hand. "I'll go on alone," he said. "You stay here." It seemed a long time that he waited in the darkness. He could not hear the low _tap, tap, tap_ of his master's fingers against the glass of Nada's darkened window. And Jolly Roger, in response to that signal-tapping, heard nothing from within, except a monotone of voice that came from the outer room. For half an hour he waited, repeating the signals at intervals. At last a door opened, and Nada stood silhouetted against the light of the room beyond. McKay tapped again, very lightly, and the door closed quickly behind the girl. In a moment she was at the window, which was raised a little from the bottom. "Mister--Roger--" she whispered. "Is it--_you_?" "Yes," he said, finding a little hand in the darkness. "It's me." The hand was cold, and its fingers clung tightly to his, as if the girl was frightened. Peter, restless with waiting, had come up quietly in the dark, and he heard the low, trembling whisper of Nada's voice at the window. There was something in the note of it, and in the caution of Jolly Roger's reply, that held him stiff and attentive, his ears wide-open for approaching sound. For several minutes he stood thus, and then the whispering voices at the window ceased and he heard his master retreating very quietly through the night. When Jolly Roger spoke to him, back under the broken shoulder of the ridge, he did not know that Peter had stood near the window. McKay stood looking back at the pale glow of light in the cabin. "Something happened there tonight--something she wouldn't tell me about," he said, speaking half to Peter and half to himself. "I could _feel_ it. I wish I could have seen her face." He set out over the plain; and then, as if remembering that he must explain the matter to Peter, he said: "She can't get out tonight, _Pied-Bot_, but she'll come to us in the jackpines tomorrow afternoon. We'll have to wait." He tried to say the thing cheerfully, but between this night and tomorrow afternoon seemed an interminable time, now that he was determined to make a clean breast of his affairs to Nada, and leave the country. Most of that night he walked in the coolness of the moonlit plain, and for a long time he sat amid the flower-scented shadows of the trysting-place in the heart of the jackpine clump, where Nada had a hidden place all her own. It was here that Peter discovered something which Jolly Roger could not see in the deep shadows, a bundle warm and soft and sweet with the presence of Nada herself. It was hidden under a clump of young banksians, very carefully hidden, and tucked about with grass and evergreen boughs. When McKay left the jackpines he wondered why it was that Peter showed no inclination to follow him until he was urged. They did not return to the Stew-Kettle until dawn, and most of that day Jolly Roger spent in sleep between the two big rocks. It was late afternoon when they made their last meal. In this farewell hour McKay climbed up close to the pinnacle, where he smoked his pipe and measured the shadows of the declining sun until it was time to leave for the jackpines. Retracing his steps to the hiding place under Gog and Magog he looked for Peter. But Peter's sand-wallow was empty, and Peter was gone. CHAPTER VII Peter was on his way to the mystery of the bundle he had found in the jackpines. At the foot of the ridge, where the green plain fought with the blighting edge of the Stew-Kettle, he stood for many minutes before he started east-ward. With keen eyes gleaming behind his mop of scraggly face-bristles he critically surveyed both land and air, and then, with the slight limp in his gait which would always remain as a mark of Jed Hawkins' brutality, he trotted deliberately in the direction of the whiskey-runner's cabin home. A bitter memory of Jed Hawkins flattened his ears when he came near the rock-cluttered coulee in which he had fought for Nada, and had suffered his broken bones, and today--even as he obeyed the instinctive caution to stop and listen--Jed Hawkins himself came out of the mouth of the coulee, bearing a brown jug in one hand and a thick cudgel in the other. His one wicked eye gleamed in the waning sun. His lean and scraggly face was alight with a sinister exultation as he paused for a moment close to the rock behind which Peter was hidden, and Peter's fangs lay bare and his body trembled while the man stood there. Then he moved on, and Peter did not stir, but waited until the jug and the cudgel and the man were out of sight. Low under his breath he was snarling when he went on. Hatred, for a moment, had flamed hot in his soul. Then he turned, and buried himself in a clump of balsams that reached out into the plain, and a few moments later came to the edge of a tiny meadow in the heart of them, where a warbler was bursting its throat in evening-song. Around the edge of the meadow Peter circled, his feet deep in buttercups and red fire-flowers, and crushing softly ripe strawberries that grew in scarlet profusion in the open, until he came to a screen of young jackpines, and through these he quietly and apologetically nosed his way. Then he stood wagging his tail, with Nada sitting on the grass half a dozen steps from him, wiping the strawberry stain from her finger-tips. And the stain was on her red lips, and a bit of it against the flush of her cheek, as she gave a little cry of gladness and greeting to Peter. Her eyes flashed beyond him, and every drop of blood in her slim, beautiful little body seemed to be throbbing with an excitement new to Peter as she looked for Jolly Roger. Peter went to her, and dropped down, with his head in her lap, and looking up through his bushy eye-brows he saw a livid bruise just under the ripples of her brown hair, where there had been no mark yesterday, or the day before. Nada's hands drew him closer, until he was half in her lap, and she bent her face down to him, so that her thick, shining hair fell all about him. Peter loved her hair, almost as much as Jolly Roger loved it, and he closed his eyes and drew a deep breath of content as the smothering sweetness of it shut out the sunlight from him. "Peter," she whispered, "I'm almost scared to have him come today. I've promised him. You remember--I promised to tell him if Jed Hawkins struck me again. And he has! He made that mark, and if Jolly Roger knows it he'll kill him. I've got to lie--lie--" Peter wriggled, to show his interest, and his hard tail thumped the ground. For a space Nada said nothing more, and he could hear and feel the beating of her heart close down against him. Then she raised her head, and looked in the direction from which she would first hear Jolly Roger as he came through the young jackpines. Peter, with his eyes half closed in a vast contentment, did not see or sense the change in her today--that her blue eyes were brighter, her cheeks flushed, and in her body a strange and subdued throbbing that had never been there before. Not even to Peter did she whisper her secret, but waited and listened for Jolly Roger, and when at last she heard him and he came through the screen of jackpines, the color in her cheeks was like the stain of strawberries crimsoning her finger-tips. In an instant, looking down upon her, Jolly Roger saw what Peter had not discovered, and he stopped in his tracks, his heart thumping like a hammer inside him. Never, even in his dreams, had the girl looked lovelier than she did now, and never had her eyes met his eyes as they met them today, and never had her red lips said as much to him, without uttering a word. In the same instant he saw the livid bruise, half hidden under her hair--and then he saw a big bundle behind her, partly screened by a dwarfed banksian. After that his eyes went back to the bruise. "Jed Hawkins didn't do it," said Nada, knowing what was in his mind. "It was Jed's woman. And you can't kill her!" she added a little defiantly. Jolly Roger caught the choking throb in her throat, and he knew she was lying. But Nada thrust Peter from her lap, and stood up, and she seemed taller and more like a woman than ever before in her life as she faced Jolly Roger there in the tiny open, with violets and buttercups and red strawberries in the soft grass under their feet. And behind them, and very near, a rival to the warbler in the meadow began singing. But Nada did not hear. The color had rushed hot into her cheeks at first, but now it was fading out as swiftly, and her hands trembled, clasped in front of her. But the blue in her eyes was as steady as the blue in the sky as she looked at Jolly Roger. "I'm not going back to Jed Hawkins' any more, Mister Roger," she said. A soft breath of wind lifted the tress of hair from her forehead, revealing more clearly the mark of Jed Hawkins' brutality, and Nada saw gathering in Jolly Roger's eyes that cold, steely glitter which always frightened her when it came. His hands clenched, and when she reached out and touched his arm the flesh of it was as hard as white birch. Even in her fear there was glory in the thought that at a word from her he would kill the man who had struck her. Her fingers crept up his arm, timidly, and the blue in her eyes darkened, and there was a pleading tremble in the curve of her lips as she looked straight at him. "I'm not going back," she repeated. Jolly Roger, looking beyond her, saw the significance of the bundle. His eyes met her steady gaze again, and his heart seemed to swell in his chest, and choke him. He tried to let his tense muscles relax. He tried to smile. He struggled to bring up the courage which would make possible the confession he had to make. And Peter, sitting on his haunches in a patch of violets, watched them both, wondering what was going to happen between these two. "Where are you going?" Jolly Roger asked. Nada's fingers had crept almost to his shoulder. They were twisting at his flannel shirt nervously, but not for the tenth part of a second did she drop her eyes, and that strange, wonderful something which he saw looking at him so clearly out of her soul brought the truth to Jolly Roger, before she had spoken. "I'm goin' with you and Peter." The low cry that came from Jolly Roger was almost a sob as he stepped back from her. He looked away from her--at Peter. But her pale face, her parted red lips, her wide-open, wonderful eyes, her radiant hair stirred by the wind--came between them. She was no longer the little girl--"past seventeen, goin' on eighteen." To Jolly Roger she was all that the world held of glorious womanhood. "But--you can't!" he cried desperately. "I've come to tell you things, Nada. I'm not fit. I'm not what you think I am. I've been livin' a lie--" [Illustration: "I've come to tell you things, Nada. I've been living a lie."] He hesitated, and then lashed himself on to the truth. "You'll hate me when I tell you, Nada. You think Jed Hawkins is bad. But the law thinks I'm worse. The police want me. They've wanted me for years. That's why I came down here, and hid over in Indian Tom's cabin--near where I first met you. I thought they wouldn't find me away down here, but they did. That's why Peter and I moved over to the big rock-pile at the end of the Ridge. I'm--an outlaw. I've done a lot of bad things--in the eyes of the law, and I'll probably die with a bullet in me, or in jail. I'm sorry, but that don't help. I'd give my life to be able to tell you what's in my heart. But I can't. It wouldn't be square." He wondered why no change came into the steady blue of her eyes as he went on with the truth. The pallor was gone from her cheeks. Her lips seemed redder, and what he was saying did not seem to startle her, or frighten her. "Don't you understand, Nada?" he cried. "I'm bad. The police want me. I'm a fugitive--always running away, always hiding--an outlaw--" She nodded. "I know it, Mister Roger," she said quietly. "I heard you tell Peter that a long time ago. And Mister Cassidy was at our place the day after you and Peter ran away from Indian Tom's cabin, and I showed him the way to Father John's, and he told me a lot about you, and he told Father John a lot more, and it made me awful proud of you, Mister Roger--and I want to go with you and Peter!" "Proud!" gasped Jolly Roger. "Proud, of ME--" She nodded again. "Mister Cassidy--the policeman--he used just the word you used a minute ago. He said you was square, even when you robbed other people. He said he had to get you in jail if he could, but he hoped he never would. He said he'd like to have a man like you for a brother. And Peter loves you. And I--" The color came into her white face. "I'm goin' with you and Peter," she finished. Something came to relieve the tenseness of the moment for Jolly Roger. Peter, nosing in a thick patch of bunch-grass, put out a huge snowshoe rabbit, and the two crashed in a startling avalanche through the young jackpines, Peter's still puppyish voice yelling in a high staccato as he pursued. Jolly Roger turned from Nada, and stared where they had gone. But he was seeing nothing. He knew the hour of his mightiest fight had come. In the reckless years of his adventuring he had more than once faced death. He had starved. He had frozen. He had run the deadliest gantlets of the elements, of beast, and of man. Yet was the strife in him now the greatest of all his life. His heart thumped. His brain was swirling in a vague and chaotic struggle for the mastery of things, and as he fought with himself--his unseeing eyes fixed on the spot where Peter and the snowshoe rabbit had disappeared--he heard Nada's voice behind him, saying again that she was going with him and Peter. In those seconds he felt himself giving way, and the determined action he had built up for himself began to crumble like sand. He had made his confession and in spite of it this young girl he worshipped--sweeter and purer than the flowers of the forest--was urging herself upon him! And his soul cried out for him to turn about, and open his arms to her, and gather her into them for as long as God saw fit to give him freedom and life. But still he fought against that mighty urge, dragging reason and right back fragment by fragment, while Nada stood behind him, her wide-open, childishly beautiful eyes beginning to comprehend the struggle that was disrupting the heart of this man who was an outlaw--and her god among men. And when Jolly Roger turned, his face had aged to the grayness of stone, and his eyes were dull, and there was a terribly dead note in his voice. "You can't go with us," he said. "You can't. It's wrong--all wrong. I couldn't take care of you in jail, and some day--that's where I'll be." More than once when she had spoken of Jed Hawkins he had seen the swift flash of lightning come into the violet of her eyes. And it came now, and her little hands grew tight at her sides, and bright spots burned in her cheeks. "You won't!" she cried. "I won't let you go to jail. I'll fight for you--if you'll let me go with you and Peter!" She came a step nearer. "And if I stay here Jed Hawkins is goin' to sell me to a tie-cutter over on the railroad. That's what it is--sellin' me. I ain't--I mean I haven't--told you before, because I was afraid of what you'd do. But it's goin' to happen, unless you let me go with you and Peter. Oh, Mister Roger--Mister Jolly Roger--" Her fingers crept up his arms. They reached his shoulders, and her blue eyes, and her red lips, and the woman's soul in her girl-body were so close to him he could feel their sweetness and thrill, and then he saw a slow-gathering mist, and tears-- "I'll go wherever you go," she was whispering, "And we'll hide where they won't ever find us, and I'll be happy, so happy, Mister Roger--and if you won't take me I want to die. Oh--" She was crying, with her head on his breast, and her slim, half bare arms around his neck, and Jolly Roger listened like a miser to the choking words that came with her sobs. And where there had been tumult and indecision in his heart there came suddenly the clearness of sunshine and joy, and with it the happiness of a new and mighty possession as his arms closed about her, and he turned her face up, so that for the first time he kissed the soft red lips that for some inscrutable reason the God of all things had given into his keeping this day. And then, holding her close, with her arms still tighter about his neck, he cried softly, "I'm goin' to take you, little girl. You're goin' with Peter and me, for ever--and ever. And we'll go--tonight!" When Peter came back, just in the last sunset glow of the evening, he found his master alone in the bit of jackpine opening, and Nada was swiftly crossing the larger meadow that lay between them and the break in Cragg's Ridge, beyond which was Jed Hawkins' cabin. It was not the same Jolly Roger whom he had left half an hour before. It was not the man of the hiding-place in the rock-pile. Jolly Roger McKay, standing there in the last soft glow of the day, was no longer the fugitive and the outcast. He stood with silent lips, yet his soul was crying out its gratitude to all that God of Life which breathed its sweetness of summer evening about him. He was the First Possessor of the earth. In that hour, that moment, he would not have sold his place for all the happiness of all the remaining people in the world. He cried out aloud, and Peter, squatted at his feet with his red tongue lolling out, listened to him. "She is mine, mine, mine," he was saying, and he repeated that word over and over, until Peter quirked his ears, and wondered what it meant. And then, seeing Peter, Jolly Roger laughed softly, and bent over him, with a look of awe and wonderment mingling with the happiness in his face. "She's mine--ours," he cried boyishly. "God A'mighty took a hand, _Pied-Bot_, and she's going with us! We're going tonight, when the moon comes up. And Peter--Peter--we're going straight to the Missioner's, and he'll marry us, and then we'll hit for a place where no one in the world will ever find us. The law may want us, _Pied-Bot_, but God--this God all around--is good to us. And we'll try and pay Him back. We will, Peter!" He straightened himself, and faced the west. Then he picked up the bundle Nada had brought, and dived through the jackpines, with Peter at his heels. Swiftly they moved through the shadowing dusk of the plain, and came at last to the Stew-Kettle, and to their hiding-place under the shoulders of Gog and Magog. There was still a faint twilight in the tunnel, and in this twilight Jolly Roger McKay packed his possessions; and then, with fingers that trembled as if they were committing a sacrilege, he drew Nada's few treasures from her bundle and placed them tenderly with his own. And all the time Peter heard him saying things under his breath, so softly that it was like the whispered drone of song. In darkness they went down through the rocks to the plain, and half an hour later they came to the break in the Ridge, and went through it, and stopped in the black shadow of a great rock, with Jed Hawkins' cabin half a rifle-shot away. Here Nada was to come to them with the first rising of the moon. It was very still all about, and Peter sensed a significance in the silence, and lay very quietly watching the light in the cabin, and the shadowy form of his master. Also he knew that somewhere in the distance a storm was gathering. The breath of it was in the air, though the sky was clear of cloud overhead, except for the haze of a gray and ghostly mist that lay between them and the yellow stars. Jolly Roger counted the seconds between then and moonrise. It seemed hours before the golden rim of it rose in the east. Shadows grew swiftly after that. Grotesque things took shape. The rock-caps of the ridge began to light up, like timid signal-fires. Black spruce and balsam and cedar glistened as if bathed in enamel. And the moon came on, and mellow floods of light played in the valleys and plains, and danced over the forest-tops, and in voice-less and soundless miracle called upon all living things to look upon the glory of God. In his soul Jolly Roger McKay felt the urge and the call of that voiceless Master Power, and through his lips came an unconscious whisper of prayer--of gratitude. And he watched the light in Jed Hawkins' cabin, and strained his ears to hear a sound of footsteps coming through the moonlight. But there was no change. The light did not move. A door did not open or close. There was no sound, except the growing whisper of the wind, the call of a night bird, and the howl of the old gray wolf that always cried out to the moon from the tangled depths of Indian Tom's swamp. A thrill of nervousness swept through Jolly Roger. He waited half an hour, three-quarters, an hour--after the moon had risen. And Nada did not come. The nervousness grew in him, and he moved out into the moon-glow, and slowly and watchfully followed the edge of the rock-shadows until he came to the fringe of cedars and spruce behind the cabin. Peter, careful not to snap a twig under his paws, followed closely. They came to the cabin, and there--very distinctly--Jolly Roger McKay heard the low moaning of a voice. He edged his way to the window, and looked in. Crouched beside a chair in the middle of the floor was Jed Hawkins's woman. She was moaning, and her thin body was rocking back and forth, and with her hands clasped at her bony breast she was staring at the open door. With a shock Jolly Roger saw that except for the strangely crying old woman the cabin was empty. Sudden fear chilled his blood--a fear that scarcely took form before he was at the door, and in the cabin. The woman's eyes were red and wild as she stared at him, and she stopped her moaning, and her hands unclasped. Jolly Roger went nearer and bent over her and shivered at the half-mad terror he saw in her face. "Where is Nada?" he demanded. "Tell me--where is she?" "Gone, gone, gone," crooned the woman, clutching her hands at her breast again. "Jed has taken her--taken her to Mooney's shack, over near the railroad. Oh, my God!--I tried to keep her, but I couldn't. He dragged her away, and tonight he's sellin' her to Mooney--the devil--the black brute--the tie-cutter--" She choked, and began rocking herself back and forth, and the moaning came again from her thin lips. Fiercely McKay gripped her by the shoulder. "Mooney's shack--where?" he cried. "Quick! Tell me!" "A thousand--a thousand--he's givin' a thousand dollars to git her in the shack--alone," she cried in a dull, sing-song voice. "The road out there leads straight to it. Near the railroad. A mile. Two miles. I tried to keep him from doin' it, but I couldn't--I couldn't--" Jolly Roger heard no more. He was out of the door, and running across the open, with Peter racing close behind him. They struck the road, and Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run until the breath was out of his lungs. And all that time the things Nada had told him about Jed Hawkins and the tie-cutter were rushing madly through his brain. An hour or two ago, when the words had come from her lips in the jackpine thicket, he had believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted fear possessed her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him was too monstrous to happen. And now he cried out aloud, a groaning, terrible cry as he went on. Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney's shack long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a shack from which no cries could be heard-- Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger McKay's panting voice. And the moon shone on them as they staggered and ran, and here and there dark clouds were racing past the face of it, and the slumberous whisper of storm grew nearer in the air. And then came the time when one of the dark clouds rode under the moon and the two ran on in darkness. The cloud passed, and the moon flooded the road again with light--and suddenly Jolly Roger stopped in his tracks, and his heart almost broke in the strain of that moment. Ahead of them, staggering toward them, sobbing as she came, was Nada. Jolly Roger's blazing eyes saw everything in that vivid light of the moon. Her hair was tangled and twisted about her shoulders and over her breast. One arm was bare where the sleeve had been torn away, and her girlish breast gleamed white where her waist had been stripped half from her body. And then she saw Jolly Roger in the trail, with wide-open, reaching arms, and with a cry such as Peter had never heard come from her lips before she ran into them, and held up her face to him in the yellow moon-light. In her eyes--great, tearless, burning pools--he saw the tragedy and yet it was only that, and not horror, not despair, _not_ the other thing. His arms closed crushingly about her. Her slim body seemed to become a part of him. Her hot lips reached up and clung to his. And then, "Did--he get you--to--Mooney's shack--" He felt her body stiffen against him. "No," she panted. "I fought--every inch. He dragged me, and hit me, and tore my clothes--but I fought. And up there--in the trail--he turned his back for a moment, when he thought I was done, and I hit him with a club. And he's there, now, on his back--" She did not finish. Jolly Roger thrust her out from him, arm's length. A cloud under the moon hid his face. But his voice was low, and terrible. "Nada, go to the Missioner's as fast as you can," he said, fighting to speak coolly. "Take Peter--and go. You will make it before the storm breaks. I am going back to have a few words with Jed Hawkins--alone. Then I will join you, and the Missioner will marry us--" The cloud was gone, and he saw joy and radiance in her face. Fear had disappeared. Her eyes were luminous with the golden glow of the night. Her red lips were parted, entreating him with the lure of their purity and love, and for a moment he held her close in his arms again, kissing her as he might have kissed an angel, while her little hands stroked his face, and she laughed softly and strangely in her happiness--the wonder of a woman's soul rising swiftly out of the sweetness of her girlhood. And then Jolly Roger set her firmly in the direction she was to go. "Hurry, little girl," he said. "Hurry--before the storm breaks!" She went, calling Peter softly, and Jolly Roger strode down the trail, not once looking back, and bent only upon the vengeance he would this night wreak upon the two lowest brutes in creation. Never before had he felt the desire to kill. But he felt that desire now. Before the night was much older he would do unto Hawkins and Mooney as Hawkins had done unto Peter. He would leave them alive, but broken and crippled and forever punished. And then he stumbled over something in another darkening of the moon. He stopped, and the light came again, and he looked down into the upturned face of Jed Hawkins. It was a distorted and twisted face, and its one eye was closed. The body did not move. And close to the head was the club which Nada had used. Jolly Roger laughed grimly. Fate was kind to him in making a half of his work so easy. But he wanted Hawkins to rouse himself first. Roughly he stirred him with the toe of his boot. "Wake up, you fiend," he said. "I'm going to break your bones, your arms, your legs, just as you broke Peter--and that poor old woman back in the cabin. Wake up!" Jed Hawkins made no stir. He was strangely limp. For many seconds Jolly Roger stood looking down at him, his eyes growing wider, more staring. Darkness came again. It was an inky blackness this time, like a blotter over the world. Low thunder came out of the west. The tree-tops whispered in a frightened sort of way. And Jolly Roger could hear his heart beating. He dropped upon his knees, and his hands moved over Jed Hawkins. For a space not even Peter could have heard his movement or his breath. In the ebon darkness he rose to his feet, and the night--lifelessly still for a moment--heard the one choking word that came from his lips. "Dead!" And there he stood, the heat of his rage changing to an icy chill, his heart dragging within him like a chunk of lead, his breath choking in his throat. Jed Hawkins was dead! He was growing stiff there in the black trail. He had ceased to breathe. He had ceased to be a part of life. And the wind, rising a little with the coming of storm, seemed to whisper and chortle over the horrible thing, and the lone wolf in Indian Tom's swamp howled weirdly, as if he smelled death. Jolly Roger McKay's finger-nails dug into the flesh of his palms. If he had killed the human viper at his feet, if his own hands had meted out his punishment, he would not have felt the clammy terror that wrapped itself about him in the darkness. But he had come too late. It was Nada who had killed Jed Hawkins. Nada, with her woman's soul just born in all its glory, had taken the life of her foster-father. And Canadian law knew no excuse for killing. The chill crept to his finger-tips, and unconsciously, in a childish sort of way, he sobbed between his clenched teeth. The thunder was rolling nearer, and it was like a threatening voice, a deep-toned booming of a thing inevitable and terrible. He felt the air shivering about him, and suddenly something moved softly against his foot, and he heard a questioning whine. It was Peter--come back to him in this hour when he needed a living thing to give him courage. With a groan he dropped on his knees again, and clutched his hands about Peter. "My God," he breathed huskily. "Peter, she's killed him. And she mustn't know. We mustn't let anyone know--" And there he stopped, and Peter felt him growing rigid as stone, and for many moments Jolly Roger's body seemed as lifeless as that of the man who lay with up-turned face in the trail. Then he fumbled in a pocket and found a pencil and an old envelope. And on the envelope, with the darkness so thick he could not see his hand, he scribbled, "I killed Jed Hawkins," and after that he signed his name firmly and fully--"Jolly Roger McKay." Then he tucked the envelope under Jed Hawkins' body, where the rain could not get at it. And after that, to make the evidence complete, he covered the dead man's face with his coat. "We've got to do it, Peter," he said, and there was a new note in his voice as he stood up on his feet again. "We've got to do it--for her. We'll--tell her we caught Jed Hawkins in the trail and killed him." Caution, cleverness, his old mental skill returned to him. He dragged the boot-legger's body to a new spot, turned it face down, threw the club away, and kicked up the earth with his boots to give signs of a struggle. The note in his voice was triumph--triumph in spite of its heartbreak--as he turned back over the trail after he had finished, and spoke to Peter. "We may have done some things we oughtn't to, _Pied-Bot_," he said, "but tonight I sort o' think we've tried to make--restitution. And if they hang us, which they probably will some time, I sort o' think it'll make us happy to know we've done it--for her. Eh, _Pied-Bot_?" And the moon sailed out for a space, and shone on the dead whiteness of Jolly Roger's face. And on the lips of that face was a strange, cold smile, a smile of mastery, of exaltation, and the eyes were looking straight ahead--the eyes of a man who had made his sacrifice for a thing more precious to him than his God. Only now and then did the moon gleam through the slow-moving masses of black cloud when he came to the edge of the Indian settlement clearing three miles away, where stood the cabin of the Missioner. The storm had not broken, but seemed holding back its forces for one mighty onslaught upon the world. The thunder was repressed, and the lightning held in leash, with escaping flashes of it occasionally betraying the impending ambuscades of the sky. The clearing itself was a blot of stygian darkness, with a yellow patch of light in the center of it--the window of the Missioner's cabin. And Jolly Roger stood looking at it for a space, as a carven thing of rock might have stared. His heart was dead. His soul crushed. His dream broken. There remained only his brain, his mind made up, his worship for the girl--a love that had changed from a thing of joy to a fire of agony within him. Straight ahead he looked, knowing there was only one thing for him to do. And only one. There was no alternative. No hope. No change of fortune that even the power of God might bring about. What lay ahead of him was inevitable. After all, there is something unspeakable in the might and glory of dying for one's country--or for a great love. And Jolly Roger McKay felt that strength as he strode through the blackness, and knocked at the door, and went in to face Nada and the little old gray-haired Missioner in the lampglow. Swift as one of the flashes of lightning in the sky the anxiety and fear had gone out of Nada's face, and in an instant it was flooded with the joy of his coming. She did not mark the strange change in him, but went to him as she had gone to him in the trail, and Jolly Roger's arms closed about her, but gently this time, and very tenderly, as he might have held a little child he was afraid of hurting. Then she felt the chill of his lips as she pressed her own to them. Startled, she looked up into his eyes. And as he had done in the trail, so now Jolly Roger stood her away from him, and faced the Missioner. In a cold, hard voice he told what had happened to Nada that evening, and of the barbarous effort Jed Hawkins had made to sell her to Mooney. Then, from a pocket inside his shirt, he drew out a small, flat leather wallet, and thrust it in the little Missioner's hand. "There's close to a thousand dollars in that," he said. "It's mine. And I'm giving it to you--for Nada. I want you to keep her, and care for her, and mebby some day--" With both her hands Nada clutched his arm. Her eyes had widened. Swift pallor had driven the color from her face, and a broken cry was in her voice. "I'm goin' with you," she protested. "I'm goin' with you--and Peter!" "You can't--now," he said. "I've got to go alone, Nada. I went back--and I killed Jed Hawkins." Over the roof of the cabin rolled a crash of thunder. As the explosion of it rocked the floor under their feet, Jolly Roger pointed to a door, and said, "Father, if you will leave us alone--just a minute--" White-faced, clutching the wallet, the little gray Missioner nodded, and went to the door, and as he opened it and entered into the darkness of the other room he saw Jolly Roger McKay open wide his arms, and the girl go into them. After that the storm broke. The rain descended in a deluge upon the cabin roof. The black night was filled with the rumble and roar and the hissing lightning-flare of pent-up elements suddenly freed of bondage. And in the darkness and tumult the Missioner stood, a little gray man of tragedy, of deeply buried secrets, a man of prayer and of faith in God--his heart whispering for guidance and mercy as he waited. The minutes passed. Five. Ten. And then there came a louder roaring of the storm, shut off quickly, and the little Missioner knew that a door was opened--and closed. He lifted the latch, and looked out again into the lampglow. Huddled at the side of a chair on the floor, her arms and face buried in the lustrous, disheveled mass of her shining hair--lay Nada, and close beside her was Peter. He went to her. Tenderly he knelt down beside her. His thin arm went about her, and as the storm raved and shrieked above them he tried to comfort her--and spoke of God. And through that storm, his head bowed, his heart gone, went Jolly Roger McKay--heading north. CHAPTER VIII Peter, thrust back from the door through which through which his master had gone, listened vainly for the sound of returning footsteps in the beat of rain and the crash of thunder outside. A strange thing had burned itself into his soul, a thing that made his flesh quiver and set hot fires running in his blood. As a dog sometimes senses the stealthy approach of death, so he began to sense the tragedy of this night that had brought with it not only a chaos of blackness and storm, but an anguish which roused an answering whimper in his throat as he turned toward Nada. She was crumpled with her head in her arms, where she had flung herself with Jolly Roger's last kiss of worship on her lips, and she was sobbing like a child with its heart broken. And beside her knelt the old gray Missioner, man of God in the deep forest, who stroked her hair with his thin hand, whispering courage and consolation to her, with the wind and rain beating overhead and the windows rattling to the accompaniment of ghostly voices that shrieked and wailed in the tree-tops outside. Peter trembled at the sobbing, but his heart and his desire were with the man who had gone. In his unreasoning little soul it was Jed Hawkins who was rattling the windows with his unseen hands and who was pounding at the door with the wind, and who was filling the black night with its menace and fear. He hated this man, who lay back in the trail with his lifeless face turned up to the deluge that poured out of the sky. And he was afraid of the man, even as he hated him, and he believed that Nada was afraid of him, and that because of her fear she was crying there in the middle of the floor, with Father John patting her shoulder and stroking her hair, and saying things to her which he could not understand. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to feel himself close against her, as Nada had held him so often in those hours when she had unburdened her grief and her unhappiness to him. But even stronger than this desire was the one to follow his master. He went to the door, and thrust his nose against the crack at the bottom of it. He felt the fierceness of the wind fighting to break in, and the broken mist of it filled his nostrils. But there came no scent of Jolly Roger McKay. For a moment he struggled at the crack with his paws. Then he flopped himself down, his heart beating fast, and fixed his eyes inquiringly on Nada and the Missioner. His four and a half months of life in the big wilderness, and his weeks of constant comradeship with Jolly Roger, had developed in him a brain that was older than his body. No process of reasoning could impinge upon him the fact that his master was an outlaw, but with the swift experiences of tragedy and hiding and never-ceasing caution had come instinctive processes which told him almost as much as reason. He knew something was wrong tonight. It was in the air. He breathed it. It thrilled in the crash of thunder, in the lightning fire, in the mighty hands of the wind rocking the cabin and straining at the windows. And vaguely the knowledge gripped him that the dead man back in the trail was responsible for it all, and that because of this something that had happened his mistress was crying and his master was gone. And he believed he should also have gone with Jolly Roger into the blackness and mystery of the storm, to fight with him against the one creature in all the world he hated--the dead man who lay back in the thickness of gloom between the forest walls. And the Missioner was saying to Nada, in a quiet, calm voice out of which the tragedies of years had burned all excitement and passion: "God will forgive him, my child. In His mercy He will forgive Roger McKay, because he killed Jed Hawkins to save YOU. But man will not forgive. The law has been hunting him because he is an outlaw, and to outlawry he has added what the law will call murder. But God will not look at it in that way. He will look into the heart of the man, the man who sacrificed himself--" And then, fiercely, Nada struck up the Missioner's comforting hand, and Peter saw her young face white as star-dust in the lampglow. "I don't care what God thinks," she cried passionately. "God didn't do right today. Mister Roger told me everything, that he was an outlaw, an' I oughtn't to marry him. But I didn't care. I loved him. I could hide with him. An' we were coming to have you marry us tonight when God let Jed Hawkins drag me away, to sell me to a man over on the railroad--an' it was God who let Mister Roger go back and kill him. I tell you He didn't do right! He didn't--he didn't--because Mister Roger brought me the first happiness I ever knew, an' I loved him, an' he loved me--an' God was wicked to let him kill Jed Hawkins--" Her voice cried out, a woman's soul broken in a girl's body, and Peter whimpered and watched the Missioner as he raised Nada to her feet and went with her into his bedroom, where a few minutes before he had lighted a lamp. And Peter crept in quietly after them, and when the Missioner had gone and closed the door, leaving them alone in their tragedy, Nada seemed to see him for the first time and slowly she reached out her arms. "Peter!" she whispered. "Peter--Peter--" In the minutes that followed, Peter could feel her heart beating. Clutched against her breast he looked up at the white, beautiful face, the trembling throat, the wide-open blue eyes staring at the one black window between them and the outside night. A lull had come in the storm. It was quiet and ominous stillness, and the ticking of a clock, old and gray like the Missioner himself, filled the room. And Nada, seated on the edge of Father John's bed, no longer looked like the young girl of "seventeen goin' on eighteen." That afternoon, in the hidden jackpine open, with its sweet-scented jasmines, its violets and its crimson strawberries under their feet, the soul of a woman had taken possession of her body. In that hour the first happiness of her life had come to her. She had heard Jolly Roger McKay tell her those things which she already knew--that he was an outlaw, and that he was hiding down on the near-edge of civilization because the Royal Mounted were after him farther north--and that he was not fit to love her, and that it was a crime to let her love him. It was then the soul of the woman had come to her in all its triumph. She had made her choice, definitely and decisively, without hesitation and without fear. And now, as she stared unseeingly at the window against which the rain was beating, the woman in her girlish body rose in her mightier than in the hour of her happiness, fighting to find a way--crying out for the man she loved. Her mind swept back in a single flash through all the years she had lived, through her years of unhappiness and torment as the foster-girl of Jed Hawkins and his broken, beaten wife; through summers and winters that had seemed ages to her, eternities of desolation, of heartache, of loneliness, with the big wilderness her one friend on earth. As the window rattled in a fresh blast of storm, she thought of the day months ago when she had accidentally stumbled upon the hiding-place of Roger McKay. Since that day he had been her God, and she had lived in a paradise. He had been father, mother, brother, and at last--what she most yearned for--a lover to her. And this day, when for the first time he had held her in his arms, when the happiness of all the earth had reached out to them, God had put it into Jed Hawkins' heart to destroy her--and Jolly Roger had killed him! With a sharp little cry she sprang to her feet, so suddenly that Peter fell with a thump to the floor. He looked up at her, puzzled, his jaws half agape. She was breathing quickly. Her slender body was quivering. Suddenly Peter saw the fire in her eyes and the flame that was rushing into her white cheeks. Then she turned to him, and panted in a wild little whisper, so low that the Missioner could not hear: "Peter, I was wrong. God wasn't wicked to let Mister Roger kill Jed Hawkins. He oughta been killed. An' God meant him to be killed. Peter--Peter--we don't care if he's an outlaw! We're goin' with him. We're goin'--goin'--" She sprang to the window, and Peter was at her heels as she strained at it with all her strength, and he could hear her sobbing: "We're goin' with him, Peter. We're goin'--if we die for it!" An inch at a time she pried the window up. The storm beat in. A gust of wind blew out the light, but in the last flare of it Nada saw a knife in an Eskimo sheath hanging on the wall. She groped for it, and clutched it in her hand as she climbed through the window and dropped to the soggy ground beneath. In a single leap Peter followed her. Blackness swallowed them as they turned toward the trail leading north--the only trail which Jolly Roger could travel on a night like this. They heard the voice of the Missioner calling from the window behind them. Then a crash of thunder set the earth rolling under their feet, and the lull in the storm came to an end. The sky split open with the vivid fire of lightning. The trees wailed and whined, the rain fell again in a smothering deluge, and through it Nada ran, gripping the knife as her one defense against the demons of darkness--and always close at her side ran Peter. He could not see her in that pitchy blackness, except when the lightning flashes came. Then she was like a ghostly wraith, with drenched clothes clinging to her until she seemed scarcely dressed, her wet hair streaming and her wide, staring eyes looking straight ahead. After the lightning flashes, when the world was darkest, he could hear the stumbling tread of her feet and the panting of her breath, and now and then the swish of brush as it struck across her face and breast. The rain had washed away the scent of his master's feet but he knew they were following Jolly Roger, and that the girl was running to overtake him. In him was the desire to rush ahead, to travel faster through the night, but Nada's stumbling feet and her panting breath and the strange white pictures he saw of her when the sky split open with fire held him back. Something told him that Nada must reach Jolly Roger. And he was afraid she would stop. He wanted to bark to give her encouragement, as he had often barked in their playful races in the green plain-lands on the farther side of Cragg's Ridge. But the rain choked him. It beat down upon him with the weight of heavy hands, it slushed up into his face from pools in the trail and drove the breath from him when he attempted to open his jaws. So he ran close--so close that at times Nada felt the touch of his body against her. In these first minutes of her fight to overtake the man she loved Nada heard but one voice--a voice crying out from her heart and brain and soul, a voice rising above the tumult of thunder and wind, urging her on, whipping the strength from her frail body in pitiless exhortation. Jolly Roger was less than half an hour ahead of her. And she must overtake him--quickly--before the forests swallowed him, before he was gone from her life forever. The wall of blackness against which she ran did not frighten her. When the brush tore at her face and hair she swung free of it, and stumbled on. Twice she ran blindly into broken trees that lay across her path, and dragged her bruised body through their twisted tops, moaning to Peter and clutching tightly to the sheathed knife in her hand. And the wild spirits that possessed the night seemed to gather about her, and over her, exulting in the helplessness of their victim, shrieking in weird and savage joy at the discovery of this human plaything struggling against their might. Never had Peter heard thunder as he heard it now. It rocked the earth under his feet. It filled the world with a ceaseless rumble, and the lightning came like flashes from swift-loading guns, and with it all a terrific assault of wind and rain that at last drove Nada down in a crumpled heap, panting for breath, with hands groping out wildly for him. Peter came to them, sodden and shivering. His warm tongue found the palm of her hand, and for a space Nada hugged him close to her, while she bowed her head until her drenched curls became a part of the mud and water of the trail. Peter could hear her sobbing for breath. And then suddenly, there came a change. The thunder was sweeping eastward. The lightning was going with it. The wind died out in wailing sobs among the treetops, and the rain fell straight down. Swiftly as its fury had come, the July storm was passing. And Nada staggered to her feet again and went on. Her mind began to react with the lessening of the storm, dragging itself out quickly from under the oppression of fear and shock. She began to reason, and with that reason the beginning of faith and confidence gave her new strength. She knew that Jolly Roger would take this trail, for it was the one trail leading from the Missioner's cabin through the thick forest country north. And in half an hour he would not travel far. The thrilling thought came to her that possibly he had sought shelter in the lee of a big tree trunk during the fury of the storm. If he had done that he would be near, very near. She paused in the trail and gathered her breath, and cried out his name. Three times she called it, and only the low whine in Peter's throat came in answer. Twice again during the next ten minutes she cried out as loudly as she could into the darkness. And still no answer came back to her through the gloom ahead. The trail had dipped, and she felt the deepening slush of swamp-mire under her feet. She sank in it to her shoe-tops, and stumbled into pools knee-deep, and Peter wallowed in it to his belly. A quarter of an hour they fought through it to the rising ground beyond. And by that time the last of the black storm clouds had passed overhead. The rain had ceased. The rumble of thunder came more faintly. There was no lightning, and the tree-tops began to whisper softly, as if rejoicing in the passing of the wind. About them--everywhere--they could hear the run and drip of water, the weeping of the drenched trees, the gurgle of flooded pools, and the trickle of tiny rivulets that splashed about their feet. Through a rift in the breaking clouds overhead came a passing flash of the moon. "We'll find him now, Peter," moaned the girl. "We'll find him--now. He can't be very far ahead--" And Peter waited, holding his breath, listening for an answer to the cry that went out for Jolly Roger McKay. The glory of July midnight, with a round, full moon straight overhead, followed the stress of storm. The world had been lashed and inundated, every tree whipped of its rot and slag, every blade of grass and flower washed clean. Out of the earth rose sweet smells of growing life, the musky fragrance of deep moss and needle-mold, and through the clean air drifted faintly the aroma of cedar and balsam and the subtle tang of unending canopies and glistening tapestries of evergreen breathing into the night. The deep forest seemed to tremble with the presence of an invisible and mysterious life--life that was still, yet wide-awake, breathing, watchful, drinking in the rejuvenating tonic of the air which had so quietly followed thunder and lightning and the roar of wind and rain. And the moon, like a queen who had so ordered these things, looked down in a mighty triumph. Her radiance, without dust or fog or forest-smoke to impede its way, was like the mellow glow of half-day. It streamed through the treetops in paths of gold and silver, throwing dark shadows where it failed to penetrate, and gathering in wide pools where its floods poured through broad rifts in the roofs of the forest. And the trail, leading north, was like a river of shimmering silver, splitting the wilderness from earth to sky. In this trail, clearly made in the wet soil, were Jolly Roger's foot-prints, and in a wider space, where at some time a trapper had cleared himself a spot for his tepee or shack, Jolly Roger had paused to rest after his fight through the storm--and had then continued on his way. And into this clearing, three hours after they left the Missioner's cabin, came Nada and Peter. They came slowly, the girl a slim wraith in the moon-light; in the open they stood for a moment, and Peter's heart weighed heavily within him as his mistress cried out once more for Jolly Roger. Her voice rose only in a sob, and ended in a sob. The last of her strength was gone. Her little figure swayed, and her face was white and haggard, and in her drawn lips and staring eyes was the agony of despair. She had lost, and she knew that she had lost as she crumpled down in the trail, crying out sobbingly to the footprints which led so clearly ahead of her. "Peter, I can't go on," she moaned. "I can't--go on--" Her hands clutched at her breast. Peter saw the glint of the moonlight on the ivory sheath of the Eskimo knife, and he saw her white face turned up to the sky--and also that her lips were moving, but he did not hear his name come from them, or any other sound. He whined, and foot by foot began to nose along the trail on the scent left by Jolly Roger. It was very clear to his nostrils, and it thrilled him. He looked back, and again he whined his encouragement to the girl. "Peter!" she called. "Peter!" He returned to her. She had drawn the knife out of its scabbard, and the cold steel glistened in her hand. Her eyes were shining, and she reached out and clutched Peter close up against her, so that he could hear the choke and throb of her heart. "Oh, Peter, Peter," she panted. "If you could only talk! If you could run and catch Mister Roger, an' tell him I'm here, an' that he must come back--" She hugged him closer. He sensed the sudden thrill that leapt through her body. "Peter," she whispered, "will you do it?" For a few moments she did not seem to breathe. Then he heard a quick little cry, a sob of inspiration and hope, and her arms came from about him, and he saw the knife flashing in the yellow moonlight. He did not understand, but he knew that he must watch her carefully. She had bent her head, and her hair, nearly dry, glowed softly in the face of the moon. Her hands were fumbling in the disheveled curls, and Peter saw the knife flash back and forth, and heard the cut of it, and then he saw that in her hand she held a thick brown tress of hair that she had severed from her head. He was puzzled. And Nada dropped the knife, and his curiosity increased when she tore a great piece out of her tattered dress, and carefully wrapped the tress of hair in it. Then she drew him to her again, and tied the knotted fold of dress securely about his neck; after that she tore other strips from her dress, and wound them about his neck until he felt muffled and half smothered. And all the time she was talking to him in a half sobbing, excited little voice, and the blood in Peter's body ran swifter, and the strange thrill in him was greater. When she had finished she rose to her feet, and stood there swaying back and forth, like one of the spruce-top shadows, while she pointed up the moonlit trail. "Go, Peter!" she cried softly. "Quick! Follow him, Peter--catch him--bring him back! Mister Roger--Jolly Roger--go, Peter! Go--go--go--" It was strange to Peter. But he was beginning to understand. He sniffed in Jolly Roger's footprints, and then he looked up quickly, and saw that it had pleased the girl. She was urging him on. He sniffed from one footprint to another, and Nada clapped her hands and cried out that he was right--for him to hurry--hurry-- Impulse, thought, swiftly growing knowledge of something to be done thrilled in his brain. Nada wanted him to go. She wanted him to go to Jolly Roger. And she had put something around his neck which she wanted him to take with him. He whined eagerly, a bit excitedly. Then he began to trot. Instinctively it was his test. She did not call him back. He flattened his ears, listening for her command to return, but it did not come. And then the thrill in him leapt over all other things. He was right. He was not abandoning Nada. He was not running away. She WANTED him to go! The night swallowed him. He became a part of the yellow floods of its moonlight, a part of its shifting shadows, a part of its stillness, its mystery, its promise of impending things. He knew that grim and terrible happenings had come with the storm, and he still sensed the nearness of tragedy in this night-world through which he was passing. He did not go swiftly, yet he went three times as fast as the girl and he had traveled together. He was cautious and watchful, and at intervals he stopped and listened, and swallowed hard to keep the whine of eagerness out of his throat. Now that he was alone every instinct in him was keyed to the pulse and beat of life about him. He knew the Night People of the deep forests were awake. Softly padded, clawed, sharp-beaked and feathered--the prowlers of darkness were on the move. With the stillness of shadows they were stealing through the moonlit corridors of the wilderness, or hovering gray-winged and ghostly in the ambuscades of the treetops, eager to waylay and kill, hungering for the flesh and blood of creatures weaker than themselves. Peter knew. Both heritage and experience warned him. And he watched the shadows, and sniffed the air, and kept his fangs half bared and ready as he followed the trail of McKay. He was not stirred by the impulse of adventure alone. Without the finesse of what man might charitably call reason in a beast, he had sensed a responsibility. It was present in the closely drawn strips of faded cloth about his neck. It was, in a way, a part of the girl herself, a part of her flesh and blood, a part of her spirit--something vital to her and dependent upon him. He was ready to guard it with every instinct of caution and every ounce of courage there was in him. And to protect it meant to fight. That was the first law of his breed, the primal warning which came to him through the red blood of many generations of wilderness forefathers. So he listened, and he watched, and his blood pounded hot in his veins as he followed the footprints in the trail. A bit of brush, swinging suddenly free from where it had been prisoned by the storm, drew a snarl from him as he faced the sound with the quickness of a cat. A gray streak, passing swiftly over the trail ahead of him, stirred a low growl in his throat. It was a lynx, and for a space Peter paused, and then sped soft-footed past the moon-lit spot where the stiletto-clawed menace of the woods had passed. Now that he was alone, and no longer accompanied by a human presence whose footsteps and scent held the wild things aloof and still, Peter felt nearer and nearer to him the beat and stir of life. Powerful beaks, instead of remaining closed and without sound, snapped and hissed at him as the big gray owls watched his passing. He heard the rustling of brush, soft as the stir of a woman's dress, where living things were secretly moving, and he heard the louder crash of clumsy and piggish feet, and caught the strong scent of a porcupine as it waddled to its midnight lunch of poplar bark. Then the trail ended, and Jolly Roger's scent led into the pathless forest, with its shifting streams and pools of moonlight, its shadows and black pits of darkness. And here--now--Peter began his trespass into the strongholds of the People of the Night. He heard a wolf howl, a cry filled with loneliness, yet with a shivering death-note in it; he caught the musky, skunkish odor of a fox that was stalking prey in the face of a whispering breath of wind; once, in a moment of dead stillness, he listened to the snap of teeth and the crackle of bones in one of the dark pits, where a fisher-cat--with eyes that gleamed like coals of fire--was devouring the warm and bleeding carcass of a mother partridge. And beaks snapped at him more menacingly as he went on, and gray shapes floated over his head, and now and then he heard the cries of dying things--the agonized squeak of a wood-mouse, the cry of a day-bird torn from its sleeping place by a sinuous, beady-eyed creature of fur and claw, the noisy screaming of a rabbit swooped upon and pierced to the vitals by one of the gray-feathered pirates of the air. And then, squarely in the center of a great pool of moonlight, Peter came upon a monster. It was a bear, a huge mother bear, with two butter-fat cubs wrestling and rolling in the moon glow. Peter had never seen a bear. But the mother, who raised her brown nose suddenly from the cool mold out of which she had been digging lily-bulbs, had seen dogs. She had seen many dogs, and she had heard their howl, and she knew that always they traveled with man. She gave a deep, chesty sniff, and close after that sniff a _whoof_ that startled the cubs like the lashing end of a whip. They rolled to her, and with two cuffs of the mother's huge paws they were headed in the right direction, and all three crashed off into darkness. In spite of his swelling heart Peter let out a little yip. It was a great satisfaction, just at a moment when his nerves were getting unsteady, to discover that a monster like this one in the moonlight was anxious to run away from him. And Peter went on, a bit of pride and jauntiness in his step, his bony tail a little higher. A mile farther on, in another yellow pool of the moon, lay the partly devoured carcass of a fawn. A wolf had killed it, and had fed, and now two giant owls were rending and tearing in the flesh and bowels of what the wolf had left. They were Gargantuans of their kind, one a male, the other a female. Their talons warm in blood, their beaks red, their slow brains drunk with a ravenous greed, they rose on their great wings in sullen rage when Peter came suddenly upon them. He had ceased to be afraid of owls. There was something shivery in the gritting of their beaks, especially in the dark places, but they had never attacked him, and had always kept out of his reach. So their presence in a black spruce top directly over the dead fawn did not hold him back now. He sniffed at the fresh, sweet meat, and hunger all at once possessed him. Where the wolf had stripped open a tender flank he began to eat, and as he ate he growled, so that warning of his possessorship reached the spruce top. In answer to it came a stir of wings, and the male owl launched himself out into the moon glow. The female followed. For a few moments they floated like gray ghosts over Peter, silent as the night shadows. Then, with the suddenness and speed of a bolt from a catapult, the giant male shot out of a silvery mist of gloom and struck Peter. The two rolled over the carcass of the fawn, and for a space Peter was dazed by the thundering beat of powerful wings, and the hammering of the owl's beak at the back of his neck. The male had missed his claw-hold, and driven by rage and ferocity, fought to impale his victim from the ground, without launching himself into the air again. Swiftly he struck, again and again, while his wings beat like clubs. Suddenly his talons sank into the cloth wrapped about Peter's neck. Terror and shock gave way to a fighting madness inside Peter now. He struck up, and buried his fangs in a mass of feathers so thick he could not feel the flesh. He tore at the padded breast, snarling and beating with his feet, and then, as the stiletto-points of the owl's talons sank through the cloth into his neck, his jaws closed on one of the huge bird's legs. His teeth sank deep, there was a snapping and grinding of tendon and bone, and a hissing squawk of pain and fear came from above him as the owl made a mighty effort to launch himself free. As the five-foot pinions beat the air Peter was lifted from the ground. But the owl's talons were hopelessly entangled in the cloth, and the two fell in a heap again. Peter scarcely sensed what happened after that, except that he was struggling against death. He closed his eyes, and the leg between his jaws was broken and twisted into pulp. The wings beat about him in a deafening thunder, and the owl's beak tore at his flesh, until the pool of moonlight in which they fought was red with blood. At last something gave way. There was a ghastly cry that was like the cry of neither bird nor beast, a weak flutter of wings, and Gargantua of the Air staggered up into the treetops and fell with a crash among the thick boughs of the spruce. Peter raised himself weakly, the severed leg of the owl dropping from his jaws. He was half blinded. Every muscle in his body seemed to be torn and bleeding, yet in his discomfort the thrilling conviction came to him that he had won. He tensed himself for another attack, hugging the ground closely as he watched and waited, but no attack came. He could hear the flutter and wheeze of his maimed adversary, and slowly he drew himself back--still facing the scene of battle--until in a farther patch of gloom he turned once more to his business of following the trail of Jolly Roger McKay. There was no mark of bravado in his advance now. If he had possessed an over-growing confidence, Gargantua's attack had set it back, and he stole like a shifty fox through the night. Driven into his brain was the knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the snapping beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little attention had now become a deadly menace. His egoism had suffered a jolt, a healthful reaction from its too swift ascendency. He sensed the narrowness of his escape without the mental action of reasoning it out, and his injuries were secondary to the oppressive horror of the uncanny combat out of which he had come alive. Yet this horror was not a fear. Heretofore he had recognized the ghostly owl-shapes of night more or less as a curious part of darkness, inspiring neither like nor dislike in him. Now he hated them, and ever after his fangs gleamed white when one of them floated over his head. He was badly hurt. There were ragged tears in his flank and back, and a last stroke of Gargantua's talons had stabbed his shoulder to the bone. Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was closing, so that shapes and shadows were grotesquely dim in the night. Instinct and caution, and the burning pains in his body, urged him to lie down in a thicket and wait for the day. But stronger than these were memory of the girl's urging voice, the vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and the freshness of Jolly Roger's trail as it kept straight on through the forest's moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom. It was in the first graying light of July dawn that Peter dragged himself up the rough side of a ridge and looked down into a narrow strip of plain on the other side. Just as Nada had given up in weakness and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit. He had traveled miles since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened, and with every step gave him excruciating pain. His injured eye was entirely closed, and there was a strange, dull ache in the back of his head, where Gargantua had pounded him with his beak. The strip of valley, half hidden in its silvery mist of dawn, seemed a long distance away to Peter, and he dropped on his belly and began to lick his raw shoulder with a feverish tongue. He was sick and tired, and the futility of going farther oppressed him. He looked again down into the strip of plain, and whined. Then, suddenly, he smelled something that was not the musty fog-mist that hung between the ridges. It was smoke. Peter's heart beat faster, and he pulled himself to his feet, and went in its direction. Hidden in a little grassy cup between two great boulders that thrust themselves out from the face of the ridge, he found Jolly Roger. First he saw the smouldering embers of a fire that was almost out--and then his master. Jolly Roger was asleep. Storm-beaten and strangely haggard and gray his face was turned to the sky. Peter did not awaken him. There was something in his master's face that quieted the low whimper in his throat. Very gently he crept to him, and lay down. The movement, slight as it was, made the man stir. His hand rose, and then fell limply across Peter's body. But the fingers moved. Unconsciously, as if guided by the spirit and prayer of the girl waiting far back in the forest, they twined about the cloth around Peter's neck--his message to his master. And for a long time after that, as the sun rose over a wonderful world, Peter and his master slept. CHAPTER IX It was the restlessness of Peter that roused Jolly Roger. Half awake, and before he opened his eyes, life seized upon him where sleep had cut it off for a time last night. His muscles ached. His neck was stiff. He seemed weighted like a log to the hard earth. Swiftly the experience of the preceding hours rushed upon him, and it was in the first of this wakefulness that he felt the presence of Peter. He sat up and stared wide-eyed at the dog. The fact that Peter had escaped from the cabin, and had followed him, was not altogether amazing. It was quite the natural thing for a one-man dog to do. But the unexpectedness of it held McKay speechless, and at first a little disappointed. It was as if Peter had deliberately betrayed a trust. During the storm and flight of the night McKay had thought of him as the one connecting link remaining between him and the girl he loved. He had left Peter to fill his place, to guard and watch and keep alive the memory of the man who was gone. For him there had been something of consolation in this giving up of his comradeship to Nada. And Peter had turned traitor. Even Peter seemed to sense the argument and condemnation that was passing behind McKay's unsmiling eyes. He did not move, but lay squatted on his belly, with his nose straight out on the ground between his forepaws. It was his attitude of self-immolation. His acknowledgment of the other's right to strike with lash or club. Yet in his eyes, bright and steady behind his mop of whiskers, Jolly Roger saw a prayer. Without a word he held out his arms. It was all Peter needed, and in a moment he was hugged up close against McKay. After all, there was a mighty something that reached from heart to heart of these two, and Jolly Roger said, with a sound that was half laugh and half sob in his throat, "_Pied-Bot_, you devil--you little devil--" His fingers closed in the cloth about Peter's neck, and his heart jumped when he saw what it was--a piece of Nada's dress. Peter, realizing that at last the importance of his mission was understood, waited in eager watchfulness while his master untied the knot. And in another moment, out in the clean and glorious sun that had followed storm, McKay held the shining tress of Nada's hair. It was a real sob that broke in his throat now, and Peter saw him crush the shining thing to his face, and hold it there, while strange quivers ran through his strong shoulders, and a wetness that was not rain gathered in his eyes. "God bless her!" he whispered. And then he said, "I wish I was a kid, Peter--a kid. Because--if I ever wanted to cry--_it's now_." In his face, even with the tears and the strange quivering of his lips, Peter saw a radiance that was joy. And McKay stood up, and looked south, back over the trail he had followed through the blackness and storm of night. He was visioning things. He saw Nada in Father John's cabin, urging Peter out into the wild tumult of thunder and lightning with that precious part of her which she knew he would love forever. Her last message to him. Her last promise of love and faith until the end of time. He guessed only the beginning of the truth. And Peter, denied the power of thought transmission because of an error in the creation of things, ran back a little way over the trail, trying to tell his master that Nada had come with him through the storm, and was back in the deep forest calling for him to return. But McKay's mind saw nothing beyond the dimly lighted room of the Missioner's cabin. He pressed his lips to the silken tress of Nada's hair, still damp with the rain; and after that, with the care of a miser he smoothed it out, and tied the end of the tress tightly with a string, and put it away in the soft buckskin wallet which he carried. There was a new singing in his heart as he gathered sticks with which to build a small fire, for after this he would not travel quite alone. That day they went on; and day followed day, until August came, and north--still farther north they went into the illimitable wilderness which reached out in the drowsing stillness of the Flying-up-Month--the month when newly fledged things take to their wings, and the deep forests lie asleep. Days added themselves into weeks, until at last they were in the country of the Reindeer waterways. To the east was Hudson's Bay; westward lay the black forests and twisting waterways of Upper Saskatchewan; and north--always north--beckoned the lonely plains and unmapped wildernesses of the Athabasca, the Slave and the Great Bear--toward which far country their trail was slowly but surely wending its way. The woodlands and swamps were now empty of man. Cabin and shack and Indian tepee were lifeless, and waited in the desolation of abandonment. No smoke rose in the tree-tops; no howl of dog came with the early dawn and the setting sun; trap lines were over-growing, and laughter and song and the ring of the trapper's axe were gone, leaving behind a brooding silence that seemed to pulse and thrill like a great heart--the heart of the wild unchained for a space from its human bondage. It was the vacation time--the midsummer carnival weeks of the wilderness people. Wild things were breeding. Fur was not good. Flesh was unfit to kill. And so they had disappeared, man, woman and child, and their dogs as well, to foregather at the Hudson's Bay Company's posts scattered here and there in the fastnesses of the wilderness lands. A few weeks more and they would return. Cabins would send up their smoke again. Brown-faced children would play about the tepee door. Ten thousand dwellers of the forests, white and half-breed and Indian born, would trickle in twos and threes and family groups back into the age-old trade of a domain that reached from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea. Until then nature was free, and in its freedom ran in riotous silence over the land. These were days when the wolf lay with her young, but did not howl; when the lynx yawned sleepily, and hunted but little--days of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red moons, and of streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed of rains and flood-time. And through it all--through the lazy drone of insects, the rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of living things ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had found for itself a new language in this temporary absence of man. To Jolly Roger this was Life, It breathed for him out of the cool earth. He heard it over him, and under him, and on all sides of him where other ears would have found only a thing vast and oppressive and silent. On what he called these "motherhood days of the earth" the passing years had built his faith and his creed. One evening he stopped for camp at the edge of the Burntwood. From his feet reached out the wide river, ankle deep in places, knee deep in others, rippling and singing between sandbars and driftwood where in May and June it had roared with the fury of flood Peter, half asleep after their day's travel through a hot forests watched his master. Since their flight from the edge of civilization far south he had grown heavier and broadened out. The hardship of adventuring and the craft of fighting for food and life had whipped the last of his puppyhood behind him At six months of age he was scarred, and lithe-muscled, and ready for instant action at all times. Through the mop of Airedale whiskers that covered his face his bright eyes were ever alert, and always they watched the back-trail as he wondered why the slim, blue-eyed girl they both loved and missed so much did not come. And vaguely he wondered why it was that his master always went on and on, and never waited for her to catch up with them. And Jolly Roger was changed. He was not the plump and rosy-faced wilderness freebooter who whistled and sang away down at Cragg's Ridge even when he knew the Law was at his heels. The steadiness of their flight had thinned him, and a graver look had settled in his face. But in his clear eyes was still the love of life--a thing even stronger than the grief which was eating at his heart as their trail reached steadily toward the Barren Lands. In the sunset glow of this late afternoon Peter's watchful eyes saw his master draw forth their treasure. It was something he had come to look for, and expect--once, twice, and sometimes half a dozen times between the rising and the setting of the sun. And at night, when they paused in their flight for the day, Jolly Roger never failed to do what he was doing now. Peter drew nearer to where his master was sitting with his back to the big rock, and his eyes glistened. Always he caught the sweet, illusive perfume of the girl when Jolly Roger drew out their preciously guarded package. He unwrapped it gently now, and in a moment held in his hands the tress of Nada's hair, the last of her they would ever possess or see. And Peter wondered again why they did not go back to where they had left the rest of the girl. Many times, seeing his restlessness and his yearning, Jolly Roger had tried to make him understand. And Peter tried to comprehend. But always in his dreams he was with the girl he loved, following her, playing with her, fighting for her, hearing her voice--feeling the touch of her hand. In his dog soul he wanted her, just as Jolly Roger wanted her with all the yearning and heartbreak of the man. Yet always when he awoke from his dreams they went on again--not south--but north. To Peter this was hopeless mystery, and he possessed no power of reason to solve it. Nor could he speak in words the message which he carried in his heart--that last crying agony of the girl when she had sent him out on the trail of Roger McKay, entreating him to bring back the man she loved and would always love in spite of all the broken and unbroken laws in the world. That night, as they lay beside the Burntwood, Peter heard his master crying out Nada's name in his sleep. And the next dawn they went on--still farther north. In these days and weeks, with the hot inundation of the wilderness about him, McKay fought doggedly against the forces which were struggling to break down the first law of his creed. The law might catch him, and probably would, and when it caught him the law might hang him--and probably would. But it would never _know_ him. There was something grimly and tragically humorous in this. It would never know of the consuming purity of his worship for little children, and old people--and women. It would laugh at the religion he had built up for himself, and it would cackle tauntingly if he dared to say he was not wholly bad. For it believed he was bad, and it believed he had killed Jed Hawkins, and he knew that seven hundred men were anxious to get him, dead or alive. But was he bad? He took the matter up one evening, with Peter. "If I'm bad, mebby it isn't all my fault, _Pied-Bot_," he said. "Mebby it's this--" and he swept his arms out to the gathering night. "I was born in the open, on a night just like this is going to be. My mother, before she died, told me many times how she watched the moon come up that night, and how it seemed to look down on her, and talk to her, like a living thing. And I've loved the moon ever since, and the sun, and everything that's outdoors--and if there's a God I don't believe He ever intended man to make a law that wasn't right according to the plans He laid out. That's where I've got in wrong, _Pied-Bot_, I haven't always believed in man-made law, and I've settled a lot of things in my own way. And I guess I've loved trees and flowers and sunshine and wind and storm too much. I've just wandered. And I've done things along the way. The thrill of it got into me, _Pied-Bot_, and--the law wants me!" Peter heard the subdued humor of the man, a low laugh that held neither fear nor regret. "It was the Treaty Money first," he went on, leaning very seriously toward Peter, as if he expected an argument. "You see, Yellow Bird was in that particular tribe, _Pied-Bot_. I remember her as she looked to me when a boy, with her two long, shining black braids and her face that was almost as beautiful to me as my mother's. My mother loved her, and she loved my mother, and I loved Yellow Bird, just as a child loves a fairy. And always Yellow Bird has been my fairy, Peter. I guess child worship is the one thing that lasts through life, always remaining ideal, and never forgotten. Years after my mother's death, when I was a young man, and had been down to Montreal and Ottawa and Quebec, I went back to Yellow Bird's tribe. And it was starving, _Pied-Bot_. Starving to death!" Reminiscent tenderness and humor were gone from McKay's voice. It was hard and flinty. "It was winter," he continued, "the dead of winter. And cold. So cold that even the wolves and foxes had buried themselves in. No fish that autumn, no game in the deep snows, and the Indians were starving. _Pied-Bot_, my heart went dead when I saw Yellow Bird. There didn't seem to be anything left of her but her eyes and her hair--those two great, shining braids, and eyes that were big and deep and dark, like beautiful pools. Boy, you never saw an Indian--an Indian like Yellow Bird--cry. They don't cry very much. But when that childhood fairy of mine first saw me she just stood there, swaying in her weakness, and the tears filled those big, wide-open eyes and ran down her thin cheeks. She had married Slim Buck. Two of their three children had died within a fortnight. Slim Buck was dying of hunger and exhaustion. And Yellow Bird's heart was broken, and her soul was crying out for God to let her lie down beside Slim Buck and die with him--when I happened along. "Peter--" Jolly Roger leaned over in the thickening dusk, and his eyes gleamed. "Peter, if there's a God, an' He thinks I did wrong then, let Him strike me dead right here! I'm willin'. I found out what the trouble was. There was a new Indian Agent, a cur. And near the tribe was a Free Trader, another cur. The two got together. The Agent sent up the Treaty Money, and along with it--underground, mind you--he sent a lot of whiskey to the Free Trader. Inside of five days the whiskey got the Treaty Money from the Indians. Then came winter. Everything went bad, When I came--and found out what had happened--eighteen out of sixty had died, and inside of another two weeks half the others would follow. _Pied-Bot_, away back--somewhere--there must have been a pirate before me--mebby a great-grandfather of mine. I set out, I came back in three days, and I had a sledge-load of grub, and warm things to wear--plenty of them. My God, how those starving things did eat! I went again, and returned in another week, with a still bigger sledge-load. And Yellow Bird was getting beautiful again, and Slim Buck was on his feet, growing strong, and there was happiness--and I think God A'mighty was glad. I kept it up for two months. Then the back-bone of the winter broke. Game came into the country I left them well supplied--and skipped. That was what made me an outlaw, _Pied-Bot_. That!" He chuckled, and Peter heard the rubbing of his hands in the gloom. "Want to know why?" he asked. "Well, you see, I went over to the Free Trader's, and this God the law don't take into account went with me, and we found the skunk alone. First I licked him until he was almost dead. Then, sticking a knife into him about half an inch, I made him write a note saying he was called south suddenly, and authorizing me to take charge in his absence. Then I chained him in a dugout in a place where nobody would find him. And I took charge. _Pied-Bot_, I sure did! Everybody was on the trap-lines, and I wasn't bothered much by callers. And I fed and clothed my tribe for eight straight weeks, fed 'em until they grew fat, Boy--and Yellow Bird's eyes were bright as stars again. Then I brought Roach--that was his name--back to his empty post, and I lectured him, an' gave him another licking--and left." McKay rose to his feet. The first stars were peeping out of the velvety darkness of the sky, and Peter heard his master draw in a deep breath--the breath of a man whose lungs rejoice in the glory of life. After a moment he said, "And the Royal Mounted have been after me ever since that winter, Peter. And the harder they've chased me the more I've given them reason to chase me. I half killed Beaudin, the Government mail-runner, because he insulted another man's wife when that man--my friend--was away. Then Beaudin, seeing his chance, robbed the mail himself, and the crime was laid to me. Well, I got even, and stuck up a mail-sledge myself--but I guess there was a good reason for it. I've done a lot of things since then, but I've done it all with my naked fists, and I've never put a bullet or a knife into a man except Roach the Free Trader. And the funniest thing of the whole business, _Pied-Bot_, is this--I didn't kill Jed Hawkins. Some day mebby I'll tell you about what happened on the trail, the thing which you and Nada didn't see. But now--" For a moment he stood very still, and Peter sensed the sudden thrill that was going through the man as he stood there in darkness. And then, suddenly, Jolly Roger bent over him. "Peter, there's three women we'll love as long as we live," he whispered. "There's my mother, and she is dead. There's Nada back there, and we'll never see her again--" His voice choked for an instant. "And then--there's Yellow Bird--" he added. "It's five years since I fed the tribe. Mebby they've had more kids! Boy, let's go and see!" CHAPTER X North and west, in the direction of Yellow Bird's people, went Jolly Roger and Peter after that night. They traveled slowly and cautiously, and with each day Peter came to understand more clearly there was some reason why they must be constantly on their guard. His master, he noticed, was thrillingly attentive whenever a sound came to their ears--perhaps the cracking of a twig, a mysterious movement of brush, or the tread of a cloven hoof. And instinctively he came to know they were evading Man. He remembered vividly their escape from Cassidy and their quiet hiding for many days in the mass of sun-baked rocks which Jolly Roger had called the Stew-Kettle. The same vigilance seemed to be a part of his master's movements now. He did not laugh, or sing, or whistle, or talk loudly. He built fires so small that at first Peter was absorbed in an almost scientific analysis of them; and instead of shooting game which could have been easily secured he set little snares in the evening, and caught fish in the streams. At night they always slept half a mile or more from the place where they had built their tiny supper-fire. And during these hours of sleep Peter was ready to rouse himself at the slightest sound of movement near them. Scarcely a night passed that his low growl of warning did not bring Jolly Roger out of his slumber, a hand on his gun, and his eyes and ears wide open. Whether he would have used the gun had the red-coated police suddenly appeared, McKay had not quite assured himself. Day after day the same old fight went on within him. He analyzed his situation from every point of view, and always--no matter how he went about it--eventually found himself face to face with the same definite fact. If the law succeeded in catching Him it would not trouble itself to punish him for stealing back the Treaty Money, or for holding up Government mails, or for any of his other misdemeanors. It would hang him for the murder of Jed Hawkins. And the minions of the law would laugh at the truth, even if he told it--which he never would. More than once his imaginative genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening. For it was a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly humorous thing. Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly foster-father. Yet it was she--herself--who had killed him! And it was Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was known--and believed. Frequently he went back over the scenes of that tragic night at Cragg's Ridge when all the happiness in the world seemed to be offering itself to him--the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner's, to become his wife, And then--the dark trail--the disheveled girl staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney's cabin, and how--at last--she had saved herself by striking him down with a stick which she had caught up out of the darkness. Would the police believe HIM--an outlaw--if he told the rest of the story?--how he had gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found him dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down? Would they believe him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect the girl he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon himself? No, they would not. He had made the evidence too complete. The world would call him a lying yellow-back if he betrayed what had actually happened on the trail between Cragg's Ridge and Mooney's cabin. And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly Roger's heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never know--the truth. His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years ago. "It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in utter darkness. In it, waking and sleeping, he enshrined the girl who had been willing to give up all other things in the world for him, who had pleaded with him in the last hour of storm down on the edge of civilization that she be given the privilege of accompanying him wherever his fate might lead. That he was an outlaw had not destroyed her faith in him. That he had killed a man--a man unfit to live--had only drawn her arms more closely about him, and had made her more completely a part of him. And a thousand times the maddening thought possessed Jolly Roger--was he wrong, and not right, in refusing to accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept, in spite of all that had happened and all that might happen? Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in the direction of Yellow Bird's country, he crushed the final doubt that oppressed him, and knew that he was right. In his selfishness he had not shackled her to an outlaw. He had left her free. Life and hope and other happiness were ahead of her. He had not destroyed her, and this thought would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his heart, even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his final sacrifice. It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other soul but one can understand. Out of it excitement and passion have been burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into the possession of his own. And now, as they went westward and north toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger. It mellowed his world. It was half an ache, half a steady and undying pain, but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before. His love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all growing things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love for physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about him in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its power to care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come. He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to Yellow Bird's people. And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the time, that Nada was with him. He succeeded in a way that bewildered Peter, for quite frequently the man talked to someone who was not there. The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter's mental faculties with marvelous swiftness. His master, free of egoism and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and Peter struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility of this intimacy and confidence. Instinct, together with human training, taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever than his master. And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely impressed upon him the difference between wanton slaughter and necessary killing. "Everything that's got a breath of life must kill--up to a certain point," Jolly Roger explained to him, repeating the lesson over and over. "And that isn't wrong, Peter. The sin is in killing when you don't have to. See that tree over there, with a vine as big as my wrist winding around it, like a snake? Well, that vine is choking the life out of the tree, and in time the tree will die. But the vine is doing just what God A'mighty meant it to do. It needs a tree to live on. But I'm going to cut the vine, because I think more of the tree than I do the vine. That's _my_ privilege--following my conscience. And we're eating young partridges tonight, because we had to have something to keep us alive. It's the necessity of the thing that counts, Peter. Think you can understand that?" It was pretty hard for Peter at first, but he was observant, and his mind worked quickly. The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest, or on the ground, was impressed upon him. He began to understand there was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it. He looked chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter. Snowshoe rabbits, young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in a day's travel. But unless Jolly Roger gave him a signal, or he was hungry, he would pass a snowshoe unconcernedly. This phase of Peter's development interested Jolly Roger greatly. The outlaw's philosophy had not been punctured by the egotistical "I am the only reasoning being" arguments of narrow-gauged nature scientists. He believed that Peter possessed not only a brain and super-instinct, but also a very positive reasoning power which he was helping to develop. And the process was one that fascinated him. When he was not sleeping, or traveling, or teaching Peter he was usually reading the wonderful little red volumes of history which he had purloined from the mail sledge up near the Barren Lands. He knew their contents nearly by heart. His favorites were the life-stories of Napoleon, Margaret of Anjou, and Peter the Great, and always when he compared his own troubles with the difficulties and tragedies over which these people had triumphed he felt a new courage and inspiration, and faced the world with better cheer. If Nature was his God and Bible, and Nada his Angel, these finger-worn little books written by a man half a century dead were voices out of the past urging him on to his best. Their pages were filled with the vivid lessons of sacrifice, of courage and achievement, of loyalty, honor and dishonor--and of the crashing tragedy which comes always with the last supreme egoism and arrogance of man. He marked the dividing lines, and applied them to himself. And he told Peter of his conclusions. He felt a consuming tenderness for the glorious Margaret of Anjou, and his heart thrilled one day when a voice seemed to whisper to him out of the printed page that Nada was another Margaret--only more wonderful because she was not a princess and a queen. "The only difference," he explained to Peter, "is that Margaret sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw. Which makes Margaret a second-rater compared with Nada," he added. "For Margaret wanted a kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take--just you and me. And that's where we're pulling some Peter the Great stuff," he tried to laugh. "We won't let her do it!" And so they went on, day after day, toward the Wollaston waterways--the country of Yellow Bird and her people. It was early September when they crossed the Geikie and struck up the western shore of Wollaston Lake. The first golden tints were ripening in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in the rustle of the aspen trees. The poplars were yellowing, the ash were blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September. The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, new note in the voices of the wild. The wolf howled again in the middle of the night. The loon forgot his love-sickness, and screamed raucous defiance at the moon. The big snowshoes were no longer tame, but wary and alert, and the owls seemed to slink deeper into darkness and watch with more cunning. And Jolly Roger knew the human masters of the wilderness were returning from the Posts to their cabins and trap-lines, and he advanced with still greater caution. And as he went, watching for smoke and listening for sound, he began to reflect upon the many changes which five years might have produced among Yellow Bird's people. Possibly other misfortunes had come, other winters of hunger and pestilence, scattering and destroying the tribe. It might even be that Yellow Bird was dead. For three days he followed slowly the ragged shore of Wollaston Lake, and foreboding of evil was oppressing him when he came upon the fish-racks of the Indians. They had been abandoned for many days, for black bear tracks fairly inundated the place, and Peter saw two of the bears--fat and unafraid--nosing along the shore where the fish offal had been thrown. It was the next day, in the hour before sunset, that Jolly Roger and Peter came out on the edge of a shelving beach where Indian children were playing in the white sand. Among these children, playing and laughing with them, was a woman. She was tall and slim, with a skirt of soft buckskin that came only a little below her knees, and two shining black braids which tossed like velvety ropes when she ran. And she was running when they first saw her--running away from them, pursued by the children; and then she twisted suddenly, and came toward them, until with a startled cry she stopped almost within the reach of Jolly Roger's hands. Peter was watching. He saw the half frightened look in her face, then the slow widening of her dark eyes, and the quick intake of her breath. And in that moment Jolly Roger cried out a name. "Yellow Bird!" He went to her slowly, wondering if it could be possible the years had touched Yellow Bird so lightly; and Yellow Bird reached out her hands to him, her face flaming up with sudden happiness, and Peter wondered what it was all about as he cautiously eyed the half dozen brown-faced little Indian children who had now gathered quietly about them. In another moment there was an interruption. A girl came through the fringe of willows behind them. It was as if another Yellow Bird had come to puzzle Peter--the same slim, graceful little body, the same shining eyes, and yet she was half a dozen years younger than Nada. For the first time Peter was looking at Sun Cloud, the daughter of Yellow Bird. And in that moment he loved her, just as something gave him confidence and faith in the starry-eyed woman whose hands were in his master's. Then Yellow Bird called, and the girl went to her mother, and Jolly Roger hugged her in his arms and kissed her on the scarlet mouth she turned up to him. Then they hurried along the shore toward the fishing camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news, led by Sun Cloud--with Peter running at her heels. [Illustration: They hurred to the camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news] Never had Peter heard anything from a man's throat like the two yells that came from Slim Buck, Yellow Bird's husband and chief of the tribe, after he had greeted Jolly Roger McKay. It was a note harking back to the old war trails of the Crees, and what followed it that night was most exciting to Peter. Big fires were built of white driftwood, and there was singing and dancing, and a great deal of laughter and eating, and the interminable howling of half a hundred Siwash dogs. Peter did not like the dogs, but he did no fighting because his love for Sun Cloud kept him close to the touch of her little brown hand. That night, in the glow of the big fire outside of Slim Buck's tepee, Jolly Roger's heart thrilled with a pleasure which it had not known for a long time. He loved to look at Yellow Bird. Five years had not changed her. Her eyes were starry bright. Her teeth were like milk. The color still came and went in her brown cheeks, even as it did in Sun Cloud's. All of which, in this heart of a wilderness, meant that she had been happy and prosperous. And he also loved to look at Sun Cloud, who possessed all of that rare wildflower beauty sometimes given to the northern Crees. And it did him good to look at Slim Buck. He was a splendid mate, and a royal father, and Jolly Roger found himself strangely happy in their happiness. In the eyes of men and women and little children he saw that happiness all about him. For three winters there had been splendid trapping, Slim Buck told him, and this season they had caught and dried enough fish to carry them through the following winter, even if black days should come. His people were rich. They had many warm blankets, and good clothes, and the best of tepees and guns and sledges, and several treasures besides. Two of these Yellow Bird and her husband disclosed to Jolly Roger this first night. One of them was a sewing machine, and the other--a phonograph! And Jolly Roger listened to "Mother Machree" and "The Rosary" that night as he sat by Wollaston Lake with six hundred miles of wilderness between him and Cragg's Ridge. Later, when the camp slept, Yellow Bird and Slim Buck and Jolly Roger still sat beside the red embers of their fire, and Jolly Roger told of what had happened down at the edge of civilization. It was what his heart needed, and he left out none of the details. Slim Buck was listening, but Jolly Roger knew he was talking straight at Yellow Bird, and that her warm heart was full of understanding. Softly, in that low Cree voice which is the sweetest of all voices, she asked him many questions about Nada, and gently her slim fingers caressed the tress of Nada's hair which he let her take in her hands. And after a long time, she said. "I have given her a name. She is Oo-Mee, the Pigeon." Slim Buck started at the strange note in her voice. "The Pigeon," he repeated, "Yes, Oo-Mee, the Pigeon," Yellow Bird nodded. She was not looking at them. In the firelight her eyes were glowing pools. Her body had grown a little tense. Without asking Jolly Roger's permission she placed the tress of Nada's hair in her bosom. "Oo-Mee, the Pigeon," she said again, looking far away. "That is her name, because the Pigeon flies fast and straight and true. Over forests and lakes and worlds the Pigeon flies. It is tireless. It is swift. It always--flies home." Slim Buck rose quietly to his feet. "Come," he whispered, looking at Jolly Roger, Yellow Bird did not look at them or speak to them, and Slim Buck--with his hand on Jolly Roger's arm--pulled him gently away. In his eyes was a little something of fear, and yet along with it a sublime faith. "Her spirit will be with Oo-Mee, the Pigeon, tonight," he said in a voice struck with awe. "It will go to this place which you have described, and it will live in the body of the girl, and through Yellow Bird it will tell you tomorrow what has happened, and what is going to happen." In the edge of the shore-willows Jolly Roger stood for a time watching Yellow Bird as she sat under the stars, motionless as a figure graven out of stone. He felt a curious tingling at his heart, something stirring uneasily in his breast, and he stood alone even after Slim Buck had stretched himself out in the soft sand to sleep. He was not superstitious. Yet it was equally a part of his philosophy and his creed to believe in the overwhelming power of the mind. "If you have faith enough, and think hard enough, you can think anything until it comes true," he had told himself more than once. And he knew Yellow Bird possessed that illimitable faith, and that behind her divination lay generations and centuries of an unbreakable certainty in the power of mind over matter. He realized his own limitations, but a mysterious voice in the still night seemed whispering to him that in the crude wisdom of Yellow Bird's brain lay the secret to strange achievement, and that on this night her mind might perform for him what he, in his greater wisdom, would call a miracle. He had seen things like that happen. And he sat down in the sand, sleepless, and with Peter at his feet waited for Yellow Bird to stir. He could see the dull shimmer of starlight in her hair, but the rest of her was a shadow that gave no sign of life. The camp was asleep. Even the dogs were buried in their wallows of sand, and the last red spark of the fires had died out. The hour passed, and another hour followed, and the lids of Jolly Roger's eyes grew heavier as the fading stars seemed to be sinking deeper into infinity. At last he slept, with his back leaning against a sand-dune the children had made. He dreamed, and was flying through the air with Yellow Bird. She was traveling swift and straight, like an arrow, and he had difficulty in keeping up with her, and at last he cried out for her to wait--that he could go no farther. The cry roused him. He opened his eyes, and found cool, gray dawn in the sky. Peter, alert, was muzzling his hand. Slim Buck lay in the sand, still asleep. There was no stir in the camp. And then, with a sudden catch in his breath, he looked toward Yellow Bird's tepee. Yellow Bird still sat in the sand. Through the hours of fading starlight and coming dawn she had not moved. Slowly McKay rose to his feet. When he came to her, making no sound, she looked up. The shimmer of glistening dew was in her hair. Her long lashes were wet with it. Her face was very pale, and her eyes so large and dark that for a moment they startled him. She was tired. Exhaustion was in her slim, limp body. A sigh came from her lips, and her shoulders swayed a little. "Sit down, Neekewa," she whispered, drawing the ropes of her hair about her as if she were cold. Then she drew a slim hand over her eyes, and shivered. "It is well, Neekewa," she spoke softly. "I have gone through the clouds to where lives Oo-Mee, the Pigeon. I found her crying in a trail. I whispered to her and happiness came, and that happiness is going to live--for Neekewa and The Pigeon. It cannot die. It cannot be killed. The Red Coated men of the Great White Father will never destroy it. You will live. She will live. You will meet again--in happiness. And happiness will follow ever after. That much I learned, Neekewa. In happiness--you will meet again." "Where? When?" whispered Jolly Roger, his heart beating with sudden swiftness. Again Yellow Bird passed her hand over her eyes, and as she held it there for a moment she bowed her head until Jolly Roger could see only her dew-wet hair and she said, "In the Country Beyond, Neekewa." Her eyes were looking at him again, big, dark and filled with mystery. "And where is this country, Yellow Bird?" he asked, a strange chill driving the warmth out of his heart. "You mean--up there?" And he pointed to the gray sky above them. "No, it is happiness to come in life, not in death," said Yellow Bird slowly. "It is not beyond the stars. It is--" He waited, leaning toward her. "In the Country Beyond," she repeated with a tired little droop of her head. "And where that is I do not know, Neekewa. I could not pass beyond the great white cloud that shut me out. But it is--somewhere, I will find it. And then I will tell you--and The Pigeon." She stood up, and swayed in the gray light, like one worn out by hard travel. Then she passed into the tepee, and Jolly Roger heard her fall on her blanket-bed. And still stranger whisperings filled his heart as he faced the east, where the first red blush of day drove back the star-mists of dawn. He heard a step in the soft sand, and Slim Buck stood beside him. And he asked. "Did you ever hear of the Country Beyond?" Slim Buck shook his head, and both looked in silence toward the rising sun. Peter was glad when the camp roused itself out of sleep with waking voices, and laughter, and the building of fires. He waited eagerly for Sun Cloud. At last she came out of Yellow Bird's tepee, rubbing her eyes in the face of the glow in the east, and then her white teeth flashed a smile of welcome at him. Together they ran down to the edge of the lake, and Peter wagged his tail while Sun Cloud went out knee-deep and scrubbed her pretty face with handfuls of the cool water. It was a happy day for him. He was different from the Indian dogs, and Sun Cloud and her playmates made much of him. But never, even in their most exciting play, did he entirely lose track of his master. Jolly Roger, to an extent, forgot Peter. He tried to deaden within him the impulses which Yellow Bird's conjuring had roused. He tried to see in them a menace and a danger, and he repeated to himself the folly of placing credence in Yellow Bird's "medicine." But his efforts were futile, and he was honest enough to admit it. The uneasiness was in his breast. A new hope was rising up. And with that hope were fear and suspense, for deep in him was growing stronger the conviction that what Yellow Bird would tell him would be true. He noted the calm and dignified stiffness with which Slim Buck greeted the day. The young chief passed quietly among his people. A word traveled in whispers, voices and footsteps were muffled and before the sun was an hour high there was no tepee standing but one on that white strip of beach. And the one tepee was Yellow Bird's. Not until the camp was gone, leaving her alone, did Yellow Bird come out into the day. She saw the food placed at her tepee door. She saw the empty places where the homes of her people had stood, and in the wet sand of the beach the marks of their missing canoes. Then she turned her pale face and tired eyes to the sun, and unbraided her hair so that it streamed glistening all about her and covered the white sand when she sat down again in front of the smoke-darkened canvas that had become her conjurer's house. Two miles up the beach Slim Buck's people made another camp. But Slim Buck and Jolly Roger remained in the cover of a wooded headland only half a mile from Yellow Bird. They saw her when she came out. They watched for an hour after she sat down in the sand. And then Slim Buck grunted, and with a gesture of his hands said they would go. Jolly Roger protested. It was not safe for Yellow Bird to remain entirely beyond their protection. There were bears prowling about. And human beasts occasionally found their way through the wilderness. But Slim Buck's face was like a bronze carving in its faith and pride. "Yellow Bird only goes with the good spirits," he assured Jolly Roger. "She does not do witchcraft with the bad. And no harm can come while the good spirits are with her. It is thus she has brought us happiness and prosperity since the days of the famine, Neekewa!" He spoke these words in Cree, and McKay answered him in Cree as they turned in the direction of the camp. Half way, Sun Cloud came to meet them, with Peter at her side. She put a brown little hand in Jolly Roger's. It was quite new and pleasant to be kissed as Jolly Roger had kissed her, and she held up her mouth to him again. Then she ran ahead, with Peter yipping foolishly and happily at her moccasined heels. And Jolly Roger said, "I wish I was your brother, Slim Buck, and Nada was Yellow Bird's sister--and that I had many like her," and his eyes followed Sun Cloud with hungry yearning. And as he said these words, Yellow Bird sat with bowed head and closed eyes, with the soft tress of Nada's hair in her hands. It was the physical union between them, and all that day, and the night that followed, Yellow Bird held it in her hand or against her breast as she struggled to send out the soul that was in her on its mission to Oo-Mee the Pigeon. In darkness she buried the food that was left her, and stamped on it with her feet. The sacrifice of her body had begun, and for two days thereafter Jolly Roger and Slim Buck saw no movement of life about the lone tepee in the sand. But the third morning they saw the smoke of a little greenwood fire rising straight up from in front of it. Slim Buck drew in a deep breath. It was the signal fire. "She knows," he said, pointing for Jolly Roger to go. "She is calling you!" The tenseness was gone from the bronze muscles of his face. He was lonely without Yellow Bird, and the signal fire meant she would be with him again soon. Jolly Roger walked swiftly over the white beach. Again he tried to tell himself what folly it all was, and that he was answering the signal-fire only to humor Yellow Bird and Slim Buck. But words, even spoken half aloud, did not quiet the eager beating of his heart. Not until he was very near did Yellow Bird come out of the tepee. And it was then Jolly Roger stopped short, a gasp on his lips. She was changed. Her radiant hair was still down, polished smooth; but her face was whiter than he had ever seen it, and drawn and pinched almost as in the days of the famine. For two days and two nights she had taken no food, and for two days and two nights she had not slept. But there was triumph in her big, wide-open eyes, and Jolly Roger felt something strange rising up in his breast. Yellow Bird held out her hands toward him. "We have been together, The Pigeon and I," she said. "We have slept in each other's arms, and the warmth of her head has lain against my breast. I have learned the secrets, Neekewa--all but one. The spirits will not tell me where lies the Country Beyond. But it is not up there--beyond the stars. It is not in death, but in life you will find it. That they have told me. And you must not go back to where The Pigeon lives, for you will find black desolation there--but always you must keep on and on, seeking for the Country Beyond. You will find it. And there also you will find The Pigeon--and happiness. You cannot fail, Neekewa, yet my heart stings me that I cannot tell you where that strange country is. But when I came to it gold and silver clouds shut it in, and I could see nothing, and yet out of it came the singing of birds and the promise of sweet voices that it shall be found--if you seek faithfully, Neekewa. I am glad." Each word that she spoke in her soft and tremulous Cree was a new message of hope in the empty heart of Jolly Roger McKay. The world might laugh. Men might tap their heads and smile. His own voice might argue and taunt. But deep in his heart he believed. Something of the radiance of the new day came into his face, even as it was returning into Yellow Bird's. He looked about him--east, west, north and south--upon the sunlit glory of water and earth, and suddenly he reached out his arms. "I'll find it, Yellow Bird," he cried. "I'll find this place you call the Country Beyond! And when I do--" He turned and took one of Yellow Bird's slim hands in both his own. "And when I do, we'll come back to you, Yellow Bird," he said. And like a cavalier of old he touched his lips gently to the palm of Yellow Bird's little brown hand. CHAPTER XI Days of new hope and gladness followed in the camp of Yellow Bird and Slim Buck. It was as if McKay, after a long absence, had come back to his own people. The tenderness of mother and sister lay warm in Yellow Bird's breast. Slim Buck loved him as a brother. The wrinkled faces of the old softened when he came near and spoke to them; little children followed him, and at dusk and dawn Sun Cloud held up her mouth to be kissed. For the first time in years McKay felt as if he had found home. The northland Indian Summer held the world in its drowsy arms, and the sun-filled days and the starry nights seemed overflowing with the promise of all time. Each day he put off his going until tomorrow, and each day Slim Buck urged him to remain with them always. But in Yellow Bird's eyes was a strange, quiet mystery, and she did not urge. Each day and night she was watching--and waiting. And at last that for which she watched and waited came to pass. It was night, a dark, still night with a creeping restlessness in it. This restlessness was like the ghostly pulse of a great living body, still for a time, then moving, hiding, whispering between the clouds in the sky and the deeper shadowed earth below. A night of uneasiness, of unseen forces chained and stifled, of impending doubt and oppressive lifelessness. There was no wind, yet under the stars gray masses of cloud sped as if in flight. There was no breeze in the treetops, yet they whispered and sighed. In the strange spell of this midnight, heavy with its unrest, the wilderness lay half asleep, half awake, with the mysterious stillness of death enshrouding it. At the edge of the white sands of Wollaston, whose broad water was like oil tonight, stood the tepees of Yellow Bird's people. Smoke-blackened and seasoned by wind and rain they were dark blotches sentineling the shore of the big lake. Behind them, beyond the willows, were the Indian dogs. From them came an occasional whine, a deep sigh, the snapping of a jaw, and in the gloom their bodies moved restlessly. In the tepees was the spell of this same unrest. Sleep was never quite sure of itself. Men, women and little children twisted and rolled, or lay awake, and weird and distorted shapes and fancies came in dreams. In her tepee Yellow Bird lay with her eyes wide open, staring at the gray blur of the smoke hole above. Her husband was asleep. Sun Cloud, tossing on her blankets, had flung one of her long braids so that it lay across her mother's breast. Yellow Bird's slim fingers played with its silken strands as she looked straight up into nothingness. Wide awake, she was thinking--thinking as Slim Buck--would never be able to think, back to the days when a white woman had been her goddess, and when a little white boy--the woman's son--had called Yellow Bird "my fairy." In the gloom, with foreboding eating at her heart, Yellow Bird's red lips parted in a smile as those days came back to her, for they were pleasing days to think about. But after that the years sped swiftly in her mind until the day when the little boy--a man grown--came to save her tribe, and her own life, and the life of Sun Cloud, and of Slim Buck her husband. Since then prosperity and happiness had been her lot. The spirits had been good. They had not let her grow old, but had kept her still beautiful. And Sun Cloud, her little daughter, was beautiful, and Slim Buck was more than ever her god among men, and her people were happy. And all this she owed to the man who was sleeping under the gloom of the sky outside, the hunted man, the outlaw, "the little boy grown up"--Jolly Roger McKay. As she listened, and stared up at the smoke hole, strange spirits were whispering to her, and Yellow Bird's blood ran a little faster and her eyes grew bigger and brighter in the darkness. They seemed to be accusing her. They told her it was because of her that Roger McKay had come in that winter of starvation and death, and had robbed and almost killed, that she and Slim Buck and little Sun Cloud might live. That was the beginning, and the thrill of it had got into the blood of Neekewa, her "little white brother grown up." And now he was out there, alone with his dog in the night--and the red-coated avengers of the law were hunting him. They wanted him for many things, but chiefly for the killing of a man. Yellow Bird sat up, her little hands clenched about the thick braid of Sun Cloud's hair. She had conjured with the spirits and had let the soul go out of her body that she might learn the future for Neekewa, her white brother. And they had told her that Roger McKay had done right to think of killing. Their voices had whispered to her that he would not suffer more than he had already suffered--and that in the Country Beyond he would find Nada the white girl, and happiness, and peace. Yellow Bird did not disbelieve. Her faith was illimitable. The spirits would not lie. But the unrest of the night was eating at her heart. She tried to lift herself to the whisperings above the tepee top. But they were unintelligible, like many voices mingling, and with them came a dull fear into her soul. She put out a hand, as if to rouse Slim Buck. Then she drew it back, and placed Sun Cloud's braid away from her. She rose to her feet so quietly that even in their restlessness they did not fully awake. Through the tepee door she went, and stood up straight in the night, as if now she might hear more clearly, and understand. For a space she breathed in the oppressive something that was in the air, and her eyes went east and west for sign of storm. But there was no threat of storm. The clouds were drifting slowly and softly, with starlight breaking through their rifts, and there was no moan of thunder or wail of wind far away. Her heart, for a little, seemed to stop its beating, and her hands clasped tightly at her breast. She began to understand, and a strange thrill crept into her. The spirits had put a great burden upon the night so that it might drive sleep from her eyes. They were warning her. They were telling her of danger, approaching swiftly, almost impending. And it was peril for the white man who was sleeping somewhere near. Swiftly she began seeking for him, her naked little brown feet making no sound in the soft white sands of Wollaston. And as she sought, the clouds thinned out above, and the stars shone through more clearly, as if to make easier for her the quest in the gloom. Where he had made his bed of blankets in the sand, close beside a flat mass of water-washed sandstone, Jolly Roger lay half asleep. Peter was wide awake. His eyes gleamed brightly and watchfully. His lank and bony body was tense and alert. He did not whine or snap his jaws, though he heard the Indian dogs occasionally doing so. The comradeship of a fugitive, ever on the watch for his fellow men, had made him silent and velvet-footed, and had sharpened his senses to the keenness of knives. He, too, felt the impelling force of an approaching menace in this night of stillness and mystery, and he watched closely the restless movements of his master's body, and listened with burning eyes to the name which he had spoken three times in the last five minutes of his sleep. It was Nada's name, and as Jolly Roger cried it out softly in the old way, as if Nada was standing before them, he reached out, and his hands struck the sandstone rock. His eyes opened, and slowly he sat up. The sky had cleared of clouds, and there was starlight, and in that starlight Jolly Roger saw a figure standing near him in the sand. At first he thought it was Sun Cloud, for Peter stood with his head raised to her. Then he saw it was Yellow Bird, with her beautiful eyes looking at him steadily and strangely as he awakened. He got upon his feet and went to her, and took one of her hands. It was cold. He felt the shiver that ran through her slim body, and suddenly her eyes swept from him out into the night. "Listen, Neekewa!" Her fingers tightened in his hand. For a space he could hear the beating of her heart. "Twice I have heard it," she whispered then. "Neekewa, you must go!" "Heard what?" he asked. She shook her head. "Something--I don't know what. But it tells me there is danger. And I saw danger over the tepee top, and I have heard whisperings of it all about me. It is coming. It is coming slowly and cautiously. It is very near. Hark, Neekewa! Was that not a sound out on the water?" "I think it was the wing of a duck, Yellow Bird." "And _that_!" she cried swiftly, her fingers tightening still more. "That sound--as if wood strikes on wood!" "The croak of a loon far up the shore, Yellow Bird." She drew her hand away. "Neekewa, listen to me," she importuned him in Cree. "The spirits have made this night heavy with warning. I could not sleep. Sun Cloud twitches and moans. Slim Buck whispers to himself. You were crying out the name of Nada--Oo-Mee the Pigeon--when I came to you. I know. It is danger. It is very near. And it is danger for you." "And only a short time ago you were confident happiness and peace were coming to me, Yellow Bird," reminded Jolly Roger. "The spirits, you said, promised the law should never get me, and I would find Nada again in that strange place you called the Country Beyond. Have the spirits changed their message, because the night is heavy?" Yellow Bird's eyes were staring into darkness. "No, they have not changed," she whispered. "They have spoken the truth. They want to tell me more, but for some reason it is impossible. They have tried to tell me where lies this place they call the Country Beyond--where you will again find Oo-Mee the Pigeon. But a cloud always comes between. And they are trying to tell me what the danger is off there--in the darkness." Suddenly she caught his arm. "Nee-kewa, _did you hear_?" "A fish leaping in the still water, Yellow Bird." He heard a low whimper in Peter's throat, and looking down he saw Peter's muzzle pointing toward the thick cloud of gloom over the lake. "What is it, _Pied-Bot_?" he asked. Peter whimpered again. Jolly Roger touched the cold hand that rested on his arm. "Go back to your bed, Yellow Bird. There is only one danger for me--the red-coated police. And they do not travel in the dark hours of a night like this." "They are coming," she replied. "I cannot hear or see, but they are coming!" Her fingers tightened. "And they are near," she cried softly. "You are nervous, Yellow Bird," he said, thinking of the two days and three nights of her conjuring, when she had neither slept nor taken food, that she might more successfully commune with the spirits. "There is no danger. The night is a hard one for sleep. It has frightened you." "It has warned me," she persisted, standing as motionless as a statue at his side. "Neekewa, the spirits do not forget. They have not forgotten that winter when you came, and my people were dying of famine and sickness--when I dreaded to see little Sun Cloud close her eyes even in sleep, fearing she would never open them again. They have not forgotten how all that winter you robbed the white people over on the Des Chenes, that we might live. If they remember those things, and lie, I would not be afraid to curse them. But they do not lie." Jolly Roger McKay did not answer. Deep down in him that strange something was at work again, compelling him to believe Yellow Bird. She did not look at him, but in her low Cree voice, soft as the mellow notes of a bird, she was saying: "You will be going very soon, Neekewa, and I shall not see you again for a long time. Do not forget what I have told you. And you must believe. Somewhere there is this place called the Country Beyond. The spirits have said so. And it is there you will find your Oo-Mee the Pigeon--and happiness. But if you go back to the place where you left The Pigeon when you fled from the red-coated men of the law, you will find only blackness and desolation. Believe, and you shall be guided. If you disbelieve--" She stopped. "You heard that, Neekewa? It was not the wing of a duck, nor was it the croak of a loon far up the shore, or a fish leaping in the still water. _It was a paddle_!" In the star-gloom Jolly Roger McKay bowed his head, and listened. "Yes, a paddle," he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. "Probably it is one of your people returning to camp, Yellow Bird." She turned toward him, and stood very near. Her hands reached out to him. Her hair and eyes were filled with the velvety glow of the stars, and for an instant he saw the tremble of her parted lips. "Goodby, Neekewa," she whispered. And then, without letting her hands touch him, she was gone. Swiftly she ran to Slim Buck's tepee, and entered, and very soon she came out again with Slim Buck beside her. Jolly Roger did not move, but watched as Yellow Bird and her husband went down to the edge of the lake, and stood there, waiting for the strange canoe to pass--or come in. It was approaching. Slowly it came up, an indistinct shadow at first, but growing clearer, until at last he could see the silhouette of it against the star-silvered water beyond. There were two people in it. Before the canoe reached the shore Slim Buck stood out knee-deep in the water and hailed it. A voice answered. And at the sound of that voice McKay dropped like a shot beside Peter, and Peter's lips curled up, and he snarled. His master's hand warned him, and together they slipped back into the shadows, and from under a piece of canvas Jolly Roger dragged forth his pack, and quietly strapped it over his shoulders while he waited and listened. And then, as he heard the voice again, he grinned, and chuckled softly. "It's Cassidy, _Pied-Bot_! We can't lose that redheaded fox, can we?" A good humored deviltry lay in his eyes, and Peter--looking up--thought for a moment his master was laughing. Then Jolly Roger made a megaphone of his hands, and called very clearly out into the night. "Ho, Cassidy! Is that you, Cassidy?" Peter's heart was choking him as he listened. He sensed a terrific danger. There was no sound at the edge of the lake. There was no sound anywhere. For a few moments a death-like stillness followed Jolly Roger's words. Then a voice came in answer, each word cutting the gloom with the decisive clearness of a bullet coming from a gun. "Yes, this is Cassidy--Corporal Terence Cassidy, of 'M' Division, Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Is that you, McKay?" "Yes, it's me," replied Jolly Roger. "Does the wager still hold, Cassidy?" "It holds." There was a shadowy movement on the beach. The voice came again. "Watch yourself, McKay. If I see you I shall fire!" With drawn gun Cassidy rushed toward the spot where Jolly Roger and Peter had stood. It was empty now, except for the bit of old canvas. Cassidy's Indian came up and stood behind him, and for many minutes they listened for the crackling of brush. Slim Buck joined them, and last came Yellow Bird, her dark eyes glowing like pools of fire in their excitement. Cassidy looked at her, marveling at her beauty, and suspicious of something that was in her face. He went back to the beach. There he caught himself short, astonishment bringing a sharp exclamation from his lips. His canoe and outfit were gone! Out of the star-gloom behind him floated a soft ripple of laughter as Yellow Bird ran to her tepee. And from the mist of water--far out--came a voice, the voice of Jolly Roger McKay. "Goodby, Cassidy!" With it mingled the defiant bark of a dog. In her tepee, a moment later, Yellow Bird drew Sun Cloud's glossy head close against her warm breast, and turned her radiant face up thankfully to the smoke hole in the tepee top, through which the spirits had whispered their warning to her. Indistinctly, and still farther away, her straining ears heard again the cry, "Goodby, Cassidy!" CHAPTER XII In Cassidy's canoe, driving himself with steady strokes deeper into the mystery of the starlit waters of Wollaston, Jolly Roger felt the night suddenly filled with an exhilarating tonic. Its deadness was gone. Its weight had lifted. A ripple broke the star gleams where an increasing breeze touched the surface of the lake. And the thrill of adventure stirred in his blood. He laughed as he put his skill and strength in the sweep of his paddle, and for a time the thought that he was an outlaw, and in losing Nada had lost everything in life worth righting for, was not so oppressive. It was the old, joyous laugh, stirred by his sense of humor, and the trick he had played on Cassidy. He could imagine Cassidy back on the shore, his temper redder than his hair as he cursed and tore up the sand in his search for another canoe. "We're inseparable," Jolly Roger explained to Peter. "Wherever I go, Cassidy is sure to follow. You see, it's this way. A long time ago someone gave Cassidy what they call an assignment, and in that assignment it says 'go get Jolly Roger McKay, dead or alive'--or something to that effect. And Cassidy has been on the job ever since. But he can't quite catch up with me, _Pied-Bot_. I'm always a little ahead." And yet, even as he laughed, there was in Jolly Roger's heart a yearning to which he had never given voice. Half a dozen times he might have killed Cassidy, and an equal number of times Cassidy might have killed him. But neither had taken advantage of the opportunity to destroy. They had played the long and thrilling game like men, and because of the fairness and sportsmanship of the man who hunted him Jolly Roger thought of Cassidy as he might have thought of a brother, and more than once he yearned to go to him, and hold out his hand in friendship. Yet he knew Corporal Cassidy was the deadliest menace the earth held for him, a menace that had followed him like a shadow through months and years--across the Barren Lands, along the rim of the Arctic, down the Mackenzie, and back again--a menace that never tired, and was never far behind in that ten thousand miles of wilderness they had covered. Together in the bloodstirring game of One against One they had faced the deadliest perils of the northland. They had gone hungry, and cold, and more than once a thousand miles of nothingness lay behind them, and death seemed preferable to anything that might lie ahead. Yet in that aloneness, when companionship was more precious than anything else on earth, neither had cried quits. The game had gone on, Cassidy after his man--and Jolly Roger McKay fighting for his freedom. As he headed his canoe north and east, Jolly Roger thought again of the wager made weeks ago down at Cragg's Ridge, when he had turned the tables on Cassidy and when Cassidy had made a solemn oath to resign from the service if he failed to get his man in their next encounter. He knew Cassidy would keep his word, and something told him that tonight the last act in this tragedy of two had begun. He chuckled again as he pictured the probable course of events on shore. Cassidy, backed by the law, was demanding another canoe and a necessary outfit of Slim Buck. Slim Buck, falling back on his tribal dignity, was killing all possible time in making the preparations. When pursuit was resumed Jolly Roger would have at least a mile the start of the red-headed nemesis who hung to his trail. And Wollaston Lake, sixty miles from end to end, and half as wide, offered plenty of room in which to find safety. The rising of the wind, which came from the south and west, was pleasing to Jolly Roger, and he put less caution and more force into the sweep of his paddle. For two hours he kept steadily eastward, and then swung a little north, guiding himself by the stars. With the breaking of dawn he made out the thickly wooded shore on the opposite side of the lake from Slim Buck's camp, and before the sun was half an hour high he had drawn up his canoe at the tip of a headland which gave him a splendid view of the lake in all directions. From this point, comfortably encamped in the cool shadows of a thick clump of spruce, Jolly Roger and Peter watched all that day for a sign of their enemy. As far as the eye could reach no movement of human life appeared on the quiet surface of Wollaston. Not until that hazy hour between sunset and dusk did he build a fire and cook a meal from the supplies in Cassidy's pack, for he knew smoke could be discerned much farther than a canoe. Yet even as he observed this caution he was confident there was no longer any danger in returning to Yellow Bird and her people. "You see, _Pied-Bot_," he said, discussing the matter with Peter, while he smoked a pipeful of tobacco in the early evening, "Cassidy thinks we're on our way north, as fast as we can go. He'll hit for the upper end of the Lake and the Black River waterway, and keep right on into the Porcupine country. It's a big country up there, and we've always taken plenty of space for our travels. Shall we go back to Yellow Bird, Peter? And Sun Cloud?" Peter tried to answer, and thumped his tail, but even as he asked the questions there was a doubt growing in Jolly Roger's mind. He wanted to go back, and as darkness gathered about him he was urged by a great loneliness. Only Yellow Bird grieved with him in his loss of Nada, and understood how empty life had become for him. She had, in a way, become a part of Nada; her presence raised him out of despair, her voice gave him hope, her unconquerable spirit--fighting for his happiness--inspired him until he saw light where there had been only darkness. The impelling desire to return to her brought him to his feet and down to the pebbly shore of the lake, where the water rippled softly in the thickening gloom. But a still more powerful force held him back, and he went to his blankets, spread over a thick couch of balsam boughs. For hours his eyes were wide open and sleepless. He no longer thought of Cassidy, but of Yellow Bird. Doubt--a charitable inclination to half believe--gave way in him to a conviction which he could not fight down. More than once in his years of wilderness life strange facts had compelled him to give some credence to the power of the Indian conjurer. Belief in the mastery of the mind was part of his faith in nature. It had come to him from his mother, who had lived and died in the strength of her creed. "Think hard, and with faith, if you want anything to come true," she had told him. And this was also Yellow Bird's creed. Was it possible she had told him the truth? Had her mind actually communed with the mind of Nada? Had she, through the sheer force of her illimitable faith, projected her subconscious self into the future that she might show him the way? His eyes were staring, his ears unhearing, as he thought of the proof which Yellow Bird had given to him. A few hours ago she had brought him warning of impending danger. There had been no hesitation and no doubt. She had come to him unequivocal and sure. Without seeing, without hearing, she knew Cassidy was stealing upon him through the night. In the darkness Jolly Roger sat up, his heart beating fast. Without effort, and with no thought of the necessity of proof, Yellow Bird had given him a test of her power. It had been a spontaneous and unstaged thing, a woman's heart reaching out for him--as she had promised that it would. And yet, even as the simplicity and truth of it pressed upon him, doubt followed with its questions. If, after this, Yellow Bird had told him to return to Nada as swiftly as he could, he would have believed, and this night would have seen him on his way. But she had warned him against this, predicting desolation and grief if he returned. She had urged him to go on, somewhere, anywhere, seeking for an illusion and an unreality which the spirits had named, to her as the Country Beyond. And when he reached this Country Beyond, wherever it might be, he would possess Nada again, and happiness for all time. After all, there was something archaically crude in what he was trying to believe, when he came to analyze it. Yellow Bird possessed her powers, but they were definitely limited. And to believe beyond those limitations, to ride upon the wings of superstition and imagination, was sheer savagery. Jolly Roger stretched himself upon his blankets again, repeating this final argument to himself. But as the night drew closer about him, and his eyes closed, and sleep came, there was a lightness in his heart which he had not known for many days. He dreamed, and his dream was of Nada. He was with her again and it seemed, in this dream, that Yellow Bird was always watching them, and they could not quite get away from her. They ran through the jackpine openings where the strawberries and blue violets grew, and he always ran behind Nada, so he could see her brown curls flying about her. But they never could rid themselves of Yellow Bird, no matter how fast they ran or where they tried to hide. From somewhere Yellow Bird's dark eyes would look out at them, and finally, laughing at his own discomfiture, he drew Nada down beside him in a little fen, white and yellow and blue with wildflowers, and boldly took her head in his arms and kissed her--with Yellow Bird looking at them from behind a banksian clump twenty feet away. So real was the kiss, and so real the warm pressure of Nada's slim arms about his neck that he awoke with a glad cry--and sat up to find the dawn had come. For a few moments he sat stupidly, looking about him as if not quite believing the unreality of it all. Then with Peter he went down to the edge of the lake. All that day Peter sensed a quiet change in his master. Jolly Roger did not talk. He did not whistle or laugh, but moved quietly when he moved at all, with a set, strange look in his face. He was making his last big fight against the desire to return to Cragg's Ridge. Yellow Bird's predictions, and her warning, had no influence with him now. He was thinking of Nada alone. She was back there, waiting for him, praying for his return, ready and happy to become a fugitive with him--to accept her chances of life or death, of happiness or grief, in his company. A dozen times the determination to return for her almost won. But each time came the other picture--a vision of ceaseless flight, of hiding, of hunger and cold and never ending hardship, and at the last, inevitable as the dawning of another day--prison, and possibly the hangman. Not until late that afternoon did Peter see the old Jolly Roger in the face of his master. And Jolly Roger said: "We've made up our mind, _Pied-Bot_. We can't go back. We'll hit north and spend the winter along the edge of the Barren Lands. It's the biggest country I know of, and if Cassidy comes--" He shrugged his shoulders grimly. In half an hour they had started, with the sun beginning to sink in the west. For two days Jolly Roger and Peter paddled their way slowly up the eastern shore of Wollaston. That he had correctly analyzed the mental arguments which would guide Cassidy in his pursuit Jolly Roger had little doubt. He would keep to the west shore, and up through the Hatchet Lake and Black River waterways, as his quarry had never failed to hit straight for the farther north in time of peril. Meanwhile Jolly Roger had decided to make his way without haste up the east shore of Wollaston, and paddle north and east through the Du Brochet and Thiewiaza River waterways. If these courses were followed, each hour would add to the distance between them, and when the way was safe they would head straight for the Barren Lands. Peter, and only Peter, sensed the glory of that third afternoon when they paddled slowly ashore close to the shimmering stream of spring water that was called Limping Moose Creek. The sun was still two hours high in the west. There was no wind, and Wollaston was like a mirror; yet in the still air was the clean, cool tang of early autumn, and shoreward the world reached out in ridges and billows of tinted forests, with a September haze pulsing softly over them, fleecy as the misty shower of a lady's powder puff. It was destined to be a memorable afternoon for Peter, a going down of the sun that he would never forget as long as he lived. Yet there was no warning of the thing impending, and his eyes saw only the mystery and wonder of the big world, and his ears heard only the drowsing murmur of it, and his nose caught only the sweet scents of cedars and balsams and of flowering and ripening things. Straight ahead, beyond the white shore line, was a low ridge, and this ridge--where it was not purple and black with the evergreen--was red with the crimson blotches of mountain-ash berries, and patches of fire flowers that glowed like flame in the setting sun. From out of this paradise, as they drew near to it, came softly the voice and song of birds and the chatter of red squirrels. A big jay was screeching over it all, and between the first ridge and the second--which rose still higher beyond it--a cloud of crows were circling excitedly over a mother black bear and her half grown cubs as they feasted on the red ash berries. But Peter could not smell the bears, nor hear them, and the distant crows were of less interest than the wonder and mystery of the shore close at hand. He turned from his place in the bow of the canoe, and looked at his master. There was little of inspiration in Jolly Roger's face or eyes. The glory of the world ahead gave him no promise, as it gave promise to Peter. Beyond what he could see there lay, for him, a vast emptiness, a chaos of loneliness, an eternity of shattered hopes and broken dreams. Love of life was gone out of him. He saw no beauty. The sun had changed. The sky was different. The bigness of his wilderness no longer thrilled him, but oppressed him. Peter sensed sharply the change in his master without knowing the reason for it. Just as the world had changed for Jolly Roger, so Jolly Roger had changed for Peter. They landed on a beach of sand, soft as a velvet carpet. Peter jumped out. A long-legged sandpiper and her mate ran down the shore ahead of him. He perked up his angular ears, and then his nose caught a fresh scent under his feet where a porcupine had left his trail. And he heard more clearly the raucous tumult of the jay and the musical chattering of the red squirrels. All these things were satisfactory to Peter. They were life, and life thrilled him, just as it had thrilled his master a few days ago. He adventured a little distance up to the edge of the green willows and the young birch and the crimson masses of fire flowers that fringed the beginning of the forest. It had rained recently here, and the scents were fresh and sweet. He found a wild currant bush, glistening with its luscious black berries, and began nibbling at them. A gopher, coming to his supper bush, gave a little squeak of annoyance, and Peter saw the bright eyes of the midget glaring at him from under a big fern leaf. Peter wagged his tail, for the savagery of his existence was qualified by that mellowing sense of humor which had always been a part of his master. He yipped softly, in a companionable sort of way. And then there smote upon his ears a sound which hardened every muscle in his body. "Throw up your hands, McKay!" He turned his head. Close to him stood a man. In an instant he had recognized him. It was the man whose scent he had first discovered down at Cragg's Ridge, the man from whom his master was always running away, the man whose voice he had heard again at Yellow Bird's Camp a few nights ago--Corporal Terence Cassidy, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Twenty paces away stood McKay. His dunnage was on his back, his paddle in his hand. And Cassidy, smiling grimly, a dangerous humor in his eyes, was leveling an automatic at his breast. It was, in that instant, a tableau which no man could ever forget. Cassidy was bareheaded, and the sun burned hotly in his red hair. And his face was red, and in the pale blue of his Irish eyes was a fierce joy of achievement. At last, after months and years, the thrilling game of One against One was at an end. Cassidy had made the last move, and he was winner. For half a minute after the command to throw up his hands McKay did not move. And Cassidy did not repeat the command, for he sensed the shock that had fallen upon his adversary, and was charitable enough to give him time. And then, with something like a deep sigh from between his lips, Jolly Roger's body sagged. The dunnage dropped from his shoulder to the sand. The paddle slipped from his hand. Slowly he raised his arms above his head, and Cassidy laughed softly. A few days ago McKay would have grinned back, coolly, good humoredly, appreciative of the other's craftsmanship even in the hour of his defeat. But today there was another soul within him. His eyes no longer saw the old Cassidy, brave and loyal to his duty, a chivalrous enemy, the man he had yearned to love as brother loves brother, even in the hours of sharpest pursuit. In Cassidy he saw now the hangman himself. The whole world had turned against him, and in this hour of his greatest despair and hopelessness a bitter fate had turned up Cassidy to deal him the finishing blow. A swift rage burned in him, even as he raised his hands. It swept through his brain in a blinding inundation. He did not think of the law, or of death, or of freedom. It was the unfairness of the thing that filled his soul with the blackness of one last terrible desire for vengeance. Cassidy's gun, leveled at his breast, meant nothing. A thousand guns leveled at his breast would have meant nothing. A choking sound came from his lips, and like a shot his right hand went to his revolver holster. In that last second or two Cassidy had foreseen the impending thing, and with the movement of the other's hand he cried out: "Stop! For God's sake stop--or I shall fire!" Even into the soul of Peter there came in that moment the electrical thrill of something terrific about to happen, of impending death, of tragedy close at hand. Once, a long time ago, Peter had felt another moment such as this--when he had buried his fangs in Jed Hawkins' leg to save Nada. In that fraction of a second which carried Peter through space, Corporal Cassidy's finger was pressing the trigger of his automatic, for McKay's gun was half out of its holster. He was aiming at the other's shoulder, somewhere not to kill. The shock of Peter's assault came simultaneously with the explosion of his gun, and McKay heard the hissing spit of the bullet past his ear. His arm darted out. And as Peter buried his teeth deeper into Cassidy's leg, he heard a second shot, and knew that it came from his master. There was no third. Cassidy drooped, and something like a little laugh came from him--only it was not a laugh. His body sagged, and then crumpled down, so that the weight of him fell upon Peter. For many seconds after that Jolly Roger stood with his gun in his hand, not a muscle of his body moving, and with something like stupor in his staring eyes. Peter struggled out from under Cassidy, and looked inquisitively from his master to the man who lay sprawled out like a great spider upon the sand. It was then that life seemed to come back into Jolly Roger's body. His gun fell, as if it was the last thing in the world to count for anything now, and with a choking cry he ran to Cassidy and dropped upon his knees beside him. "Cassidy--Cassidy--" he cried. "Good God, I didn't mean to do it! Cassidy, old pal--" The agony in his voice stilled the growl in Peter's throat. McKay saw nothing for a space, as he raised Cassidy's head and shoulders, and brushed back the mop of red hair. Everything was a blur before his eyes. He had killed Cassidy. He knew it. He had shot to kill, and not once in a hundred times did he miss his mark. At last he was what the law wanted him to be--a murderer. And his victim was Cassidy--the man who had played him fairly and squarely from beginning to end, the man who had never taken a mean advantage of him, and who had died there in the white sand because he had not shot to kill. With sobbing breath he cried out his grief, and then, looking down, he saw the miracle in Cassidy's face. The Irishman's eyes were wide open, and there was pain, and also a grin, about his mouth. "I'm glad you're sorry," he said. "I'd hate to have a bad opinion of you, McKay. But--you're a rotten shot!" His body sagged heavily, and the grin slowly left his lips, and a moan came from between them. He struggled and spoke. "It may be--you'll want help, McKay. If you do--there's a cabin half a mile up the creek. Saw the smoke--heard axe--I don't blame you. You're a good sport--pretty quick--but--rotten shot! Oh, Lord--such--rotten--shot--" And he tried vainly to grin up into Jolly Roger's face as he became a lifeless weight in the other's arms. Jolly Roger was sobbing. He was sobbing, in a strange, hard man-fashion, as he tore open Cassidy's shirt and saw the red wound that went clean through Cassidy's right breast just under the shoulder. And Peter still heard that strange sound coming from his lips, a moaning as if for breath, as his master ran and brought up water, and worked over the fallen man. And then he got under Cassidy, and rose up with him on his shoulders, and staggered off with him toward the creek. There he found a path, a narrow foot trail, and not once did he stop with his burden until he came into a little clearing, out of which Cassidy had seen the smoke rising. In this clearing was a cabin, and from the cabin came an old man to meet him--an old man and a girl. At first something shot up into Peter's throat, for he thought it was Nada who came behind the grizzled and white-headed man. There was the same lithe slimness in her body, the same brown glint in her hair, and the same--but he saw then that it was not Nada. She was older. She was a bit taller. And her face was white when she saw the bleeding burden on Jolly Roger's back. "I shot him," panted McKay. "God knows I didn't mean to! I'm afraid--" He did not finish giving voice to the fear that Cassidy was dead--or dying, and for a moment he saw only the big staring eyes of the girl as the gray-bearded man helped him with his burden. Not until the Irishman was on a cot in the cabin did he discover how childishly weak he had become and what a terrific struggle he had made with the weight on his shoulders. He sank into a chair, while the old trapper worked over Cassidy. He heard the girl call him grandfather. She was no longer frightened, and she moved like a swift bird about the cabin, getting water and bandages and pillows, and the sight of fresh blood and of Cassidy's dead-white face brought a glow of tenderness into her eyes. McKay, sitting dumbly, saw that her hands were doing twice the work his own could have accomplished, and not until he heard a low moan from the wounded man did he come to her side. "The bullet went through clean as a whistle," the old man said. "Lucky you don't use soft nosed bullets, friend." A deep sigh came from Cassidy's lips. His eyelids fluttered, and then slowly his eyes opened. The girl was bending over him, and Cassidy saw only her face, and the brown sheen of her hair. "He'll live?" Jolly Roger said tremulously. The older man remained mute. It was Cassidy, turning his head a little, who answered weakly. "Don't worry, McKay. I'll--live." Jolly Roger bent over the cot, between Cassidy and the girl. Gently he took one of the wounded man's hands in both his own. "I'm sorry, old man," he whispered. "You won, fair and square. And I won't go far away. I'll be waiting for you when you get on your feet. I promise that. I'll wait." A wan smile came over Cassidy's lips, and then he moaned again, and his eyes closed. The girl thrust Jolly Roger back. "No--you better not go far, an' you better wait," she said, and there was an unspoken thing in the dark glow of her eyes that made him think of Nada on that day when she told him how Jed Hawkins had struck her in the cabin at Cragg's Ridge. That night Jolly Roger made his camp close to the mouth of the Limping Moose. And for three days thereafter his trail led only between this camp and the cabin of old Robert Baron and his granddaughter, Giselle. All this time Cassidy was telling things in a fever. He talked a great deal about Jolly Roger. And the girl, nursing him night and day, with scarcely a wink of sleep between, came to believe they had been great comrades, and had been inseparable for a long time. Even then she would not let McKay take her place at Cassidy's side. The third day she started him off for a post sixty miles away to get a fresh supply of bandages and medicines. It was evening, three days later, when Jolly Roger and Peter returned. The windows of the cabin were brightly lighted, and McKay came up to one of these windows and looked in. Cassidy was bolstered up in his cot. He was very much alive, and on the floor at his side, sitting on a bear rug, was the girl. A lump rose in Jolly Roger's throat. Quietly he placed the bundle which he had brought from the post close up against the door, and knocked. When Giselle opened it he had disappeared into darkness, with Peter at his heels. The next morning he found old Robert and said to him: "I'm restless, and I'm going to move a little. I'll be back in two weeks. Tell Cassidy that, will you?" Ten minutes later he was paddling up the shore of Wollaston, and for a week thereafter he haunted the creeks and inlets, always on the move. Peter saw him growing thinner each day. There was less and less of cheer in his voice, seldom a smile on his lips, and never did his laugh ring out as of old. Peter tried to understand, and Jolly Roger talked to him, but not in the old happy way. "We might have finished him, an' got rid of him for good," he said to Peter one chilly night beside their campfire. "But we couldn't, just like we couldn't have brought Nada up here with us. And we're going back. I'm going to keep that promise. We're going back, Peter, if we hang for it!" And Jolly Roger's jaw would set grimly as he measured the time between. The tenth day came and he set out for the mouth of the Canoe River. On the afternoon of the twelfth he paddled slowly into Limping Moose Creek. Without any reason he looked at his watch when he started for old Robert's cabin. It was four o'clock. He was two days ahead of his promise, and there was a bit of satisfaction in that. There was an odd thumping at his heart. He had faith in Cassidy, a belief that the Irishman would call their affair a draw, and tell him to take another chance in the big open. He was the sort of man to live up to the letter of a wager, when it was honestly made. But, if he didn't-- Jolly Roger paused long enough to take the cartridges from his gun. There would be no more shooting'--on his part. The mellow autumn sun was flooding the open door of the cabin when he came up. He heard laughter. It was Giselle. She was talking, too. And then he heard a man's voice--and from far off to his right came the chopping of an axe. Old Robert was at work. Giselle and Cassidy were at home. He stepped up to the door, coughing to give notice of his approach. And then, suddenly, he stopped, staring thunderstruck at what was happening within. Terence Cassidy was sitting in a big chair. The girl was behind him. Her white arms were around his neck, her face was bent down, her lips were kissing him. In an instant Cassidy's eyes had caught him. "Come in," he cried, so suddenly and so loudly that it startled the girl. "McKay, come in!" Jolly Roger entered, and the girl stood up straight behind Cassidy's chair, her cheeks aflame and her eyes filled with the glow of the sunset. And Terence Cassidy was grinning in that old triumphant way as he leaned forward in his chair, gripping the arms of it with both hands. "McKay, you've lost," he cried. "I'm the winner!" In the same moment he took the girl's hand and drew her from behind his chair. "Giselle, do as you said you were going to do. Prove to him that I've won." Slowly she came to Jolly Roger. Her cheeks were like the red of the sunset. Her eyes were flaming. Her lips were parted. And dumbly he waited, and wondered, until she stood close to him. Then, swiftly, her arms were around his neck, and she kissed him. In an instant she was back on her knees at the wounded man's side, her burning face hidden against him, and Cassidy was laughing, and holding out both hands to McKay. "McKay, Roger McKay, I want you to meet Mrs. Terence Cassidy, my wife," he said. And the girl raised her face, so that her shining eyes were on Jolly Roger. Still dumbly he stood where he was. "The Missioner from Du Brochet was here yesterday, and married us," he heard Cassidy saying. "And we've written out my resignation together, old man. We've both won. I thank God you put that bullet into me down on the shore, for it's brought me paradise. And here's my hand on it, McKay--forever and ever!" Half an hour later, when McKay stumbled out into the forest trail again, his eyes were blinded by tears and his heart choked by a new hope as big as the world itself. Yellow Bird was right, and God must have been with her that night when her soul went to commune with Nada's. For Yellow Bird had proved herself again. And now he believed her. He believed in the world again. He believed in love and happiness and the glory of life, and as he went down the narrow trail to his canoe, with Peter close behind him, his heart was crying out Nada's name and Yellow Bird's promise that sometime--somewhere--they two would find happiness together, as Giselle and Terence Cassidy had found it. And Peter heard the chopping of the distant axe, and the song of birds, and the chattering of squirrels--but thrilling his soul most of all was the voice of his master, the old voice, the glad voice, the voice he had first learned to love at Cragg's Ridge in the days of blue violets and red strawberries, when Nada had filled his world. CHAPTER XIII McKay still had his mind on a certain stretch of timber that reached out into the Barren Lands, hundreds of miles farther north. In this hiding place, three years before, he had built himself a cabin, and had caught foxes during half the long winter. Not only the cabin, but the foxes, were drawing him. Necessity was close upon his heels. What little money he possessed after leaving Cragg's Ridge was exhausted, his supplies were gone, and his boots and clothes were patched with deer hide. In the Snowbird Lake country, a week after he left Cassidy in his paradise at Wollaston, he fell in with good fortune. Two trappers had come in from Churchill. One of them was sick, and the other needed help in the building of their winter cabin. McKay remained with them for ten days, and when he continued his journey northward his pack was stuffed with supplies, and he wore new boots and more comfortable clothes. It was the middle of October when he found his old cabin, a thousand miles from Cragg's Ridge. It was as he had left it three years ago. No one had opened its door since then. The little box stove was waiting for a fire. Behind it was a pile of wood. On the table were the old tin dishes, and hanging from babiche cords fastened to the roof timbers, out of reach of mice and ermine, were blankets and clothing and other possessions he had left behind him in that winter break-up of what seemed like ages ago to him. He raised a small section in the floor, and there were his traps, thickly coated with caribou grease. For half an hour before he built a fire he sought eagerly for the things he had concealed here and there. He found oil, and a tin lamp, and candles, and as darkness of the first night gathered outside a roaring fire sent sparks up the chimney, and the little cabin's one window glowed with light, and the battered old coffee pot bubbled and steamed again, as if rejoicing at his return. With the breaking of another day he immediately began preparations for the season's trapping. In two days' hunting he killed three caribou, his winter meat. Then he cut wood, and made his strychnine poison baits, and marked out his trap-lines. The first of November brought the chill whisperings of an early winter through the Northland. Farther south autumn was dying, or dead. The last of the red ash berries hung shriveled and frost-bitten on naked twigs, freezing nights were nipping the face of the earth, the voices of the wilderness were filled with a new note and the winds held warning for every man and beast between Hudson's Bay and the Great Slave and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea. Seven years before there had come such a winter, and the land had not forgotten it--a winter sudden and swift, deadly in its unexpectedness, terrific in its cold, bringing with it such famine and death as the Northland had not known for two generations. But this year there was premonition. Omen of it came with the first wailing night winds that bore the smell of icebergs from over the black forests north and west. The moon came up red, and it went down red, and the sun came up red in the morning. The loon's call died a month ahead of its time. The wild geese drove steadily south when they should have been feeding from the Kogatuk to Baffin's Bay, and the beaver built his walls thick, and anchored his alders and his willows deep so that he would not starve when the ice grew heavy. East, west, north and south, in forest and swamp, in the trapper's cabin and the wolf's hiding-place, was warning of it. Gray rabbits turned white. Moose and caribou began to herd. The foxes yipped shrilly in the night, and a new hunger and a new thrill sent the wolves hunting in packs, while the gray geese streaked southward under the red moon overhead. Through this November, and all of December, Jolly Roger and Peter were busy from two hours before dawn of each day until late at night. The foxes were plentiful, and McKay was compelled to shorten his lines and put out fewer baits, and on the tenth of December he set out for a fur-trading post ninety miles south with two hundred and forty skins. He had made a toboggan, and a harness for Peter, and pulling together they made the trip in three days, and on the fourth started for the cabin again with supplies and something over a thousand dollars in cash. Through the weeks of increasing storm and cold that followed, McKay continued to trap, and early in February he made another trip to the fur post. It was on their return that they were caught in the Black Storm. It will be a long time before the northland will forget that storm. It was a storm in which the Sarcees died to a man, woman and child over on the Dubawnt waterways, and when trees froze solid and split open with the sharp explosions of high-power guns. In it, all furred and feathered life and all hoof and horn along the edge of the Barren Lands from Aberdeen Lake to the Coppermine was swallowed up. It was in this storm that streams froze solid, and the man who was cautious fastened a babiche rope about his waist when he went forth from his cabin for wood or water, so that his wife might help to pull and guide him back through that blinding avalanche of wind and freezing fury that held a twisted and broken world in its grip. In the country west of Artillery Lake and south of the Theolon River, Jolly Roger and Peter were compelled to "dig in." They were in a country where the biggest stick of wood that thrust itself up out of the snow was no bigger than McKay's thumb; a country of green grass and succulent moss on which the caribou fed in season, but a hell on earth when arctic storm howled and screamed across it in winter. Piled up against a mass of rock Jolly Roger found a huge snow drift. This drift was as long as a church and half as high, with its outer shell blistered and battered to the hardness of rock by wind and sleet. Through this shell he cut a small door with his knife, and after that dug out the soft snow from within until he had a room half as big as his cabin, and so snug and warm after a little with the body heat of himself and Peter that he could throw off the thick coat which he wore. To Peter, in the first night of this storm, it seemed as though all the people in the world were shrieking and wailing and sobbing in the blackness outside. Jolly Roger sat smoking his pipe at intervals in the gloom, though there was little pleasure in smoking a pipe in darkness. The storm did not oppress him, but filled him with an odd sense of security and comfort. The wind shrieked and lashed itself about his snow-dune, but it could not get at him. Its mightiest efforts to destroy only beat more snow upon him, and made him safer and warmer. In a way, there was something of humor as well as tragedy in its wild frenzy, and Peter heard him laugh softly in the darkness. More and more frequently he had heard that laugh since those warm days of autumn when they had last met the red-headed man, Terence Cassidy, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, and his master had shot him on the white shore of Wollaston. "You see," said McKay, caressing Peter's hairy neck in the gloom. "Everything is turning out right for us, and I'm beginning to believe more and more what Yellow Bird told us, and that in the end we're going to be happy--somewhere--with Nada. What do you think, _Pied-Bot_? Shall we take a chance, and go back to Cragg's Ridge in the spring?" Peter wriggled himself in answer, as a wild shriek of wind wailed over the huge snow-dune. Jolly Roger's fingers tightened at Peter's neck. "Well, we're going," he said, as though he was telling Peter something new. "I'm believing Yellow Bird, _Pied-Bot_. I'm believing her--now. What she told us was more than fortune-telling. It wasn't just Indian sorcery. When she shut herself up and starved for those three days and nights in her little conjurer's house, just for you and me--SOMETHING HAPPENED. Didn't it? Wouldn't you say something happened?" Peter swallowed and his teeth clicked as he gave evidence of understanding. "She told us a lot of truth," went on Jolly Roger, with deep faith in his voice "And we must believe, _Pied-Bot_. She told us Cassidy was coming after us, and he came. She said the spirits promised her the law would never get us, and we thought it looked bad when Cassidy had us covered with his gun on the shore at Wollaston. But something more than luck was with us, and we shot him. Then we brought him back to life and lugged him to a cabin, and the little stranger girl took him, and nursed him, and Cassidy fell in love with her--and married her. So Yellow Bird was right again, _Pied-Bot_. We've got to believe her. And she says everything is coming out right for us, and that we are going back to Nada, and be happy--" Jolly Roger's pipe-bowl glowed in the blackness. "I'm going to light the alcohol lamp," he said. "We can't sleep. And I want a good smoke. It isn't fun when you can't see the smoke. Too bad God forgot to make you so you could use a pipe, Peter. You don't know what you are missing--in times like these." He fumbled in his pack and found the alcohol lamp, which was fresh filled and screwed tight. Peter heard him working for a moment in the darkness. Then he struck a match, and the yellow flare of it lighted up his face. In his joy Peter whined. It was good to see his master. And then, in another moment, the little lamp was filling their white-walled refuge with a mellow glow. Jolly Roger's eyes, coming suddenly out of darkness, were wide and staring. His face was covered with a scrub beard. But there was something of cheer about him even in this night of terror outside, and when he had driven his snowshoe into the snow wall, and had placed the lamp on it, he grinned companionably at Peter. Then, with a deep breath of satisfaction, he puffed out clouds of smoke from his pipe, and stood up to look about their room. "Not so bad, is it?" he asked. "We could have a big house here if we wanted to dig out rooms--eh, Peter? Parlors, and bed-rooms, and a library--and not a policeman within a million miles of us. That's the nice part of it, _Pied-Bot_--none of the Royal Mounties to trouble us. They would never think of looking for us in the heart of a big snow-dune out in this God-forsaken barren, would they?" The thought was a pleasing one to Jolly Roger. He spread out his blankets on the snow floor, and sat down on them, facing Peter. "We've got 'em beat," he said, a chuckling note of pride in his voice. "The world is small when it comes to hiding, _Pied-Bot_, but all the people in it couldn't find us here--not in a million years. If we could only find a place as safe as this--where a girl could live--and had Nada with us--" Many times during the past few weeks Peter had seen the light that flamed up now in his master's eyes. That, and the strange thrill in Jolly Roger's voice, stirred him more than the words to which he listened, and tried to understand. "And we're _going_ to," finished McKay, almost fiercely, his hands clenching as he leaned toward Peter. "We have made a big mistake, _Pied-Bot_, and it has taken us a long time to see it. It will be hard for us to leave our north country, but that is what we must do. Maybe Yellow Bird's good spirits meant that when they said we would find happiness with Nada in a place called The Country Beyond. There are a lot of 'Countries Beyond,' Peter, and as soon as the spring break-up comes and we can travel without leaving trails behind us we will go back to Cragg's Ridge and get Nada, and hit for some place where the law won't expect to find us. There's China, for instance. A lot of yellow people. But what do we care for color as long as we have _her_ with us? I say--" Suddenly he stopped. And Peter's body grew tense. Both faced the round hole, half filled with softly packed snow, which McKay had cut as a door into the heart of the big drift. They had grown accustomed to the tumult of the storm. Its strange wailings and the shrieking voices which at times seemed borne in the moaning sweep of it no longer sent shivers of apprehension through Peter. But in that moment when both turned to listen there came a sound which was not like the other sounds they had heard. It was a voice--not one of the phantom voices of the screaming wind, but a voice so real and so near that for a beat or two even Jolly Roger McKay's heart stood still. It was as if a man, standing just beyond their snow barricade, had shouted a name. But there came no second call. The wind lulled, so that for a space there was stillness outside. Jolly Roger laughed a little uneasily. "Good thing we don't believe in ghosts, Peter, or we would swear it was a _Loup-Garou_ smelling us through the wall!" He thumbed the tobacco down in his pine, and nodded. "Then--there is South America," he said. "They have everything down there--the biggest rivers in the world, the biggest mountains, and so much room that even a _Loup-Garou_ couldn't hunt us out. She will love it, _Pied-Bot_. But if it happens she likes Africa better, or Australia, or the South Sea--Now, what the devil was that?" Peter had jumped as if stung, and for a moment Jolly Roger sat tense as a carven Indian. Then he rose to his feet, a look of perplexity and doubt in his eyes. "What was it, Peter? Can the wind shoot a gun--like _that_?" Peter was sniffing at the loosely blocked door of their snow-room. A whimper rose in his throat. He looked up at Jolly Roger, his eyes glowing fiercely through the mass of Airedale whiskers that covered his face. He wanted to dig. He wanted to plunge out into the howling darkness. Slowly McKay beat the ash out of his pipe and placed the pipe in his pocket. "We'll take a look," he said, something repressive in his voice. "But it isn't reasonable, Peter. It is the wind. There couldn't be a man out there, and it wasn't a rifle we heard. It is the wind--with the devil himself behind it!" With a few sweeps of his hands and arms he scooped out the loose snow from the hole. The opening was on the sheltered side of the drift, and only the whirling eddies of the storm swept about him as he thrust out his head and shoulders. But over him it was rushing like an avalanche. He could hear nothing but the moaning advance of it. And he could see nothing. He held out his hand before his face, and blackness swallowed it. "We have been chased so much that we're what you might call super-sensitive," he said, pulling himself back and nodding at Peter in the gray light of the alcohol lamp. "Guess we'd better turn in, boy. This is a good place to sleep--plenty of fresh air, no mosquitoes or black flies, and the police so far away that we will soon forget how they look. If you say so we will have a nip of cold tea and a bite--" He did not finish. For a moment the wind had lessened in fury, as if gathering a deeper breath. And what he heard drew a cry from him this time, and a sharper whine from Peter. Out of the blackness of the night had come a woman's voice! In that first instant of shock and amazement he would have staked his life that what he heard was not a mad outcry of the night or an illusion of his brain. It was clear--distinct--a woman's voice coming from out on the Barren, rising above the storm in an agony of appeal, and dying out quickly until it became a part of the moaning wind. And then, with equal force, came the absurdity of it to McKay. A woman! He swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat, and tried to laugh. A WOMAN--out in that storm--a thousand miles from nowhere! It was inconceivable. The laugh which he forced from his lips was husky and unreal, and there was a smothering grip of something at his heart. In the ghostly light of the alcohol lamp his eyes were wide open and staring. He looked at Peter. The dog stood stiff-legged before the hole. His body was trembling. "Peter!" With a responsive wag of his tail Peter turned his bristling face up to his master. Many times Jolly Roger had seen that unfailing warning in his comrade's eyes. _There was some one outside_--or Peter's brain, like his own, was twisted and fooled by the storm! Against his reasoning--in the face of the absurdity of it--Jolly Roger was urged into action. He changed the snowshoe and replaced the alcohol lamp so that the glow of light could be seen more clearly from the Barren. Then he went to the hole and crawled through. Peter followed him. As if infuriated by their audacity, the storm lashed itself over the top of the dune. They could hear the hissing whine of fine hard snow tearing above their heads like volleys of shot, and the force of the wind reached them even in their shelter, bringing with it the flinty sting of the snow-dust. Beyond them the black barren was filled with a dismal moaning. Looking up, and yet seeing nothing in the darkness, Peter understood where the weird shriekings and ghostly cries came from. It was the wind whipping itself up the side and over the top of the dune. Jolly Roger listened, hearing only the convulsive sweep of that mighty force over a thousand miles of barren. And then came again one of those brief intervals when the storm seemed to rest for a moment, and its moaning grew less and less, until it was like the sound of giant chariot wheels receding swiftly over the face of the earth. Then came the silence--a few seconds of it--while in the north gathered swiftly the whispering rumble of a still greater force. And in this silence came once more a cry--a cry which Jolly Roger McKay could no longer disbelieve, and close upon the cry the report of a rifle. Again he could have sworn the voice was a woman's voice. As nearly as he could judge it came from dead ahead, out of the chaos of blackness, and in that direction he shouted an answer. Then he ran out into the darkness, followed by Peter. Another avalanche of wind gathered at their heels, driving them on like the crest of a flood. In the first force of it Jolly Roger stumbled and fell to his knees, and in that moment he saw very faintly the glow of his light at the opening in the snow dune. A realization of his deadly peril if he lost sight of the light flashed upon him. Again and again he called into the night. After that, bowing his head in the fury of the storm, he plunged on deeper into darkness. A sudden wild thought seized upon his soul and thrilled him into forgetfulness of the light and the snow-dune and his own safety. In the heart of this mad world he had heard a voice. He no longer doubted it. And the voice was a woman's voice! Could it be Nada? Was it possible she had followed him after his flight, determined to find him, and share his fate? His heart pounded. Who else, of all the women in the world, could be following his trail across the Barrens--a thousand miles from civilization? He began to shout her name. "Nada--Nada--Nada!" And hidden in the gloom at his side Peter barked. Storm and darkness swallowed them. The last faint gleam of the alcohol lamp died out. Jolly Roger did not look back. Blindly he stumbled ahead, counting his footsteps as he went, and shouting Nada's name. Twice he thought he heard a reply, and each time the will-o'-the-wisp voice seemed to be still farther ahead of him. Then, with a fiercer blast of the wind beating upon his back, he stumbled and fell forward upon his face. His hand reached out and touched the thing that had tripped him. It was not snow. His naked fingers clutched in something soft and furry. It was a man's coat. He could feel buttons, a belt, and the sudden thrill of a bearded face. He stood up. The wind was wailing off over the Barren again, leaving an instant of stillness about him. And he shouted: "Nada--Nada--Nada!" An answer came so quickly that it startled him, not one voice, but two--three--and one of them the shrill agonized cry of a woman. They came toward him as he continued to shout, until a few feet away he could make out a gray blur moving through the gloom. He went to it, staggering under the weight of the man he had found in the snow. The blur was made up of two men dragging a sledge, and behind the sledge was a third figure, moaning in the darkness. "I found some one in the snow," Jolly Roger shouted. "Here he is--" He dropped his burden, and the last of his words were twisted by a fresh blast of the storm. But the figure behind the sledge had heard, and Jolly Roger saw her indistinctly at his feet, shielding the man he had found with her arms and body, and crying out a name which he could not understand in that howling of the wind. But a thing like cold steel sank into his heart, and he knew it was not Nada he had found this night on the Barren. He placed the unconscious man on the sledge, believing he was dead. The girl was crying out something to him, unintelligible in the storm, and one of the men shouted in a thick throaty voice which he could not understand. Jolly Roger felt the weight of him as he staggered in the wind, fighting to keep his feet, and he knew he was ready to drop down in the snow and die. "It's only a step," he shouted. "Can you make it?" His words reached the ears of the others. The girl swayed through the darkness and gripped his arm. The two men began to tug at the sledge, and Jolly Roger seized the rope between them, wondering why there were no dogs, and faced the driving of the storm. It seemed an interminable time before he saw the faint glow of the alcohol lamp. The last fifty feet was like struggling against an irresistible hail from machine-guns. Then came the shelter of the dune. One at a time McKay helped to drag them through the hole which he used for a door. For a space his vision was blurred, and he saw through the hazy film of storm-blindness the gray faces and heavily coated forms of those he had rescued. The man he had found in the snow he placed on his blankets, and the girl fell down upon her knees beside him. It was then Jolly Roger began to see more clearly. And in that same instant came a shock as unexpected as the smash of dynamite under his feet. The girl had thrown back her parkee, and was sobbing over the man on the blankets, and calling him father. She was not like Nada. Her hair was in thick, dark coils, and she was older. She was not pretty--now. Her face was twisted by the brutal beating of the storm, and her eyes were nearly closed. But it was the man Jolly Roger stared at, while his heart choked inside him. He was grizzled and gray-bearded, with military mustaches and a bald head. He was not dead. His eyes were open, and his blue lips were struggling to speak to the girl whose blindness kept her from seeing that he was alive. And the coat which he wore was the regulation service garment of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police! Slowly McKay turned, wiping the film of snow-sweat from his eyes, and stared at the other two. One of them had sunk down with his back to the snow wall. He was a much younger man, possibly not over thirty, and his face was ghastly. The third lay where he had fallen from exhaustion after crawling through the hole. Both wore service coats, with holsters at their sides. The man against the snow-wall was making an effort to rise. He sagged back, and grinned up apologetically at McKay. "Dam' fine of you, old man," he mumbled between blistered lips. "I'm Porter--'N' Division--taking Superintendent Tavish to Fort Churchill--Tavish and his daughter. Made a hell of a mess of it, haven't I?" He struggled to his knees. "There's brandy in our kit. It might help--over there," and he nodded toward the girl and the gray-bearded man on the blankets. CHAPTER XIV Jolly Roger did not answer, but crawled through the hole and found the sledge in the outer darkness. He heard Peter coming after him, and he saw Porter's bloodless face in the illumination of the alcohol lamp, where he waited to help him with the dunnage. In those seconds he fought to get a grip on himself. A quarter of an hour ago he had laughed at the thought of the law. Never had it seemed to be so far away from him, and never had he been more utterly isolated from the world. His mind was still a bit dazed by the thing that had happened. The police had not trailed him. They had not ferreted him out, nor had they stumbled upon him by accident. It was he who had gone out into the night and deliberately dragged them in! Of all the trickery fate had played upon him this was the least to be expected. His mind began to work more swiftly as in darkness he cut the _babiche_ cordage that bound the patrol dunnage to the sledge. "N" Division, he told himself, was away over in the Athabasca country. He had never heard of Porter, nor of Superintendent Tavish, and inasmuch as the outfit was evidently a special escort to Fort Churchill it was very likely that Porter and his companions would not be thinking of outlaws, and especially of Jolly Roger McKay. This was his one chance. To attempt an escape through the blizzard was not only a desperate hazard. It was death. There were only two packs on the sledge, and these he passed through the hole to Porter. A few moments later he was holding a flask of liquor to the lips of the gray-bearded man, while the girl looked at him with eyes that were widening as the snow-sting left them. Tavish gulped, and his mittened hand closed on the girl's arm. "I'm all right, Jo," he mumbled. "All right--" His eyes met McKay's, and then took in the snow walls of the dug-out. They were deep, piercing eyes, overhung by shaggy brows. Jolly Roger felt the intentness of their gaze as he gave the girl a swallow of the brandy, and then passed the flask to Porter. "You have saved our lives," said Tavish, in a voice that was clearer. "I don't just understand how it happened. I remember stumbling in the darkness, and being unable to rise. I was behind the sledge. Porter and Breault were dragging it, and Josephine, my daughter, was sheltered under the blankets. After that--" He paused, and Jolly Roger explained how it all had come about. He pointed to Peter. It was the dog, he said. Peter had insisted there was someone outside, and they had taken a chance by going in search of them. He was John Cummings, a fox trapper, and the storm had caught him fifty miles from his cabin. He was traveling without a dog-sledge, and had only a pack-outfit. Breault, the third man, had regained his wind, and was listening to him. One look at his dark, thin face told McKay that he was the wilderness man of the three. He was staring at Jolly Roger in a strange sort of way. And then, as if catching himself, he nodded, and began rubbing his frosted face with handfuls of snow. Porter had thrown off his heavy coat, and was unpacking one of the dunnage sacks. He and the girl seemed to have suffered less than the other two. Jo, the girl, was looking at him. And then her eyes turned to Jolly Roger. They were large, fine eyes, wide open and clear now. There was something of splendid strength about her as she smiled at McKay. She was not of the hysterical sort. He could see that. "If we could have some hot soup," she suggested. "May we?" There was gratitude in her eyes, which she made no attempt to express in words. Jolly Roger liked her. And Peter crept up behind her, and watched her as she followed Breault's example, and rubbed the cheeks of the bearded man with snow. "There's an alcohol stove in the other pack," said Breault, with his hard, narrow eyes fixed steadily on Jolly Roger's face. "By the way, what did you say your name was?" "Cummings--John Cummings." Breault made no answer. During the next half hour Jolly Roger felt stealing over him a growing sense of uneasiness. They drank soup and ate bannock. It grew warm, and the girl threw off the heavy fur garment that enveloped her. Color returned into her cheeks. Her eyes were bright, and in her voice was a tremble of happiness at finding warmth and life where she had expected death. Porter's friendliness was almost brotherly. He explained what had happened. Two rascally Chippewyans had deserted them, stealing off into darkness and storm with both dog teams and one of their sledges. After that they had fought on, seeking for a drift into which they might dig a refuge. But the Barren was as smooth as a table. They had shouted, and Miss Tavish had screamed--not because they expected to find assistance--but on account of Tavish falling in the storm, and losing himself. It was quite a joke, Porter thought, that Superintendent Tavish, one of the iron men of the service, should have given up the ghost so easily. Tavish smiled grimly. They were all in good humor, and happy, with the possible exception of Breault. Not once did he laugh or smile. Yet Jolly Roger noted that each time he spoke the others were specially attentive. There was something repressive and mysterious about the man, and the girl would cut herself short in the middle of a laugh if he happened to speak, and the softness of her mouth would harden in an instant. He understood the significance of her gladness, and of Porter's, for twice he saw their hands come together, and their fingers entwine. And in their eyes was something which they could not hide when they looked at each other. But Breault puzzled him. He did not know that Breault was the best man-hunter in "N" Division, which reached from Athabasca Landing to the Arctic Ocean, or that up and down the two thousand-mile stretch of the Three River Country he was known as _Shingoos_, the Ferret. The girl fell asleep first that night, with her cheek on her father's shoulder. Breault, the Ferret, rolled himself in a blanket, and breathed deeply. Porter still smoked his pipe, and looked wistfully at the pale face of Josephine Tavish. He smiled a bit proudly at McKay. "She's mine," he whispered. "We're going to be married." Jolly Roger wanted to reach over and grip his hand. He nodded, a little lump coming in his throat. "I know how you feel," he said. "When I heard her calling out there--it made me think--of a girl down south." "Down south?" queried Porter. "Why down south--if you care for her--and you up here?" McKay shrugged his shoulders. He had said too much. Neither he nor Porter knew that Breault's eyes were half open, and that he was listening. Jolly Roger held up a hand, as if something in the wailing of the storm had caught his attention. "We'll have two or three days of this. Better turn in, Porter. I'm going to dig out another room--for Miss Tavish. I'm afraid she'll need the convenience of a private room before we're able to move. It's an easy job--and passes the time away." "I'll help," offered Porter. For an hour they worked, using McKay's snowshoes as shovels. During that hour Breault did not close his eyes. A curious smile curled his thin lips as he watched Jolly Roger. And when at last Porter turned in, and slept, the Ferret sat up, and stretched himself. McKay had finished his room, and was beginning a tunnel which would lead as a back door out of the drift, when Breault came in and picked up the snowshoe which Porter had used. "I'll take my turn," he said. "I'm a bit nervous, and not at all sleepy, Cummings." He began digging into the snow. "Been long in this country?" he asked. "Three winters. It's a good red fox country, with now and then a silver and a black." Breault grunted. "You must have met Cassidy, then," he said casually, without looking at McKay. "Corporal Terence Cassidy. This is _his_ country." Jolly Roger did not look up from his work of digging. "Yes, I know him. Met him last winter. Red headed. A nice chap. I like him. You know him?" "Entered the service together," said Breault. "But he's unlucky. For two or three years he has been on the trail of a man named McKay. Jolly Roger, they call him--Jolly Roger McKay. Ever hear of him?" Jolly Roger nodded. "Cassidy told me about him when he was at my cabin. From what I've heard I--rather like him." "Who--Cassidy, or Jolly Roger?" "Both." For the first time the Ferret leveled his eyes at his companion. They were mystifying eyes, never appearing to open fully, but remaining half closed as if to conceal whatever thought might lie behind them. McKay felt their penetration. It was like a cold chill entering into him, warning him of a menace deadlier than the storm. "Haven't any idea where one might come upon this Jolly Roger, have you?" "No." "You see, he thinks he killed a man down south. Well, he didn't. The man lived. If you happen to see him at any time give him that information, will you?" Jolly Roger thrust his head and shoulders into the growing tunnel. "Yes, I will." He knew Breault was lying. And also knew that back of the narrow slits of Breault's eyes was the cunning of a fox. "You might also tell him the law has a mind to forgive him for sticking up that free trader's post a few years ago." Jolly Roger turned with his snowshoe piled high with a load of snow. "I'll tell him that, too," he said, chuckling at the obviousness of the other's trap. "What do you think my cabin is, Breault--a Rest for Homeless Outlaws?" Breault grinned. It was an odd sort of grin, and Jolly Roger caught it over his shoulder. When he returned from dumping his load, Breault said: "You see, we know this Jolly Roger fellow is spending the winter somewhere up here. And Cassidy says there is a girl down south--" Jolly Roger's face was hidden in the tunnel. "--who would like to see him," finished Breault. When McKay turned toward him the Ferret was carelessly lighting his pipe. "I remember--Cassidy told me about this girl," said Jolly Roger. "He said--some day--he would trap this--this man--through the girl. So if I happen to meet Jolly Roger McKay, and send him back to the girl, it will help out the law. Is that it, Breault? And is there any reward tacked to it? Anything in it for me?" Breault was looking at him in the pale light of the alcohol lamp, puffing out tobacco smoke, and with that odd twist of a smile about his thin lips. "Listen to the storm," he said. "I think it's getting worse--Cummings!" Suddenly he held out a hand to Peter, who sat near the lamp, his bright eyes fixed watchfully on the stranger. "Nice dog you have, Cummings. Come here, Peter! Peter--Peter--" Tight ringers seemed to grip at McKay's throat. He had not spoken Peter's name since the rescue of Breault. "Peter--Peter--" The Ferret was smiling affably. But Peter did not move. He made no response to the outstretched hand. His eyes were steady and challenging. In that moment McKay wanted to hug him up in his arms. The Ferret laughed. "He's a good dog, a very good dog, Cummings. I like a one-man dog, and I also like a one-dog man. That's what Jolly Roger McKay is, if you ever happen to meet him. Travels with one dog. An Airedale, with whiskers on him like a Mormon. And his name is Peter. Funny name for a dog, isn't it?" He faced the outer room, stretching his long arms above his head. "I'm going to try sleep again, Cummings. Goodnight! And--Mother of Heaven!--listen to the wind." "Yes, it's a bad night," said McKay. He looked at Peter when Breault was gone, and his heart was beating fast. He could hear the wind, too. It was sweeping over the Barren more fiercely than before, and the sound of it brought a steely glitter into his eyes. This time he could not run away from the law. Flight meant death. And Breault knew it. He was in a trap--a trap built by himself. That is, if Breault had guessed the truth, and he believed he had. There was only one way out--and that meant fight. He went into the outer room for his pack and a blanket. He did not look at Breault, but he knew the man's narrow eyes were following him. He left the alcohol lamp burning, but in his own room, after he had spread out his bed, he extinguished the light. Then, very quietly, he dug a hole through the snow partition between the two rooms. He waited for ten minutes before he thrust a finger-tip through the last thin crust of snow. With his eye close to the aperture he could see Breault. The Ferret was sitting up, and leaning toward Porter, who was sleeping an arm's length away. He reached over, and touched him on the shoulder. Jolly Roger widened the snow-slit another inch, straining his ears to hear. He could see Tavish and the girl asleep. In another moment Porter was sitting up, with the Ferret's hand gripping his arm warningly. Breault motioned toward the inner room, and Porter was silent. Then Breault bent over and began to whisper. Jolly Roger could hear only the indistinct monotone of his voice. But he could see very clearly the change that came into Porter's face. His eyes widened, and he stared toward the inner room, making a movement as if to rouse Tavish and the girl. The Ferret stopped him. "Don't get excited. Let them sleep." McKay heard that much--and no more. For some time after that the two men sat close together, conversing in whispers. There was an exultant satisfaction in Porter's clean-cut face, as well as in Breault's. Jolly Roger watched them until Breault extinguished the second lamp. Then he lightly plugged the hole in the partition with snow, and reached out in the darkness until his hand found Peter. "They think they've got us, boy," he whispered, "They think they've got us!" Very quietly they lay for an hour. McKay did not sleep, and Peter was wide awake. At the end of that hour Jolly Roger crept on his hands and knees to the doorway and listened. One after another he picked out the steady breathing of the sleepers. Then he began feeling his way around the wall of his room until he came to a place where the snow was very soft. "An air-drift," he whispered to Peter, close at his shoulder. "We'll fool 'em, boy. And we'll fight--if we have to." He began worming his head and shoulders and body into the air-drift like a gimlet. A foot at a time he burrowed himself through, heaving his body up and down and sideways to pack the light snow, leaving a round tunnel two feet in diameter behind him. Within an hour he had come to the outer crust on the windward side of the big snow-dune. He did not break through this crust, which was as tough as crystal-glass, but lay quietly for a time and listened to the sweep of the wind outside. It was warm, and very comfortable, and he had half-dozed off before he caught himself back into wakefulness and returned to his room. The mouth of his tunnel he packed with snow. After that he wound the blanket about him and gave himself up calmly to sleep. Only Peter lay awake after that. And it was Peter who roused Jolly Roger in what would have been the early dawn outside the snow-dune. McKay felt his restless movement, and opened his eyes. A faint light was illumining his room, and he sat up. In the outer room the alcohol lamp was burning again. He could hear movement, and voices that were very low and indistinct. Carefully he dug out once more the little hole in the snow wall, and widened the slit. Breault and Tavish were asleep, but Porter was sitting up, and close beside him sat the girl. Her coiled hair was loosened, and fallen over her shoulders. There was no sign of drowsiness in her wide-open eyes as they stared at the door between the two rooms. McKay could see her hand clasping Porter's arm. Porter was talking, with his face so close to her bent head that his lips touched her hair, and though Jolly Roger could understand no word that was spoken he knew Porter was whispering the exciting secret of his identity to Josephine Tavish. He could see, for a moment, a shadow of protest in her face, he could hear the quick, sibilant whisper of her voice, and Porter cautioned her with a finger at her lips, and made a gesture toward the sleeping Tavish. Then his fingers closed about her uncoiled hair as he drew her to him. McKay watched the long kiss between them. The girl drew away quickly then, and Porter tucked the blanket about her when she lay down beside her father. After that he stretched out again beside Breault. Jolly Roger guessed what had happened. The girl had awakened, a bit nervous, and had roused Porter and asked him to relight the alcohol lamp. And Porter had taken advantage of the opportunity to tell her of the interesting discovery which Breault had made--and to kiss her. McKay stroked Peter's scrawny neck, and listened. He could no longer hear the storm, and he wondered if the fury of it was spent. Every few minutes he looked through the slit in the snow wall. The last time, half an hour after Porter had returned to his blanket, Josephine Tavish was sitting up. She was very wide awake. McKay watched her as she rose slowly to her knees, and then to her feet. She bent over Porter and Breault to make sure they were asleep, and then came straight toward the door of his room. He lay back on his blanket, with the fingers of one hand gripped closely about Peter. "Be quiet, boy," he whispered. "Be quiet." He could see the shutting out of light at his door as the girl stood there, listening for his breathing. He breathed heavily, and before he closed his eyes he saw Josephine Tavish coming toward him. In a moment she was bending over him. He could feel the soft caress of her loose hair on his face and hands. Then she knelt quietly down beside him, stroking Peter with her hand, and shook him lightly by the shoulder. "Jolly Roger!" she whispered. "Jolly Roger McKay!" He opened his eyes, looking up at the white face in the gloom. "Yes," he replied softly. "What is it, Miss Tavish?" He could hear the choking breath in her throat as her fingers tightened at his shoulder. She bent her face still nearer to him, until her hair cluttered his throat and breast. "You are--awake?" "Yes." "Then--listen to me. If you are Jolly Roger McKay you must get away--somewhere. You must go before Breault awakens in the morning. I think the storm is over--there is no wind--and if you are here when day comes--" Her fingers loosened. Jolly Roger reached out and somewhere in the darkness he found her hand. It clasped his own--firm, warm, thrilling. "I thank you for what you have done," she whispered. "But the law--and Breault--they have no mercy!" She was gone, swiftly and silently, and McKay looked through the slit in the wall until she was with her father again. In the gloom he drew Peter close to him. "We're up against it again, _Pied-Bot_," he confided under his breath. "We've got to take another chance." He worked without sound, and in a quarter of an hour his pack was ready, and the entrance to his tunnel dug out. He went into the outer room then, where Josephine Tavish was awake. Jolly Roger pantomimed his desire as she sat up. He wanted something from one of the packs. She nodded. On his knees he fumbled in the dunnage, and when he rose to his feet, facing the girl, her eyes opened wide at what he held in his hand--a small packet of old newspapers her father was taking to the factor at Fort Churchill. She saw the hungry, apologetic look in his eyes, and her woman's heart understood. She smiled gently at him, and her lips formed an unvoiced whisper of gratitude as he turned to go. At the door he looked back. He thought she was beautiful then, with her shining hair and eyes, and her lips parted, and her hands half reaching out to him, as if in that moment of parting she was giving him courage and faith. Suddenly she pressed the palms of her fingers to her mouth and sent the kiss of benediction to him through the twilight glow of the snow-room. A moment later, crawling through his tunnel with Peter close behind him, there was an exultant singing in Jolly Roger's heart. Again he was fleeing from the law, but always, as Yellow Bird had predicted in her sorcery, there were happiness and hope in his going. And always there was someone to urge him on, and to take a pride in him, like Josephine Tavish. He broke through the dune-crust at the end of his tunnel and crawled out into the thick, gray dawn of a barren-land day. The sky was heavy overhead, and the wind had died out. It was the beginning of the brief lull which came in the second day of the Great Storm. McKay laughed softly as he sensed the odds against them. "We'll be having the storm at our heels again before long, _Pied-Bot_," he said. "We'd better make for the timber a dozen miles south." He struck out, circling the dune, so that he was traveling straight away from the first hole he had cut through the shell of the drift. From that door, made by the outlaw who had saved them, Josephine Tavish watched the shadowy forms of man and dog until they were lost in the gray-white chaos of a frozen world. CHAPTER XV Through the blizzard Jolly Roger made his way a score of miles southward from the big dune on the Barren. For a day and a night he made his camp in the scrub timber which edged the vast treeless tundras reaching to the Arctic. He believed he was safe, for the unceasing wind and the blasts of shot-like snow filled his tracks a few moments after they were made. He struck a straight line for his cabin after that first day and night in the scrub timber. The storm was still a thing of terrific force out on the barren, but in the timber he was fairly well sheltered. He was convinced the police patrol would find his cabin very soon after the storm had worn itself out. Porter and Tavish did not trouble him. But from Breault he knew there was no getting away. Breault would nose out his cabin. And for that reason he was determined to reach it first. The second night he did not sleep. His mind was a wild thing--wild as a _Loup-Garou_ seeking out its ghostly trails; it passed beyond his mastery, keeping sleep away from him though he was dead tired. It carried him back over all the steps of his outlawry, visioning for him the score of times he had escaped, as he was narrowly escaping now; and it pictured for him, like a creature of inquisition, the tightening net ahead of him, the final futility of all his effort. And at last, as if moved by pity to ease his suffering a little, it brought him back vividly to the green valley, the flowers and the blue skies of Cragg's Ridge--and Nada. It was like a dream. At times he could scarcely assure himself that he had actually lived those weeks and months of happiness down on the edge of civilization; it seemed impossible that Nada had come like an Angel into his life down there, and that she had loved him, even when he confessed himself a fugitive from the law and had entreated him to take her with him. He closed his eyes and that last roaring night of storm at Cragg's Ridge was about him again. He was in the little old Missioner's cabin, with thunder and lightning rending earth and sky outside and Nada was in his arms, her lips against his, the piteous heartbreak of despair in her eyes. Then he saw her--a moment later--a crumpled heap down beside the chair, the disheveled glory of her hair hiding her white face from him as he hesitated for a single instant before opening the door and plunging out into the night. With a cry he sprang up, dashing the vision from him, and threw fresh fuel on the fire. And he cried out the same old thought to Peter. "It would have been murder for us to bring her, _Pied-Bot_. It would have been murder!" He looked about him at the swirling chaos outside the rim of light made by his fire and listened to the moaning of the wind over the treetops. Beyond the circle of light the dry snow, which crunched like sand under his feet, was lost in ghostly gloom. It was forty degrees below zero. And he was glad, even with this sickness of despair in his heart, that she was not a fugitive with him tonight. Yet he built up a little make-believe world for himself as he sat with a blanket hugged close about him, staring into the fire. In a hundred different ways he saw her face, a will-o-the-wisp thing amid the flames; an illusive, very girlish, almost childish face--yet always with the light of a woman's soul shining in it. That was the miracle which startled him at last. It seemed as if the fiction he built up in his despair transformed itself subtly into fact and that her soul had come to him from out of the southland and was speaking to him with eyes which never changed or faltered in their adoration, their faith and their courage. She seemed to come to him, to creep into his arms under the folds of the blanket and he sensed the soft crush of her hair, the touch of her lips, the warm encircling of her arms about his neck. Closer to him pressed the mystery, until the beating of her heart was a living pulse against him; and then--suddenly, as an irresistible impulse closed his arms to hold the spirit to him, his eyes were drawn to the heart of the fire, and he saw there for an instant, wide-eyed and speaking to him, the face of Yellow Bird the Indian sorceress. The flames crept up the long braids of her hair, her lips moved, and then she was gone--but slowly, like a ghost slipping upward into the mist of smoke and night. Peter heard his master's cry. And after that Jolly Roger rose up and threw off the blanket and walked back and forth until his feet trod a path in the snow. He told himself it was madness to believe, and yet he believed. Faith fought itself back into that dark citadel of his heart from which for a time it had been driven. New courage lighted up again the black chaos of his soul. And at last he fell down on his knees and gripped Peter's shaggy head between his two hands. "_Pied-Bot_, she said everything would come out right in the end," he cried, a new note in his voice. "That's what Yellow Bird told us, wasn't it? Mebby they would have burned her as a witch a long time ago because she's a sorceress, and says she can send her soul out of her body and see what we can't see. _But we believe_!" His voice choked up, and he laughed. "They were both here tonight," he added. "Nada--and Yellow Bird. And I believe--I believe--I know what it means!" He stood up again, and Peter saw the old smile on his master's lips as Jolly Roger looked up into the swirling black canopy of the spruce-tops. And the wailing of the storm seemed no longer to hold menace and taunt, but in it he heard the whisper of fierce, strong voices urging upon him the conviction that had already swept indecision from his heart. And then he said, holding out his arms as if encompassing something which he could not see. "Peter, we're going back to Nada!" Dawn was a scarcely perceptible thing when it came. Darkness seemed to fade a little, that was all. Frosty shapes took form in the gloom, and the spruce-tops became tangible in an abyss of sepulchral shadow overhead. Through this beginning of the barren-land day Jolly Roger set out in the direction of his cabin and in his blood was that new singing thing of fire and warmth that more than made up for the hours of sleep he had lost during the night. The storm was dying out, he thought, and it was growing warmer; yet the wind whistled and raved in the open spaces and his thermometer registered the fortieth and a fraction degree below zero. The air he breathed was softer, he fancied, yet it was still heavy with the stinging shot of blizzard; and where yesterday he had seen only the smothering chaos of twisted spruce and piled up snow, there was now--as the pale day broadened--his old wonderland of savage beauty, awaiting only a flash of sunlight to transform it into the pure glory of a thing indescribable. But the sun did not come and Jolly Roger did not miss it over-much for his heart was full of Nada, and a-thrill with the inspiration of his home-going. "That's what it means, _going home_," he said to Peter, who nosed close in the path of his snowshoes. "There's a thousand miles between us and Cragg's Ridge, a thousand miles of snow and ice--and hell, mebby. But we'll make it!" He was sure of himself now. It was as if he had come up from out of the shadow of a great sickness. He had been unwise. He had not reasoned as a man should reason. The hangman might be waiting for him at Cragg's Ridge, down on the rim of civilization, but that same grim executioner was also pursuing close at his heels. He would always be pursuing in the form of a Breault, a Cassidy, a Tavish, or a Somebody Else of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. It would be that way until the end came. And when the end did come, when they finally got him, the blow would be easier at Cragg's Ridge than up here on the edge of the Barren Land. And again there was hope, a wild, almost unbelievable hope that with Nada he might find that place which Yellow Bird, the sorceress, had promised for them--that mystery-place of safety and of happiness which she had called The Country Beyond, where "all would end well." He had not the faith of Yellow Bird's people; he was not superstitious enough to believe fully in her sorcery, except that he seized upon it as a drowning man might grip at a floating sea-weed. Yet was the under-current of hope so persistent that at times it was near faith. Up to this hour Yellow Bird's sorcery had brought him nothing but the truth. For him she had conjured the spirits of her people, and these spirits, speaking through Yellow Bird's lips, had saved him from Cassidy at the fishing camp and had performed the miracle on the shore of Wollaston and had predicted the salvation that had come to him out on the Barren. And so--was it not conceivable that the other would also come true? But these visions came to him only in flashes. As he traveled through the hours the one vital desire of his being was to bring himself physically into the presence of Nada, to feel the wild joy of her in his arms once more, the crush of her lips to his, the caress of her hands in their old sweet way at his face--and to hear her voice, the girl's voice with the woman's soul behind it, crying out its undying love, as he had last heard it that night in the Missioner's cabin many months ago. After this had happened, then--if fate decreed it so--all other things might end. Breault, the Ferret, might come. Or Porter. Or that Somebody Else who was always on his trail. If the game finished thus, he would be satisfied. When he stopped to make a pot of black tea and warm a snack to eat Jolly Roger tried to explain this new meaning of life to Peter. "The big thing we must do is to get there--safely," he said, already beginning to make plans in the back of his head. And then he went on, building up his fabric of new hope before Peter, while he crunched his luncheon of toasted bannock and fat bacon. There was something joyous and definite in his voice which entered into Peter's blood and body. There was even a note of excitement in it, and Peter's whiskers bristled with fresh courage and his eyes gleamed and his tail thumped the snow comprehendingly. It was like having a master come back to him from the dead. And Jolly Roger even laughed, softly, under his breath. "This is February," he said. "We ought to make it late in March. I mean Cragg's Ridge, _Pied-Bot_." After that they went on, traveling hard to reach their cabin before the darkness of night, which would drop upon them like a thick blanket at four o'clock. In these last hours there pressed even more heavily upon Jolly Roger that growing realization of the vastness and emptiness of the world. It was as if blindness had dropped from his eyes and he saw the naked truth at last. Out of this world everything had emptied itself until it held only Nada. Only she counted. Only she held out her arms to him, entreating him to keep for her that life in his body which meant so little in all other ways. He thought of one of the little worn books which he carried in his shoulder-pack--Jeanne D'Arc. As she had fought, with the guidance of God, so he believed the blue-eyed girl down at Cragg's Ridge was fighting for him, and had sent her spirit out in quest of him. And he was going back to her. _Going_! The last word, as it came from his lips, meant that nothing would stop them. He almost shouted it. And Peter answered. In spite of their effort, darkness closed in on them. With the first dusk of this night there came sudden lulls in which the blizzard seemed to have exhausted itself. Jolly Roger read the signs. By tomorrow there would be no storm and Breault the Ferret would be on the trail again, along with Porter and Tavish. It was his old craft, his old cunning, that urged him to go on. Strangely, he prayed for the blizzard not to give up the ghost. Something must be accomplished before its fury was spent; and he was glad when after each lull he heard again the moaning and screeching of it over the open spaces, and the slashing together of spruce tops where there was cover. In a chaos of gloom they came to the low ridge which reached across an open sweep of tundra to the finger of shelter where the cabin was built. An hour later they were at its door. Jolly Roger opened it and staggered in. For a space he stood leaning against the wall while his lungs drank in the warmer air. The intake of his breath made a whistling sound and he was surprised to find himself so near exhaustion. He heard the thud of Peter's body as it collapsed to the floor. "Tired, _Pied-Bot_?" It was difficult for his storm-beaten lips to speak the words. Peter thumped his tail. The rat-tap-tap of it came in one of those lulls of the storm which Jolly Roger had begun to dread. "I hope it keeps up another two hours," he said, wetting his lips to take the stiffness out of them. "If it doesn't--" He was thinking of Breault as he drew off his mittens and fumbled for a match. It was Breault he feared. The Ferret would find his cabin and his trail if the storm died out too soon. He lighted the tin lamp on his table and after that, assured that wastefulness would cost him nothing now, he set two bear-drip candles going, one at each end of the cabin. The illumination filled the single room. There was little for it to reveal--the table he had made, a chair, a battered little sheet-iron stove, and the humped up blanket in his bunk, under which he had stored the remainder of his possessions. Back of the stove was a pile of dry wood, and in another five minutes the roar of flames in the chimney mingled with a fresh bluster of the wind outside. Defying the exhaustion of limbs and body, Jolly Roger kept steadily at work. He threw off his heavier garments as the freezing atmosphere of the room became warmer, and prepared for a feast. "We'll call it Christmas, and have everything we've got, _Pied-Bot_. We'll cook a quart of prunes instead of six. No use stinting ourselves--tonight!" Even Peter was amazed at the prodigality of his master. An hour later they ate, and McKay drank a quart of hot coffee before he was done. Half of his fatigue was gone and he sat back for a few minutes to finish off with the luxury of his pipe. Peter, gorged with caribou meat, stretched himself out to sleep. But his eyes did not close. His master puzzled him. For after a little Jolly Roger put on his heavy coat and parkee and pocketed his pipe. After that he slipped the straps of his pack over head and shoulders and then, even more to Peter's bewilderment, emptied a quart bottle of kerosene over the pile of dry wood behind the hot stove. To this he touched a lighted match. His next movement drew from Peter a startled yelp. With a single thrust of his foot he sent the stove crashing into the middle of the floor. Half an hour later, when Peter and Jolly Roger looked back from the crest of the ridge, a red pillar of flame lighted up the gloomy chaos of the unpeopled world they were leaving behind them. The wind was driving fiercely from the Barren and with it came stinging volleys of the fine drift-snow. In the teeth of it Roger McKay stared back. "It's a good fire," he mumbled in his hood. "Half an hour and it will be out. There'll be nothing for Breault to find if this wind keeps up another two hours--nothing but drift-snow, with no sign of trail or cabin." He struck out, leaving the shelter of the ridge. Straight south he went, keeping always in the open spaces where the wind-swept drift covered his snowshoe trail almost as soon as it was made. Darkness did not trouble him now. The open barren was ahead, miles of it, while only a little to the westward was the shelter of timber. Twice he blundered to the edge of this timber, but quickly set his course again in the open, with the wind always quartering at his back. He could only guess how long he kept on. The time came when he began to count the swing of his snowshoes, measuring off half a mile, or a mile, and then beginning over again until at last the achievement of five hundred steps seemed to take an immeasurable length of time and great effort. Like the ache of a tooth came the first warning of snowshoe cramp in his legs. In the black night he grinned. He knew what it meant--a warning as deadly as swimmer's cramp in deep water. If he continued much longer he would be crawling on his hands and knees. Quickly he turned in the direction of the timber. He had traveled three hours, he thought, since abandoning his cabin to the flames. Another half hour, with the caution of slower, shorter steps, brought him to the timber. Luck was with him and he cried aloud to Peter as he felt himself in the darkness of a dense cover of spruce and balsam. He freed himself from his entangled snowshoes and went on deeper into the shelter. It became warmer and they could feel no longer a breath of the wind. He unloaded his pack and drew from it a jackpine torch, dried in his cabin and heavy with pitch. Shortly the flare of this torch lighted up their refuge for a dozen paces about them. In the illumination of it, moving it from place to place, he gathered dry fire wood and with his axe cut down green spruce for the smouldering back-fire that would last until morning. By the time the torch had consumed itself the fire was burning, and where Jolly Roger had scraped away the snow from the thick carpet of spruce needles underfoot he piled a thick mass of balsam boughs, and in the center of the bed he buried himself, wrapped warmly in his blankets, and with Peter snuggled close at his side. Through dark hours the green spruce fire burned slowly and steadily. For a long time there was wailing of wind out in the open. But at last it died away, and utter stillness filled the world. No life moved in these hours which followed the giving up of the big storm's last gasping breath. Slowly the sky cleared. Here and there a star burned through. But Jolly Roger and Peter, deep in the sleep of exhaustion, knew nothing of the change. CHAPTER XVI It was Peter who roused Jolly Roger many hours later; Peter nosing about the still burning embers of the fire, and at last muzzling his master's face with increasing anxiety. McKay sat up out of his nest of balsam boughs and blankets and caught the bright glint of sunlight through the treetops. He rubbed his eyes and stared again to make sure. Then he looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock and peering in the direction of the open he saw the white edge of it glistening in the unclouded blaze of a sun. It was the first sun--the first real sun--he had seen for many days, and with Peter he went to the rim of the barren a hundred yards distant. He wanted to shout. As far as he could see the white plain was ablaze with eye-blinding light, and never had the sky at Cragg's Ridge been clearer than the sky that was over him now. He returned to the fire, singing. Back through the months leapt Peter's memory to the time when his master had sung like that. It was in Indian Tom's cabin, with Cragg's Ridge just beyond the creek, and it was in those days before Terence Cassidy had come to drive them to another hiding place; in the happy days of Nada's visits and of their trysts under the Ridge, when even the little gray mother mouse lived in a paradise with her nest of babies in the box on their cabin shelf. He had almost forgotten but it came back to him now. It was the old Jolly Roger--the old master come to life again. In the clear stillness of the morning one might have heard that shouting song half a mile away. But McKay was no longer afraid. As the storm seemed to have cleaned the world so the sun cleared his soul of its last shadow of doubt. It was not merely an omen or a promise, but for him proclaimed a certainty. God was with him. Life was with him. His world was opening its arms to him again--and he sang as if Nada was only a mile away from him instead of a thousand. When he went on, after their breakfast, he laughed at the thought of Breault discovering their trail. The Ferret would be more than human to do that after what wind and storm and fire had done for them. This first day of their pilgrimage into the southland was a day of glory from its beginning until the setting of the sun. There was no cloud in the sky. And it grew warmer, until Jolly Roger flung back the hood of his parkee and turned up the fur of his cap. That night a million stars lighted the heaven. After this first day and night nothing could break down the hope and confidence of Jolly Roger and his, dog. Peter knew they were going south, in which direction lay everything he had ever yearned for; and each night beside their campfire McKay made a note with pencil and paper and measured the distance they had come and the distance they had yet to go. Hope in a little while became certainty. Into his mind urged no thought of changes that might have taken place at Cragg's Ridge; or, if the thought did come, it caused him no uneasiness. Now that Jed Hawkins was dead Nada would be with the little old Missioner in whose care he had left her, and not for an instant did a doubt cloud the growing happiness of his anticipations. Breault and the hunters of the law were the one worry that lay ahead and behind him. If he outwitted them he would find Nada waiting for him. Day after day they kept south and west until they struck the Thelon; and then through a country unmapped, and at times terrific in its cold and storm, they fought steadily to the frozen regions of the Dubawnt waterways. Only once in the first three weeks did they seek human company. This was at a small Indian camp where Jolly Roger bartered for caribou meat and moccasins for Peter's feet. Twice between there and God's Lake they stopped at trappers' cabins. It was early in March when they struck the Lost Lake country, three hundred miles from Cragg's Ridge. And here it was, buried under a blind of soft snow, that Peter nosed out the frozen carcass of a disemboweled buck which Boileau, the French trapper, had poisoned for wolves. Jolly Roger had built a fire and was warming half a pint of deer tallow for a baking of bannock, when Peter dragged himself in, his rear legs already stiffening with the palsy of strychnine. In a dozen seconds McKay had the warm tallow down Peter's throat, to the last drop of it; and this he followed with another dose as quickly as he could heat it, and in the end Peter gave up what he had eaten. Half an hour later Boileau, who was eating his dinner, jumped up in wonderment when the door of his cabin was suddenly opened by a grim and white-faced man who carried the limp body of a dog in his arms. For a long time after this the shadow of death hung over the Frenchman's trapping-shack. To Boileau, with his brotherly sympathy and regret that his poison-bait had brought calamity, Peter was "just dog." But when at last he saw the strong shoulders of the grim-faced stranger shaking over Peter's paralyzed body and listened to the sobbing grief that broke in passionate protest from his white lips, he drew back a little awed. It seemed for a time that Peter was dead; and in those moments Jolly Roger put his arms about him and buried his despairing face in Peter's scraggly neck, calling in a wild fit of anguish for him to come back, to live, to open his eyes again. Boileau, crossing himself, felt of Peter's body and McKay heard his voice over him, saying that the dog was not dead, but that his heart was beating steadily and that he thought the last stiffening blow of the poison was over. To McKay it was like bringing the dead back to life. He raised his head and drew away his arms and knelt beside the bunk stunned and mutely hopeful while Boileau took his place and began dropping warm condensed milk down Peter's throat. In a little while Peter's eyes opened and he gave a great sigh. Boileau looked up and shrugged his shoulders. "That was a good breath, m'sieu," he said. "What is left of the poison has done its worst. He will live." A bit stupidly McKay rose to his feet. He swayed a little, and for the first time sensed the hot tears that had blinded his eyes and wet his cheeks. And then there came a sobbing laugh out of his throat and he went to the window of the Frenchman's shack and stared out into the white world, seeing nothing. He had stood in the presence of death many times before but never had that presence choked up his heart as in this hour when the soul of Peter, his comrade, had stood falteringly for a space half-way between the living and the dead. When he turned from the window Boileau was covering Peter's body with blankets and a warm bear skin. And for many days thereafter Peter was nursed through the slow sickness which followed. An early spring came this year in the northland. South of the Reindeer waterway country the snows were disappearing late in March and ice was rotting the first week in April. Winds came from the south and west and the sun was warmer and clearer than Boileau had ever known it at the winter's end in Lost Lake country. It was in this first week of April that Peter was able to travel, and McKay pointed his trail once more for Cragg's Ridge. He left a part of his winter dunnage at Boileau's shack and went on light, figuring to reach Cragg's Ridge before the new "goose moon" had worn itself out in the west. But for a week Peter lagged and until the darker red in the rims of his eyes cleared away Jolly Roger checked the impetus of his travel so that the goose moon had faded out and the "frog moon" of May was in its full before they came down the last slope that dipped from the Height of Land to the forests and lakes of the lower country. And now, in these days, it seemed to Jolly Roger that a great kindness, and not tragedy, had delayed him so that his "home coming" was in the gladness of spring. All about him was the sweetness and mystic whispering of new life just awakening. It was in the sky and the sun; it was underfoot, in the fragrance of the mold he trod upon, in the trees about him, and in the mate-chirping of the birds flocking back from the southland. His friends the jays were raucous and jaunty again, bullying and bluffing in the warmth of sunshine; the black glint of crows' wings flashed across the opens; the wood-sappers and pewees and big-eyed moose-birds were aflutter with the excitement of home planning; partridges were feasting on the swelling poplar buds--and then, one glorious sunset, he heard the chirruping evening song of his first robin. And the next day they would reach Cragg's Ridge! Half of that last night he sat up, awake, or smoked in the glow of his fire, waiting for the dawn. With the first lifting of darkness he was traveling swiftly ahead of Peter and the morning was only half gone when he saw far ahead of him the great ridge which shut out Indian Tom's swamp, and Nada's plain, and Cragg's Ridge beyond it. It was noon when he stood at the crest of this. He was breathing hard, for to reach this last precious height from which he might look upon the country of Nada's home he had half run up its rock-strewn side. There, with his lungs gasping for air, his eager eyes shot over the country below him and for a moment the significance of the thing which he saw did not strike him. And then in another instant it seemed that his heart choked up, like a fist suddenly tightened, and stopped its beating. Reaching away from him, miles upon miles of it, east, west and south--was a dead and char-stricken world. Up to the foot of the ridge itself had come the devastation of flame, and where it had swept, months ago, there was now no sign of the glorious spring that lay behind him. He looked for Indian Tom's swamp, and where it had been there was no longer a swamp but a stricken chaos of ten thousand black stubs, the shriven corpses of the spruce and cedar and jackpines out of which the wolves had howled at night. He looked for the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of a blackened world. And then he looked to Cragg's Ridge, and along the bald crest of it, naked as death, he saw blackened stubs pointing skyward, painting desolation against the blue of the heaven beyond. A cry came from him, a cry of fear and of horror, for he was looking upon the fulfilment of Yellow Bird's prediction. He seemed to hear, whispering softly in his ears, the low, sweet voice of the sorceress, as on the night when she had told him that if he returned to Cragg's Ridge he would find a world that had turned black with ruin and that it would not be there he would ever find Nada. After that one sobbing cry he tore like a madman dawn into the valley, traveling swiftly through the muck of fire and under-foot tangle with Peter fighting behind him. Half an hour later he stood where the Missioner's cabin had been and he found only a ruin of ash and logs burned down to the earth. Where the trail had run there was no longer a trail. A blight, grim and sickening, lay upon the earth that had been paradise. Peter heard the choking sound in his master's throat and chest. He, too, sensed the black shadow of tragedy and cautiously he sniffed the air, knowing that at last they were home--and yet it was not home. Instinctively he had faced Cragg's Ridge and Jolly Roger, seeing the dog's stiffened body pointing toward the break beyond which lay Nada's old home, felt a thrill of hope leap up within him. Possibly the farther plain had escaped the scourge of fire. If so, Nada would be there, and the Missioner-- He started for the break, a mile away. As he came nearer to it his hope grew less for he could see where the flames had swept in an inundating sea along Cragg's Ridge. They passed over the meadow where the thick young jackpines, the red strawberries and the blue violets had been and Peter heard the strange sob when they came to the little hollow--the old trysting place where Nada had first given herself into his master's arms. And there it was that Peter forgot master and caution and sped swiftly ahead to the break that cut the Ridge in twain. When Jolly Roger came to that break and ran through it he was staggering from the mad effort he had made. And then, all at once, the last of his wind came in a cry of gladness. He swayed against a rock and stood there staring wild-eyed at what was before him. The world was as black ahead of him as it was behind. But Jed Hawkins' cabin was untouched! The fire had crept up to its very door and there it had died. He went on the remaining hundred yards and before the closed door of Nada's old home he found Peter standing stiff-legged and strange. He opened the door and a damp chill touched his face. The cabin was empty. And the gloom and desolation of a grave filled the place. He stepped in, a moaning whisper of the truth coming to his lips. He heard the scurrying flight of a starved wood-rat, a flutter of loose papers, and then the silence of death fell about him. The door of Nada's little room was open and he entered through it. The bed was naked and there remained only the skeleton of things that had been. He moved now like a man numbed by a strange sickness and Peter followed gloomily and silently in the footsteps of his master. They went outside and a distance away Jolly Roger saw a thing rising up out of the char of fire, ugly and foreboding, like the evil spirit of desolation itself. It was a rude cross made of saplings, up which the flames had licked their way, searing it grim and black. His hands clenched slowly for he knew that under the cross lay the body of Jed Hawkins, the fiend who had destroyed his world. After that he re-entered the cabin and went into Nada's room, closing the door behind him; and for many minutes thereafter Peter remained outside guarding the outer door, and hearing no sound or movement from within. When Jolly Roger came out his face was set and white, and he looked where the thick forest had stood on that stormy night when he ran down the trail toward Mooney's cabin. There was no forest now. But he found the old tie-cutters' road, cluttered as it was with the debris of fire, and he knew when he came to that twist in the trail where long ago Jed Hawkins had lain dead on his back. Half a mile beyond he came to the railroad. Here it was that the fire had burned hottest, for as far as his vision went he could see no sign of life or of forest green alight in the waning sun. And now there fell upon him, along with the desolation of despair, a something grimmer and more terrible--a thing that was fear. About him everywhere reached this graveyard of death, leaving no spot untouched. Was it possible that Nada and the Missioner had not escaped its fury? The fear settled upon him more heavily as the sun went down and the gloom of evening came, bringing with it an unpleasant chill and a cloying odor of things burned dead. He did not talk to Peter now. There was a lamp in the cabin and wood behind the stove, and silently he built a fire and trimmed and lighted the wick when darkness came. And Peter, as if hiding from the ghosts of yesterday, slunk into a corner and lay there unmoving and still. And McKay did not get supper nor did he smoke, but after a long time he carried his blankets into Nada's room, and spread them out upon her bed. Then he put out the light and quietly laid himself down where through the nights of many a month and year Nada had slept in the moon glow. The moon was there tonight. The faint glow of it rose in the east and swiftly it climbed over the ragged shoulder of Cragg's Ridge, flooding the blackened world with light and filling the room with a soft and golden radiance. It was a moon undimmed, full and round and yellow; and it seemed to smile in through the window as if some living spirit in it had not yet missed Nada, and was embracing her in its glory. And now it came upon Jolly Roger why she had loved it even more than she had loved the sun; for through the little window it shut out all the rest of the world, and sitting up, he seemed to hear her heart beating at his side and clearly he saw her face in the light of it and her slim arms out-reaching, as if to gather it to her breast. Thus--many times, she had told him--had she sat up in her bed to greet the moon and to look for the smiling face that was almost always there, the face of the Man in the Moon, her friend and playmate in the sky. For a space his heart leapt up; and then, as if discovery of the usurper in her room had come, a cloud swept over the face of the moon like a mighty hand and darkness crowded him in. But the cloud sailed on and the light drove out the gloom again. Then it was that Jolly Roger saw the Old Man in the Moon was up and awake tonight, for never had he seen his face more clearly. Often had Nada pointed it out to him in her adorable faith that the Old Man loved her, telling him how this feature changed and that feature changed, how sometimes the Old Man looked sick and at others well, and how there were times when he smiled and was happy and other times when he was sad and stern and sat there in his castle in the sky sunk in a mysterious grief which she could not understand. "And always I can tell whether I'm going to be glad or sorry by the look of the Man in the Moon," she had said to him. "He looks down and tells me even when the clouds are thick and he can only peep through now and then. And he knows a lot about you, Mister--Jolly Roger--because I've told him everything." Very quietly Jolly Roger got up from the bed and very strange seemed his manner to Peter as he walked through the outer room and into the night beyond. There he stood making no sound or movement, like one of the lifeless stubs left by fire; and Peter looked up, as his master was looking, trying to make out what it was he saw in the sky. And nothing was there--nothing that he had not seen many times before; a billion stars, and the moon riding King among them all, and fleecy clouds as if made of web, and stillness, a great stillness that was like sleep in the lap of the world. For a little Jolly Roger was silent and then Peter heard him saying, "Yellow Bird was right--again. She said we'd find a black world down here and we've found it. And we're going to find Nada where she told us we'd find her, in that place she called The Country Beyond--the country beyond the forests, beyond the tall trees and the big swamps, beyond everything we've ever known of the wild and open spaces; the country where God lives in churches on Sunday and where people would laugh at some of our queer notions, _Pied-Bot_. It's there we'll find Nada, driven out by the fire, and waiting for us now in the settlements." He spoke with a strange and quiet conviction, the haggard look dying out of his face as he stared up into the splendor of the sky. And then he said. "We won't sleep tonight, Peter. We'll travel with the moon." Half an hour later, as the lonely figures of man and dog headed for the first settlement a dozen miles away, there seemed to come for an instant the flash of a satisfied smile in the face of the Man in the sky. CHAPTER XVII From the cabin McKay went first to the great rock that jutted from the broken shoulder of Cragg's Ridge, and as they stood there Peter heard the strange something that was like a laugh, and yet was not a laugh, on his master's lips. But his scraggly face did not look up. There was an answering whimper in his throat. He had been slow in sensing the significance of the mysterious thing that had changed his old home since months ago. During the hours of afternoon, and these moonlit hours that followed, he tried to understand. He knew this was home. Yet the green grass was gone, and a million trees had changed into blackened stubs. The world was no longer shut in by deep forests. And Cragg's Ridge was naked where he and Nada had romped in sunshine and flowers, and out of it all rose the mucky death-smell of the flame-swept earth. These things he understood, in his dog way. But what he could not understand clearly was why Nada was not in the cabin, and why they did not find her, even though the world was changed. He sat back on his haunches, and Jolly Roger heard again the whimpering grief in his throat. It comforted the man to know that Peter remembered, and he was not alone in his desolation. Gently he placed a soot-grimed hand on his comrade's head. "Peter, it was from this rock--right where we're standing now--that I first saw her, a long time ago," he said, a bit of forced cheer breaking through the huskiness of his voice. "Remember the little jackpine clump down there? You climbed up onto her lap, a little know-nothing thing, and you pawed in her loose curls, and growled so fiercely I could hear you. And when I made a noise, and she looked up, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen--just a kid, with those eyes like the flowers, and her hair shining in the sun, an' tear stains on her cheeks. Tear stains, _Pied-Bot_--because of that snake who's dead over there. Remember how you growled at me, Peter?" Peter wriggled an answer. "That was the beginning," said Jolly Roger, "and this--looks like the end. But--" He clenched his fists, and there was a sudden fierceness in the grotesque movement of his shadow on the rock. "We're going to find her before that end comes," he added defiantly. "We're going to find her, _Pied-Bot_, even if it takes us to the settlements--right up into the face of the law." He set out over the rocks, his boots making hollow sounds in the deadness of the world about them. Again he followed where once had been the trail that led to Mooney's shack, over on the wobbly line of rail that rambled for eighty miles into the wilderness from Fort William. The P. D. & W. it was named--Port Arthur, Duluth & Western; but it had never reached Duluth, and there were those who had nicknamed it Poverty, Destruction & Want. Many times Jolly Roger had laughed at the queer stories Nada told him about it; how a wrecking outfit was always carried behind on the twice-a-week train, and how the crew picked berries in season, and had their trapping lines, and once chased a bear half way to Whitefish Lake while the train waited for hours. She called it the "Cannon Ball," because once upon a time it had made sixty-nine miles in twenty-four hours. But there was nothing of humor about it as Jolly Roger and Peter came out upon it tonight. It stretched out both ways from them, a thin, grim line of tragedy in the moonlight, and from where they stood it appeared to reach into a black and abysmal sea. Once more man and dog paused, and looked back at what had been. And the whine came in Peter's throat again and something tugged inside him, urging him to bark up into the face of the moon, as he had often barked for Nada in the days of his puppyhood, and afterward. But his master went on and Peter followed him, stepping the uneven ties one by one. And with the black chaos of the world under and about them, and the glorious light of the moon filling; the sky over their heads, the journey they made seemed weirdly unreal. For the silver and gold of the moon and the black muck of the fire refused to mingle, and while over their heads they could see the tiniest clouds and beyond to the farthest stars, all was black emptiness when they looked about them upon what once had been a living earth. Only the two lines of steel caught the moon-glow and the charred ends of the fire-shriven stubs that rose up out of the earth shroud and silhouetted themselves against the sky. To Peter it was not what he failed to see, but what he did not hear or smell that oppressed him and stirred him to wide-eyed watchfulness against impending evil. Under many moons he had traveled with his master in their never-ending flight from the law, and many other nights with neither moon nor stars had they felt out their trails together. But always, under him and over him on all sides of him, there had been _life_. And tonight there was no life, nor smell of life. There was no chirp of night bird, or flutter of owl's wing, no plash of duck or cry of loon. He listened in vain for the crinkling snap of twig, and the whisper of wind in treetops. And there was no smell--no musk of mink that had crossed his path, no taste in the air of the strong scented fox, no subtle breath of partridge and rabbit and fleshy porcupine. And even from the far distances there came no sound, no howl of wolf, no castanet clatter of stout moose horns against bending saplings--not even the howl of a trapper's dog. The stillness was of the earth, and yet unearthly. It was even as if some fearsome thing was smothering the sound of his master's feet. To McKay, sensing these same things that Peter sensed, came understanding that brought with it an uneasiness which changed swiftly into the chill of a growing fear. The utter lifelessness told him how vast the destruction of the fire had been. Its obliteration was so great no life had adventured back into the desolated country, though the conflagration must have passed in the preceding autumn, many months ago. The burned country was a grave and the nearest edge of it, judged from the sepulchral stillness of the night, was many miles away. For the first time came the horror of the thought that in such a fire as this people must have died. It had swept upon them like a tidal wave, galloping the forests with the speed of a race horse, with only this thin line of rail leading to the freedom of life outside. In places only a miracle could have made escape possible. And here, where Nada had lived, with the pitch-wood forests crowding close, the fire must have burned most fiercely. In this moment, when fear of the unspeakable set his heart trembling, his faith fastened itself grimly to the little old gray Missioner, Father John, in whose cabin Nada had taken refuge many months ago, when Jed Hawkins lay dead in the trail with his one-eyed face turned up to the thunder and lightning in the sky. Father John, on that stormy night when he fled north, had promised to care for Nada, and in silence he breathed a prayer that the Missioner had saved her from the red death that had swept like an avalanche upon them. He told himself it must be so. He cried out the words aloud, and Peter heard him, and followed closer, so that his head touched his master's leg as he walked. But the fear was there. From a spark it grew into a red-hot spot in Jolly Roger's heart. Twice in his own life he had raced against death in a forest fire. But never had he seen a fire like this must have been. All at once he seemed to hear the roar of it in his ears, the rolling thunder of the earth as it twisted in the cataclysm of flame, the hissing shriek of the flaming pitch-tops as they leapt in lightning fires against the smoke-smothered sky. A few hours ago he had stood where Father John's Cabin had been and the place was a ruin of char and ash. If the fire had hemmed them in and they had not escaped-- His voice cried out in sudden protest. "It can't be, Peter. It can't be! They made the rail--or the lake--and we'll find them in the settlements. It couldn't happen. God wouldn't let her die like that!" He stopped, and stared into the moon-broken gloom on his left. Something was there, fifty feet away, that drew him down through the muck which lay knee deep in the right-of-way ditch. It was what was left of the cutter's cabin, a clutter of burned logs, a wind scattered heap of ash. Even there, within arm's reach of the railroad, there had been no salvation from the fire. He waded again through the muck of the ditch, and went on. Mentally and physically he was fighting the ogre that was striving to achieve possession of his brain. Over and over he repeated his faith that Nada and the Missioner had escaped and he would find them in the settlements. Less than ever he thought of the law in these hours. What happened to himself was of small importance now, if he could find Nada alive before the menace caught up with him from behind, or ambushed him ahead. Yet the necessity of caution impinged itself upon him even in the recklessness of his determination to find her if he had to walk into the arms of the law that was hunting him. For an hour they went on, and as the moon sank westward it seemed to turn its face to look at them; and behind them, when they looked back, the world was transformed into a black pit, while ahead--with the glow of it streaming over their shoulders--ghostly shapes took form, and vision reached farther. Twice they caught the silvery gleam of lakes through the tree-stubs, and again they walked with the rippling murmur of a stream that kept for a mile within the sound of their ears. But even here, with water crying out its invitation to life, there was no life. Another hour after that Jolly Roger's pulse beat a little faster as he strained his eyes to see ahead. Somewhere near, within a mile or two, was the first settlement with its sawmill and its bunkhouses, its one store and its few cabins, with flat mountains of sawdust on one side of it, and the evergreen forest creeping up to its doors on the other. Surely they would find life here, where there had been man power to hold fire back from the clearing. And it was here he might find Nada and the Missioner, for more than once Father John had preached to the red-cheeked women and children and the clear-eyed men of the Finnish community that thrived there. But as they drew nearer he listened in vain for the bark of a dog, and his eyes quested as futilely for a point of light in the wide canopy of gloom. At last, close together, they rounded a curve in the road, and crossed a small bridge with a creek running below, and McKay knew his arm should be able to send a stone to what he was seeking ahead. And then, a minute later, he drew in a great gasping breath of unbelief and horror. For the settlement was no longer in the clearing between him and the rim-glow of the moon. No living tree raised its head against the sky, no sign of cabin or mill shadowed the earth, and where the store had been, and the little church with its white-painted cross, was only a chaos of empty gloom. He went down, as he had gone to the tie cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the scourge of the fire. A groaning agony was in the breath of Jolly Roger's lips as he went back to the railroad and hurried on Death must have come here, death sudden and swift. And if it had fallen upon the Finnish settlement, with its strong women and its stronger men, what might it not have done in the cabin of the little old gray Missioner--and Nada? For a long time after that he forgot Peter was with him. He forgot everything but his desire to reach a living thing. At times, where the road-bed was smooth, he almost ran, and at others he paused for a little to gather his breath and listen. And it was Peter, in one of these intervals, who caught the first message of life. From a long distance away came faintly the barking of a dog. Half a mile farther on they came to a clearing where no stubs of trees stood up like question marks against the sky, and in this clearing was a cabin, a dark blotch that was without light or sound. But from behind it the dog barked again, and Jolly Roger made quickly toward it. Here there was no ash under his feet, and he knew that at last he had found an oasis of life in the desolation. Loudly he knocked with his fist at the cabin door and soon there was a response inside, the heavy movement of a man's body getting out of bed, and after that the questioning voice of a woman. He knocked again and the flare of a lighted match illumined the window. Then came the drawing of a bar at the door and a man stood there in his night attire, a man with a heavy face and bristling beard, and a lamp in his hand. "I beg your pardon for waking you," said Jolly Roger, "but I am just down from the north, hoping to find my friends back here and I have seen nothing but destruction and death. You are the first living soul I have found to ask about them." "Where were they?" grunted the man. "At Cragg's Ridge." "Then God help them," came the woman's voice from back in the room. "Cragg's Ridge," said the man, "was a burning hell in the middle of the night." Jolly Roger's fingers dug into the wood at the edge of the door. "You mean--" "A lot of 'em died," said the man stolidly, as if eager to rid himself of the one who had broken his sleep. "If it was Mooney, he's dead. An' if it was Robson, or Jake the Swede, or the Adams family--they're dead, too." "But it wasn't," said Jolly Roger, his heart choking between fear and hope. "It was Father John, the Missioner, and Nada Hawkins, who lived with him--or with her foster-mother in the Hawkins' cabin." The man shook his head, and turned down the wick of his lamp. "I dunno about the girl, or the old witch who was her mother," he said, "but the Missioner made it out safe, and went to the settlements." "And no girl was with him?" "No, there was no girl," came the woman's voice again, and Peter jerked up his ears at the creaking of a bed. "Father John stopped here the second day after the fire had passed, and he said he was gathering up the bones of the dead. Nada Hawkins wasn't with him, and he didn't say who had died and who hadn't. But I think--" She stopped as the bearded man turned toward her. "You think what?" demanded Jolly Roger, stepping half into the room. "I think," said the woman, "that she died along with the others. Anyway, Jed Hawkins' witch-woman was burned trying to make for the lake, and little of her was left." The man with the lamp made a movement as if to close the door. "That's all we know," he growled. "For God's sake--don't!" entreated Jolly Roger, barring the door with his arm. "Surely there were some who escaped from Cragg's Ridge and beyond!" "Mebby a half, mebby less," said the man. "I tell you it burned like hell, and the worst of it came in the middle of the night with a wind behind it that blew a hurricane. We've twenty acres cleared here, with the cabin in the center of it, an' it singed my beard and burned her hair and scorched our hands, and my pigs died out there from the heat of it. Mebby it's a place to sleep in for the night you want, stranger?" "No, I'm going on," said Jolly Roger, the blood in his veins running with the chill of water. "How far before I come to the end of fire?" "Ten miles on. It started this side of the next settlement." Jolly Roger drew back and the door closed, and standing on the railroad once more he saw the light go out and after that the occasional barking of the settler's dog grew fainter and fainter behind them. He felt a great weariness in his bones and body now. With hope struck down the exhaustion of two nights and a day without sleep seized upon him and his feet plodded more and more slowly over the uneven ties of the road. Even in his weariness he fought madly against the thought that Nada was dead and he repeated the word "impossible--impossible" so often that it ran in sing-song through his brain. And he could not keep away from him the white, thin face of the Missioner, who had promised on his faith In God to care for Nada, and who had passed the settler's cabin _alone_. Another two hours they went on and then came the first of the green timber. Under the shelter of some balsams Jolly Roger found a resting place and there they waited for the break of dawn. Peter stretched out and slept. But Jolly Roger sat with his head and shoulders against the bole of a tree, and not until the light of the moon was driven away by the darkness that preceded dawn by an hour or two did his eyes close in restless slumber. He was roused by the wakening twitter of birds and in the cold water of a creek that ran near he bathed his face and hands. Peter wondered why there was no fire and no breakfast this morning. The settlement was only a little way ahead and it was very early when they reached it. People were still in their beds and out of only one chimney was smoke rising into the clear calm of the breaking day. From this cabin a young man came, and stood for a moment after he had closed the door, yawning and stretching his arms and looking up to see what sort of promise the sky held for the day. After that he went to a stable of logs, and Jolly Roger followed him there. He was unlike the bearded settler, and nodded with a youthful smile of cheer. "Good morning," he said. "You're traveling early, and--" He looked more keenly as his eyes took in Jolly Roger's boots and clothes, and the gray pallor in his face. "Just get in?" he asked kindly. "And--from the burnt country?" "Yes, from the burnt country. I've been away a long time, and I'm trying to find out if my friends are among the living or the dead. Did you ever hear of Father John, the Missioner at Cragg's Ridge?" The young man's face brightened. "I knew him," he said. "He helped me to bury my brother, three years ago. And if it's him you seek, he is safe. He went up to Fort William a week after the fire, and that was in September, eight months past." "And was there with him a girl named Nada Hawkins?" asked Jolly Roger, trying hard to speak calmly as he looked into the other's face. The youth shook his head. "No, he was alone. He slept in my cabin overnight, and he said nothing of a girl named Nada Hawkins." "Did he speak of others?" "He was very tired, and I think he was half dead with grief at what had happened. He spoke no names that I remember." Then he saw the gray look in Jolly Roger's face grow deeper, and saw the despair which could not hide itself in his eyes. "But there were a number of girls who passed here, alone or with their friends," he said hopefully. "What sort of looking girl was Nada Hawkins?" "A--kid. That's what I called her," said Jolly Roger, in a dead, cold voice. "Eighteen, and beautiful, with blue eyes, and brown hair that she couldn't keep from blowing in curls about her face. So like an angel you wouldn't forget her if you'd seen her--just once." Gently the youth placed a hand on Jolly Roger's arm. "She didn't come this way," he said, "but maybe you'll find her somewhere else. Won't you have breakfast with me? I've a stranger in the cabin, still sleeping, who's going into the fire country from which you've come. He's hunting for some one, and maybe you can give him information. He's going to Cragg's Ridge." "Cragg's Ridge!" exclaimed Jolly Roger. "What is his name?" "Breault," said the youth. "Sergeant Breault, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police." Jolly Roger turned to stroke the neck of a horse waiting for its morning feed. But he felt nothing of the touch of flesh under his hand. Cold as iron went his heart, and for half a minute he made no answer. Then he said: "Thanks, friend. I breakfasted before it was light and I'm hitting out into the brush west and north, for the Rainy River country. Please don't tell this man Breault that you saw me, for he'll think badly of me for not waiting to give him information he might want. But--you understand--if you loved the brother who died--that it's hard for me to talk with anyone just now." The young man's fingers touched his arm again. "I understand," he said, "and I hope to God you'll find her." Silently they shook hands, and Jolly Roger hurried away from the cabin with the rising spiral of smoke. Three days later a man and a dog came from the burned country into the town of Fort William, seeking for a wandering messenger of God who called himself Father John, and a young and beautiful girl whose name was Nada Hawkins. He stopped first at the old mission, in whose shadow the Indians and traders of a century before had bartered their wares, and Father Augustine, the aged patriarch who talked with him, murmured as he went that he was a strange man, and a sick one, with a little madness lurking in his eyes. And it was, in fact, a madness of despair eating out the life in Jolly Roger's heart. For he no longer had hope Nada had escaped the fire, even though at no place had he found a conclusive evidence of her death. But that signified little, for there were many of the missing who had not been found between the last of September and these days of May. What he did find, with deadly regularity, was the fact that Father John had escaped--and that he had traveled to safety ALONE. And Father Augustine told him that when Father John stopped to rest for a few days at the Mission he was heading north, for somewhere on Pashkokogon Lake near the river Albany. There was little rest for Peter and his master at Fort William town. That Breault must be close on their trail, and following it with the merciless determination of the ferret from which he had been named, there was no shadow of doubt in the mind of Jolly Roger McKay. So after outfitting his pack at a little corner shop, where Breault would be slow to enquire about him, he struck north through the bush toward Dog Lake and the river of the same name. Five or six days, he thought, would bring him to Father John and the truth which he dreaded more and more to hear. The despondency of his master had sunk, in some mysterious way, into the soul of Peter. Without the understanding of language he sensed the oppressive gloom of tragedy behind and about him and there was a wolfish slinking in the manner of his travel now, and his confidence was going as he caught the disease of despair of the man who traveled with him. But constantly and vigilantly his eyes and scent were questing about them, suspicious of the very winds that whispered in the treetops. And at night after they had built their little cooking fire in the deepest heart of the bush he would lie half awake during the hours of darkness, the watchfulness of his senses never completely dulled in the stupor of sleep. Since the night they had stopped at the settler's cabin Jolly Roger's face had grown grayer and thinner. A number of times he had tried to assure himself what he would do in that moment which was coming when he would stand face to face with Breault the man-hunter. His caution, after he left Fort William, was in a way an automatic instinct that worked for self-preservation in face of the fact that he was growing less and less concerned regarding Breault's appearance. It was not in his desire to delay the end much longer. The chase had been a long one, with its thrills and its happiness at times, but now he was growing tired and with Nada gone there was only hopeless gloom ahead. If she were dead he wanted to go to her. That thought was a dawning pleasure in his breast, and it was warm in his heart when he tied in a hard knot the buckskin string which locked the flap of his pistol holster. When Breault overtook him the law would know, because of the significance of this knot, that he had welcomed the end of the game. Never in the northland had there come a spring more beautiful than this of the year in which McKay and his dog went through the deep wilds to Pashkokogon Lake. In a few hours, it seemed, the last chill died out of the air and there came the soft whispers of those bridal-weeks between May and Summer, a month ahead of their time. But Jolly Roger, for the first time in his life, failed to respond to the wonder and beauty of the earth's rejoicing. The first flowers did not fill him with the old joy. He no longer stood up straight, with expanding chest, to drink in the rare sweetness of air weighted with the tonic of balsams and cedar spruce. Vainly he tried to lift up his soul with the song and bustle of mating things. There was no longer music for him in the flood-time rushing of spring waters. An utter loneliness filled the cry of the loon. And all about him was a vast emptiness from which the spirit of life had fled for him. Thus he came at last to a stream in the Burntwood country which ran into Pashkokogon Lake; and it was this day, in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, that they heard coming to them from out of the dense forest the chopping of an axe. Toward this they made their way, with caution and no sound, until in a little clearing in a bend of the stream they saw a cabin. It was a newly built cabin, and smoke was rising from the chimney. But the chopping was nearer them, in the heart of a thick cover of evergreen and birch. Into this Jolly Roger and Peter made their way and came within a dozen steps of the man who was wielding the axe. It was then that Jolly Roger rose up with a cry on his lips, for the man was Father John the Missioner. In spite of the tragedy through which he had passed the little gray man seemed younger than in that month long ago when Jolly Roger had fled to the north. He dropped his axe now and stood as if only half believing, a look of joy shining in his face as he realized the truth of what had happened. "McKay," he cried, reaching out his hands. "McKay, my boy!" A look of pity mellowed the gladness in his eyes as he noted the change in Jolly Roger's face, and the despair that had set its mark upon it. They stood for a moment with clasped hands, questioning and answering with the silence of their eyes. And then the Missioner said: "You have heard? Someone has told you?" "No," said Jolly Roger, his head dropping a little. "No one has told me," and he was thinking of Nada, and her death. Father John's fingers tightened. "It is strange how the ways of God bring themselves about," he spoke in a low voice. "Roger, you did not kill Jed Hawkins!" Dumbly, his lips dried of words, Jolly Roger stared at him. "No, you didn't kill him," repeated Father John. "On that same night of the storm when you thought you left him dead in the trail, he stumbled back to his cabin, alive. But God's vengeance came soon. "A few days later, while drunk, he missed his footing and fell from a ledge to his death. His wife, poor creature, wished him buried in sight of the cabin door--" But in this moment Roger McKay was thinking less of Breault the Ferret and the loosening of the hangman's rope from about his neck than he was of another thing. And Father John was saying in a voice that seemed far away and unreal: "We've sent out word to all parts of the north, hoping someone would find you and send you back. And she has prayed each night, and each hour of the day the same prayer has been in her heart and on her lips. And now--" Someone was coming to them from the direction of the cabin--someone, a girl, and she was singing, McKay's face went whiter than the gray ash of fire. "My God," he whispered huskily. "I thought--she had died!" It was only then Father John understood the meaning of what he had seen in his face. "No, she is alive," he cried. "I sent her straight north through the bush with an Indian the day after the fire. And later I left word for you with the Fire Relief Committee at Fort William, where I thought you would first enquire." "And it was there," said Jolly Roger, "that I did not enquire at all!" In the edge of the clearing, close to the thicket of timber, Nada had stopped. For across the open space a strange looking creature had raced at the sound of her voice; a dog with bristling Airedale whiskers, and a hound's legs, and wild-wolf's body hardened and roughened by months of fighting in the wilderness. As in the days of his puppyhood, Peter leapt up against her, and a cry burst from Nada's lips, a wild and sobbing cry of _Peter, Peter, Peter_--and it was this cry Jolly Roger heard as he tore away from Father John. On her knees, with her arms about Peter's shaggy head, Nada stared wildly at the clump of timber, and in a moment she saw a man break out of it, and stand still, as if the mellow sunlight blinded him, and made him unable to move. And the same choking weakness was at her own heart as she rose up from Peter, and reached out her arms toward the gray figure in the edge of the wood, sobbing, trying to speak and yet saying no word. And a little slower, because of his age, Father John came a moment later, and peered out with the knowledge of long years from a thicket of young banksians, and when he saw the two in the open, close in each other's arms, and Peter hopping madly about them, he drew out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and went back then for the axe which he had dropped in the timber clump. There was a great drumming in Jolly Roger's head, and for a time he failed even to hear Peter yelping at their side, for all the world was drowned in those moments by the breaking sobs in Nada's breath and the wild thrill of her body in his arms; and he saw nothing but the upturned face, crushed close against his breast, and the wide-open eyes, and the lips to kiss. And even Nada's face he seemed to see through a silvery mist, and he felt her arms strangely about his neck, as if it was all half like a dream--a dream of the kind that had come to him beside his campfire. It was a little cry from Nada that drove the unreality away. "Roger--you're--breaking me," she cried, gasping for her breath in his arms, yet without giving up the clasp of her own arms about his neck in the least; and at that he sensed the brutality of his strength, and held her off a little, looking into her face. Pride and happiness and the courage in his heart would have slunk away could he have seen himself then, as Father John saw him, coming from the edge of the bush, and as Nada saw him, held there at the end of his arms. Since the day he had come with Peter to Cragg's Ridge the blade of a razor had not touched his face, and his beard was like a brush, and with it his hair unkempt and straggling; and his eyes were red from sleeplessness and the haunting of that grim despair which had dogged his footsteps. But these things Nada did not see. Or, if she did, there must have been something beautiful about them for her. For it was not a little girl, but a woman who was standing there before Jolly Roger now--Nada grown older, very much older it seemed to McKay, and taller, with her hair no longer rioting free about her, but gathered up in a wonderful way on the crown of her head. This change McKay discovered as she stood there, and it swept upon him all in a moment, and with it the prick of something swift and terrorizing inside him. She was not the little girl of Cragg's Ridge. She was a _woman_. In a year had come this miracle of change, and it frightened him, for such a creature as this that stood before him now Jed Hawkins would never have dared to curse or beat, and he--Roger McKay--was afraid to gather her back into his arms again. And then, even as his fingers slowly drew themselves away from her shoulders, he saw that which had not changed--the wonder-light in her eyes, the soul that lay as open to him now as on that other day in Indian Tom's cabin, when Mrs. Captain Kidd had bustled and squeaked on the pantry shelf, and Peter had watched them as he lay with his broken leg in the going down of the sun. And as he hesitated it was Nada herself who came into his arms, and laid her head on his breast, and trembled and laughed and cried there, while Father John came up and patted her shoulder, and smiled happily at McKay, and then went on to the cabin in the clearing. For a time after that Jolly Roger crushed his face in Nada's hair, and neither said a word, but there was a strange throbbing of their hearts together, and after a little Nada reached up a hand to his cheek, and stroked it tenderly, bristly beard and all. "I'll never let you run away from me again--Mister--Jolly Roger," she said, and it was the little Nada of Cragg's Ridge who whispered the words, half sobbing; but in the voice there was also something very definite and very sure, and McKay felt the glorious thrill of it as he raised his face from her hair, and saw once more the sun-filled world about him. CHAPTER XVIII Following this day Peter was observant of a strange excitement in the cabin on the Burntwood. It was not so much a thing of physical happening, but more the mysterious _feel_ of something impending and very near. The day following their arrival in the Pashkokogon country his master seemed to have forgotten him entirely. It was Nada who noticed him, but even she was different; and Father John went about, overseeing two Indians whom he kept very busy, his pale, thin face luminous with an anticipation which roused Peter's curiosity, and kept him watchful. He was puzzled, too, by the odd actions of the humans about him. The second morning Nada remained in her room, and Jolly Roger wandered off into the woods without his breakfast, and Father John ate alone, smiling gently as he looked at the tightly closed door of Nada's bedroom. Even Oosimisk, the Leaf Bud, the sleek-haired Indian woman who cared for the house, was nervously expectant as she watched for Nada, and Mistoos, her husband, grunted and grimaced as he carried in from the edge of the forest many loads of soft evergreens on his shoulders. Into the forest Jolly Roger went alone, puffing furiously at his pipe. He was all a-tremble and his blood seemed to quiver and dance as it ran through his veins. Since the first rose-flush of dawn he had been awake, fighting against this upsetting of every nerve that was in him. He felt pitiably weak and helpless. But it was the weakness and helplessness of a happiness too vast for him to measure. It was Nada in her ragged shoes and dress, with the haunting torture of Jed Hawkins' brutality in her eyes and face, that he had expected to find, if he found her at all; someone to fight for, and kill for if necessary, someone his muscle and brawn would always protect against evil. He had not dreamed that in these many months with Father John she would change from "a little kid goin' on eighteen" into--_a woman_. He tried to recall just what he had said to her last night--that he was still an outlaw, and would always be, no matter how well he lived from this day on; and that she, now that she had Father John's protection, was very foolish to care for him, or keep her troth with him, and would be happier if she could forget what had happened at Cragg's Ridge. "You're a _woman_ now," he said. "_A woman_--" he had emphasized that--"and you don't need me any more." And she had looked at him, without speaking, as if reading what was inside him; and then, with a sudden little laugh, she swiftly pulled her hair down about her shoulders, and repeated the very words she had said to him a long time ago--"Without you--I'd want to die--Mister--Jolly Roger," and with that she turned and ran into the cabin, her hair flying riotously, and he had not seen her again since that moment. Since then his heart had behaved like a thing with the fever, and it was beating swiftly now as he looked at his watch and noted the quick passing of time. Back in the cabin Peter was sniffing at the crack under Nada's door, and listening to her movement. For a long time he had heard her, but not once had she opened the door. And he wondered, after that, why Oosimisk and her husband and Father John piled evergreens all about, until the cabin looked like the little jackpine trysting-place down at Cragg's Ridge, even to the soft carpet of grass on the floor, and flowers scattered all about. Hopeless of understanding what it meant, he went outside, and waited in the warm May-day sun until his master came back through the clearing. What happened after that puzzled him greatly. When he followed Jolly Roger into the cabin Mistoos and the Leaf Bud were seated in chairs, their hands folded, and Father John stood behind a small table on which lay an open book, and he was looking at his watch when they came in. He nodded, and smiled, and very clearly Peter saw his master gulp, as if swallowing something that was in his throat. And the ruddiness had gone completely out of his smooth-shaven cheeks. It was the first time Peter had seen his master so clearly afraid, and from his burrow in the evergreens he growled under his breath, eyeing the open door with sudden thought of an enemy. And then Father John was tapping at Nada's door. He went back to the table and waited, and as the knob of the door turned very slowly Jolly Roger swallowed again, and took a step toward it. It opened, and Nada stood there. And Jolly Roger gave a little cry, so low that Peter could just hear it, as he held out his hands to her. For Nada was no longer the Nada who had come to him in Father John's clearing. She was the Nada of Cragg's Ridge, the Nada of that wild night of storm when he had fled into the north. Her hair fell about her, as in the old days when Peter and she had played together among the rocks and flowers, and her wedding dress was faded and torn, for it was the dress she had worn that night of despair when she sent her message to Peter's master, and on her little feet were shoes broken and disfigured by her flight in those last hours of her mighty effort to go with the man she loved. In Father John's eyes, as she stood there, was a great astonishment; but in Jolly Roger's there came such a joy that, in answer to it, Nada went straight into his arms and held up her lips to be kissed. Her cheeks were very pink when she stood beside McKay, with Father John before them, the open book in his hands; and then, as her long lashes drooped over her eyes, and her breath came a little more quickly, she saw Peter staring at her questioningly, and made a little motion to him with her hand. He went to her, and her fingers touched his head as Father John began speaking. Peter looked up, and listened, and was very quiet in these moments. Jolly Roger was staring straight at the balsam-decked wall opposite him, but there was something mighty strong and proud in the way he held his head, and the fear had gone completely out of his eyes. And Nada stood very close to him, so that her brown head lightly touched his shoulder and he could see the silken shimmer of loose tresses which with sweet intent she had let fall over his arm. And her little fingers clung tightly to his thumb, as on that blessed night when they had walked together across the plain below Cragg's Ridge, with the moon lighting their way. Peter, in his dog way, fell a-wondering as he stood there, but kept his manners and remained still. When it was all over he felt a desire to show his teeth and growl, for when Father John had kissed Nada, and was shaking Jolly Roger's hand, he saw his mistress crying in that strange, silent way he had so often seen her crying in his puppyhood days. Only now her blue eyes were wide open as she looked at Jolly Roger, and her cheeks were flushed to the pink of wild rose petals, and her lips were trembling a little, and there was a tiny something pulsing in her soft white throat. And all at once there came a smile with the tears, and Jolly Roger--turning from Father John to find her thus--gathered her close in his arms, and Peter wagged his tail and went out into the sun-filled day, where he heard a red squirrel challenging him from a stub in the edge of the clearing. A little later he saw Nada and his master come out of the cabin, and walk hand in hand across the open into the sweet-smelling timber where Father John had been chopping with his axe. On a fresh-cut log Nada sat down, and McKay sat beside her, still holding her hand. Not once had he spoken in crossing the open, and it seemed as though little devils were holding his lips closed now. With her eyes looking down at the greening earth under their feet, Nada said, very softly, "Mister--Jolly Roger--are you glad?" "Yes," he said. "Glad that I am--your wife?" The word drew a great, sobbing breath from him, and looking up suddenly she saw that he was staring over the balsam-tops into the wonderful blue of the sky. "Your _wife_," she whispered, touching his shoulder gently with her lips. "Yes, I'm glad," he said. "So glad that I'm--afraid." "Then--if you are glad--please kiss me again." He stood up, and drew her to him, and held her face between his hands as he kissed her red lips; and after that he kissed her shining hair again and again, and when he let her go her eyes were a glory of happiness. "And you will never run away from me again?" she demanded, holding him at arm's length. "Never?" "Never!" "Then--I want nothing more in this life," she said, nestling against him again. "Only you, for ever and ever." Jolly Roger made no answer, but held her a long time in his arms, with the soft beating of her heart against him, and listened to the twitter and song of nesting and mating things about them. In this silence she lay content, until Peter--growing restless--started quietly into the golden depths of the forest. It was _Pied-Bot_'s going, cautious and soft-footed, as if danger and menace might lurk just ahead of him, that brought another look into McKay's eyes as Nada's hand crept to his cheek, and rested there. "You love me--very much?" "More than life," he answered, and as he spoke he was watching Peter, questing the soft wind that came whispering from the south. Her finger touched his lips, gentle and sweet. "And wherever you go, I go--forever and always?" she questioned. "Yes, forever and always"--and his eyes were looking through miles upon miles of deep forest, and at the end he saw the thin and pitiless face of a man who was following his trail, Breault the Ferret. His arms closed more tightly about her, and he pressed her face against him. "And I pray God you will never be sorry," he said, still looking through the miles of forest. "No, no--sorry I shall never be," she cried softly. "Not if we fly, and go hungry, and fight--and die. Never shall I be sorry--with you," and he felt the tightening of her arms. And then, as he remained silent, with his lips on the velvety smoothness of her hair, she told him what Father John had already told him--of her wild effort to overtake him in that night of storm when he had fled from the Missioner's cabin at Cragg's Ridge; and in turn he told her how Peter came to him in the break of the morning with the treasure which had saved him heart and soul, and how he had given that treasure into the keeping of Yellow Bird, on the shores of Wollaston. And thereafter, for an hour, as they wandered through the May-time sweetness of the forest, she would permit him to talk of only Yellow Bird and Sun Cloud; and, one thing leading to another, she learned how it was that Yellow Bird had been his fairy in childhood days, and how he came to be an outlaw for her in later manhood. Her eyes were shining when he had finished, and her red lips were a-tremble with the quickness of her breathing. "Some day--you'll take me there," she whispered. "Oh, I'm so proud of you, my Roger. And I love Yellow Bird. And Sun Cloud. Some day--we'll go!" He nodded, happiness overshadowing the fear of Breault that had grown in his heart. "Yes, we'll go. I've dreamed it, and the dream helped to keep me alive--" And then he told her of Cassidy, and of the paradise he had found with Giselle and her grandfather on the other side of Wollaston. And so it happened the hours passed swiftly, and it was afternoon when they returned to Father John's cabin, and Nada went into her room. In the early waning of the sun the feast which the Leaf Bud had been preparing was ready, and not until then did Nada appear again. And once more the lump rose up in Roger's throat at the wonder of her, for very completely she had transformed herself into a woman again, from the softly shining coils of hair on the crown of her head to the coquettish little slippers that set off her dainty feet. And he saw the white gleam of soft shoulders and tender arms where once had been rags and bruises, and held there by the slim beauty and exquisite daintiness of her he stared like a fool, until suddenly she laughed joyously at his amaze, and ran to him with wide-open arms, and kissed him so soundly that Peter cocked up his ears a bit startled. And then she kissed Father John, and after that was mistress at the table, radiant in her triumph and her eyes starry with happiness. And she was no longer shy in speaking his name, but called him Roger boldly and many times, and twice during that meal of marvelous forgetfulness--though long lashes covered her eyes when she spoke it--she called him 'my husband.' In truth she was a woman and for the most part Roger McKay--fighting man and very strong though he was--looked at her in dumb worship, speaking little, his heart a-throb, and his brain reeling in the marvel of what at last had come into his possession. And yet, even in this hour of supreme happiness that held him half mute, there was always lurking in the back of his brain a thought of Breault, the Ferret. CHAPTER XIX In the star dusk of evening the time came when he spoke his fears to Father John. Nada had gone into her room, taking Peter with her, and out under the cool of the skies Father John's pale face was turned up to the unending glory of the firmament, and his lips were whispering a prayer of gratitude and blessing, when Roger laid a hand gently on his arm. "Father," he said, "it is a wonderful night." "A night of gladness and omen," replied Father John. "See the stars! They seem to be alive and rejoicing, and it is not sacrilege to believe they are, giving you their benediction." "And yet--I am afraid." "Afraid?" Father John looked into his eyes, and saw him staring off over the forest-tops. "Yes--afraid for her." Briefly he told him of what had happened on the Barren months ago, and how he had narrowly escaped Breault in coming away from the burned country. "He is on my trail," he said, "and tonight he is not very far away." The Missioner's hand rested in a comforting way on his arm. "You did not kill Jed Hawkins, my son, and for that we have thanked God each day and night of our lives--Nada and I. And each evening she has prayed for you, kneeling at my side, and through every hour of the day I know she was praying for you in her heart--and I believe in the answer to prayer such as that, Roger. Her faith, now, is as deep as the sea. And you, too, must have faith." "She is more precious to me than life--a thousand lives, if I had them," whispered Jolly Roger. "If anything should happen--now--" "Yes, if the thing you fear should happen, what then?" cried Father John, faith ringing like a note of inspiration in his low voice. "What, then, Roger? You did not kill Jed Hawkins. If the law compels you to pay a price for the errors it believes you have committed, will that price be so terribly severe?" "Prison, Father. Probably five years." Father John laughed softly, the star-glow revealing a radiance in his face. "Five years!" he repeated. "Oh, my boy, my dear boy, what are five years to pay for such a treasure as that which has come into your possession tonight? Five short years--only five. And she waiting for you, proud of you for those very achievements which sent you to prison, planning for all the future that lies beyond those five short years, growing sweeter and more beautiful for you as she waits--Roger, is that a very great sacrifice? Is it too great a price to pay? Five years, and after that--peace, love, happiness for all time? Is it, Roger?" McKay felt his voice tremble as he tried to answer. "But she, father--" "Yes, yes, I know what you would say," interrupted Father John gently. "I argued with her, just as you would have argued, Roger. I appealed to her reason. I told her that if you returned it would mean prison for you, and strangely I said that same thing--five years. But I found her selfish, Roger, very selfish--and set upon her desire beyond all reason. And it was she who asked first those very questions I have asked you tonight. 'What are five years?' she demanded of me, defying my logic. 'What are five years--or ten--or twenty, _if I know I am to have him after that_?' Yes, she was selfish, Roger. Just that great is her love for you." "Dear God in Heaven," breathed Jolly Roger, and stopped, his eyes staring wide at the stars. "And after that, after I had given in to her selfishness, Roger, she planned how we--she and I--would live very near to the place where they imprisoned you, and how each day some sight or sign should pass between you, and the baby--" "The baby, Father?" "Thus it seems she dreams, Roger. She, in the wilfulness of her desire and selfishness--" With a choking cry Roger bowed his face in his hands. For a moment Father John was silent. And then he said, so very low that it was almost a whisper, "I have passed many years in the wilderness, Roger, many years trying to look into the hearts of people--and of God. And this--this love of Nada's--is the greatest of all the miracles I have witnessed in a life that is now reaching to its three score and five. Do you see the wonder of it, son? And does it make you happy, and fearless now?" He did not wait for an answer, but turned slowly and went in the direction of the cabin, leaving Roger alone under the thickening stars. And McKay's face was like Father John's, filled with a strange and wonderful radiance when he looked up. But with that light of happiness was also the fiercer underglow of a great determination. For Nada--for _the baby_--the worst should not happen; he breathed the thought aloud, and in the words was a prayer that God might help him, and make unnecessary the sacrifice from which Father John had taken the sting of fear. And yet, if that sacrifice came, he saw clearly now that it would not be a great tragedy but only a brief shadow cast over the undying happiness in his soul. For they--_Nada and the baby_--would be waiting--waiting-- Suddenly he was conscious of a sound very near, and he beheld Nada, taller and slimmer and more beautiful than ever, it seemed to him, in the starlight. "I have told him," Father John had whispered to her only a moment before. "I have told him, so that he will not fear prison--either for himself or for you." And she had come to him quietly, all of the pretty triumph and playfulness gone, so that she stood like an angel in the soft glow of the skies, much older than he had ever seen her before, and smiled at him with a new and wonderful tenderness as she held out her hands to him. Not until she lay in his arms, looking up at him from under her long lashes, did he dare to speak. And then, "Is it true--what Father John has told me?" he asked. "It is true," she whispered, and the silken lashes covered her eyes. Her hand crept up to his face in the silence that followed, and rested there; and with no desire to hear more than the three words she had spoken he crushed his lips in the sweet coils of her hair, and together, in that peace ands understanding, they listened to the gentle whisperings of the night. "Roger," she whispered at last. "Yes, my _Newa_--" "What does that mean, Roger?" "It means--beloved--wife" "Then I like it. But I shall like the others--one of the others--best." "My--_wife_." "That--that makes me happiest, Roger. Your _wife_. Oh, it is the sweetest word in the world, that--and--" He felt her warm face hide itself softly against his neck. "Mother," he added. "Yes--Mother," she repeated after him in an awed little voice. "Oh, I have dreamed of Mothers since I have been old enough to dream, Roger! My Mother--I never had one that I can remember, except in a dream. It must be wonderful to--to--have a Mother, Roger." "And yet, I think, not quite so wonderful as to BE a Mother, my Nada." "Listen!" she whispered. "It is the Leaf Bud singing." "A love song?" "Yes, in Cree." She raised her head, so that her eyes were wide open, and looking at him. "Since we came up here all this wonderful world has been promising song for me, Roger. And since you came back to me it has been singing--singing--singing--every hour of night and day. Have you ever dreamed of leaving it, Roger--of going down into that world of towns and cities of which Father John has told me so much?" "Would you like to go there, Nada?" "Only to look upon it, and come away. I want to live in the forests, where I found you. Always and always, Roger." She raised herself on tip-toe, and kissed him. "I want to live near Yellow Bird and Sun Cloud--please--Mister Jolly Roger--I do. And Father John will go with us. And we'll be so happy there all together, Yellow Bird and Sun Cloud and Giselle and I--oh!" His arms had tightened so suddenly that the little cry came from her. "And yet--I may have to leave you for a little time, Nada. But it will not be for long. What are five years, when all life reaches out a paradise before us? They are nothing--nothing--and will pass swiftly--" "Yes, they will pass swiftly," she said, so gently that scarce did he hear. But on his breast she gave a little sob which would not choke itself back, a sob which bravely she smiled through a moment later, and which he--knowing that it was best--made as if he had not heard. And so, this night, while Father John and Peter waited and watched in the cabin, did they plan their future in the company of the stars. CHAPTER XX The Sabbath was a day of glory and peace in the Burntwood country. The sun rose warm and golden, the birds were singing, and never had the air seemed sweeter to Father John when he came out quietly from the cabin and breathed it in the early break of dawn. Best of all he loved this very beginning of day, before darkness was quite gone, when the world seemed to be awakening mid sleepy whisperings and sounds came clearly from a long distance. This morning he heard the barking of a dog, a mile away it must have been, and Peter, who followed close beside him, pricked up his ears at the sound of it. Father John had noted Peter's vigilance, the cautious expectancy with which he was always sniffing the air, and the keen alertness of his eyes and ears. McKay had explained the reason for it. And this morning, as they made their way down to the pool at the creekside, Peter's ceaseless watching for danger held a deeper significance for Father John. All through the night, in spite of his faith and his words of consolation, he was thinking of the menace which was following McKay, and which eventually must catch up with him. And yet, how short a time was five years! Looking backward, each five years of his life seemed but a yesterday. It was eight times five years ago that a sweet-faced girl had first filled his life, as Nada filled Jolly Roger's now, and through the thirty years since he had lost her he could still hear her voice as clearly as though he had held her in his arms only a few hours ago, so swift had been the passing of time. But looking ahead, and not backward, five years seemed an eternity of time, and the dread of it was in Father John's heart as he stood at the side of the pool, with the first pink glow of sunrise coming to him over the forest-tops. Five years, and he was an old man now. A long and dreary wait it would be for him. But for youth, the glorious youth of Roger and Nada, it would seem very short when in later years they looked back upon it. And for a time as he contemplated the long span of life that lay behind him, and the briefness of that which lay ahead, a yearning selfishness possessed the soul of Father John, an almost savage desire to hold those five years away from the violation of the law--not alone for Nada's sake and Roger McKay's--but for his own. In this twilight of a tragic life a great happiness had come to him in the love of these two, and thought of its menace, its desecration by a pitiless and mistaken justice, roused in him something that was more like the soul of a fighting man than the spirit of a missioner of God. Vainly he tried to stamp out the evil of this resentment, for evil he believed it to be. And shame possessed him when he saw the sweet glory in Nada's face later that morning, and the happiness that was in Roger McKay's. Yet was that aching place in his heart, and the hidden fear which he could not vanquish. And that day, it seemed to him, his lips gave voice to lies. For, being Sunday, the wilderness folk gathered from miles about, and he preached to them in the little mission house which they had helped him to build of logs in the clearing. Partly he spoke in Cree, and partly in English, and his message was one of hope and inspiration, pointing out the silver linings that always lay beyond the darkness of clouds. To McKay, holding Nada's hand in his own as they listened, Father John's words brought a great and comforting faith. And in Nada's eyes and voice as she led in Cree the song, "Nearer, My God, to Thee," he heard and saw the living fire of that faith, and had Breault come in through the open doorway then he would have accepted him calmly as the beginning of that sacrifice which he had made up his mind to make. In the afternoon, when the wilderness people had gone, Father John heard again the story of Yellow Bird, for Nada was ever full of questions about her, and for the first time the Missioner learned of the inspiration which the Indian woman's sorcery had been to Jolly Roger. "It was foolish," McKay apologized, in spite of the certainty and faith which he saw shining in Nada's eyes. "But--it helped me." "It wasn't foolish," replied Nada quickly. "Yellow Bird _did_ come to me. And--_she knew_." "No true faith is folly," said Father John, in his soft, low voice. "The great fact is that Yellow Bird believed. She was inspired by a great confidence, and confidence and faith give to the mind a power which it is utterly incapable of possessing without them. I believe in the mind, children. I believe that in some day to come it will reach those heights where it will unlock the mystery of life itself to us. I have seen many strange things in my forty-odd years in the wilderness, and not the least of these have been the achievements of the primitive mind. And it seems to me, Roger, that Yellow Bird told you much that has come true. And has it occurred to you--" He stopped, knowing that the cloud of unrest which was almost fear in his heart was driving him to say these things. "What, father," questioned Nada, bending toward him. "I was about to express a thought which suggests an almost childish curiosity, and you will laugh at me, my dear. I am wondering if it has occurred to Roger the mysterious 'Country Beyond' of which Yellow Bird dreamed might be the great country down there--south--_beyond the border_--the United States?" Something which he could not control seemed to drive the words from his lips, and in an instant he saw that Nada had seized upon their significance. Her eyes widened. The blue in them grew darker, and Roger observed her fingers grip suddenly in the softness of her dress as she turned from Father John to look at him. "Or--it might be China, or Africa, or the South Seas," he tried to laugh, remembering his old visions. "It might be--anywhere." Nada's lips trembled, as if she were about to speak; and then very quietly she sat, with her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and Father John knew she was not expressing the thought in her heart when she said, "Someday I want to tell Yellow Bird how much I love her." Now in these hours since he and his master had come to the Burntwood it seemed to Peter that he had lost something very great, for in his happiness McKay had taken but scant notice of him, and Nada seemed to have found a greater joy than that which a long time ago she had found in his comradeship. So now, as she saw him lying in his loneliness a short distance away, Nada suddenly ran to him, and together they went into the thick screen of the balsams, Peter yipping joyously, and Nada without so much as turning her head in the direction of Roger and Father John. But even in that bird-like swiftness with which she had left them, Father John had caught the look in her eyes. "I have made a mistake," he confessed humbly. "I have sinned, because in her I have roused the temptation to urge you to fly away with her--down there--south. She is a woman, and being a woman she has infinite faith in Yellow Bird, for Yellow Bird helped to give you to her. She believes--" "And I--I--also believe," said McKay, staring at the green balsams. "And yet--it is better for you to remain. God means that judgment and happiness should come in their turn." Jolly Roger rose to his feet, facing the south. "It is a temptation, father. It would be hard to give her up--now. If Breault would only wait a little while. But if he comes--_now_--" He walked away slowly, following through the balsams where Nada and Peter had gone. Father John watched him go, and a trembling smile came to his lips when he was alone. In his heart he knew he was a coward, and that these young people had been stronger than he. For in their happiness and the faith which he had falsely built up in them they had resigned themselves to the inevitable, while he, in these moments of cowardice, had shown them the way to temptation. And yet as he stood there, looking in the direction they had gone, he felt no remorse because of what he had done, and a weight seemed to have lifted itself from his shoulders. For a time the more selfish instincts of the man rose in him, fighting down the sacrificial humility of the great faith of which he was a messenger. The new sensation thrilled him, and in its thrill he felt his heart beating a little faster, and hope rising in him. Five years were a long time--_for him_. That was the thought which kept repeating itself over and over in his brain, and with it came that other thought, that self-preservation was the first law of existence, and therefore could not be a sin. Thus did Father John turn traitor to his spoken words, though his calm and smiling face gave no betrayal of it when Nada and Roger returned to the cabin an hour later, their arms filled with red bakneesh vines and early wildflowers. Nada's cheeks were as pink as the bakneesh, and her eyes as blue as the rock-violets she wore on her breast. And Father John knew that Jolly Roger was no longer oppressed by the fear of a menace which he was helpless to oppose, for there was something very confident in the look of his eyes and the manner in which they rested upon Nada. Peter alone saw the mysterious thing which happened in the early evening. He was with Nada in her room. And she was the old Nada again, hugging his shaggy head in her arms, and whispering to him in the old, excited way. And strange memory of a bundle came back to Peter, for very quietly, as if unseen ears might be listening to her, Nada gathered many things in a pile on the table, and made another bundle. This bundle she thrust under her bed, just as a long time ago she had thrust a similar bundle under a banksian clump in the meadowland below Cragg's Ridge. Father John went to his bed very early, and he was thinking of Breault. The Hudson's Bay Company post was only twelve miles away, and Breault would surely go there before questing from cabin to cabin for his victim. So it happened that a little after midnight he rose without making a sound, and by the light of a candle wrote a note for Nada, saying he had business at the post that day, and without wakening them had made an early start. This note Nada read to McKay when they sat at breakfast. "Quite frequently he has gone like that," Nada explained. "He loves the forests at night--in the light of the moon." "But last night there was no moon," said Roger. "Yes--" "And when Father John left the cabin the sky was clouded, and it was very dark." "You heard him go?" "Yes, and saw him. There was a worried look in his face when he wrote that note in the candle-glow." "Roger, what do you mean?" McKay went behind her chair, and tilted up her face, and kissed her shining hair and questioning eyes. "It means, precious little wife, that Father John is hurrying to the post to get news of Breault if he can. It means that deep in his heart he wants us to follow Yellow Bird's advice to the end. For he is sure that he knows what Yellow Bird meant by 'The Country Beyond.' It is the great big world outside the forests, a world so big that if need be we can put ourselves ten thousand miles away from the trails of the mounted police. That is the thought which is urging him to the post to look for Breault." Her arms crept up to his neck, and in a little voice trembling with eagerness she said, "Roger, my bundle is ready. I prepared it last night--and it is under the bed." He held her more closely. "And you are willing to go with me--anywhere?" "Yes, anywhere." "To the end of the earth?" Her crumpled head nodded against his breast. "And leave Father John?" "Yes, for you. But I think--sometime--he will come to us." Her fingers touched his cheek. "And there must be forests, big, beautiful forests, in some other part of the world, Roger." "Or a desert, where they would never think of looking for us," he laughed happily. "I'd love the desert, Roger." "Or an uninhabited island?" Against him her head nodded again. "I'd love life anywhere--_with you_." "Then--we'll go," he said, trying to speak very calmly in spite of the joy that was consuming him like a fire. And then he went on, steadying his voice until it was almost cold. "But it means giving up everything you've dreamed of, Nada--these forests you love, Father John, Yellow Bird, Sun Cloud--" "I have only one dream," she interrupted him softly. "And five years will pass very quickly," he continued. "Possibly it will not be as bad as that, and afterward all this land we love will be free to us forever. Gladly will I remain and take my punishment if in the end it will make us happier, Nada." "I have only one dream," she repeated, caressing his cheek with her hand, "and that is you, Roger. Where-ever you take me I shall be the happiest woman in the world." "_Woman_," he laughed, scarcely breathing the word aloud. "Yes, I am a woman--now" "And yet forever and ever the little girl of Cragg's Ridge," he cried with sudden passion, crushing her close to him. "I'd lose my life sooner than I would lose her, Nada--the little girl with flying hair and strawberry stain on her nose, and who believed so faithfully in the Man in the Moon. Always I shall worship her as the little goddess who came down to me from somewhere in heaven!" Yet all through that day, as they waited for Father John's return, he saw more and more of the wonder of woman that had come to crown the glory of Nada's wifehood, and his heart trembled with joy at the miracle of it. There was something vastly sweet in the change of her. She was no longer the utterly dependent little thing, possibly caring for him because he was big and strong and able to protect her; she was a woman, and loved him as a woman, and not because of fear or helplessness. And then came the thrilling mystery of another thing. He found himself, in turn, beginning to depend upon her, and in their planning her calm decision and quiet reasoning strengthened him with new confidence and made his heart sing with gladness. With his eyes on the smooth and velvety coils of hair which she had twisted woman-like on her head, he said, "With your hair like that you are my Margaret of Anjou, and the other way--with it down you are my little Nada of Cragg's Ridge. And I--I don't quite understand why God should be so good to me." And this day Peter was trying in his dumb way to analyze the change. The touch of Nada's hand thrilled him, as it did a long time ago, and still he sensed the difference. Her voice was even softer when she put her cheek down to his whiskered face and talked to him, but in it he missed that which he could not quite bring back clearly through the lapse of time--the childish comradeship of her. Yet he began to worship her anew, even more fiercely than he had loved the Nada of old. He was content now to lie with his nose touching her foot or dress; but when in the sunset of early evening she went into her room, and came out a little later with her curling hair clouding her shoulders and breast, and tied with a faded ribbon she had brought from Cragg's Ridge, he danced about her, yelping joyously, and she accepted the challenge in a wild race with him to the edge of the clearing. Panting and flushed she ran back to Jolly Roger, and rested in his arms. And it was McKay, with his face half hidden in her riotous hair, who saw a figure come suddenly out of the forest at the far end of the clearing. It was Father John. He saw him pause for an instant, and then stagger toward them, swaying as if about to fall. The sudden stopping of his breath--the tightening of his arms--drew Nada's shining eyes to his face, and then she, too, saw the little old Missioner as he swayed and staggered across the clearing. With a cry she was out of McKay's arms and running toward him. Father John was leaning heavily upon her when McKay came up. His face was tense and his breath came in choking gasps. But he tried to smile as he clutched a hand at his breast. "I have hurried," he said, making a great effort to speak calmly, "and I am--winded--" He drew in a deep breath, and looked at Jolly Roger. "Roger--I have hurried to tell you--Breault is coming. He cannot be far behind me. Possibly half a mile, or a mile--" In the thickening dusk he took Nada's white face between his hands. "I find--at last--that I was mistaken, child," he said, very calmly now. "I believe it is not God's will that you remain to be taken by Breault. You must go. There is no time to lose. If Breault does not stumble off the trail in this gloom he will be here in a few minutes. Come." Not a word did Nada say as they went to the cabin, and McKay saw her tense face as pale as an ivory cameo in the twilight. But something in the up-tilt of her chin and the poise of her head assured him she was prepared, and unafraid. In the cabin the Leaf Bud met them, and to her Nada spoke quickly. There was understanding between them, and Oosimisk dragged in a filled pack from the kitchen while Nada ran into her room and came out with the bundle. Suddenly she was standing before McKay and Father John, her breast throbbing with excitement. "There is nothing more to make ready," she said. "Yellow Bird has been with me all this day, and her spirit told me to prepare. We have everything we need." And then she saw only Father John, and put her arms closely about his neck, and with wide, tearless eyes looked into his face. "Father, you will come to us?" she whispered. "You promise that?" The Missioner's arms closed about her, and he bowed his face against her lips and cheek. "I pray God that it may be so," he said. Nada's arms tightened convulsively, and in that moment there came a warning growl from outside the cabin door. "Peter!" she cried. In another moment Father John had extinguished the light. "Go, my children," he commanded. "You must be quick. Twenty paces below the pool is a canoe. I had one of my Indians leave it there yesterday, and it is ready. Roger--Nada--" He groped out, and the hands of the three met in the darkness. "God bless you--both! And go south--always south. Now go--go! I think I hear footsteps--" He thrust them to the door, Nada with her bundle and Roger with his pack. Suddenly he felt Peter at his side, and reaching down he fastened his fingers in the scruff of his neck, and held him back. "Good-bye," he whispered huskily. "Good-bye--Nada--Roger--" A sob came back out of the gloom. "Good-bye, father." And then they listened, Peter and Father John, until the swift footsteps of the two they loved passed beyond their hearing. Peter whimpered, and struggled a little, but Father John held him as he closed the door. "It's best for you to stay, Peter," he tried to explain. "It's best for you to stay--with me. For I think they are going a far distance, and will come to a land where you would shrivel up and die. Besides, you could not go in the canoe. So be good, and remain with me, Peter--with me--" And the Leaf Bud, standing wide-eyed and motionless, heard a strange little choking laugh come from Father John as he groped in darkness for a light. CHAPTER XXI A slow illumination filled the cabin, first the yellow flare of a match and then the light of a lamp, and as Father John's waxen face grew out of the darkness Peter whimpered and whined and scratched with, his paws at the closed door. Oosimisk, the Leaf Bud, stood like a statue, with her wide, dark eyes staring at Father John, but scarcely seeming to breathe. In the old Missioner's face came a trembling smile and a look of triumph as he read the fear-written question in her steady gaze. "All is well, Oosimisk," he said quietly, speaking in Cree. "They are safely away, and will not be caught. Continue with your duties and let no one see that anything unusual has happened. Breault will come very soon." He straightened his shoulders, as if to give himself confidence and strength, and then he called Peter, and comforted the dog whose master and mistress were fleeing through the dark. "They have reached the pool," he said, seating himself and holding Peter's shaggy head between his hands. "They have just about reached the pool, and Breault must be entering the clearing on the other side. Roger cannot miss the canoe--twenty paces down and with nothing to shadow it overhead; I think he has found it by this time, and in another half minute they will be off. And it is very black down the Burntwood, with deep timber close to the water, and for many miles no man can follow by night along its shores." Suddenly his hands tightened, and the Leaf Bud, watching him slyly, saw the last of suspense go out of his face. "And now--they are safe," he cried exultantly. "They must be on their way--and Breault has not come across the clearing!" He rose to his feet, and began pacing back and forth, while Peter sniffed yearningly at the door again. Oosimisk, with the caution of her race in moments of danger, was drawing the curtains at the windows, and Father John smiled his approbation. He did not want Breault, the man-hunter, peering through one of the windows at him. Even as he walked back and forth he listened intently for Breault's footsteps. Peter, with a sigh, gave up his scratching and settled himself on his haunches close to Nada's door. Father John, in passing him, paused to lay a hand on his head. "Some day it may please God to let us go to them," he consoled, speaking for himself even more than for Peter. "Some day, when they are far away--and safe." He felt Peter suddenly stiffen under his hand, and from the Leaf Bud came a low, swift word of warning. She began singing softly, and dishes and pans already clean rattled under her hands in the kitchen, and she continued to sing even as the cabin door opened and Breault the man-hunter stood in it. The unexpectedness of his appearance, without the sound of a warning footstep outside, was amazing even to Peter. In the open door he stood for a moment, his thin, ferret-like face standing out against the black background of the night, and his strange eyes, apparently half closed yet bright as diamonds, sweeping the interior without effort but with the quickness of lightning. There was something deadly and foreboding about him as he stood here, and Peter growled low in his throat. Recognition flashed upon him in an instant. It was the man of the snow-dune, away up on the Barren, the man whom he had mistrusted from the beginning, and from whom they had fled into the face of the Big Storm months ago. His mind worked swiftly, even as swiftly as Breault's in its way, and without any process of reasoning he sensed menace and enmity in this man's appearance, and associated with it the mysterious flight of Jolly Roger and Nada. Breault had nodded, without speaking. Then his eyes rested on Peter, and his face broke into a twisted sort of smile. It was not altogether unpleasant, yet was there something about it which made one shiver. It spoke the character of the man, pitiless, determined, omniscient almost, as if the spirit of a grim and unrelenting fate walked with him. Again he nodded, and held out a hand. "Peter," he called. "Come here, Peter!" Peter flattened his ears a fraction of an inch, but did not move. Even that fraction of an inch caught Breault's keen eyes. "Still a one-man dog," he observed, stepping well inside the cabin, and facing Father John. "Where is McKay, Father?" He had not closed the door, and Peter saw his chance. The Leaf Bud saw him pass like a shot out into the night, but as he went she made no effort to call him back, for her ears were wide open as Breault repeated his question, "Where is McKay, Father?" Peter heard the man-hunter's voice from the darkness outside. For barely an instant he paused, picking up the fresh scent of Nada and Jolly Roger. It was easy to follow--straight to the pool, and from the pool twenty paces down-stream, where a little finger of sand and pebbles had been formed by the eddies. In this bar was fresh imprint of the canoe, and here the footprints ended. Peter whimpered, peering into the tunnel of darkness between forest trees, where the water rippled and gurgled softly on its way into a deeper and more tangled wilderness. He waded belly-deep into the current, half determined to swim; and then he waited, listening intently, but could hear no sound of voice or paddle stroke. Yet he knew Jolly Roger and Nada could not be far away. He returned to the edge of the pool, and began sniffing his way down-stream, pausing every two or three minutes to listen. Now and then he caught the presence of those he sought, in the air, but those intervals in which he stopped to catch sound of voice or paddle lost him time, so the canoe was traveling faster than Peter. Half way between himself and the bow of that canoe McKay could dimly make out Nada's pale face in the star glow that filtered like a mist through the tops of the close-hanging trees. Scarcely above his breath he laughed in joyous confidence. "At last my dream is coming true, Nada," he whispered. "You are mine. And we are going into another world. And no one will ever find us there--no one but Father John, when we send him word. You are not afraid?" Her voice trembled a little in the gloom. "No, I am not afraid. But it is dark--so dark--" "The moon will be with us again in a few nights--your moon, with the Old Man smiling down on us. I know how the Man in the Moon must feel when he's on the other side of the world, and can't see you, Nada." Her silence made him lean toward her, striving to get a better view of her face where the starlight broke through an opening in the tree-tops. And in that moment he heard a little breath that was almost a sob. "It's Peter," she said, before he could speak. "Oh, Roger, why didn't we bring Peter?" "Possibly--we should have," he replied, skipping a stroke with his paddle. "But I think we have done the best thing for Peter. He is a wilderness dog, and has never known anything different. Over there, where we are going--" "I understand. And some day, Father John will bring him?" "Yes. He has promised that. Peter will come to us when Father John comes." She had turned, looking into the pit-gloom ahead of them, so dark that the canoe seemed about to drive against a wall. Under its bow the water gurgled like oil. "We are entering the big cedar swamp," he explained. "It is like Blind Man's Buff, isn't it? Can you see?" "Not beyond the bow of the canoe, Roger." "Work back to me," he said, "very carefully." She came, obediently. "Now turn slowly, so that you face the bow, and lean back with your head against my knees." This also, she did. "This is much nicer," she whispered, nestling her head comfortably against him. "So much nicer." By leaning over until his back nearly cracked he was able to find her lips in the darkness. "I was thinking of the brush that overhangs the stream," he explained when he had straightened himself. "Sitting up as you were it might have caused you hurt." There was a little silence between them, in which his paddle caught again its slow and steady rhythm. Then, "Were you thinking only of the brush, Roger--and of the hurt it might cause me?" "Yes, only of that," and he chuckled softly. "Then I don't think it nice here at all," she complained. "I shall sit up straight so the brush may put my eyes out!" But her head pressed even closer against him, and careful not to interrupt his paddle-stroke she touched his face for an instant with her hand. "It's there," she purled, as if utterly comforted. "I wanted to be sure--it is so dark!" With cimmerian blackness on all sides of them, and a chaotic tunnel ahead, they were happy. Staring straight before him, though utterly unable to see, McKay sensed in every movement he made and in every breath he drew the exquisite thrill of a miracle. And the same thrill swept into him and through him from the softly breathing body of Nada. Light or darkness made no difference now. Together, inseparable from this time forth, they had started on the one great adventure of their lives, and for them fear had ceased to exist. The night sheltered them. Its very blackness held in its embrace a warmth of welcome and of unending hope. Twice in the next half hour he put his hand to Nada's face, and each time she pressed her lips against it, sweet with that confidence which so completely possessed her soul. Very slowly they moved through the swamp, for because of the gloom his paddle-strokes were exceedingly short, and he was feeling his way. Frequently he ran into brush, or struck the boggy shore, and occasionally Nada would hold lighted matches while he extricated the canoe from tree-tops and driftwood that impeded the way. He loved the brief glimpses he caught of her face in the match-glow, and twice he deliberately wasted the tiny flares that he might hold the vision of her a little longer. At last he began to feel the pulse of a current against his paddle, and soon after that the star-mist began filtering through the thinning tree-tops again, so that he knew they were almost through the swamp. Another half-hour and they were free of it, with a clear sky overhead and the cheering song of running water on both sides of them. Nada sat up, and it was now so light that he could see the soft shimmer of her hair in the starlight. He also saw a pretty little grimace in her face, even as she smiled at him. "I--I can't move," she exclaimed. "_Ugh_! my feet are asleep--" "We'll go ashore and stretch ourselves," said McKay, who had looked at his watch in the light of the last match. "We've two hours the start of Breault, and there is no other canoe." He began watching the shore closely, and it was not long before he made out the white smoothness of a sandbar on their right. Here they landed and for half an hour rested their cramped limbs. Then they went on, and in his heart McKay blessed the deep swamp that lay between them and Breault. "I don't think he can make it without a canoe, even if he guesses we went this way," he explained to Nada. "And that means--we are safe." There was a cheery ring in his voice which would have changed to the deadness of cold iron could he have looked back into that sluggish pit of the Burntwood through which they had come, or could he have seen into the heart of the still blacker swamp. For through the swamp, feeling his way in the black abysses and amid the monster-ghosts of darkness, came Peter. And down the Burntwood, between the boggy mucklips of the swamp, a man followed with slow but deadly surety, guiding with a long pole two light cedar timbers which he had lashed together with wire, and which bore him safely and in triumph where the canoe had gone before him. This man was Breault, the man-hunter. "The swamp will hold him!" McKay was saying again, exultantly. "Even if he guesses our way, the swamp will hold him back, Nada." "But he won't know the way we have come," cried Nada, the faith in her voice answering his own. "Father John will guide him in another direction." Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like a night-owl's into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on. CHAPTER XXII Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery of Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night that drew Peter continually deeper into the swamp. Half a dozen times he caught the scent of him in a quiet air that seemed only now and then to rise up in his face softly, as if stirred by butterflies' wings. Always it came from ahead, and Peter's mind worked swiftly to the decision that where Breault was there also would be Nada and Jolly Roger. Yet he caught the scent of neither of these two, and that puzzled him. Many times he found himself at the edge of the black lip of water, but never quite at the right time to see a shadow in its darkness, or hear the sound of Breault's pole. But in the swamp, as he went on, he saw nothing but shadow, and heard weird and nameless sounds which made his blood creep, even though his courage was now full-grown within him. He was not frightened at the ugly sputter of the owls, as in the days of old. Their throaty menace and snapping beaks did not stop him nor turn him aside. The slashing scrape of claws in the bark of trees and the occasional crackling of brush were matters of intimate knowledge, and he gave but little attention to them in his eagerness to reach those who had gone ahead of him. What troubled him, and filled his eyes with sudden red glares, were the oily gurgles of the pitfalls which tried to suck him down; the laughing madness of muck that held him as if living things were in it, and which spluttered and coughed when he freed himself. Half blinded at times, so that even the black shadows were blotted out, he went on. And at last, coming again to the edge of the stream, he heard a new kind of sound--the slow, steady dipping of Breault's pole. He hurried on, finding harder ground under his feet, and came noiselessly abreast of the man on his raft of cedar timbers. He could almost hear his breathing. And very faintly he could see in the vast gloom a shadow--a shadow that moved slowly against the background of a still deeper shadow beyond. But there was no scent of Nada or Jolly Roger, and whatever desire had risen in him to make himself known was smothered by caution and suspicion. After this he did not go ahead of Breault, but kept behind him or abreast of him, within sound of the dipping pole. And every minute his heart thumped expectantly, and he sniffed the new air for signs of those he most desired to find. Dawn was breaking in the sky when they came out of the swamp, and the first flush of the sun was lighting up the east when Breault headed his improvised craft for the sandbar upon which Nada and McKay had rested many hours before. Breault was tired, but his eyes lighted up when he saw the footprints in the sand, and he chuckled--almost good humoredly. As a matter of fact he was in a good humor. But one would not have reckoned it as such in Breault. A hard man, the forests called him; a man with the hunting instincts of the fox and the wolf and the merciless persistency of the weazel--a man who lived his code to the last letter of the law, without pity and without favoritism. At least so he was judged, and his hard, narrow eyes, his thin lips and his cynically lined face seldom betrayed the better thoughts within him, if he possessed any at all. In the Service he was regarded as a humanly perfect mechanism, a bit of machinery that never failed, the dreaded Nemesis to be set on the trail of a wrong-doer when all others had failed. But this morning, with every bone and muscle in him aching from his long night of tedious exertion, the chuckle grew into a laugh as he looked upon the telltale signs in the sand. He stretched himself and his tired bones cracked. Breault did not think aloud. But he was saying to himself. "There, against that rock, Jolly Roger McKay sat There is the imprint of only one person sitting. The girl was in his arms. Here are little holes where her outstretched heels rested in the sand. She is wearing shoes and not moccasins." He grinned as he drew his service pack from the two-log cedar raft. "Plenty of time now," he continued to think. "They are mine this time--sure. They believe they have fooled me, and they haven't. That's fatal. Always." Not infrequently, when entirely alone, Breault let a little part of himself loose, as if freeing a prisoner from bondage for a short time. For instance, he whistled. It was not an unpleasant whistle, but rather oddly reminiscent of tender things he remembered away back somewhere; and as he fried his bacon and steamed a handful of desiccated potatoes he hummed a song, also rather pleasant to ears that were as closely attentive as Peter's. For Peter had crept up through a tangle of ground-scrub and lay not twenty paces away, smelling of the bacon hungrily, and watching intently from his concealment. Peter knew the fox and the wolf, but he did not know Breault, and he did not guess why the man's whistling grew a little louder, nor why his humming voice grew stronger. But after a time, with his back and not his face toward Peter, Breault called in the most natural and matter-of-fact voice in the world, "Come on, Peter. Breakfast is ready!" Peter's jaws dropped in amazement. And as Breault turned toward him, his thin face a-grin, and continued to invite him in a most companionable way, he forgot his concealment entirely and stood up straight, ready either to fight or fly. Breault tossed him a dripping slice of bacon which he held in his hand. It fell within a foot of Peter's nose, and Peter was ravenously hungry. The delicious odor of it demoralized his senses and his caution. For a few seconds he resisted, then thrust himself out toward it an inch at a time, made a sudden grab, and swallowed it at one gulp. Breault laughed outright, and with the first of the sun striking into his face he did not look like an enemy to Peter. A second slice of bacon followed the first, and then a third--until Breault was frying another mess over the fire. "That's partial payment for what you did up on the Barren," he was saying inside himself. "If it hadn't been for you--" He didn't even imagine the rest. Nor after that did he pay the slightest attention to Peter. For Breault knew dogs possibly even better than he knew men, and not by the smallest sign did he give Peter to understand that he was interested in him at all. He washed his dishes, whistling and humming, reloaded his pack on the raft, and once more began poling his way downstream. Peter, still in the edge of the scrub, was not only puzzled, but felt a further sense of abandonment. After all, this man was not his enemy, and he was leaving him as his master and mistress had left him. He whined. And Breault was not out of sight when he trotted down to the sandbar, and quickly found the scent of Nada and McKay. Purposely Breault had left a lump of desiccated potato as big as his fist, and this Peter ate as ravenously as he had eaten the bacon. Then, just as Breault knew he would do, he began following the raft. Breault did not hurry, and he did not rest. There was something almost mechanically certain in his slow but steady progress, though he knew it was possible for the canoe to outdistance him three to one. He was missing nothing along the shore. Three times during the forenoon he saw where the canoe had landed, and he chuckled each time, thinking of the old story of the tortoise and the hare. He stopped for not more than two or three minutes at each of these places, and was then on his way again. Peter was fascinated by the unexcited persistency of the man's movement. He followed it, watched it, and became more and more interested in the unvarying monotony of it. There were the same up-and-down strokes of the long pole, the slight swaying of the upstanding body, the same eddy behind the cedar logs--and occasionally wisps of smoke floating behind when the pursuer smoked his pipe. Not once did Peter see Breault turn his head to look behind him. Yet Breault was seeing everything. Five times that morning he saw Peter, but not once did he make a sign or call to him. He drove his raft ashore at twelve o'clock to prepare his dinner, and after he had built a fire, and his cooking things were scattered about, he straightened himself up and called in that same matter-of-fact way, as if expecting an immediate response, "Here, Peter!--Peter!--Come in, Boy!" And Peter came. Fighting against the last instinct that held him back he first thrust his head out from the brush and looked at Breault. Breault paid no attention to him for a few moments, but sliced his bacon. When the perfume of the cooking meat reached Peter's nose he edged himself a little nearer, and with a whimpering sigh flattened himself on his belly. Breault heard the sigh, and grunted a reply, "Hungry again, Peter?" he inquired casually. He had saved for this moment a piece of cooked bacon held over from breakfast, and tearing this with his fingers he tossed the strips to Peter. As he did this he was thinking to himself, "Why am I doing this? I don't want the dog. He will be a nuisance. He will eat my grub. But it's fair. I'm paying a debt. He helped to save me up on the Barren." Thus did Breault, the man without mercy, the Nemesis, briefly analyze the matter. And he cooked five pieces of bacon for Peter. During the rest of that day Peter made no effort to keep himself in concealment as he followed Breault and his raft. This afternoon Breault shot a fawn, and when he made camp that night both he and Peter feasted on fresh meat. This broke down the last of Peter's suspicion, and Breault laid a hand on his head. He did not particularly like the feel of the hand, but he tolerated it, and Breault grunted aloud, with a note of commendation in his hard voice. "A one-man dog--never anything else." Half a dozen times during the day Peter had found the scent of Nada and Roger where they had come ashore, and from this night on he associated Breault as a necessary agent in his search for them. And with Breault he went, instinctively guessing the truth. The next day they found where Nada and McKay had abandoned the canoe, and had struck south through the wilderness. This pleased Breault, who was tired of his poling. This third night there was a new moon, and something about it stirred in Peter an impulse to run ahead and overtake those he was seeking. But a still strong instinct held him to Breault. Tonight Breault slept like a dead man on his cedar boughs. He was up and had a fire built an hour before dawn, and with the first gray streaking of day was on the trail again. He made no further effort to follow signs of the pursued, for that was a hopeless task. But he knew how McKay was heading, and he traveled swiftly, figuring to cover twice the distance that Nada might travel in the same given time. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when he came to a great ridge, and on its highest pinnacle he stopped. Peter had grown restless again, and a little more suspicious of Breault. He was not afraid of him, but all that day he had found no scent of Nada or Jolly Roger, and slowly the conviction was impinging itself upon him that he should seek for himself in the wilderness. Breault saw this restlessness, and understood it. "I'll keep my eye on the dog," he thought. "He has a nose, and an uncanny sixth sense, and I haven't either. He will bear watching. I believe McKay and the girl cannot be far away. Possibly they have traveled more slowly than I thought, and haven't passed this ridge; or it may be they are down there, in the plain. If so I should catch sign of smoke or fire--in time." For an hour he kept watch over the plain through his binoculars, seeking for a wisp of smoke that might rise at any time over the treetops. He did not lose sight of Peter, questing out in widening circles below him. And then, quite unexpectedly, something happened. In the edge of a tiny meadow an eighth of a mile away Peter was acting strangely. He was nosing the ground, gulping the wind, twisting eagerly back and forth. Then he set out, steadily and with unmistakable decision, south and west. In a flash Breault was on his feet, had caught up his pack, and was running for the meadow. And there he found something in the velvety softness of the earth which brought a grim smile to his thin lips as he, too, set out south and west. The scent he had found, hours old, drew Peter on until in the edge of the dusk of evening it brought him to a foot-worn trail leading to the Hudson's Bay Company post many miles south. In this path, beaten by the feet of generations of forest dwellers, the hard heels of McKay's boots had made their imprint, and after this the scent was clearer under Peter's nose. But with forest-bred caution he still traveled slowly, though his blood was burning like a pitch-fed fire in his veins. Almost as swiftly followed Breault behind him. Again came darkness, and then the moon, brighter than last night, lighting his way between the two walls of the forest. CHAPTER XXIII Dawn came softly where the quiet waters of the Willow Bud ran under deep forests of evergreen out into the gold and silver birch of the Nelson River flats. A veiling mist rose out of the earth to meet the promise of day, gentle and sweet, like scented raiment, stirring sleepily to the pulse of an awakening earth. Through it came the first low twitter of birdsong, a sound that seemed to swell and grow until it filled the world. Yet was it still a sound of sleep, of half wakefulness, and the mist was thinning away when, a ruffled little breast sent out its full throat-song from the tip of a silver birch that overhung the stream. The little warbler was looking down, as if wondering why there was no stir of life beneath him, where in last night's sunset there had been much to wonder at and a new kind of song to thrill him. But the girl was no longer there to sing back at him. The cedar and balsam shelter dripped with morning dew, the place where fire had been was black and dead, and ruffling his feathers the warbler continued his song in triumph. Nada, hidden under her shelter, and still half dreaming, heard him. She lay with her head nestled in the crook of Roger's arm, and the birdsong seemed to come to her from a great distance away. She smiled, and her lips trembled, as if even in sleep she--was about to answer it. And then the song drifted away until she could no longer hear it, and she sank back into an oblivion of darkness in which she seemed lost for a long time, and out of which some invisible force was struggling to drag her. There came at last a sudden irresistible pull at her senses, and she opened her eyes, awake. Her head was no longer in the crook of Jolly Roger's arm. She could see him sitting up straight, and he was not looking at her. It must be late, she thought, for the light was strong in his face, warm with the first golden flow of the sun. She smiled, and sat up, and shook her soft curls with a happy little laugh. "Roger--" And then she, too, was staring, wide-eyed and speechless. For she saw Peter under Jolly Roger's hand. But it was not Peter who drew her breath short and sent fear cutting like a sharp knife through her heart. Facing them, seated coldly on a log which McKay had dragged in from the timber, was a thin-faced sharp-eyed man who was studying them with an odd smile on his lips, and instantly Nada knew this man was Breault. There was something peculiarly appalling about him as he sat there, in spite of the fact that for a few moments he neither spoke nor moved. His eyes, Nada thought, were not like human eyes, and his lips were like the blades of two knives set together. Yet he was smiling, or half smiling, not in a comforting or humorous way, but with exultation and triumph. From looking at him one would never have guessed that Breault loved his joke. He nodded. "Good morning, Jolly Roger McKay! And--good morning, Mrs. Jolly Roger McKay! Pardon me for watching you like this, but duty is duty. I am Breault, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police." McKay wet his lips. Breault saw him, and the grin on his thin face widened. "I know, it's hard," he said. "But you've got Peter to thank for it. Peter led me to you." He stood up, and in a most casual fashion covered Jolly Roger with his automatic. "Would you mind stepping out, McKay?" he asked. In his other hand he dangled a pair of handcuffs. McKay stood up, and Nada rose beside him, gripping his arms with both hands. "No need of those things, Breault," he said. "I'll go peaceably." "Still--it's safer," argued Breault, a wicked glitter in his eyes. "Hold out one hand, please--" The manacle snapped over Jolly Roger's wrist. "I'm Breault--not Terence Cassidy," he chuckled. "Never take a chance, you know. Never!" Swift as a flash was his movement then, as the companion bracelet snapped over Nada's wrist. He stepped back, facing them with a grin. "Got you both now, haven't I?" he gloated. "Can't get away, can you?" He put his gun away, and bowed low to Nada. "How do you like married life, Mrs. Jolly Roger?" McKay's face was whiter than Nada's. "You coward!" he spoke in a low, quiet voice. "You low-down miserable coward. You're a disgrace to the Service. Do you mean you are going to keep my wife ironed like this?" "Sure," said Breault. "I'm going to make you pay for some of the trouble I've had over you. I believe in a man paying his debts, you know. And a woman, too. And probably you've lied to her like the very devil." "He hasn't!" protested Nada fiercely. "You're a--a--" "Say it," nodded Breault good humoredly. "By all means say it, Mrs. Jolly Roger. If you can't find words, let me help you," and while he waited he loaded his pipe and lighted it. "You see I don't exactly live up to regulations when I'm with good friends like you," he apologized cynically. "In other words you're a couple of hard cases. Cassidy has turned in all sorts of evidence about you. He says that you, McKay, should be hung the moment we catch you. He warned me not to take a chance--that you'd slit my throat in the dark without a prick of conscience. And I'm a valuable man in the Service. It can't afford to lose me." McKay shut his lips tightly, and did not answer. "Now, while you're helpless, I want to tell you a few things," Breault went on. "And while I'm talking I'll start the fire, so we can have breakfast. Peter and, I are hungry. A good dog, McKay. He saved us up on the Barren. Have you told Mrs. Jolly Roger about that?" He expected no answer, and whistled as he lighted a pile of birchbark which he had already placed under dry cedar wood which McKay had gathered the preceding evening. "That's where _my_ trouble began--up there on the Barren, Mrs. Jolly Roger," he continued, ignoring McKay. "You see the three of us, Superintendent Tavish, and Porter--who is now his son-in-law--and I had a splendid chance to die like martyrs, and go down forever in the history of the Service, if it hadn't been for this fool of a husband of yours, and Peter. I can't blame Peter, because he's only a dog. But McKay is responsible. He robbed us of a beautiful opportunity of dying in an unusual way by hunting us up and dragging us into his shelter. A shabby trick, don't you think? And inasmuch as Superintendent Tavish is about the biggest man in the Service, and Porter is his son-in-law, and Miss Tavish was saved along with us--why, they reckoned something ought to be done about it." Breault did not look up. With, exasperating slowness he added fuel to the fire. "And so--" He rose and stood before them again. "And so--they assigned me to the very unpleasant duty of running you down with a pardon, McKay--a pardon forgiving you for all your sins, forever and ever, Amen. And here it is!" He had drawn an official-looking envelope from inside his coat, and held it out now--not to McKay--but to Nada. Neither reached for it. Standing there with the cynical smile still on his lips, his strange eyes gimleting them with a cold sort of laughter, it was as if Breault tortured them with a last horrible joke. Then, suddenly, Nada seized the envelope and tore it open, while McKay stared at Breault, believing, and yet not daring to speak. It was Nada's cry, a cry wild and sobbing and filled with gladness, that told him the truth, and with the precious paper clutched in her hand she smothered her face against McKay's breast, while Breault came up grinning behind them, and Jolly Roger heard the click of his key in the handcuffs. "I am also loaded down with a number of foolish messages for you," he said, attending to the fire again. "For instance, that red-headed good-for-nothing, Cassidy, says to tell you he is building a four-room bungalow for you in their clearing, and that it will be finished by the time you arrive. Also, a squaw named Yellow Bird, and a redskin who calls himself Slim Buck, sent word that you will always be welcome in their hunting grounds. And a pretty little thing named Sun Cloud sent as many kisses as there are leaves on the trees--" [Illustration: "--a squaw named Yellow Bird send word that you would be welcome."] He paused, chuckling, and did not look up to see the wide, glorious eyes of the girl upon him. "But the funniest thing of all is the baby," he went on, preparing to slice bacon. "They're going to have one pretty soon--Cassidy's wife, I mean. They've given it a name already. If it's a boy it's Roger--if it's a girl it's Nada. They wanted me to tell you that. Silly bunch, aren't they? A couple of young fools--" Just then something new happened in the weirdly adventurous life of François Breault. Without warning he was suddenly smothered in a pair of arms, his head was jerked back, and against his hard and pitiless mouth a pair of soft red lips pressed for a single thrilling instant. "Well, I'll be damned," he gasped, dropping his bacon and staggering to his feet like a man who had been shot. "I'll be--_cussed_!" And he picked up his pack and walked off into the thick young spruce at the edge of the timber, without saying another word or once looking behind him. And breakfast waited, and Nada and Jolly Roger and Peter waited, but François Breault did not return. For a strange and unaccountable man was he, a hard and pitiless man and a deadly hunter who knew no fear. Yet the wilderness swallowed him, a coward at last--running away from the two red lips that had kissed him. So went Breault, for the first time in his life a messenger of mercy; and at the top of the silver birch the little warbler knew that something glad had happened, and offered up its gratitude in a sudden burst of song. THE END 
4702	----	THE FLAMING FOREST BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE COUNTRY BEYOND, THE ALASKAN, ETC. THE FLAMING FOREST I An hour ago, under the marvelous canopy of the blue northern sky, David Carrigan, Sergeant in His Most Excellent Majesty's Royal Northwest Mounted Police, had hummed softly to himself, and had thanked God that he was alive. He had blessed McVane, superintendent of "N" Division at Athabasca Landing, for detailing him to the mission on which he was bent. He was glad that he was traveling alone, and in the deep forest, and that for many weeks his adventure would carry him deeper and deeper into his beloved north. Making his noonday tea over a fire at the edge of the river, with the green forest crowding like an inundation on three sides of him, he had come to the conclusion--for the hundredth time, perhaps--that it was a nice thing to be alone in the world, for he was on what his comrades at the Landing called a "bad assignment." "If anything happens to me," Carrigan had said to McVane, "there isn't anybody in particular to notify. I lost out in the matter of family a long time ago." He was not a man who talked much about himself, even to the superintendent of "N" Division, yet there were a thousand who loved Dave Carrigan, and many who placed their confidences in him. Superintendent Me Vane had one story which he might have told, but he kept it to himself, instinctively sensing the sacredness of it. Even Carrigan did not know that the one thing which never passed his lips was known to McVane. Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago. It was the thing which, first of all, had driven him into the north. And though it had twisted and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it had brought its compensation. For he had come to love the north with a passionate devotion. It was, in a way, his God. It seemed to him that the time had never been when he had lived any other life than this under the open skies. He was thirty-seven now. A bit of a philosopher, as philosophy comes to one in a sun-cleaned and unpolluted air, A good-humored brother of humanity, even when he put manacles on other men's wrists; graying a little over the temples--and a lover of life. Above all else he was that. A lover of life. A worshiper at the shrine of God's Country. So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles north of Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present conditions of his existence. A hundred and eighty miles farther on was Fort McMurray, and another two hundred beyond that was Chipewyan, and still beyond that the Mackenzie and its fifteen-hundred-mile trail to the northern sea. He was glad there was no end to this world of his. He was glad there were few people in it. But these people he loved. That hour ago he had looked out on the river as two York boats had forged up against the stream, craft like the long, slim galleys of old, brought over through the Churchill and Clearwater countries from Hudson's Bay. There were eight rowers in each boat. They were singing. Their voices rolled between the walls of the forests. Their naked arms and shoulders glistened in the sun. They rowed like Vikings, and to him they were symbols of the freedom of the world. He had watched them until they were gone up-stream, but it was a long time before the chanting of their voices had died away. And then he had risen from beside his tiny fire, and had stretched himself until his muscles cracked. It was good to feel the blood running red and strong in one's veins at the age of thirty-seven. For Carrigan felt the thrill of these days when strong men were coming out of the north--days when the glory of June hung over the land, when out of the deep wilderness threaded by the Three Rivers came romance and courage and red-blooded men and women of an almost forgotten people to laugh and sing and barter for a time with the outpost guardians of a younger and more progressive world. It was north of Fifty-Four, and the waters of a continent flowed toward the Arctic Sea. Yet soon would the strawberries be crushing red underfoot; the forest road was in bloom, scarlet fire-flowers reddened the trail, wild hyacinths and golden-freckled violets played hide-and-seek with the forget-me-nots in the meadows, and the sky was a great splash of velvety blue. It was the north triumphant--at the edge of civilization; the north triumphant, and yet paying its tribute. For at the other end were waiting the royal Upper Ten Thousand and the smart Four Hundred with all the beau monde behind them, coveting and demanding that tribute to their sex--the silken furs of a far country, the life's blood and labor of a land infinitely beyond the pale of drawing-rooms and the whims of fashion. Carrigan had thought of these things that hour ago, as he sat at the edge of the first of the Three Rivers, the great Athabasca. From down the other two, the Slave and the Mackenzie, the fur fleets of the unmapped country had been toiling since the first breakups of ice. Steadily, week after week, the north had been emptying itself of its picturesque tide of life and voice, of muscle and brawn, of laughter and song--and wealth. Through, long months of deep winter, in ten thousand shacks and tepees and cabins, the story of this June had been written as fate had written it each winter for a hundred years or more. A story of the triumph of the fittest. A story of tears, of happiness here and there, of hunger and plenty, of new life and quick death; a story of strong men and strong women, living in the faith of their forefathers, with the best blood of old England and France still surviving in their veins. Through those same months of winter, the great captains of trade in the city of Edmonton had been preparing for the coming of the river brigades. The hundred and fifty miles of trail between that last city outpost of civilization and Athabasca Landing, the door that opened into the North, were packed hard by team and dog-sledge and packer bringing up the freight that for another year was to last the forest people of the Three River country--a domain reaching from the Landing to the Arctic Ocean. In competition fought the drivers of Revillon Brothers and Hudson's Bay, of free trader and independent adventurer. Freight that grew more precious with each mile it advanced must reach the beginning of the waterway. It started with the early snows. The tide was at full by midwinter. In temperature that nipped men's lungs it did not cease. There was no let-up in the whip-hands of the masters of trade at Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, and London across the sea. It was not a work of philanthropy. These men cared not whether Jean and Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie were well-fed or hungry, whether they lived or died, so far as humanity was concerned. But Paris, Vienna, London, and the great capitals of the earth must have their furs--and unless that freight went north, there would be no velvety offerings for the white shoulders of the world. Christmas windows two years hence would be bare. A feminine wail of grief would rise to the skies. For woman must have her furs, and in return for those furs Jean and Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie must have their freight. So the pendulum swung, as it had swung for a century or two, touching, on the one side, luxury, warmth, wealth, and beauty; on the other, cold and hardship, deep snows and open skies--with that precious freight the thing between. And now, in this year before rail and steamboat, the glory of early summer was at hand, and the wilderness people were coming up to meet the freight. The Three Rivers--the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie, all joining in one great two-thousand-mile waterway to the northern sea--were athrill with the wild impulse and beat of life as the forest people lived it. The Great Father had sent in his treaty money, and Cree song and Chipewyan chant joined the age-old melodies of French and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their long drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile waterway a world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and each post and gathering place along its length was turned into a metropolis, half savage, archaic, splendid with the strength of red blood, clear eyes, and souls that read the word of God in wind and tree. And up and down this mighty waterway of wilderness trade ran the whispering spirit of song, like the voice of a mighty god heard under the stars and in the winds. But it was an hour ago that David Carrigan had vividly pictured these things to himself close to the big river, and many things may happen in the sixty minutes that follow any given minute in a man's life. That hour ago his one great purpose had been to bring in Black Roger Audemard, alive or dead--Black Roger, the forest fiend who had destroyed half a dozen lives in a blind passion of vengeance nearly fifteen years ago. For ten of those fifteen years it had been thought that Black Roger was dead. But mysterious rumors had lately come out of the North. He was alive. People had seen him. Fact followed rumor. His existence became certainty. The Law took up once more his hazardous trail, and David Carrigan was the messenger it sent. "Bring him back, alive or dead," were Superintendent McVane's last words. And now, thinking of that parting injunction, Carrigan grinned, even as the sweat of death dampened his face in the heat of the afternoon sun. For at the end of those sixty minutes that had passed since his midday pot of tea, the grimly, atrociously unexpected had happened, like a thunderbolt out of the azure of the sky. II Huddled behind a rock which was scarcely larger than his body, groveling in the white, soft sand like a turtle making a nest for its eggs, Carrigan told himself this without any reservation. He was, as he kept repeating to himself for the comfort of his soul, in a deuce of a fix. His head was bare--simply because a bullet had taken his hat away. His blond hair was filled with sand. His face was sweating. But his blue eyes were alight with a grim sort of humor, though he knew that unless the other fellow's ammunition ran out he was going to die. For the twentieth time in as many minutes he looked about him. He was in the center of a flat area of sand. Fifty feet from him the river murmured gently over yellow bars and a carpet of pebbles. Fifty feet on the opposite side of him was the cool, green wall of the forest. The sunshine playing in it seemed like laughter to him now, a whimsical sort of merriment roused by the sheer effrontery of the joke which fate had inflicted upon him. Between the river and the balsam and spruce was only the rock behind which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open. And his rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was under him. The wash sand that covered it like a carpet was not more than four or five inches deep. He could not dig in. There was not enough of it within reach to scrape up as a protection. And his enemy, a hundred yards or so away, was a determined wretch--and the deadliest shot he had ever known. Three times Carrigan had made experiments to prove this, for he had in mind a sudden rush to the shelter of the timber. Three times he had raised the crown of his hat slightly above the top of the rock, and three times the marksmanship of the other had perforated it with neatness and dispatch. The third bullet had carried his hat a dozen feet away. Whenever he showed a patch of his clothing, a bullet replied with unerring precision. Twice they had drawn blood. And the humor faded out of Carrigan's eyes. Not long ago he had exulted in the bigness and glory of this country of his, where strong men met hand to hand and eye to eye. There were the other kind in it, the sort that made his profession of manhunting a thing of reality and danger, but he expected these--forgot them--when the wilderness itself filled his vision. But his present situation was something unlike anything that had ever happened in his previous experience with the outlawed. He had faced dangers. He had fought. There were times when he had almost died. Fanchet, the half-breed who had robbed a dozen wilderness mail sledges, had come nearest to trapping him and putting him out of business. Fanchet was a desperate man and had few scruples. But even Fanchet--before he was caught--would not have cornered a man with such bloodthirsty unfairness as Carrigan found himself cornered now. He no longer had a doubt as to what was in the other's mind. It was not to wound and make merely helpless. It was to kill. It was not difficult to prove this. Careful not to expose a part of his arm or shoulder, he drew a white handkerchief from his pocket, fastened it to the end of his rifle, and held the flag of surrender three feet above the rock. And then, with equal caution, he slowly thrust up a flat piece of shale, which at a distance of a hundred yards might appear as his shoulder or even his head. Scarcely was it four inches above the top of the rock before there came the report of a rifle, and the shale was splintered into a hundred bits. Carrigan lowered his flag and gathered himself in tighter. The accuracy of the other's marksmanship was appalling. He knew that if he exposed himself for an instant to use his own rifle or the heavy automatic in his holster, he would be a dead man before he could press a trigger. And that time, he felt equally sure, would come sooner or later. His muscles were growing cramped. He could not forever double himself up like a four-bladed jackknife behind the altogether inefficient shelter of the rock. His executioner was hidden in the edge of the timber, not directly opposite him, but nearly a hundred yards down stream. Twenty times he had wondered why the fiend with the rifle did not creep up through that timber and take a good, open pot-shot at him from the vantage point which lay at the end of a straight line between his rock and the nearest spruce and balsam. From that angle he could not completely shelter himself. But the man a hundred yards below had not moved a foot from his ambush since he had fired his first shot. That had come when Carrigan was crossing the open space of soft, white sand. It had left a burning sensation at his temple--half an inch to the right and it would have killed him. Swift as the shot itself, he dropped behind the one protection at hand, the up-jutting shoulder of shale. For a quarter of an hour he had been making efforts to wriggle himself free from his bulky shoulder-pack without exposing himself to a coup-de-grace. At last he had the thing off. It was a tremendous relief when he thrust it out beside the rock, almost doubling the size of his shelter. Instantly there came the crash of a bullet in it, and then another. He heard the rattle of pans, and wondered if his skillet would be any good after today. For the first time he could wipe the sweat from his face and stretch himself. And also he could think. Carrigan possessed an unalterable faith in the infallibility of the mind. "You can do anything with the mind," was his code. "It is better than a good gun." Now that he was physically more at ease, he began reassembling his scattered mental faculties. Who was this stranger who was pot-shotting at him with such deadly animosity from the ambush below? Who-- Another crash of lead in tinware and steel put an unpleasant emphasis to the question. It was so close to his head that it made him wince, and now--with a wide area within reach about him--he began scraping up the sand for an added protection. There came a long silence after that third clatter of distress from his cooking utensils. To David Carrigan, even in his hour of deadly peril, there was something about it that for an instant brought back the glow of humor in his eyes. It was hot, swelteringly hot, in that packet of sand with the unclouded sun almost straight overhead. He could have tossed a pebble to where a bright-eyed sandpiper was cocking itself backward and forward, its jerky movements accompanied by friendly little tittering noises. Everything about him seemed friendly. The river rippled and murmured in cooling song just beyond the sandpiper. On the other side the still cooler forest was a paradise of shade and contentment, astir with subdued and hidden life. It was nesting season. He heard the twitter of birds. A tiny, brown wood warbler fluttered out to the end of a silvery birch limb, and it seemed to David that its throat must surely burst with the burden of its song. The little fellow's brown body, scarcely larger than a butternut, was swelling up like a round ball in his effort to vanquish all other song. "Go to it, old man," chuckled Carrigan. "Go to it!" The little warbler, that he might have crushed between thumb and forefinger, gave him a lot of courage. Then the tiny chorister stopped for breath. In that interval Carrigan listened to the wrangling of two vivid-colored Canada jays deeper in the timber. Chronic scolds they were, never without a grouch. They were like some people Carrigan had known, born pessimists, always finding something to complain about, even in their love days. And these were love days. That was the odd thought that came to Carrigan as he lay half on his face, his fingers slowly and cautiously working a loophole between his shoulder-pack and the rock. They were love days all up and down the big rivers, where men and women sang for joy, and children played, forgetful of the long, hard days of winter. And in forest, plain, and swamp was this spirit of love also triumphant over the land. It was the mating season of all feathered things. In countless nests were the peeps and twitters of new life; mothers of first-born were teaching their children to swim and fly; from end to end of the forest world the little children of the silent places, furred and feathered, clawed and hoofed, were learning the ways of life. Nature's yearly birthday was half-way gone, and the doors of nature's school wide open. And the tiny brown songster at the end of his birch twig proclaimed the joy of it again, and challenged all the world to beat him in his adulation. Carrigan found that he could peer between his pack and the rock to where the other warbler was singing--and where his enemy lay watching for the opportunity to kill. It was taking a chance. If a movement betrayed his loophole, his minutes were numbered. But he had worked cautiously, an inch at a time, and was confident that the beginning of his effort to fight back was, up to the present moment, undiscovered. He believed that he knew about where the ambushed man was concealed. In the edge of a low-hanging mass of balsam was a fallen cedar. From behind the butt of that cedar he was sure the shots had come. And now, even more cautiously than he had made the tiny opening, he began to work the muzzle of his rifle through the loophole. As he did this he was thinking of Black Roger Audemard. And yet, almost as quickly as suspicion leaped into his mind, he told himself that the thing was impossible. It could not be Black Roger, or one of Black Roger's friends, behind the cedar log. The idea was inconceivable, when he considered how carefully the secret of his mission had been kept at the Landing. He had not even said goodby to his best friends. And because Black Roger had won through all the preceding years, Carrigan was stalking his prey out of uniform. There had been nothing to betray him. Besides, Black Roger Audemard must be at least a thousand miles north, unless something had tempted him to come up the rivers with the spring brigades. If he used logic at all, there was but one conclusion for him to arrive at. The man in ambush was some rascally half-breed who coveted his outfit and whatever valuables he might have about his person. A fourth smashing eruption among his comestibles and culinary possessions came to drive home the fact that even that analysis of the situation was absurd. Whoever was behind the rifle fire had small respect for the contents of his pack, and he was surely not in grievous need of a good gun or ammunition. A sticky mess of condensed cream was running over Carrigan's hand. He doubted if there was a whole tin in his kit. For a few moments he lay quietly on his face after the fourth shot. His eyes were turned toward the river, and on the far side, a quarter of a mile away, three canoes were moving swiftly up the slow current of the stream. The sunlight flashed on their wet sides. The gleam of dripping paddles was like the flutter of silvery birds' wings, and across the water came an unintelligible shout in response to the rifle shot. It occurred to David that he might make a trumpet of his hands and shout back, but the distance was too great for his voice to carry its message for help. Besides, now that he had the added protection of the pack, he felt a certain sense of humiliation at the thought of showing the white feather. A few minutes more, if all went well, and he would settle for the man behind the log. He continued again the slow operation of worming his rifle barrel between the pack and the rock. The near-sighted little sandpiper had discovered him and seemed interested in the operation. It had come a dozen feet nearer, and was perking its head and seesawing on its long legs as it watched with inquisitive inspection the unusual manifestation of life behind the rock. Its twittering note had changed to an occasional sharp and querulous cry. Carrigan wanted to wring its neck. That cry told the other fellow that he was still alive and moving. It seemed an age before his rifle was through, and every moment he expected another shot. He flattened himself out, Indian fashion, and sighted along the barrel. He was positive that his enemy was watching, yet he could make out nothing that looked like a head anywhere along the log. At one end was a clump of deeper foliage. He was sure he saw a sudden slight movement there, and in the thrill of the moment was tempted to send a bullet into the heart of it. But he saved his cartridge. He felt the mighty importance of certainty. If he fired once--and missed--the advantage of his unsuspected loophole would be gone. It would be transformed into a deadly menace. Even as it was, if his enemy's next bullet should enter that way-- He felt the discomfort of the thought, and in spite of himself a tremor of apprehension ran up his spine. He felt an even greater desire to wring the neck of the inquisitive little sandpiper. The creature had circled round squarely in front of him and stood there tilting its tail and bobbing its head as if its one insane desire was to look down the length of his rifle barrel. The bird was giving him away. If the other fellow was only half as clever as his marksmanship was good-- Suddenly every nerve in Carrigan's body tightened. He was positive that he had caught the outline of a human head and shoulders in the foliage. His finger pressed gently against the trigger of his Winchester. Before he breathed again he would have fired. But a shot from the foliage beat him out by the fraction of a second. In that precious time lost, his enemy's bullet entered the edge of his kit--and came through. He felt the shock of it, and in the infinitesimal space between the physical impact and the mental effect of shock his brain told him the horrible thing had happened. It was his head--his face. It was as if he had plunged them suddenly into hot water, and what was left of his skull was filled with the rushing and roaring of a flood. He staggered up, clutching his face with both hands. The world about him was twisted and black, a dizzily revolving thing--yet his still fighting mental vision pictured clearly for him a monstrous, bulging-eyed sandpiper as big as a house. Then he toppled back on the white sand, his arms flung out limply, his face turned to the ambush wherein his murderer lay. His body was clear of the rock and the pack, but there came no other shot from the thick clump of balsam. Nor, for a time, was there movement. The wood warbler was cheeping inquiringly at this sudden change in the deportment of his friend behind the shoulder of shale. The sandpiper, a bit startled, had gone back to the edge of the river and was running a race with himself along the wet sand. And the two quarrelsome jays had brought their family squabble to the edge of the timber. It was their wrangling that roused Carrigan to the fact that he was not dead. It was a thrilling discovery--that and the fact that he made out clearly a patch of sunlight in the sand. He did not move, but opened his eyes wider. He could see the timber. On a straight line with his vision was the thick clump of balsam. And as he looked, the boughs parted and a figure came out. Carrigan drew a deep breath. He found that it did not hurt him. He gripped the fingers of the hand that was under his body, and they closed on the butt of his service automatic. He would win yet, if God gave him life a few minutes longer. His enemy advanced. As he drew nearer, Carrigan closed his eyes more and more. They must be shut, and he must appear as if dead, when the other came up. Then, when the scoundrel put down his gun, as he naturally would--his chance would be at hand. If a quiver of his eyes betrayed him-- He closed them tight. Dizziness began to creep over him, and the fire in his brain grew hot again. He heard footsteps, and they stopped in the sand close beside him. Then he heard a human voice. It did not speak in words, but gave utterance to a strange and unnatural cry. With a mighty effort Carrigan assembled his last strength. It seemed to him that he brought himself up quickly, but his movement was slow, painful--the effort of a man who might be dying. The automatic hung limply in his hand, its muzzle pointing to the sand. He looked up, trying to swing into action that mighty weight of his weapon. And then from his own lips, even in his utter physical impotence, fell a cry of wonder and amazement. His enemy stood there in the sunlight, staring down at him with big, dark eyes that were filled with horror. They were not the eyes of a man. David Carrigan, in this most astounding moment of his life, found himself looking up into the face of a woman. III For a matter of twenty seconds--even longer it seemed to Carrigan--the life of these two was expressed in a vivid and unforgettable tableau. One half of it David saw--the blue sky, the dazzling sun, the girl in between. The pistol dropped from his limp hand, and the weight of his body tottered on the crook of his under-elbow. Mentally and physically he was on the point of collapse, and yet in those few moments every detail of the picture was painted with a brush of fire in his brain. The girl was bareheaded. Her face was as white as any face he had ever seen, living or dead; her eyes were like pools that had caught the reflection of fire; he saw the sheen of her hair, the poise of her slender body--its shock, stupefaction, horror. He sensed these things even as his brain wobbled dizzily, and the larger part of the picture began to fade out of his vision. But her face remained to the last. It grew clearer, like a cameo framed in an iris--a beautiful, staring, horrified face with shimmering tresses of jet-black hair blowing about it like a veil. He noticed the hair, that was partly undone as if she had been in a struggle of some sort, or had been running fast against the breeze that came up the river. He fought with himself to hold that picture of her, to utter some word, make some movement. But the power to see and to live died out of him. He sank back with a queer sound in his throat. He did not hear the answering cry from the girl as she flung herself, with a quick little prayer for help, on her knees in the soft, white sand beside him. He felt no movement when she raised his head in her arm and with her bare hand brushed back his sand-littered hair, revealing where the bullet had struck him. He did not know when she ran back to the river. His first sensation was of a cool and comforting something trickling over his burning temples and his face. It was water. Subconsciously he knew that, and in the same way he began to think. But it was hard to pull his thoughts together. They persisted in hopping about, like a lot of sand-fleas in a dance, and just as he got hold of one and reached for another, the first would slip away from him. He began to get the best of them after a time, and he had an uncontrollable desire to say something. But his eyes and his lips were sealed tight, and to open them, a little army of gnomes came out of the darkness in the back of his head, each of them armed with a lever, and began prying with all their might. After that came the beginning of light and a flash of consciousness. The girl was working over him. He could feel her and hear her movement. Water was trickling over his face. Then he heard a voice, close over him, saying something in a sobbing monotone which he could not understand. With a mighty effort he opened his eyes. "Thank LE BON DIEU, you live, m'sieu," he heard the voice say, as if coming from a long distance away. "You live, you live--" "Tryin' to," he mumbled thickly, feeling suddenly a sense of great elation. "Tryin'--" He wanted to curse the gnomes for deserting him, for as soon as they were gone with their levers, his eyes and his lips shut tight again, or at least he thought they did. But he began to sense things in a curious sort of way. Some one was dragging him. He could feel the grind of sand under his body. There were intervals when the dragging operation paused. And then, after a long time, he seemed to hear more than one voice. There were two--sometimes a murmur of them. And odd visions came to him. He seemed to see the girl with shining black hair and dark eyes, and then swiftly she would change into a girl with hair like blazing gold. This was a different girl. She was not like Pretty Eyes, as his twisted mind called the other. This second vision that he saw was like a radiant bit of the sun, her hair all aflame with the fire of it and her face a different sort of face. He was always glad when she went away and Pretty Eyes came back. To David Carrigan this interesting experience in his life might have covered an hour, a day, or a month. Or a year for that matter, for he seemed to have had an indefinite association with Pretty Eyes. He had known her for a long time and very intimately, it seemed. Yet he had no memory of the long fight in the hot sun, or of the river, or of the singing warblers, or of the inquisitive sandpiper that had marked out the line which his enemy's last bullet had traveled. He had entered into a new world in which everything was vague and unreal except that vision of dark hair, dark eyes, and pale, beautiful face. Several times he saw it with marvelous clearness, and each time he drifted away into darkness again with the sound of a voice growing fainter and fainter in his ears. Then came a time of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit, where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale and indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily up through the eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, the less there was of the blackness of night. From a star it grew into a sun, and with the sun came dawn. In that dawn he heard the singing of a bird, and the bird was just over his head. When Carrigan opened his eyes, and understanding came to him, he found himself under the silver birch that belonged to the wood warbler. For a space he did not ask himself how he had come there. He was looking at the river and the white strip of sand. Out there were the rock and his dunnage pack. Also his rifle. Instinctively his eyes turned to the balsam ambush farther down. That, too, was in a blaze of sunlight now. But where he lay, or sat, or stood--he was not sure what he was doing at that moment--it was shady and deliciously cool. The green of the cedar and spruce and balsam was close about him, inset with the silver and gold of the thickly-leaved birch. He discovered that he was bolstered up partly against the trunk of this birch and partly against a spruce sapling. Between these two, where his head rested, was a pile of soft moss freshly torn from the earth. And within reach of him was his own kit pail filled with water. He moved himself cautiously and raised a hand to his head. His fingers came in contact with a bandage. For a minute or two after that he sat without moving while his amazed senses seized upon the significance of it all. In the first place he was alive. But even this fact of living was less remarkable than the other things that had happened. He remembered the final moments of the unequal duel. His enemy had got him. And that enemy was a woman! Moreover, after she had blown away a part of his head and had him helpless in the sand, she had--in place of finishing him there--dragged him to this cool nook and tied up his wound. It was hard for him to believe, but the pail of water, the moss behind his shoulders, the bandage, and certain visions that were reforming themselves in his brain convinced him. A woman had shot him. She had worked like the very devil to kill him. And afterward she had saved him! He grinned. It was final proof that his mind hadn't been playing tricks on him. No one but a woman would have been quite so unreasonable. A man would have completed the job. He began to look for her up and down the white strip of sand. And in looking he saw the gray and silver flash of the hard-working sandpiper. He chuckled, for he was exceedingly comfortable, and also exhilaratingly happy to know that the thing was over and he was not dead. If the sandpiper had been a man, he would have called him up to shake hands with him. For if it hadn't been for the bird getting squarely in front of him and giving him away, there might have been a more horrible end to it all. He shuddered as he thought of the mighty effort he had made to fire a shot into the heart of the balsam ambush--and perhaps into the heart of a woman! He reached for the pail and drank deeply of the water in it. He felt no pain. His dizziness was gone. His mind had grown suddenly clear and alert. The warmth of the water told him almost instantly that it had been taken from the river some time ago. He observed the change in sun and shadows. With the instinct of a man trained to note details, he pulled out his watch. It was almost six o'clock. More than three hours had passed since the sandpiper had got in front of his gun. He did not attempt to rise to his feet, but scanned with slower and more careful scrutiny the edge of the forest and the river. He had been mystified while cringing for his life behind the rock, but he was infinitely more so now. Greater desire he had never had than this which thrilled him in these present minutes of his readjustment--desire to look upon the woman again. And then, all at once, there came back to him a mental flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back to him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick brain had made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that the first picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted in his brain when he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right one. He had seen her dark eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen of her black hair rippling in the wind; he had seen the white pallor in her face, the slimness of her as she stood over him in horror--he remembered even the clutch of her white hand at her throat. A moment before she had tried to kill him. And then he had looked up and had seen her like that! It must have been some unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded her hair with golden fire at times. His eyes followed a furrow in the white sand which led from where he sat bolstered against the tree down to his pack and the rock. It was the trail made by his body when she had dragged him up to the shelter and coolness of the timber. One of his laws of physical care was to keep himself trained down to a hundred and sixty, but he wondered how she had dragged up even so much as that of dead weight. It had taken a great deal of effort. He could see distinctly three different places in the sand where she had stopped to rest. Carrigan had earned a reputation as the expert analyst of "N" Division. In delicate matters it was seldom that McVane did not take him into consultation. He possessed an almost uncanny grip on the working processes of a criminal mind, and the first rule he had set down for himself was to regard the acts of omission rather than the one outstanding act of commission. But when he proved to himself that the chief actor in a drama possessed a normal rather than a criminal mind, he found himself in the position of checkmate. It was a thrilling game. And he was frankly puzzled now, until--one after another--he added up the sum total of what had been omitted in this instance of his own personal adventure. Hidden in her ambush, the woman who had shot him had been in both purpose and act an assassin. Her determination had been to kill him. She had disregarded the white flag with which he had pleaded for mercy. Her marksmanship was of fiendish cleverness. Up to her last shot she had been, to all intent and purpose, a murderess. The change had come when she looked down upon him, bleeding and helpless, in the sand. Undoubtedly she had thought he was dying. But why, when she saw his eyes open a little later, had she cried out her gratitude to God? What had worked the sudden transformation in her? Why had she labored to save the life she had so atrociously coveted a minute before? If his assailant had been a man, Carrigan would have found an answer. For he was not robbed, and therefore robbery was not a motif. "A case of mistaken identity," he would have told himself. "An error in visual judgment." But the fact that in his analysis he was dealing with a woman made his answer only partly satisfying. He could not disassociate himself from her eyes--their beauty, their horror, the way they had looked at him. It was as if a sudden revulsion had come over her; as if, looking down upon her bleeding handiwork, the woman's soul in her had revolted, and with that revulsion had come repentance--repentance and pity. "That," thought Carrigan, "would be just like a woman--and especially a woman with eyes like hers." This left him but two conclusions to choose from. Either there had been a mistake, and the woman had shown both horror and desire to amend when she discovered it, or a too tender-hearted agent of Black Roger Audemard had waylaid him in the heart of the white strip of sand. The sun was another hour lower in the sky when Carrigan assured himself in a series of cautious experiments that he was not in a condition to stand upon his feet. In his pack were a number of things he wanted--his blankets, for instance, a steel mirror, and the thermometer in his medical kit. He was beginning to feel a bit anxious about himself. There were sharp pains back of his eyes. His face was hot, and he was developing an unhealthy appetite for water. It was fever and he knew what fever meant in this sort of thing, when one was alone. He had given up hope of the woman's return. It was not reasonable to expect her to come back after her furious attempt to kill him. She had bandaged him, bolstered him up, placed water beside him, and had then left him to work out the rest of his salvation alone. But why the deuce hadn't she brought up his pack? On his hands and knees he began to work himself toward it slowly. He found that the movement caused him pain, and that with this pain, if he persisted in movement, there was a synchronous rise of nausea. The two seemed to work in a sort of unity. But his medicine case was important now, and his blankets, and his rifle if he hoped to signal help that might chance to pass on the river. A foot at a time, a yard at a time, he made his way down into the sand. His fingers dug into the footprints of the mysterious gun-woman. He approved of their size. They were small and narrow, scarcely longer than the palm and fingers of his hand--and they were made by shoes instead of moccasins. It seemed an interminable time to him before he reached his pack. When he got there, a pendulum seemed swinging back and forth inside his head, beating against his skull. He lay down with his pack for a pillow, intending to rest for a spell. But the minutes added themselves one on top of another. The sun slipped behind clouds banking in the west. It grew cooler, while within him he was consumed by a burning thirst. He could hear the ripple of running water, the laughter of it among pebbles a few yards away. And the river itself became even more desirable than his medicine case, or his blankets, or his rifle. The song of it, inviting and tempting him, blotted thought of the other things out of his mind. And he continued his journey, the swing of the pendulum in his head becoming harder, but the sound of the river growing nearer. At last he came to the wet sand, and fell on his face, and drank. After this he had no great desire to go back. He rolled himself over, so that his face was turned up to the sky. Under him the wet sand was soft, and it was comfortingly cool. The fire in his head died out. He could hear new sounds in the edge of the forest evening sounds. Only weak little twitters came from the wood warblers, driven to silence by thickening gloom in the densely canopied balsams and cedars, and frightened by the first low hoots of the owls. There was a crash not far distant, probably a porcupine waddling through brush on his way for a drink; or perhaps it was a thirsty deer, or a bear coming out in the hope of finding a dead fish. Carrigan loved that sort of sound, even when a pendulum was beating back and forth in his head. It was like medicine to him, and he lay with wide-open eyes, his ears picking up one after another the voices that marked the change from day to night. He heard the cry of a loon, its softer, chuckling note of honeymoon days. From across the river came a cry that was half howl, half bark. Carrigan knew that it was coyote, and not wolf, a coyote whose breed had wandered hundreds of miles north of the prairie country. The gloom gathered in, and yet it was not darkness as the darkness of night is known a thousand miles south. It was the dusky twilight of day where the sun rises at three o'clock in the morning and still throws its ruddy light in the western sky at nine o'clock at night; where the poplar buds unfold themselves into leaf before one's very eyes; where strawberries are green in the morning and red in the afternoon; where, a little later, one could read newspaper print until midnight by the glow of the sun--and between the rising and the setting of that sun there would be from eighteen to twenty hours of day. It was evening time in the wonderland of the north, a wonderland hard and frozen and ridden by pain and death in winter, but a paradise upon earth in this month of June. The beauty of it filled Carrigan's soul, even as he lay on his back in the damp sand. Far south of him steam and steel were coming, and the world would soon know that it was easy to grow wheat at the Arctic Circle, that cucumbers grew to half the size of a man's arm, that flowers smothered the land and berries turned it scarlet and black. He had dreaded these days--days of what he called "the great discovery"--the time when a crowded civilization would at last understand how the fruits of the earth leaped up to the call of twenty hours of sun each day, even though that earth itself was eternally frozen if one went down under its surface four feet with a pick and shovel. Tonight the gloom came earlier because of the clouds in the west. It was very still. Even the breeze had ceased to come from up the river. And as Carrigan listened, exulting in the thought that the coolness of the wet sand was drawing the fever from him, he heard another sound. At first he thought it was the splashing of a fish. But after that it came again, and still again, and he knew that it was the steady and rhythmic dip of paddles. A thrill shot through him, and he raised himself to his elbow. Dusk covered the river, and he could not see. But he heard low voices as the paddles dipped. And after a little he knew that one of these was the voice of a woman. His heart gave a big jump. "She is coming back," he whispered to himself. "She is coming back!" IV Carrigan's first impulse, sudden as the thrill that leaped through him, was to cry out to the occupants of the unseen canoe. Words were on his lips, but he forced them back. They could not miss him, could not get beyond the reach of his voice--and he waited. After all, there might be profit in a reasonable degree of caution. He crept back toward his rifle, sensing the fact that movement no longer gave him very great distress. At the same time he lost no sound from the river. The voices were silent, and the dip, dip, dip of paddles was approaching softly and with extreme caution. At last he could barely hear the trickle of them, yet he knew the canoe was coming steadily nearer. There was a suspicious secretiveness in its approach. Perhaps the lady with the beautiful eyes and the glistening hair had changed her mind again and was returning to put an end to him. The thought sharpened his vision. He saw a thin shadow a little darker than the gloom of the river; it grew into shape; something grated lightly upon sand and pebbles, and then he heard the guarded plash of feet in shallow water and saw some one pulling the canoe up higher. A second figure joined the first. They advanced a few paces and stopped. In a moment a voice called softly, "M'sieu! M'sieu Carrigan!" There was an anxious note in the voice, but Carrigan held his tongue. And then he heard the woman say, "It was here, Bateese! I am sure of it!" There was more than anxiety in her voice now. Her words trembled with distress. "Bateese--if he is dead--he is up there close to the trees." "But he isn't dead," said Carrigan, raising himself a little. "He is here, behind the rock again!" In a moment she had run to where he was lying, his hand clutching the cold barrel of the pistol which he had found in the sand, his white face looking up at her. Again he found himself staring into the glow of her eyes, and in that pale light which precedes the coming of stars and moon the fancy struck him that she was lovelier than in the full radiance of the sun. He heard a throbbing note in her throat. And then she was down on her knees at his side, leaning close over him, her hands groping at his shoulders, her quick breath betraying how swiftly her heart was beating. "You are not hurt--badly?" she cried. "I don't know," replied David. "You made a perfect shot. I think a part of my head is gone. At least you've shot away my balance, because I can't stand on my feet!" Her hand touched his face, remaining there for an instant, and the palm of it pressed his forehead. It was like the touch of cool velvet, he thought. Then she called to the man named Bateese. He made Carrigan think of a huge chimpanzee as he came near, because of the shortness of his body and the length of his arms. In the half light he might have been a huge animal, a hulking creature of some sort walking upright. Carrigan's fingers closed more tightly on the butt of his automatic. The woman began to talk swiftly in a patois of French and Cree. David caught the gist of it. She was telling Bateese to carry him to the canoe, and to be very careful, because m'sieu was badly hurt. It was his head, she emphasized. Bateese must be careful of his head. David slipped his pistol into its holster as Bateese bent over him. He tried to smile at the woman to thank her for her solicitude--after having nearly killed him. There was an increasing glow in the night, and he began to see her more plainly. Out on the middle of the river was a silvery bar of light. The moon was coming up, a little pale as yet, but triumphant in the fact that clouds had blotted out the sun an hour before his time. Between this bar of light and himself he saw the head of Bateese. It was a wild, savage-looking head, bound pirate-fashion round the forehead with a huge Hudson's Bay kerchief. Bateese might have been old Jack Ketch himself bending over to give the final twist to a victim's neck. His long arms slipped under David. Gently and without effort he raised him to his feet. And then, as easily as he might have lifted a child, he trundled him up in his arms and walked off with him over the sand. Carrigan had not expected this. He was a little shocked and felt also the impropriety of the thing. The idea of being lugged off like a baby was embarrassing, even in the presence of the one who had deliberately put him in his present condition. Bateese did the thing with such beastly ease. It was as if he was no more than a small boy, a runt with no weight whatever, and Bateese was a man. He would have preferred to stagger along on his own feet or creep on his hands and knees, and he grunted as much to Bateese on the way to the canoe. He felt, at the same time, that the situation owed him something more of discussion and explanation. Even now, after half killing him, the woman was taking a rather high-handed advantage of him. She might at least have assured him that she had made a mistake and was sorry. But she did not speak to him again. She said nothing more to Bateese, and when the half-breed deposited him in the midship part of the canoe, facing the bow, she stood back in silence. Then Bateese brought his pack and rifle, and wedged the pack in behind him so that he could sit upright. After that, without pausing to ask permission, he picked up the woman and carried her through the shallow water to the bow, saving her the wetting of her feet. As she turned to find her paddle her face was toward David, and for a moment she was looking at him. "Do you mind telling me who you are, and where we are going?" he asked. "I am Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain," she said. "My brigade is down the river, M'sieu Carrigan." He was amazed at the promptness of her confession, for as one of the working factors of the long arm of the police he accepted it as that. He had scarcely expected her to divulge her name after the cold-blooded way in which she had attempted to kill him. And she had spoken quite calmly of "my brigade." He had heard of the Boulain Brigade. It was a name associated with Chipewyan, as he remembered it--or Fort McMurray. He was not sure just where the Boulain scows had traded freight with the upper-river craft. Until this year he was positive they had not come as far south as Athabasca Landing. Boulain--Boulain--The name repeated itself over and over in his mind. Bateese shoved off the canoe, and the woman's paddle dipped in and out of the water beginning to shimmer in moonlight. But he could not, for a time, get himself beyond the pounding of that name in his brain. It was not merely that he had heard the name before. There was something significant about it. Something that made him grope back in his memory of things. Boulain! He whispered it to himself, his eyes on the slender figure of the woman ahead of him, swaying gently to the steady sweep of the paddle in her hands. Yet he could think of nothing. A feeling of irritation swept over him, disgust at his own mental impotency. And the dizzying sickness was brewing in his head again. "I have heard that name--somewhere--before," he said. There was a space of only five or six feet between them, and he spoke with studied distinctness. "Possibly you have, m'sieu." Her voice was exquisite, clear as the note of a bird, yet so soft and low that she seemed scarcely to have spoken. And it was, Carrigan thought, criminally evasive--under the circumstances. He wanted her to turn round and say something. He wanted, first of all, to ask her why she had tried to kill him. It was his right to demand an explanation. And it was his duty to get her back to the Landing, where the law would ask an accounting of her. She must know that. There was only one way in which she could have learned his name, and that was by prying into his identification papers while he was unconscious. Therefore she not only knew his name, but also that he was Sergeant Carrigan of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. In spite of all this she was apparently not very deeply concerned. She was not frightened, and she did not appear to be even slightly excited. He leaned nearer to her, the movement sending a sharp pain between his eyes. It almost drew a cry from him, but he forced himself to speak without betraying it. "You tried to murder me--and almost succeeded. Haven't you anything to say?" "Not now, m'sieu--except that it was a mistake, and I am sorry. But you must not talk. You must remain quiet. I am afraid your skull is fractured." Afraid his skull was fractured! And she expressed her fear in the casual way she might have spoken of a toothache. He leaned back against his dunnage sack and closed his eyes. Probably she was right. These fits of dizziness and nausea were suspicious. They made him top-heavy and filled him with a desire to crumple up somewhere. He was clear-mindedly conscious of this and of his fight against the weakness. But in those moments when he felt better and his head was clear of pain, he had not seriously thought of a fractured skull. If she believed it, why did she not treat him a bit more considerately? Bateese, with that strength of an ox in his arms, had no use for her assistance with the paddle. She might at least have sat facing him, even if she refused to explain matters more definitely. A mistake, she called it. And she was sorry for him! She had made those statements in a matter-of-fact way, but with a voice that was like music. She had spoken perfect English, but in her words were the inflection and velvety softness of the French blood which must be running red in her veins. And her name was Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain! With eyes closed, Carrigan called himself an idiot for thinking of these things at the present time. Primarily he was a man-hunter out on important duty, and here was duty right at hand, a thousand miles south of Black Roger Audemard, the wholesale murderer he was after. He would have sworn on his life that Black Roger had never gone at a killing more deliberately than this same Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain had gone after him behind the rock! Now that it was all over, and he was alive, she was taking him somewhere as coolly and as unexcitedly as though they were returning from a picnic. Carrigan shut his eyes tighter and wondered if he was thinking straight. He believed he was badly hurt, but he was as strongly convinced that his mind was clear. And he lay quietly with his head against the pack, his eyes closed, waiting for the coolness of the river to drive his nausea away again. He sensed rather than felt the swift movement of the canoe. There was no perceptible tremor to its progress. The current and a perfect craftsmanship with the paddles were carrying it along at six or seven miles an hour. He heard the rippling of water that at times was almost like the tinkling of tiny bells, and more and more bell-like became that sound as he listened to it. It struck a certain note for him. And to that note another added itself, until in the purling rhythm of the river he caught the murmuring monotone of a name Boulain--Boulain--Boulain. The name became an obsession. It meant something. And he knew what it meant--if he could only whip his memory back into harness again. But that was impossible now. When he tried to concentrate his mental faculties, his head ached terrifically. He dipped his hand into the water and held it over his eyes. For half an hour after that he did not raise his head. In that time not a word was spoken by Bateese or Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. For the forest people it was not an hour in which to talk. The moon had risen swiftly, and the stars were out. Where there had been gloom, the world was now a flood of gold and silver light. At first Carrigan allowed this to filter between his fingers; then he opened his eyes. He felt more evenly balanced again. Straight in front of him was Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. The curtain of dusk had risen from between them, and she was full in the radiance of the moon. She was no longer paddling, but was looking straight ahead. To Cardigan her figure was exquisitely girlish as he saw it now. She was bareheaded, as he had seen tier first, and her hair hung down her back like a shimmering mass of velvety sable in the star-and-moon glow. Something told Carrigan she was going to turn her face in his direction, and he dropped his hand over his eyes again, leaving a space between the fingers. He was right in his guess. She fronted the moon, looking at him closely--rather anxiously, he thought. She even leaned a little toward him that she might see more clearly. Then she turned and resumed her paddling. Carrigan was a bit elated. Probably she had looked at him a number of times like that during the past half-hour. And she was disturbed. She was worrying about him. The thought of being a murderess was beginning to frighten her. In spite of the beauty of her eyes and hair and the slim witchery of her body he had no sympathy for her. He told himself that he would give a year of his life to have her down at Barracks this minute. He would never forget that three-quarters of an hour behind the rock, not if he lived to be a hundred. And if he did live, she was going to pay, even if she was lovelier than Venus and all the Graces combined. He felt irritated with himself that he should have observed in such a silly way the sable glow of her hair in the moonlight. And her eyes. What the deuce did prettiness matter in the present situation? The sister of Fanchet, the mail robber, was beautiful, but her beauty had failed to save Fanchet. The Law had taken him in spite of the tears in Carmin Fanchet's big black eyes, and in that particular instance he was the Law. And Carmin Fanchet was pretty--deucedly pretty. Even the Old Man's heart had been stirred by her loveliness. "A shame!" he had said to Carrigan. "A shame!" But the rascally Fanchet was hung by the neck until he was dead. Carrigan drew himself up slowly until he was sitting erect. He wondered what Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain would say if he told her about Carmin. But there was a big gulf between the names Fanchet and Boulain. The Fanchets had come from the dance halls of Alaska. They were bad, both of them. At least, so they had judged Carmin Fanchet--along with her brother. And Boulain-- His hand, in dropping to his side, fell upon the butt of his pistol. Neither Bateese nor the girl had thought of disarming him. It was careless of them, unless Bateese was keeping a good eye on him from behind. A new sort of thrill crept into Carrigan's blood. He began to see where he had made a huge error in not playing his part more cleverly. It was this girl Jeanne who had shot him. It was Jeanne who had stood over him in that last moment when he had made an effort to use his pistol. It was she who had tried to murder him and who had turned faint-hearted when it came to finishing the job. But his knowledge of these things he should have kept from her. Then, when the proper moment came, he would have been in a position to act. Even now it might be possible to cover his blunder. He leaned toward her again, determined to make the effort. "I want to ask your pardon," he said. "May I?" His voice startled her. It was as if the stinging tip of a whip-lash had touched her bare neck. He was smiling when she turned. In her face and eyes was a relief which she made no effort to repress. "You thought I might be dead," he laughed softly. "I'm not, Miss Jeanne. I'm very much alive again. It was that accursed fever--and I want to ask your pardon! I think--I know--that I accused you of shooting me. It's impossible. I couldn't think of it--In my clear mind. I am quite sure that I know the rascally half-breed who pot-shotted me like that. And it was you who came in time, and frightened him away, and saved my life. Will you forgive me--and accept my gratitude?" There came into the glowing eyes of the girl a reflection of his own smile. It seemed to him that he saw the corners of her mouth tremble a little before she answered him. "I am glad you are feeling better, m'sieu." "And you will forgive me for--for saying such beastly things to you?" She was lovely when she smiled, and she was smiling at him now. "If you want to be forgiven for lying, yes," she said. "I forgive you that, because it is sometimes your business to lie. It was I who tried to kill you, m'sieu. And you know it." "But--" "You must not talk, m'sieu. It is not good for you: Bateese, will you tell m'sieu not to talk?" Carrigan heard a movement behind him. "M'sieu, you will stop ze talk or I brak hees head wit' ze paddle in my han'!" came the voice of Bateese close to his shoulder. "Do I mak' ze word plain so m'sieu compren'?" "I get you, old man," grunted Carrigan. "I get you--both!" And he leaned back against his dunnage-sack, staring again at the witching slimness of the lovely Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as she calmly resumed her paddling in the bow of the canoe. V In the few minutes following the efficient and unexpected warning of Bateese an entirely new element of interest entered into the situation for David Carrigan. He had more than once assured himself that he had made a success of his profession of man-hunting not because he was brighter than the other fellow, but largely because he possessed a sense of humor and no vanities to prick. He was in the game because he loved the adventure of it. He was loyal to his duty, but he was not a worshipper of the law, nor did he covet the small monthly stipend of dollars and cents that came of his allegiance to it. As a member of the Scarlet Police, and especially of "N" Division, he felt the pulse and thrill of life as he loved to live it. And the greatest of all thrills came when he was after a man as clever as himself, or cleverer. This time it was a woman--or a girl! He had not yet made up his mind which she was. Her voice, low and musical, her poise, and the tranquil and unexcitable loveliness of her face had made him, at first, register her as a woman. Yet as he looked at the slim girlishness of her figure in the bow of the canoe, accentuated by the soft sheen of her partly unbraided hair, he wondered if she were eighteen or thirty. It would take the clear light of day to tell him. But whether a girl or a woman, she had handled him so cleverly that the unpleasantness of his earlier experience began to give way slowly to an admiration for her capability. He wondered what the superintendent of "N" Division would say if he could see Black Roger Audemard's latest trailer propped up here in the center of the canoe, the prisoner of a velvety-haired but dangerously efficient bit of feminine loveliness--and a bull-necked, chimpanzee-armed half-breed! Bateese had confirmed the suspicion that he was a prisoner, even though this mysterious pair were bent on saving his life. Why it was their desire to keep life in him when only a few hours ago one of them had tried to kill him was a. question which only the future could answer. He did not bother himself with that problem now. The present was altogether too interesting, and there was but little doubt that other developments equally important were close at hand. The attitude of both Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain and her piratical-looking henchman was sufficient evidence of that. Bateese had threatened to knock his head off, and he could have sworn that the girl--or woman--had smiled her approbation of the threat. Yet he held no grudge against Bateese. An odd sort of liking for the man began to possess him, just as he found himself powerless to resist an ingrowing admiration for Marie-Anne. The existence of Black Roger Audemard became with him a sort of indefinite reality. Black Roger was a long way off. Marie-Anne and Bateese were very near. He began thinking of her as Marie-Anne. He liked the name. It was the Boulain part of it that worked in him with an irritating insistence. For the first time since the canoe journey had begun, he looked beyond the darkly glowing head and the slender figure in the bow. It was a splendid night. Ahead of him the river was like a rippling sheet of molten silver. On both sides, a quarter of a mile apart, rose the walls of the forest, like low-hung, oriental tapestries. The sky seemed near, loaded with stars, and the moon, rising with almost perceptible movement toward the zenith, had changed from red to a mellow gold. Carrigan's soul always rose to this glory of the northern light. Youth and vigor, he told himself, must always exist under those unpolluted lights of the upper worlds, the unspeaking things which had told him more than he had ever learned from the mouths of other men. They stood for his religion, his faith, his belief in the existence of things greater than the insignificant spark which animated his own body. He appreciated them most when there was stillness. And tonight it was still. It was so quiet that the trickling of the paddles was like subdued music. From the forest there came no sound. Yet he knew there was life there, wide-eyed, questing life, life that moved on velvety wing and padded foot, just as he and Marie-Anne and the half-breed Bateese were moving in the canoe. To have called out in this hour would have taken an effort, for a supreme and invisible Hand seemed to have commanded stillness upon the earth. And then there came droning upon his ears a break in the stillness, and as he listened, the shores closed slowly in, narrowing the channel until he saw giant masses of gray rock replacing the thick verdure of balsam, spruce, and cedar. The moaning grew louder, and the rocks climbed skyward until they hung in great cliffs. There could be but one meaning to this sudden change. They were close to LE SAINT-ESPRIT RAPIDE--the Holy Ghost Rapids. Carrigan was astonished. That day at noon he had believed the Holy Ghost to be twenty or thirty miles below him. Now they were at its mouth, and he saw that Bateese and Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain were quietly and unexcitedly preparing to run that vicious stretch of water. Unconsciously he gripped the gunwales of the canoe with both hands as the sound of the rapids grew into low and sullen thunder. In the moonlight ahead he could see the rock walls closing in until the channel was crushed between two precipitous ramparts, and the moon and stars, sending their glow between those walls, lighted up a frothing path of water that made Carrigan hold his breath. He would have portaged this place even in broad day. He looked at the girl in the bow. The slender figure Was a little more erect, the glowing head held a little higher. In those moments he would have liked to see her face, the wonderful something that must be in her eyes as she rode fearlessly into the teeth of the menace ahead. For he could see that she was not afraid, that she was facing this thing with a sort of exultation, that there was something about it which thrilled her until every drop of blood in her body was racing with the impetus of the stream itself. Eddies of wind puffing out from between the chasm walls tossed her loose hair about her back in a glistening veil. He saw a long strand of it trailing over the edge of the canoe into the water. It made him shiver, and he wanted to cry out to Bateese that he was a fool for risking her life like this. He forgot that he was the one helpless individual in the canoe, and that an upset would mean the end for him, while Bateese and his companion might still fight on. His thought and his vision were focused on the girl--and what lay straight ahead. A mass of froth, like a windrow of snow, rose up before them, and the canoe plunged into it with the swiftness of a shot. It spattered in his face, and blinded him for an instant. Then they were out of it, and he fancied he heard a note of laughter from the girl in the bow. In the next breath he called himself a fool for imagining that. For the run was dead ahead, and the girl became vibrant with life, her paddle flashing in and out, while from her lips came sharp, clear cries which brought from Eateese frog-like bellows of response. The walls shot past; inundations rose and plunged under them; black rocks whipped with caps of foam raced up-stream with the speed of living things; the roar became a drowning voice, and then--as if outreached by the wings of a swifter thing--dropped suddenly behind them. Smoother water lay ahead. The channel broadened. Moonlight filled it with a clearer radiance, and Carrigan saw the girl's hair glistening wet, and her arms dripping. For the first time he turned about and faced Bateese. The half-breed was grinning like a Cheshire cat! "You're a confoundedly queer pair!" grunted Carrigan, and he turned about again to find Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as unconcerned as though running the Holy Ghost Rapids in the glow of the moon was nothing more than a matter of play. It was impossible for him to keep his heart from beating a little faster as he watched her, even though he was trying to regard her in a most professional sort of way. He reminded himself that she was an iniquitous little Jezebel who had almost murdered him. Carmin Fanchet had been like her, an AME DAMNEE--a fallen angel--but his business was not sympathy in such matters as these. At the same time he could not resist the lure of both her audacity and her courage, and he found himself all at once asking himself the amazing question as to what her relationship might be to Bateese. It occurred to him rather unpleasantly that there had been something distinctly proprietary in the way the half-breed had picked her up on the sand, and that Bateese had shown no hesitation a little later in threatening to knock his head off unless he stopped talking to her. He wondered if Bateese was a Boulain. The two or three minutes of excitement in the boiling waters of the Holy Ghost had acted like medicine on Carrigan. It seemed to him that something had given way in his head, relieving him of an oppression that had been like an iron hoop drawn tightly about his skull. He did not want Bateese to suspect this change in him, and he slouched lower against the dunnage-pack with his eyes still on the girl. He was finding it increasingly difficult to keep from looking at her. She had resumed her paddling, and Bateese was putting mighty efforts in his strokes now, so that the narrow, birchbark canoe shot like an arrow with the down-sweeping current of the river. A few hundred yards below was a twist in the channel, and as the canoe rounded this, taking the shoreward curve with dizzying swiftness, a wide, still straight-water lay ahead. And far down this Carrigan saw the glow of fires. The forest had drawn back from the river, leaving in its place a broken tundra of rock and shale and a wide strip of black sand along the edge of the stream itself. Carrigan knew what it was--an upheaval of the tar-sand country so common still farther north, the beginning of that treasure of the earth which would some day make the top of the American continent one of the Eldorados of the world. The fires drew nearer, and suddenly the still night was broken by the wild chanting of men. David heard behind him a choking note in the throat of Bateese. A soft word came from the lips of the girl, and it seemed to Carrigan that her head was held higher in the moon glow. The chant increased in volume, a rhythmic, throbbing, savage music that for a hundred and fifty years had come from the throats of men along the Three Rivers. It thrilled Carrigan as they bore down upon it. It was not song as civilization would have counted song. It was like an explosion, an exultation of human voice unchained, ebullient with the love of life, savage in its good-humor. It was LE GAITE DE COEUR of the rivermen, who thought and sang as their forefathers did in the days of Radisson and good Prince Rupert; it was their merriment, their exhilaration, their freedom and optimism, reaching up to the farthest stars. In that song men were straining their vocal muscles, shouting to beat out their nearest neighbor, bellowing like bulls in a frenzy of sudden fun. And then, as suddenly as it had risen in the night, the clamor of voices died away. A single shout came up the river. Carrigan thought he heard a low rumble of laughter. A tin pan banged against another. A dog howled. The flat of an oar played a tattoo for a moment on the bottom of a boat. Then one last yell from a single throat--and the night was silent again. And that was the Boulain Brigade--singing at this hour of the night, when men should have been sleeping if they expected to be up with the sun. Carrigan stared ahead. Shortly his adventure would take a new twist. Something was bound to happen when they got ashore. The peculiar glow of the fires had puzzled him. Now he began to understand. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain's men were camped in the edge of the tar-sands and had lighted a number of natural gas-jets that came up out of the earth. Many times he had seen fires like these burning up and down the Three Rivers. He had lighted fires of his own; he had cooked over them and had afterward had the fun and excitement of extinguishing them with pails of water. But he had never seen anything quite like this that was unfolding itself before his eyes now. There were seven of the fires over an area of half an acre--spouts of yellowish flame burning like giant torches ten or fifteen feet in the air. And between them he very soon made out great bustle and activity. Many figures were moving about. They looked like dwarfs at first, gnomes at play in a little world made out of witchcraft. But Bateese was sending the canoe nearer with powerful strokes, and the figures grew taller, and the spouts of flame higher. Then he knew what was happening. The Boulain men were taking advantage of the cool hours of the night and were tarring up. He could smell the tar, and he could see the big York boats drawn up in the circle of yellowish light. There were half a dozen of them, and men stripped to the waist were smearing the bottoms of the boats with boiling tar and pitch. In the center was a big, black cauldron steaming over a gas-jet, and between this cauldron and the boats men were running back and forth with pails. Still nearer to the huge kettle other men were filling a row of kegs with the precious black GOUDRON that oozed up from the bowels of the earth, forming here and there jet-black pools that Carrigan could see glistening in the flare of the gas-lamps. He figured there were thirty men at work. Six big York boats were turned keel up in the black sand. Close inshore, just outside the circle of light, was a single scow. Toward this scow Bateese sent the canoe. And as they drew nearer, until the laboring men ashore were scarcely a stone's throw away, the weirdness of the scene impressed itself more upon Carrigan. Never had he seen such a crew. There were no Indians among them. Lithe, quick-moving, bare-headed, their naked arms and shoulders gleaming in the ghostly illumination, they were racing against time with the boiling tar and pitch in the cauldron. They did not see the approach of the canoe, and Bateese did not draw their attention to it. Quietly he drove the birchbark under the shadow of the big bateau. Hands were waiting to seize and steady it. Carrigan caught but a glimpse of the faces. In another instant the girl was aboard the scow, and Bateese was bending over him. A second time he was picked up like a child in the chimpanzee-like arms of the half-breed. The moonlight showed him a scow bigger than he had ever seen on the upper river, and two-thirds of it seemed to be cabin. Into this cabin Bateese carried him, and in darkness laid him upon what Carrigan thought must be a cot built against the wall. He made no sound, but let himself fall limply upon it. He listened to Bateese as he moved about, and closed his eyes when Bateese struck a match. A moment later he heard the door of the cabin close behind the half-breed. Not until then did he open his eyes and sit up. He was alone. And what he saw in the next few moments drew an exclamation of amazement from him. Never had he seen a cabin like this on the Three Rivers. It was thirty feet long if an inch, and at least eight feet wide. The walls and ceiling were of polished cedar; the floor was of cedar closely matched. It was the exquisite finish and craftsmanship of the woodwork that caught his eyes first. Then his astonished senses seized upon the other things. Under his feet was a soft rug of dark green velvet. Two magnificent white bearskins lay between him and the end of the room. The walls were hung with pictures, and at the four windows were curtains of ivory lace draped with damask. The lamp which Bateese had lighted was fastened to the wall close to him. It was of polished silver and threw a brilliant light softened by a shade of old gold. There were three other lamps like this, unlighted. The far end of the room was in deep shadow, but Carrigan made out the thing he was staring at--a piano. He rose to his feet, disbelieving his eyes, and made his way toward it. He passed between chairs. Near the piano was another door, and a wide divan of the same soft, green upholstery. Looking back, he saw that what he had been lying upon was another divan. And dose to this were book-shelves, and a table on which were magazines and papers and a woman's workbasket, and in the workbasket--sound asleep--a cat! And then, over the table and the sleeping cat, his eyes rested upon a triangular banner fastened to the wall. In white against a background of black was a mighty polar bear holding at bay a horde of Arctic wolves. And suddenly the thing he had been fighting to recall came to Carrigan--the great bear--the fighting wolves--the crest of St. Pierre Boulain! He took a quick step toward the table--then caught at the back of a chair. Confound his head! Or was it the big bateau rocking under his feet? The cat seemed to be turning round in its basket. There were half a dozen banners instead of one; the lamp was shaking in its bracket; the floor was tilting, everything was becoming hideously contorted and out of place. A shroud of darkness gathered about him, and through that darkness Carrigan staggered blindly toward the divan. He reached it just in time to fall upon it like a dead man. VI For what seemed to be an interminable time after the final breakdown of his physical strength David Carrigan lived in a black world where a horde of unseen little devils were shooting red-hot arrows into his brain. He did not sense the fact of human presence; nor that the divan had been changed into a bed and the four lamps lighted, and that wrinkled, brown hands with talon-like fingers were performing a miracle of wilderness surgery upon him. He did not see the age-old face of Nepapinas--"The Wandering Bolt of Lightning"--as the bent and tottering Cree called upon all his eighty years of experience to bring him back to life. And he did not see Bateese, stolid-faced, silent, nor the dead-white face and wide-open, staring eyes of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as her slim, white fingers worked with the old medicine man's. He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment. He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who was over him. He did not hear her voice nor feel the soothing of her hands, nor the powerful grip of Bateese as he held him when the critical moments came. And Nepapinas, like a machine that had looked upon death a thousand times, gave no rest to his claw-like fingers until the work was done--and it was then that something came to drive the arrow-shooting devils out of the darkness that was smothering Carrigan. After that Carrigan lived through an eternity of unrest, a life in which he seemed powerless and yet was always struggling for supremacy over things that were holding him down. There were lapses in it, like the hours of oblivion that come with sleep, and there were other times when he seemed keenly alive, yet unable to move or act. The darkness gave way to flashes of light, and in these flashes he began to see things, curiously twisted, fleeting, and yet fighting themselves insistently upon his senses. He was back in the hot sand again, and this time he heard the voices of Jeanne Marie-Anne and Golden-Hair, and Golden-Hair flaunted a banner in his face, a triangular pennon of black on which a huge bear was fighting white Arctic wolves, and then she would run away from him, crying out--"St. Pierre Boulain--St. Pierre Boulain--" and the last he could see of her was her hair flaming like fire in the sun. But it was always the other--the dark hair and dark eyes--that came to him when the little devils returned to assault him with their arrows. From somewhere she would come out of darkness and frighten them away. He could hear her voice like a whisper in his ears, and the touch of her hands comforted him and quieted his pain. After a time he grew to be afraid when the darkness swallowed her up, and in that darkness he would call for her, and always he heard her voice in answer. Then came a long oblivion. He floated through cool space away from the imps of torment; his bed was of downy clouds, and on these clouds he drifted with a great shining river under him; and at last the cloud he was in began to shape itself into walls and on these walls were pictures, and a window through which the sun was shining, and a black pennon--and he heard a soft, wonderful music that seemed to come to him faintly from another world. Other creatures were at work in his brain now. They were building up and putting together the loose ends of things. Carrigan became one of them, working so hard that frequently a pair of dark eyes came out of the dawning of things to stop him, and quieting hands and a voice soothed him to rest. The hands and the voice became very intimate. He missed them when they were not near, especially the hands, and he was always groping for them to make sure they had not gone away. Only once after the floating cloud transformed itself into the walls of the bateau cabin did the chaotic darkness of the sands fully possess him again. In that darkness he heard a voice. It was not the voice of Golden-Hair, or of Bateese, or of Jeanne Marie-Anne. It was close to his ears. And in that darkness that smothered him there was something terrible about it as it droned slowly the words--"HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?" He tried to answer, to call back to it, and the voice came again, repeating the words, emotionless, hollow, as if echoing up out of a grave. And still harder he struggled to reply to it, to say that he was David Carrigan, and that he was out on the trail of Black Roger Audemard, and that Black Roger was far north. And suddenly it seemed to him that the voice changed into the flesh and blood of Black Roger himself, though he could not see in the darkness--and he reached out, gripping fiercely at the warm substance of flesh, until he heard another voice, the voice of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain, entreating him to let his victim go. It was this time that his eyes shot open, wide and seeing, and straight over him was the face of Jeanne Marie-Anne, nearer him than it had been even in the visionings of his feverish mind. His fingers were clutching her shoulders, gripping like steel hooks. "M'sieu--M'sieu David!" she was crying. For a moment he stared; then his hands and fingers relaxed, and his arms dropped limply. "Pardon--I--I was dreaming," he struggled weakly. "I thought--" He had seen the pain in her face. Now, changing swiftly, it lighted up with relief and gladness. His vision, cleared by long darkness, saw the change come in an instant like a flash of sunshine. And then--so near that he could have touched her--she was smiling down into his eyes. He smiled back. It took an effort, for his face felt stiff and unnatural. "I was dreaming--of a man--named Roger Audemard," he continued to apologize. "Did I--hurt you?" The smile on her lips was gone as swiftly as it had come. "A little, m'sieu. I am glad you are better. You have been very sick." He raised a hand to his face. The bandage was there, and also a stubble of beard on his cheeks. He was puzzled. This morning he had fastened his steel mirror to the side of a tree and shaved. "It was three days ago you were hurt," she said quietly. "This is the afternoon of the third day. You have been in a great fever. Nepapinas, my Indian doctor, saved your life. You must lie quietly now. You have been talking a great deal." "About--Black Roger?" he said. She nodded. "And--Golden--Hair?" "Yes, of Golden--Hair." "And--some one else--with dark hair--and dark eyes--" "It may be, m'sieu." "And of little devils with bows and arrows, and of polar bears, and white wolves, and of a great lord of the north who calls himself St. Pierre Boulain?" "Yes, of all those." "Then I haven't anything more to tell you," grunted David. "I guess I've told you all I know. You shot me, back there. And here I am. What are you going to do next?" "Call Bateese," she answered promptly, and she rose swiftly from beside him and moved toward the door. He made no effort to call her back. His wits were working slowly, readjusting themselves after a carnival in chaos, and he scarcely sensed that she was gone until the cabin door closed behind her. Then again he raised a hand to his face and felt his beard. Three days! He turned his head so that he could take in the length of the cabin. It was filled with subdued sunlight now, a western sun that glowed softly, giving depth and richness to the colors on the floor and walls, lighting up the piano keys, suffusing the pictures with a warmth of life. David's eyes traveled slowly to his own feet. The divan had been opened and transformed into a bed. He was undressed. He had on somebody's white nightgown. And there was a big bunch of wild roses on the table where three days ago the cat had been sleeping in the work-basket. His head cleared swiftly, and he raised himself a little on one elbow, with extreme caution, and listened. The big bateau was not moving. It was still tied up, but he could hear no voices out where the tar-sands were. He dropped back on his pillow, and his eyes rested on the black pennon. His blood stirred again as he looked at the white bear and the fighting wolves. Wherever men rode the waters of the Three Rivers that pennon was known. Yet it was not common. Seldom was it seen, and never had it come south of Chipewyan. Many things came to Carrigan now, things that he had heard at the Landing and up and down the rivers. Once he had read the tail-end of a report the Superintendent of "N" Division had sent in to headquarters. "We do not know this St. Pierre. Few men have seen him out of his own country, the far headwaters of the Yellowknife, where he rules like a great overlord. Both the Yellowknives and the Dog Ribs call him KICHEOO KIMOW, or King, and the same rumors say there is never starvation or plague in his regions; and it is fact that neither the Hudson's Bay nor Revillon Brothers in their cleverest generalship and trade have been able to uproot his almost dynastic jurisdiction. The Police have had no reason to investigate or interfere." At least that was the gist of what Carrigan had read in McVane's report. But he had never associated it with the name of Boulain. It was of St. Pierre that he had heard stories, St. Pierre and his black pennon with its white bear and fighting wolves. And so--it was St. Pierre BOULAIN! He closed his eyes and thought of the long winter weeks he had passed at Hay River Post, watching for Fanchet, the mail robber. It was there he had heard most about this St. Pierre, and yet no one he had talked with had ever seen him; no one knew whether he was old or young, a pigmy or a giant. Some stories said that he was strong, that he could twist a gun-barrel double in his hands; others said that he was old, very old, so that he never set forth with his brigades that brought down each year a treasure of furs to be exchanged for freight. And never did a Dog Rib or a Yellowknife open his mouth about KICHEOO KIMOW St. Pierre, the master of their unmapped domains. In that great country north and west of the Great Slave he remained an enigma and a sphinx. If he ever came out with his brigades, he did not disclose his identity, so that if one saw a fleet of boats or canoes with the St. Pierre pennon, one had to make his own guess whether St. Pierre himself was there or not. But these things were known--that the keenest, quickest, and strongest men in the northland ran the St. Pierre brigades, that they brought out the richest cargoes of furs, and that they carried back with them into the secret fastnesses of their wilderness the greatest cargoes of freight that treasure could buy. So much the name St. Pierre dragged out of Carrigan's memory. It came to him now why the name "Boulain" had pounded so insistently in his brain. He had seen this pennon with its white bear and fighting wolves only once before, and that had been over a Boulain scow at Chipewyan. But his memory had lost its grip on that incident while retaining vividly its hold on the stories and rumors of the mystery-man, St. Pierre. Carrigan pulled himself a little higher on his pillow and with a new interest scanned the cabin. He had never heard of Boulain women. Yet here was the proof of their existence and of the greatness that ran in the red blood of their veins. The history of the great northland, hidden in the dust-dry tomes and guarded documents of the great company, had always been of absorbing interest to him. He wondered why it was that the outside world knew so little about it and believed so little of what it heard. A long time ago he had penned an article telling briefly the story of this half of a great continent in which for two hundred years romance and tragedy and strife for mastery had gone on in a way to thrill the hearts of men. He had told of huge forts with thirty-foot stone bastions, of fierce wars, of great warships that had fired their broadsides in battle in the ice-filled waters of Hudson's Bay. He had described the coming into this northern world of thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest and best-blooded men of England and France, and how these thousands had continued to come, bringing with them the names of kings, of princes, and of great lords, until out of the savagery of the north rose an aristocracy of race built up of the strongest men of the earth. And these men of later days he had called Lords of the North--men who had held power of life and death in the hollow of their hands until the great company yielded up its suzerainty to the Government of the Dominion in 1870; men who were kings in their domains, whose word was law, who were more powerful in their wilderness castles than their mistress over the sea, the Queen of Britain. And Carrigan, after writing of these things, had stuffed his manuscript away in the bottom of his chest at barracks, for he believed that it was not in his power to do justice to the people of this wilderness world that he loved. The powerful old lords were gone. Like dethroned monarchs, stripped to the level of other men, they lived in the memories of what had been. Their might now lay in trade. No more could they set out to wage war upon their rivals with powder and ball. Keen wit, swift dogs, and the politics of barter had taken the place of deadlier things. LE FACTEUR could no longer slay or command that others be slain. A mightier hand than his now ruled the destinies of the northern people--the hand of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. It was this thought, the thought that Law and one of the powerful forces of the wilderness had met in this cabin of the big bateau, that came to Carrigan as he drew himself still higher against his pillow. A greater thrill possessed him than the thrill of his hunt for Black Roger Audemard. Black Roger was a murderer, a wholesale murderer and a fiend, a Moloch for whom there could be no pity. Of all men the Law wanted Black Roger most, and he, David Carrigan, was the chosen one to consummate its desire. Yet in spite of that he felt upon him the strange unrest of a greater adventure than the quest for Black Roger. It was like an impending thing that could not be seen, urging him, rousing his faculties from the slough into which they had fallen because of his wound and sickness. It was, after all, the most vital of all things, a matter of his own life. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain had tried to kill him deliberately, with malice and intent. That she had saved him afterward only added to the necessity of an explanation, and he was determined that he would have that explanation and settle the present matter before he allowed another thought of Black Roger to enter his head. This resolution reiterated itself in his mind as the machine-like voice of duty. He was not thinking of the Law, and yet the consciousness of his accountability to that Law kept repeating itself. In the very face of it Carrigan knew that something besides the moral obligation of the thing was urging him, something that was becoming deeply and dangerously personal. At least--he tried to think of it as dangerous. And that danger was his unbecoming interest in the girl herself. It was an interest distinctly removed from any ethical code that might have governed him in his experience with Carmin Fanchet, for instance. Comparatively, if they had stood together, Carmin would have been the lovelier. But he would have looked longer at Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. He conceded the point, smiling a bit grimly as he continued to study that part of the cabin which he could see from his pillow. He had lost interest--temporarily at least--in Black Roger Audemard. Not long ago the one question to which, above all others, he had desired an answer was, why had Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain worked so desperately to kill him and so hard to save him afterward? Now, as he looked about him, the question which repeated itself insistently was, what relationship did she bear to this mysterious lord of the north, St. Pierre? Undoubtedly she was his daughter, for whom St. Pierre had built this luxurious barge of state. A fierce-blooded offspring, he thought, one like Cleopatra herself, not afraid to kill--and equally quick to make amends when there was a mistake. There came the quiet opening of the cabin door to break in upon his thought. He hoped it was Jeanne Marie-Anne returning to him. It was Nepapinas. The old Indian stood over him for a moment and put a cold, claw-like hand to his forehead. He grunted and nodded his head, his little sunken eyes gleaming with satisfaction. Then he put his hands under David's arms and lifted him until he was sitting upright, with three or four pillows at his back. "Thanks," said Carrigan. "That makes me feel better. And--if you don't mind--my last lunch was three days ago, boiled prunes and a piece of bannock--" "I have brought you something to eat, M'sieu David," broke in a soft voice behind him. Nepapinas slipped away, and Jeanne Marie-Anne stood in his place. David stared up at her, speechless. He heard the door close behind the old Indian. Then Jeanne Marie-Anne drew up a chair, so that for the first time he could see her clear eyes with the light of day full upon her. He forgot that a few days ago she had been his deadliest enemy. He forgot the existence of a man named Black Roger Audemard. Her slimness was as it had pictured itself to him in the hot sands. Her hair was as he had seen it there. It was coiled upon her head like ropes of spun silk, jet-black, glowing softly. But it was her eyes he stared at, and so fixed was his look that the red lips trembled a bit on the verge of a smile. She was not embarrassed. There was no color in the clear whiteness of her skin, except that redness of her lips. "I thought you had black eyes," he said bluntly. "I'm glad you haven't. I don't like them. Yours are as brown as--as--" "Please, m'sieu," she interrupted him, sitting down close beside him. "Will you eat--now?" A spoon was at his mouth, and he was forced to take it in or have its contents spilled over him. The spoon continued to move quickly between the bowl and his mouth. He was robbed of speech. And the girl's eyes, as surely as he was alive, were beginning to laugh at him. They were a wonderful brown, with little, golden specks in them, like the freckles he had seen in wood-violets. Her lips parted. Between their bewitching redness he saw the gleam of her white teeth. In a crowd, with her glorious hair covered and her eyes looking straight ahead, one would not have picked her out. But close, like this, with her eyes smiling at him, she was adorable. Something of Carrigan's thoughts must have shown in his face, for suddenly the girl's lips tightened a little, and the warmth went out of her eyes, leaving them cold and distant. He finished the soup, and she rose again to her feet. "Please don't go," he said. "If you do, I think I shall get up and follow. I am quite sure I am entitled to a little something more than soup." "Nepapinas says that you may have a bit of boiled fish for supper," she assured him. "You know I don't mean that. I want to know why you shot me, and what you think you are going to do with me." "I shot you by mistake--and--I don't know just what to do with you," she said, looking at him tranquilly, but with what he thought was a growing shadow of perplexity in her eyes. "Bateese says to fasten a big stone to your neck and throw you in the river. But Bateese doesn't always mean what he says. I don't think he is quite as bloodthirsty--" "--As the young lady who tried to murder me behind the rock," Carrigan interjected. "Exactly, m'sieu. I don't think he would throw you into the river--unless I told him to. And I don't believe I am going to ask him to do that," she added, the soft glow flashing back into her eyes for an instant. "Not after the splendid work Nepapinas has done on your head. St. Pierre must see that. And then, if St. Pierre wishes to finish you, why--" She shrugged her slim shoulders and made a little gesture with her hands. In that same moment there came over her a change as sudden as the passing of light itself. It was as if a thing she was hiding had broken beyond her control for an instant and had betrayed her. The gesture died. The glow went out of her eyes, and in its place came a light that was almost fear--or pain. She came nearer to Carrigan again, and somehow, looking up at her, he thought of the little brush warbler singing at the end of its birch twig to give him courage. It must have been because of her throat, white and soft, which he saw pulsing like a beating heart before she spoke to him. "I have made a terrible mistake, m'sieu David," she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper. "I'm sorry I hurt you. I thought it was some one else behind the rock. But I can not tell you more than that--ever. And I know it is impossible for us to be friends." She paused, one of her hands creeping to her bare throat, as if to cover the throbbing he had seen there. "Why is it impossible?" he demanded, leaning away from his pillows so that he might bring himself nearer to her. "Because--you are of the police, m'sieu." "The police, yes," he said, his heart thrumming inside his breast. "I am Sergeant Carrigan. I am out after Roger Audemard, a murderer. But my commission has nothing to do with the daughter of St. Pierre Boulain. Please--let's be friends--" He held out his hand; and in that moment David Carrigan placed another thing higher than duty--and in his eyes was the confession of it, like the glow of a subdued fire. The girl's fingers drew more closely at her throat, and she made no movement to accept his hand. "Friends," he repeated. "Friends--in spite of the police." Slowly the girl's eyes had widened, as if she saw that new-born thing riding over all other things in his swiftly beating heart. And afraid of it, she drew a step away from him. "I am not St. Pierre Boulain's daughter," she said, forcing the words out one by one. "I am--his wife." VII Afterward Carrigan wondered to what depths he had fallen in the first moments of his disillusionment. Something like shock, perhaps even more than that, must have betrayed itself in his face. He did not speak. Slowly his outstretched arm dropped to the white counterpane. Later he called himself a fool for allowing it to happen, for it was as if he had measured his proffered friendship by what its future might hold for him. In a low, quiet voice Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain was saying again that she was St. Pierre's wife. She was not excited, yet he understood now why it was he had thought her eyes were very dark. They had changed swiftly. The violet freckles in them were like little flecks of gold. They were almost liquid in their glow, neither brown nor black now, and with that threat of gathering lightning in them. For the first time he saw the slightest flush of color in her cheeks. It deepened even as he held out his hand again. He knew that it was not embarrassment. It was the heat of the fire back of her eyes. "It's--funny," he said, making an effort to redeem himself with a lie and smiling. "You rather amaze me. You see, I have been told this St. Pierre is an old, old man--so old that he can't stand on his feet or go with his brigades, and if that is the truth, it is hard for me to picture you as his wife. But that isn't a reason why we should not be friends. Is it?" He felt that he was himself again, except for the three days' growth of beard on his face. He tried to laugh, but it was rather a poor attempt. And St. Pierre's wife did not seem to hear him. She was looking at him, looking into and through him with those wide-open glowing eyes. Then she sat down, out of reach of the hand which he had held toward her. "You are a sergeant of the police," she said, the softness gone suddenly out of her voice. "You are an honorable man, m'sieu. Your hand is against all wrong. Is it not so?" It was the voice of an inquisitor. She was demanding an answer of him. He nodded. "Yes, it is so." The fire in her eyes deepened. "And yet you say you want to be the friend of a stranger who has tried to kill you. WHY, m'sieu?" He was cornered. He sensed the humiliation of it, the impossibility of confessing to her the wild impulse that had moved him before he knew she was St. Pierre's wife. And she did not wait for him to answer. "This--this Roger Audemard--if you catch him--what will you do with him?" she asked. "He will be hanged," said David. "He is a murderer." "And one who tries to kill--who almost succeeds--what is the penalty for that?" She leaned toward him, waiting. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, the spots were brighter in her cheeks. "From ten to twenty years," he acknowledged. "But, of course, there may be circumstances--" "If so, you do not know them," she interrupted him. "You say Roger Audemard is a murderer. You know I tried to kill you. Then why is it you would be my friend and Roger Audemard's enemy? Why, m'sieu?" Carrigan shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. "I shouldn't," he confessed. "I guess you are proving I was wrong in what I said. I ought to arrest you and take you back to the Landing as soon as I can. But, you see, it strikes me there is a big personal element in this. I was the man almost killed. There was a mistake,--must have been, for as soon as you put me out of business you began nursing me back to life again. And--" "But that doesn't change it," insisted St. Pierre's wife. "If there had been no mistake, there would have been a murder. Do you understand, m'sieu? If it had been some one else behind that rock, I am quite certain he would have died. The Law, at least, would have called it murder. If Roger Audemard is a criminal, then I also am a criminal. And an honorable man would not make a distinction because one of them is a woman!" "But--Black Roger was a fiend. He deserves no mercy. He--" "Perhaps, m'sieu!" She was on her feet, her eyes flaming down upon him. In that moment her beauty was like the beauty of Carmin Fanchet. The poise of her slender body, her glowing cheeks, her lustrous hair, her gold-flecked eyes with the light of diamonds in them, held him speechless. "I was sorry and went back for you," she said. "I wanted you to live, after I saw you like that on the sand. Bateese says I was indiscreet, that I should have left you there to die. Perhaps he is right. And yet--even Roger Audemard might have had that pity for you." She turned quickly, and he heard her moving away from him. Then, from the door, she said, "Bateese will make you comfortable, m'sieu." The door opened and closed. She was gone. And he was alone in the cabin again. The swiftness of the change in her amazed him. It was as if he had suddenly touched fire to an explosive. There had been the flare, but no violence. She had not raised her voice, yet he heard in it the tremble of an emotion that was consuming her. He had seen the flame of it in her face and eyes. Something he had said, or had done, had tremendously upset her, changing in an instant her attitude toward him. The thought that came to him made his face burn under its scrub of beard. Did she think he was a scoundrel? The dropping of his hand, the shock that must have betrayed itself in his face when she said she was St. Pierre's wife--had those things warned her against him? The heat went slowly out of his face. It was impossible. She could not think that of him. It must have been a sudden giving way under terrific strain. She had compared herself to Roger Audemard, and she was beginning to realize her peril--that Bateese was right--that she should have left him to die in the sand! The thought pressed itself heavily upon Carrigan. It brought him suddenly back to a realization of how small a part he had played in this last half hour in the cabin. He had offered to Pierre's wife a friendship which he had no right to offer and which she knew he had no right to offer. He was the Law. And she, like Roger Audemard, was a criminal. Her quick woman's instinct had told her there could be no distinction between them, unless there was a reason. And now Carrigan confessed to himself that there had been a reason. That reason had come to him with the first glimpse of her as he lay in the hot sand. He had fought against it in the canoe; it had mastered him in those thrilling moments when he had beheld this slim, beautiful creature riding fearlessly into the boiling waters of the Holy Ghost. Her eyes, her hair, the sweet, low voice that had been with him in his fever, had become a definite and unalterable part of him. And this must have shown in his eyes and face when he dropped his hand--when she told him she was St. Pierre's wife. And now she was afraid of him! She was regretting that she had not left him to die. She had misunderstood what she had seen betraying itself during those few seconds of his proffered friendship. She saw only a man whom she had nearly killed, a man who represented the Law, a man whose power held her in the hollow of his hand. And she had stepped back from him, startled, and had told him that she was not St. Pierre's daughter, but his wife! In the science of criminal analysis Carrigan always placed himself in the position of the other man. And he was beginning to see the present situation from the view-point of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. He was satisfied that she had made a desperate mistake and that until the last moment she had believed it was another man behind the rock. Yet she had shown no inclination to explain away her error. She had definitely refused to make an explanation. And it was simply a matter of common sense to concede that there must be a powerful motive for her refusal. There was but one conclusion for him to arrive at--the error which St. Pierre's wife had made in shooting the wrong man was less important to her than keeping the secret of why she had wanted to kill some other man. David was not unconscious of the breach in his own armor. He had weakened, just as the Superintendent of "N" Division had weakened that day four years ago when they had almost quarreled over Carmin Fanchet. "I'll swear to Heaven she isn't bad, no matter what her brother has been," McVane had said. "I'll gamble my life on that, Carrigan!" And because the Chief of Division with sixty years of experience behind him, had believed that, Carmin Fanchet had not been held as an accomplice in her brother's evildoing, but had gone back into her wilderness uncrucified by the law that had demanded the life of her brother. He would never forget the last time he had seen Carmin Fanchet's eyes--great, black, glorious pools of gratitude as they looked at grizzled old McVane; blazing fires of venomous hatred when they turned on him. And he had said to McVane, "The man pays, the woman goes--justice indeed is blind!" McVane, not being a stickler on regulations when it came to Carrigan, had made no answer. The incident came back vividly to David as he waited for the promised coming of Bateese. He began to appreciate McVane's point of view, and it was comforting, because he realized that his own logic was assailable. If McVane had been comparing the two women now, he knew what his argument would be. There had been no absolute proof of crime against Carmin Fanchet, unless to fight desperately for the life of her brother was a crime. In the case of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain there was proof. She had tried to kill. Therefore, of the two, Carmin Fanchet would have been the better woman in the eyes of McVane. In spite of the legal force of the argument which he was bringing against himself, David felt unconvinced. Carmin Fanchet, had she been in the place of St. Pierre's wife, would have finished him there in the sand. She would have realized the menace of letting him live and would probably have commanded Bateese to dump him in the river. St. Pierre's wife had gone to the other extreme. She was not only repentant, but was making restitution, for her mistake, and in making that restitution had crossed far beyond the dead-line of caution. She had frankly told him who she was; she had brought him into the privacy of what was undeniably her own home; in her desire to undo what she had done she had hopelessly enmeshed herself in the net of the Law--if that Law saw fit to act. She had done these things with courage and conviction. And of such a woman, Carrigan thought, St. Pierre must be very proud. He looked slowly about the cabin again and each thing that he saw was a living voice breaking up a dream for him. These voices told him that he was in a temple built because of a man's worship for a woman--and that man was St. Pierre. Through the two western windows came the last glow of the western sun, like a golden benediction finding its way into a sacred place. Here there was--or had been--a great happiness, for only a great pride and a great happiness could have made it as it was. Nothing that wealth and toil could drag up out of a civilization a thousand miles away had been too good for St. Pierre's wife. And about him, looking more closely, David saw the undisturbed evidences of a woman's contentment. On the table were embroidery materials with which she had been working, and a lamp-shade half finished. A woman's magazine printed in a city four thousand miles away lay open at the fashion plates. There were other magazines, and many books, and open music above the white keyboard of the piano, and vases glowing red and yellow with wild-flowers and silver birch leaves. He could smell the faint perfume of the fireglow blossoms, red as blood. In a pool of sunlight on one of the big white bear rugs lay the sleeping cat. And then, at the far end of the cabin, an ivory-white Cross of Christ glowed for a few moments in a last homage of the sinking sun. Uneasiness stole upon him. This was the woman's holy ground, her sanctuary and her home, and for three days his presence had driven her from it. There was no other room. In making restitution she had given up to him her most sacred of all things. And again there rose up in him that new-born thing which had set strange fires stirring in his heart, and which from this hour on he knew he must fight until it was dead. For an hour after the last of the sun was obliterated by the western mountains he lay in the gloom of coming darkness. Only the lapping of water under the bateau broke the strange stillness of the evening. He heard no sound of life, no voice, no tread of feet, and he wondered where the woman and her men had gone and if the scow was still tied up at the edge of the tar-sands. And for the first time he asked himself another question, Where was the man, St. Pierre? VIII It was utterly dark in the cabin, when the stillness was broken by low voices outside. The door opened, and some one came in. A moment later a match flared up, and in the shifting glow of it Carrigan saw the dark face of Bateese, the half-breed. One after another he lighted the four lamps. Not until he had finished did he turn toward the bed. It was then that David had his first good impression of the man. He was not tall, but built with the strength of a giant. His arms were long. His shoulders were stooped. His head was like the head of a stone gargoyle come to life. Wide-eyed, heavy-lipped, with the high cheek-bones of an Indian and uncut black hair bound with the knotted red MOUCHOIR, he looked more than ever like a pirate and a cutthroat to David. Such a man, he thought, might make play out of the business of murder. And yet, in spite of his ugliness, David felt again the mysterious inclination to like the man. Bateese grinned. It was a huge grin, for his mouth was big. "You ver' lucky fellow," he announced. "You sleep lak that in nice sof' bed an' not back on san'-bar, dead lak ze feesh I bring you, m'sieu. That ees wan beeg mistake. Bateese say, 'Tie ze stone roun' hees neck an' mak' heem wan ANGE DE MER. Chuck heem in ze river, MA BELLE Jeanne!' An' she say no, mak heem well, an' feed heem feesh. So I bring ze feesh which she promise, an' when you have eat, I tell you somet'ing!" He returned to the door and brought back with him a wicker basket. Then he drew up the table beside Carrigan and proceeded to lay out before him the boiled fish which St. Pierre's wife had promised him. With it was bread and an earthen pot of hot tea. "She say that ees all you have because of ze fever. Bateese say, 'Stuff heem wit' much so that he die queek!'" "You want to see me dead. Is that it, Bateese?" "OUI. You mak' wan ver' good dead man, m'sieu!" Bateese was no longer grinning. He stood back and pointed at the food. "You eat--queek. An' when you have finish' I tell you somet'ing!" Now that he saw the luscious bit of whitefish before him, Carrigan was possessed of the hungering emptiness of three days and nights. As he ate, he observed that Bateese was performing curious duties. He straightened a couple of rugs, ran fresh water into the flower vases, picked up half a dozen scattered magazines, and then, to David's increasing interest, produced a dust-cloth from somewhere and began to dust. David finished his fish, the one slice of bread, and his cup of tea. He felt tremendously good. The hot tea was like a trickle of new life through every vein in his body, and he had the desire to get up and try out his legs. Suddenly Bateese discovered that his patient was laughing at him. "QUE DIABLE!" he demanded, coming up ferociously with the cloth in his great hand. "You see somet'ing ver' fonny, m'sieu?" "No, nothing funny, Bateese," grinned Carrigan. "I was just thinking what a handsome chambermaid you make. You are so gentle, so nice to look at, so--" "DIABLE!" exploded Bateese, dropping his dust cloth and bringing his huge hands down upon the table with a smash that almost wrecked the dishes. "You have eat, an' now you lissen. You have never hear' before of Concombre Bateese. An' zat ees me. See! Wit' these two hands I have choke' ze polar bear to deat'. I am strongest man w'at ees in all nort' countree. I pack four hundre' pound ovair portage. I crack ze caribou bones wit' my teeth, lak a dog. I run sixt' or hundre' miles wit'out stop for rest. I pull down trees w'at oder man cut wit' axe. I am not 'fraid of not'ing. You lissen? You hear w'at I say?" "I hear you." "BIEN! Then I tell you w'at Concombre Bateese ees goin' do wit' you, M'sieu Sergent de Police! MA BELLE Jeanne she mak' wan gran' meestake. She too much leetle bird heart, too much pity for want you to die. Bateese say, 'Keel him, so no wan know w'at happen t'ree day ago behin' ze rock.' But MA BELLE Jeanne, she say, 'No, Bateese, he ees meestake for oder man, an' we mus' let heem live.' An' then she tell me to come an' bring you feesh, an' tell you w'at is goin' happen if you try go away from thees bateau. You COMPREN'? If you try run away, Bateese ees goin' keel you! See--wit' thees han's I br'ak your neck an' t'row you in river. MA BELLE Jeanne say do zat, an' she tell oder mans-twent', thirt', almos' hundre' GARCONS--to keel you if you try run away. She tell me bring zat word to you wit' ze feesh. You listen hard w'at I say?" If ever a worker of iniquity lived on earth, Carrigan might have judged Bateese as that man in these moments. The half-breed had worked himself up to a ferocious pitch. His eyes rolled. His wide mouth snarled in the virulence of its speech. His thick neck grew corded, and his huge hands clenched menacingly upon the table. Yet David had no fear. He wanted to laugh, but he knew laughter would be the deadliest of insults to Bateese just now. He remembered that the half-breed, fierce as a pirate, had a touch as gentle as a woman's. This man, who could choke an ox with his monstrous hands, had a moment before petted a cat, straightened out rugs, watered the woman's flowers, and had dusted. He was harmless--now. And yet in the same breath David sensed the fact that a single word from St. Pierre's wife would be sufficient to fire his brute strength into a blazing volcano of action. Such a henchman was priceless--under certain conditions! And he had brought a warning straight from the woman. "I think I understand what you mean, Bateese," he said. "She says that I am to make no effort to leave this bateau--that I am to be killed if I try to escape? Are you sure she said that?" "PAR LES MILLE CORNES DU DIABLE, you t'ink Bateese lie, m'sieu? Concombre Bateese, who choke ze w'ite bear wit' hees two ban', who pull down ze tree--" "No, no, I don't think you lie. But I am wondering why she didn't tell me that when she was here." "Becaus' she have too much leetle bird heart, zat ees w'y. She say: 'Bateese, you tell heem he mus' wait for St. Pierre. An' you tell heem good an' hard, lak you choke ze w'ite bear an' lak you pull down ze tree, so he mak' no meestake an' try get away.' An' she tell zat before all ze BATELIERS--all ze St. Pierre mans gathered 'bout a beeg fire--an' they shout up lak wan gargon that they watch an' keel you if you try get away." Carrigan reached out a hand. "Let's shake, Bateese. I'll give you my word that I won't try to escape--not until you and I have a good stand-up fight with the earth under our feet, and I've whipped you. Is it a go?" Bateese stared for a moment, and then his face broke into a wide grin. "You lak ze fight, m'sieu?" "Yes. I love a scrap with a good man like you." One of Bateese's huge hands crawled slowly over the table and engulfed David's. Joy shone on his face. "An' you promise give me zat fight, w'en you are strong?" "If I don't, I'll let you tie a stone around my neck and drop me into the river." "You are brave GARCON," cried the delighted Bateese. "Up an' down ze rivers ees no man w'at can whip Concombre Bateese!" Suddenly his face grew clouded. "But ze head, m'sieu?" he added anxiously. "It will get well quickly if you will help me, Bateese. Right now I want to get up. I want to stretch my legs. Was my head bad?" "NON. Ze bullet scrape ze ha'r off--so--so--an' turn ze brain seek. I t'ink you be good fighting man in week!" "And you will help me up?" Bateese was a changed man. Again David felt that mighty but gentle strength of his arms as he helped him to his feet. He was a trifle unsteady for a moment. Then, with the half-breed close at his side, ready to catch him if his legs gave way, he walked to one of the windows and looked out. Across the river, fully half a mile away, he saw the glow of fires. "Her camp?" he asked. "OUI, m'sieu." "We have moved from the tar-sands?" "Yes, two days down ze river." "Why are they not camping over here with us?" Bateese gave a disgusted grunt. "Becaus' MA BELLE Jeanne have such leetle bird heart, m'sieu. She say you mus' not have noise near, lak ze talk an' laugh an' ZE CHANSONS. She say it disturb, an' zat it mak you worse wit' ze fever. She ees mak you lak de baby, Bateese say to her. But she on'y laugh at zat an' snap her leetle w'ite finger. Wait St. Pierre come! He brak yo'r head wit' hees two fists. I hope we have ze fight before then, m'sieu!" "We'll have it anyway, Bateese. Where is St. Pierre, and when shall we see him?" Bateese shrugged his shoulders. "Mebby week, mebby more. He long way off." "Is he an old man?" Slowly Bateese turned David about until he was facing him. "You ask not'ing more about St. Pierre," he warned. "No mans talk 'bout St. Pierre. Only wan--MA BELLE Jeanne. You ask her, an' she tell you shut up. W'en you don't shut up she call Bateese to brak your head." "You're a--a sort of all-round head-breaker, as I understand it," grunted David, walking slowly back to his bed. "Will you bring me my pack and clothes in the morning? I want to shave and dress." Bateese was ahead of him, smoothing the pillows and straightening out the rumpled bed-clothes. His huge hands were quick and capable as a woman's, and David could not keep himself from chuckling at this feminine ingeniousness of the powerful half-breed. Once in the crush of those gorilla-like arms that were working over his bed now, he thought, and it would be all over with the strongest man in "N" Division. Bateese heard the chuckle and looked up. "Somet'ing ver' funny once more, is eet--w'at?" he demanded. "I was thinking, Bateese--what will happen to me if you get me in those arms when we fight? But it isn't going to happen. I fight with my fists, and I'm going to batter you up so badly that nobody will recognize you for a long time." "You wait!" exploded Bateese, making a horrible grimace. "I choke you lak w'ite bear, I t'row you ovair my should'r, I mash you lak leetle strawberr', I--" He paused in his task to advance with a formidable gesture. "Not now," warned Carrigan. "I'm still a bit groggy, Bateese." He pointed down at the bed. "I'm driving HER from that," he said. "I don't like it. Is she sleepin' over there--in the camp?" "Mebby--an' mebby not, m'sieu," growled Bateese. "You mak' guess, eh?" He began extinguishing the lights, until only the one nearest the door was left burning. He did not turn toward Carrigan or speak to him again. When he Went out, David heard the click of a lock in the door. Bateese had not exaggerated. It was the intention of St. Pierre's wife that he should consider himself a prisoner--at least for tonight. He had no desire to lie down again. There was an unsteadiness in his legs, but outside of that the evil of his sickness no longer oppressed him. The staff doctor at the Landing would probably have called him a fool for not convalescing in the usual prescribed way, but Carrigan was already beginning to feel the demand for action. In spite of what physical effort he had made, his head did not hurt him, and his mind was keenly alive. He returned to the window through which he could see the fires on the western shore, and found no difficulty in opening it. A strong screen netting kept him from thrusting out his head and shoulders. Through it came the cool night breeze of the river. It seemed good to fill his lungs with it again and smell the fresh aroma of the forest. It was very dark, and the fires across the river were brighter because of the deep gloom. There was no promise of the moon in the sky. He could not see a star. From far in the west he caught the low intonation of thunder. Carrigan turned from the window to the end of the cabin in which the piano stood. Here, too, was the second divan, and he saw the meaning now of two close-tied curtains, one at each side of the cabin. Drawn together on a taut wire stretched two inches under the ceiling, they shut off this end of the bateau and turned at least a third of the cabin into the privacy of the woman's bedroom. With growing uneasiness David saw the evidences that this had been her sleeping apartment. At each side of the piano was a small door, and he opened one of these just enough to discover that it was a wardrobe closet. A third door opened on the shore side of the bateau, but this was locked. Shut out from the view of the lower end of the cabin by a Japanese screen were a small dresser and a mirror. In the dim illumination that came from the distant lamp David bent over the open sheet of music on the piano. It was Mascagni's AVE MARIA. His blood tingled. His brain was stirred by a new emotion, a growing thing that made him uneasy and filled him with a strange restlessness. He felt as though he had come suddenly to the edge of a great danger; somewhere within him an intelligence seized upon it and understood. Yet it was not physical enough for him to fight. It was a danger which crept up and about him, something which he could not see or touch and yet which made his heart beat faster and the blood come into his face. It drew him, triumphed over him, dragged his hand forth until his fingers closed upon a lacy, crumpled bit of a handkerchief that lay on the edge of the piano keys. It was the woman's handkerchief, and like a thief he raised it slowly. It smelled faintly of crushed violets; it was as if she were bending over him in his sickness again, and it was her breath that came to him. He was not thinking of her as St. Pierre's wife. And then sharply he caught himself and placed the handkerchief back on the piano keys. He tried to laugh at himself, but there was an emptiness where a moment before there had been that thrill of which he was now ashamed. He turned back to the window. The thunder had come nearer. It was coming up fast out of the west, and with it a darkness that was like the blackness of a pit. A dead stillness was preceding it now, and in that stillness it seemed to Carrigan that he could hear the soapy, slitting sound of the streaming flashes of electrical fire that blazoned the advance of the storm. The camp-fires across the river were dying down. One of them went out as he looked at it, and he stared into the darkness as if trying to pierce distance and gloom to see what sort of a shelter it was that St. Pierre's wife had over there. And there came over him in these moments a desire that was almost cowardly. It was the desire to escape, to leave behind him the memory of the rock and of St. Pierre's wife, and to pursue once more his own great adventure, the quest of Black Roger Audemard. He heard the rain coming. At first the sound of it was like the pattering of ten million tiny feet in dry leaves; then, suddenly, it was like the roar of an avalanche. It was an inundation, and with it came crash after crash of thunder, and the black skies were illumined by an almost uninterrupted glare of lightning. It had been a long time since Carrigan had felt the shock of such a storm. He closed the window to keep the rain out, and after that stood with his face flattened against the glass, staring over the river. The camp-fires were all gone now, blotted out like so many candles snuffed between thumb and forefinger, and he shuddered. No canvas ever made would keep that deluge out. And now there was growing up a wind with it. The tents on the other side would be beaten down like pegged sheets of paper, ripped up and torn to pieces. He imagined St. Pierre's wife in that tumult and distress--the breath blown out of her, half drowned, blinded by deluge and lightning, broken and beaten because of him. Thought of her companions did not ease his mind. Human hands were entirely inadequate to cope with a storm like this that was rocking the earth about him. Suddenly he went to the door, determined that if Bateese was outside he would get some satisfaction out of him or challenge him to a fight right there. He beat against it, first with one fist and then with both. He shouted. There was no response. Then he exerted his strength and his weight against the door. It was solid. He was half turned when his eyes discovered, in a corner where the lamplight struck dimly, his pack and clothes. In thirty seconds he had his pipe and tobacco. After that for half an hour he paced up and down the cabin, while the storm crashed and thundered as if bent upon destroying all life off the face of the earth. Comforted by the company of his pipe, Carrigan did not beat at the door again. He waited, and at the end of another half-hour the storm had softened down into a steady patter of rain. The thunder had traveled east, and the lightning had gone with it. David opened the window again. The air that came in was rain-sweet, soft, and warm. He puffed out a cloud of smoke and smiled. His pipe always brought his good humor to the surface, even in the worst places. St. Pierre's wife had certainly had a good soaking. And in a way the whole thing was a bit funny. He was thinking now of a poor little golden-plumaged partridge, soaked to the skin, with its tail-feathers dragging pathetically. Grinning, he told himself that it was an insult to think of her and a half-drowned partridge in the same breath. But the simile still remained, and he chuckled. Probably she was wringing out her clothes now, and the men were cursing under their breath while trying to light a fire. He watched for the fire. It failed to appear. Probably she was hating him for bringing all this discomfort and humiliation upon her. It was not impossible that tomorrow she would give Bateese permission to brain him. And St. Pierre? What would this man, her husband, think and do if he knew that his wife had given up her bedroom to this stranger? What complications might arise IF HE KNEW! It was late--past midnight--when Carrigan went to bed. Even then he did not sleep for a long time. The patter of the rain grew less and less on the roof of the bateau, and as the sound of it droned itself off into nothingness, slumber came. David was conscious of the moment when the rain ceased entirely. Then he slept. At least he must have been very close to sleep, or had been asleep and was returning for a moment close to consciousness, when he heard a voice. It came several times before he was roused enough to realize that it was a voice. And then, suddenly, piercing his slowly wakening brain almost with the shock of one of the thunder crashes, it came to him so distinctly that he found himself sitting up straight, his hands clenched, eyes staring in the darkness, waiting for it to come again. Somewhere very near him, in his room, within the reach of his hands, a strange and indescribable voice had cried out in the darkness the words which twice before had beat themselves mysteriously into David Carrigan's brain--"HAS ANY ONE SEEN BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD? HAS ANY ONE SEEN BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD?" And David, holding his breath, listened for the sound of another breath which he knew was in that room. IX For perhaps a minute Carrigan made no sound that could have been heard three feet away from him. It was not fear that held him quiet. It was something which he could not explain afterward, the sensation, perhaps, of one who feels himself confronted for a moment by a presence more potent than that of flesh and blood. BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD! Three times, twice in his sickness, some one had cried out that name in his ears since the hour when St. Pierre's wife had ambushed him on the white carpet of sand. And the voice was now in his room! Was it Bateese, inspired by some sort of malformed humor? Carrigan listened. Another minute passed. He reached out a hand and groped about him, very careful not to make a sound, urged by the feeling that some one was almost within reach of him. He flung back his blanket and stood out in the middle of the floor. Still he heard no movement, no soft footfalls of retreat or advance. He lighted a match and held it high above his head. In its yellow illumination he could see nothing alive. He lighted a lamp. The cabin was empty. He drew a deep breath and went to the window. It was still open. The voice had undoubtedly come to him through that window, and he fancied he could see where the screen netting was crushed a bit inward, as though a face had pressed heavily against it. Outside the night was beautifully calm. The sky, washed by storm, was bright with stars. But there was not a ripple of movement that he could hear. After that he looked at his watch. He must have been sleeping for some time when the voice roused him, for it was nearly three o'clock. In spite of the stars, dawn was close at hand. When he looked out of the window again they were paler and more distant. He had no intention of going back to bed. He was restless and felt himself surrendering more and more to the grip of presentiment. It was still early, not later than six o'clock, when Bateese came in with his breakfast. He was surprised, as he had heard no movement or sound of voices to give evidence of life anywhere near the bateau. Instantly he made up his mind that it was not Bateese who had uttered the mysterious words of a few hours ago, for the half-breed had evidently experienced a most uncomfortable night. He was like a rat recently pulled out of water. His clothes hung upon him sodden and heavy, his head kerchief dripped, and his lank hair was wet. He slammed the breakfast things down on the table and went out again without so much as nodding at his prisoner. Again a sense of discomfort and shame swept over David, as he sat down to breakfast. Here he was comfortably, even luxuriously, housed, while out there somewhere St. Pierre's lovely wife was drenched and even more miserable than Bateese. And the breakfast amazed him. It was not so much the caribou tenderloin, rich in its own red juice, or the potato, or the pot of coffee that was filling the cabin with its aroma, that roused his wonder, but the hot, brown muffins that accompanied the other things. Muffins! And after a deluge that had drowned every square inch of the earth! How had Bateese turned the trick? Bateese did not return immediately for the dishes, and for half an hour after he had finished breakfast Carrigan smoked his pipe and watched the blue haze of fires on the far side of the river. The world was a blaze of sunlit glory. His imagination carried him across the river. Somewhere over there, in an open spot where the sun was blazing, Jeanne Marie-Anne was probably drying herself after the night of storm. There was but little doubt in his mind that she was already heaping the ignominy of blame upon him. That was the woman of it. A knock at his door drew him about. It was a light, quick TAP, TAP, TAP--not like the fist of either Bateese or Nepapinas. In another moment the door swung open, and in the flood of sunlight that poured into the cabin stood St. Pierre's wife! It was not her presence, but the beauty of her, that held him spellbound. It was a sort of shock after the vivid imaginings of his mind in which he had seen her beaten and tortured by storm. Her hair, glowing in the sun and piled up in shining coils on the crown of her head, was not wet. She was not the rain-beaten little partridge that had passed in tragic bedragglement through his mind. Storm had not touched her. Her cheeks were soft with the warm flush of long hours of sleep. When she came in, her lips greeting him with a little smile, all that he had built up for himself in the hours of the night crumbled away in dust. Again he forgot for a moment that she was St. Pierre's wife. She was woman, and as he looked upon her now, the most adorable woman in all the world. "You are better this morning," she said. Real pleasure shone in her eyes. She had left the door open, so that the sun filled the room. "I think the storm helped you. Wasn't it splendid?" David swallowed hard. "Quite splendid," he managed to say. "Have you seen Bateese this morning?" A little note of laughter came into her throat. "Yes. I don't think he liked it. He doesn't understand why I love storms. Did you sleep well, M'sieu Carrigan?" "An hour or two, I think. I was worrying about you. I didn't like the thought that I had turned you out into the storm. But it doesn't seem to have touched you." "No. I was there--quite comfortable." She nodded to the forward bulkhead of the cabin, beyond the wardrobe closets and the piano. "There is a little dining-room and kitchenette ahead," she explained. "Didn't Bateese tell you that?" "No, he didn't. I asked him where you were, and I think he told me to shut up." "Bateese is very odd," said St. Pierre's wife. "He is exceedingly jealous of me, M'sieu David. Even when I was a baby and he carried me about in his arms, he was just that way. Bateese, you know, is older than he appears. He is fifty-one." She was moving about, quite as if his presence was in no way going to disturb her usual duties of the day. She rearranged the damask curtains which he had crumpled with his hands, placed two or three chairs in their usual places, and moved from this to that with the air of a housewife who is in the habit of brushing up a bit in the morning. She seemed not at all embarrassed because he was her prisoner, nor uncomfortably restrained because of the message she had sent to him by Bateese. She was warmly and gloriously human. In her apparent unconcern at his presence he found himself sweating inwardly. A bit nervously he struck a match to light his pipe, then extinguished it. She noticed what he had done. "You may smoke," she said, with that little note in her throat which he loved to hear, like the faintest melody of laughter that did not quite reach her lips. "St. Pierre smokes a great deal, and I like it." She opened a drawer in the dressing-table and came to him with a box half filled with cigars. "St. Pierre prefers these--on occasions," she said, "Do you?" His fingers seemed all thumbs as he took a cigar from the proffered box. He cursed himself because his tongue felt thick. Perhaps it was his silence, betraying something of his mental clumsiness, that brought a faint flush of color into her cheeks. He noted that; and also that the top of her shining head came just about to his chin, and that her mouth and throat, looking down on them, were bewitchingly soft and sweet. And what she said, when her eyes opened wide and beautiful on him again, was like a knife cutting suddenly into the heart of his thoughts. "In the evening I love to sit at St. Pierre's feet and watch him smoke," she said. "I am glad it doesn't annoy you, because--I like to smoke," he replied lamely. She placed the box on the little reading table and looked at his breakfast things. "You like muffins, too. I was up early this morning, making them for you!" "You made them?" he demanded, as if her words were a most amazing revelation to him. "Surely, M'sieu David. I make them every morning for St. Pierre. He is very fond of them. He says the third nicest thing about me is my muffins!" "And the other two?" asked David. "Are St. Pierre's little secrets, m'sieu," she laughed softly, the color deepening in her cheeks. "It wouldn't be fair to tell you, would it?" "Perhaps it wouldn't," he said slowly. "But there are one or two other things, Mrs.--Mrs. Boulain--" "You may call me Jeanne, or Marie-Anne, if you care to," she interrupted him. "It will be quite all right." She was picking up the breakfast dishes, not at all perturbed by the fact that she was offering him a privilege which had the effect of quickening his pulse for a moment or two. "Thank you," he said. "I don't mind telling you it is going to be difficult for me to do that--because--well, this is a most unusual situation, isn't it? In spite of all your kindness, including what was probably your good-intentioned endeavor to put an end to my earthly miseries behind the rock, I believe it is necessary for you to give me some kind of explanation. Don't you?" "Didn't Bateese explain to you last night?" she asked, facing him. "He brought a message from you to the effect that I was a prisoner, that I must make no attempt to escape, and that if I did try to escape, you had given your men instructions to kill me." She nodded, quite seriously. "That is right, M'sieu David." His face flamed. "Then I am a prisoner? You threaten me with death?" "I shall treat you very nicely if you make no attempt to escape, M'sieu David. Isn't that fair?" "Fair!" he cried, choking back an explosion that would have vented itself on a man. "Don't you realize what has happened? Don't you know that according to every law of God and man I should arrest you and give you over to the Law? Is it possible that you don't comprehend my own duty? What I must do?" If he had noticed, he would have seen that there was no longer the flush of color in her cheeks. But her eyes, looking straight at him, were tranquil and unexcited. She nodded. "That is why you must remain a prisoner, M'sieu David, It is because I do realize, I shall not tell you why that happened behind the rock, and if you ask me, I shall refuse to talk to you. If I let you go now, you would probably have me arrested and put in jail. So I must keep you until St. Pierre comes. I don't know what to do--except to keep you, and not let you escape until then. What would you do?" The question was so honest, so like a question that might have been asked by a puzzled child, that his argument for the Law was struck dead. He stared into the pale face, the beautiful, waiting eyes, saw the pathetic intertwining of her slim fingers, and suddenly he was grinning in that big, honest way which made people love Dave Carrigan. "You're--doing--absolutely--right," he said. A swift change came in her face. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes filled with a sudden glow that made the little violet-freckles in them dance like tiny flecks of gold. "From your point of view you are right," he repeated, "and I shall make no attempt to escape until I have talked with St. Pierre. But I can't quite see--just now--how he is going to help the situation." "He will," she assured him confidently. "You seem to have an unlimited faith in St. Pierre," he replied a little grimly. "Yes, M'sieu David. He is the most wonderful man in the world. And he will know what to do." David shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps, in some nice, quiet place, he will follow the advice Bateese gave you--tie a stone round my neck and sink me to the bottom of the river." "Perhaps. But I don't think he will do that I should object to it." "Oh, you would!" "Yes. St. Pierre is big and strong, afraid of nothing in the world, but he will do anything for me. I don't think he would kill you if I asked him not to." She turned to resume her task of cleaning up the breakfast things. With a sudden movement David swung one of the' big chairs close to her. "Please sit down," he commanded. "I can talk to you better that way. As an officer of the law it is my duty to ask you a few questions. It rests in your power to answer all of them or none of them. I have given you my word not to act until I have seen St. Pierre, and I shall keep that promise. But when we do meet I shall act largely on the strength of what you tell me during the next tea minutes. Please sit down!" X In that big, deep chair which must have been St. Pierre's own, Marie-Anne sat facing Carrigan. Between its great arms her slim little figure seemed diminutive and out of place. Her brown eyes were level and clear, waiting. They were not warm or nervous, but so coolly and calmly beautiful that they disturbed Carrigan. She raised her hands, her slim fingers crumpling for a moment in the soft, thick coils of her hair. That little movement, the unconscious feminism of it, the way she folded her hands in her lap afterward, disturbed Carrigan even more. What a glory on earth it must be to possess a woman like that! The thought made him uneasy. And she sat waiting, a vivid, softly-breathing question-mark against the warm coloring of the upholstered chair. "When you shot me," he began, "I saw you, first, standing over me. I thought you had come to finish me. It was then that I saw something in your face--horror, amazement, as though you had done something you did not know you were doing. You see, I want to be charitable. I want to understand. I want to excuse you if I can. Won't you tell me why you shot me, and why that change came over you when you saw me lying there?" "No, M'sieu David, I shall not tell." She was not antagonistic or defiant. Her voice was not raised, nor did it betray an unusual emotion. It was simply decisive, and the unflinching steadiness of her eyes and the way in which she sat with her hands folded gave to it an unqualified definiteness. "You mean that I must make my own guess?" She nodded. "Or get it out of St. Pierre?" "If St. Pierre wishes to tell you, yes." "Well--" He leaned a little toward her. "After that you dragged me up into the shade, dressed my wound and made me comfortable. In a hazy sort of way I knew what was going on. And a curious thing happened. At times--" he leaned still a little nearer to her--"at times--there seemed to be two of you!" He was not looking at her hands, or he would have seen her fingers slowly tighten in her lap. "You were badly hurt," she said. "It is not strange that you should have imagined things, M'sieu David." "And I seemed to hear two voices," he went on. She made no answer, but continued to look at him steadily. "And the other had hair that was like copper and gold fire in the sun. I would see your face and then hers, again and again--and--since then--I have thought I was a heavy load for your hands to drag up through that sand to the shade alone." She held up her two hands, looking at them. "They are strong," she said. "They are small," he insisted, "and I doubt if they could drag me across this floor." For the first time the quiet of her eyes gave way to a warm fire. "It was hard work," she said, and the note in her voice gave him warning that he was approaching the dead-line again. "Bateese says I was a fool for doing it. And if you saw two of me, or three or four, it doesn't matter. Are you through questioning me, M'sieu David? If so, I have a number of things to do." He made a gesture of despair. "No, I am not through. But why ask you questions if you won't answer them?" "I simply can not. You must wait." "For your husband?" "Yes, for St. Pierre." He was silent for a moment, then said, "I raved about a number of things when I was sick, didn't I?" "You did, and especially about what you thought happened in the sand. You called this--this other person--the Fire Goddess. You were so near dying that of course it wasn't amusing. Otherwise it would have been. You see MY hair is black, almost!" Again, in a quick movement, her fingers were crumpling the lustrous coils on the crown of her head. "Why do you say 'almost'?" he asked. "Because St. Pierre has often told me that when I am in the sun there are red fires in it. And the sun was very bright that afternoon in the sand, M'sieu David." "I think I understand," he nodded. "And I'm rather glad, too. I like to know that it was you who dragged me up into the shade after trying to kill me. It proves you aren't quite so savage as--" "Carmin Fanchet," she interrupted him softly. "You talked about her in your sickness, M'sieu David. It made me terribly afraid of you--so much so that at times I almost wondered if Bateese wasn't right. It made me understand what would happen to me if I should let you go. What terrible thing did she do to you? What could she have done more terrible than I have done?" "Is that why you have given your men orders to kill me if I try to escape?" he asked. "Because I talked about this woman, Carmin Fanchet?" "Yes, it is because of Carmin Fanchet that I am keeping you for St. Pierre," she acknowledged. "If you had no mercy for her, you could have none for me. What terrible thing did she do to you, M'sieu?" "Nothing--to me," he said, feeling that she was putting him where the earth was unsteady under his feet again. "But her brother was a criminal of the worst sort. And I was convinced then, and am convinced now, that his sister was a partner in his crimes. She was very beautiful. And that, I think, was what saved her." He was fingering his unlighted cigar as he spoke. When he looked up, he was surprised at the swift change that had come into the face of St. Pierre's wife. Her cheeks were flaming, and there were burning fires screened behind the long lashes of her eyes. But her voice was unchanged. It was without a quiver that betrayed the emotion which had sent the hot flush into her face. "Then--you judged her without absolute knowledge of fact? You judged her--as you hinted in your fever--because she fought so desperately to save a brother who had gone wrong?" "I believe she was bad." The long lashes fell lower, like fringes of velvet closing over the fires in her eyes. "But you didn't know!" "Not absolutely," he conceded. "But investigations--" "Might have shown her to be one of the most wonderful women that ever lived, M'sieu David. It is not hard to fight for a good brother--but if he is bad, it may take an angel to do it!" He stared, thoughts tangling themselves in his head. A slow shame crept over him. She had cornered him. She had convicted him of unfairness to the one creature on earth his strength and his manhood were bound to protect--a woman. She had convicted him of judging without fact. And in his head a voice seemed to cry out to him, "What did Carmin Fanchet ever do to you?" He rose suddenly to his feet and stood at the back of his chair, his hands gripping the top of it. "Maybe you are right," he said. "Maybe I was wrong. I remember now that when I got Fanchet I manacled him, and she sat beside him all through that first night. I didn't intend to sleep, but I was tired--and did. I must have slept for an hour, and SHE roused me--trying to get the key to the handcuffs. She had the opportunity then--to kill me." Triumph swept over the face that was looking up at him. "Yes, she could have killed you--while you slept. But she didn't. WHY?" "I don't know. Perhaps she had the idea of getting the key and letting her brother do the job. Two or three days later I am convinced she would not have hesitated. I caught her twice trying to steal my gun. And a third time, late at night, when we were within a day or two of Athabasca Landing, she almost got me with a club. So I concede that she never did anything very terrible to me. But I am sure that she tried, especially toward the last." "And because she failed, she hated you; and because she hated you, something was warped inside you, and you made up your mind she should be punished along with her brother. You didn't look at it from a woman's viewpoint. A woman will fight, and kill, to save one she loves. She tried, perhaps, and failed. The result was that her brother was killed by the Law. Was not that enough? Was it fair or honest to destroy her simply because you thought she might be a partner in her brother's crimes?" "It is rather strange," he replied, a moment of indecision in his voice. "McVane, the superintendent, asked me that same question. I thought he was touched by her beauty. And I'm sorry--very sorry--that I talked about her when I was sick. I don't want you to think I am a bad sort--that way. I'm going to think about it. I'm going over the whole thing again, from the time I manacled Fanchet, and if I find that I was wrong--and I ever meet Carmin Fanchet again--I shall not be ashamed to get down on my knees and ask her pardon, Marie-Anne!" For the first time he spoke the name which she had given him permission to use. And she noticed it. He could not help seeing that--a flashing instant in which the indefinable confession of it was in her face, as though his use of it had surprised her, or pleased her, or both. Then it was gone. She did not answer, but rose from the big chair, and went to the window, and stood with her back toward him, looking out over the river. And then, suddenly, they heard a voice. It was the voice he had heard twice in his sickness, the voice that had roused him from his sleep last night, crying out in his room for Black Roger Audemard. It came to him distinctly through the open door in a low and moaning monotone. He had not taken his eyes from the slim figure of St. Pierre's wife, and he saw a little tremor pass through her now. "I heard that voice--again--last night," said David. "It was in this cabin, asking for Black Roger Audemard." She did not seem to hear him, and he also turned so that he was looking at the open door of the cabin. The sun, pouring through in a golden flood, was all at once darkened, and in the doorway--framed vividly against the day--was the figure of a man. A tense breath came to Carrigan's lips. At first he felt a shock, then an overwhelming sense of curiosity and of pity. The man was terribly deformed. His back and massive shoulders were so twisted and bent that he stood no higher than a twelve-year-old boy; yet standing straight, he would have been six feet tall if an inch, and splendidly proportioned. And in that same breath with which shock and pity came to him, David knew that it was accident and not birth that had malformed the great body that stood like a crouching animal in the open door. At first he saw only the grotesqueness of it--the long arms that almost touched the floor, the broken back, the twisted shoulders--and then, with a deeper thrill, he saw nothing of these things but only the face and the head of the man. There was something god-like about them, fastened there between the crippled shoulders. It was not beauty, but strength--the strength of rock, of carven granite, as if each feature had been chiseled out of something imperishable and everlasting, yet lacking strangely and mysteriously the warm illumination that comes from a living soul. The man was not old, nor was he young. And he did not seem to see Carrigan, who stood nearest to him. He was looking at St. Pierre's wife. The look which David saw in her face was infinitely tender. She was smiling at the misshapen hulk in the door as she might have smiled at a little child. And David, looking back at the wide, deep-set eyes of the man, saw the slumbering fire of a dog-like worship in them. They shifted slowly, taking in the cabin, questing, seeking, searching for something which they could not find. The lips moved, and again he heard that weird and mysterious monotone, as if the plaintive voice of a child were coming out of the huge frame of the man, crying out as it had cried last night, "HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?" In another moment St. Pierre's wife was at the deformed giant's side. She seemed tall beside him. She put her hands to his head and brushed back the grizzled black hair, laughing softly into his upturned face, her eyes shining and a strange glow in her cheeks. Carrigan, looking at them, felt his heart stand still. WAS THIS MAN ST. PIERRE? The thought came like a lightning flash--and went as quickly; it was impossible and inconceivable. And yet there was something more than pity in the voice of the woman who was speaking now. "No, no, we have not seen him, Andre--we have not seen Black Roger Audemard. If he comes, I will call you. I promise, Michiwan. I will call you!" She was stroking his bearded cheek, and then she put an arm about his twisted shoulders, and slowly she turned so that in a moment or two they were facing the sun--and it seemed to Carrigan that she was talking and sobbing and laughing in the same breath, as that great, broken hulk of a man moved out slowly from under the caress of her arm and went on his way. For a space she looked after him. Then in a swift movement she closed the door and faced Carrigan. She did not speak, but waited. Her head was high. She was breathing quickly. The tenderness that a moment before had filled her face was gone, and in her eyes was the blaze of fighting fires as she waited for him to speak--to give voice to what she knew was passing in his mind. XI For a space there was silence between Carrigan and St. Pierre's wife. He knew what she was thinking as she stood with her back to the door, waiting half defiantly, her cheeks still flushed, her eyes bright with the anticipation of battle. She was ready to fight for the broken creature on the other side of the door. She expected him to give no quarter in his questioning of her, to corner her if he could, to demand of her why the deformed giant had spoken the name of the man he was after, Black Roger Audemard. The truth hammered in David's brain. It had not been a delusion of his fevered mind after all; it was not a possible deception of the half-breed's, as he had thought last night. Chance had brought him face to face with the mystery of Black Roger. St. Pierre's wife, waiting for him to speak, was in some way associated with that mystery, and the cripple was asking for the man McVane had told him to bring in dead or alive! Yet he did not question her. He turned to the window and looked out from where Marie-Anne had stood a few moments before. The day was glorious. On the far shore he saw life where last night's camp had been. Men were moving about close to the water, and a York boat was putting out slowly into the stream. Close under the window moved a canoe with a single occupant. It was Andre, the Broken Man. With powerful strokes he was paddling across the river. His deformity was scarcely noticeable in the canoe. His bare head and black beard shone in the sun, and between his great shoulders his head looked more than ever to Carrigan like the head of a carven god. And this man, like a mighty tree stricken by lightning, his mind gone, was yet a thing that was more than mere flesh and blood to Marie-Anne Boulain! David turned toward her. Her attitude was changed. It was no longer one of proud defiance. She had expected to defend herself from something, and he had given her no occasion for defense. She did not try to hide the fact from him, and he nodded toward the window. "He is going away in a canoe. I am afraid you didn't want me to see him, and I am sorry I happened to be here when he came." "I made no effort to keep him away, M'sieu David. Perhaps I wanted you to see him. And I thought, when you did--" She hesitated. "You expected me to crucify you, if necessary, to learn the truth of what he knows about Roger Audemard," he said. "And you were ready to fight back. But I am not going to question you unless you give me permission." "I am glad," she said in a low voice. "I am beginning to have faith in you, M'sieu David. You have promised not to try to escape, and I believe you. Will you also promise not to ask me questions, which I can not answer--until St. Pierre comes?" "I will try." She came up to him slowly and stood facing him, so near that she could have reached out and put her hands on his shoulders. "St. Pierre has told me a great deal about the Scarlet Police," she said, looking at him quietly and steadily. "He says that the men who wear the red jackets never play low tricks, and that they come after a man squarely and openly. He says they are men, and many times he has told me wonderful stories of the things they have done. He calls it 'playing the game.' And I'm going to ask you, M'sieu David, will you play square with me? If I give you the freedom of the bateau, of the boats, even of the shore, will you wait for St. Pierre and play the rest of the game out with him, man to man?" Carrigan bowed his head slightly. "Yes, I will wait and finish the game with St. Pierre." He saw a quick throb come and go in her white throat, and with a sudden, impulsive movement she held out her hand to him. For a moment he held it close. Her little fingers tightened about his own, and the warm thrill of them set his blood leaping with the thing he was fighting down. She was so near that he could feel the throb of her body. For an instant she bowed her head, and the sweet perfume of her hair was in his nostrils, the lustrous beauty of it close under his lips. Gently she withdrew her hand and stood back from him. To Carrigan she was like a young girl now. It was the loveliness of girlhood he saw in the flush of her face and in the gladness that was flaming unashamed in her eyes. "I am not frightened any more," she exclaimed, her voice trembling a bit. "When St. Pierre comes, I shall tell him everything. And then you may ask the questions, and he will answer. And he will not cheat! He will play square. You will love St. Pierre, and you will forgive me for what happened behind the rock!" She made a little gesture toward the door. "Everything is free to you out there now," she added. "I shall tell Bateese and the others. When we are tied up, you may go ashore. And we will forget all that has happened, M'sieu David. We will forget until St. Pierre comes." "St. Pierre!" he groaned. "If there were no St. Pierre!" "I should be lost," she broke in quickly. "I should want to die!" Through the open window came the sound of a voice. It was the weird monotone of Andre, the Broken Man. Marie-Anne went to the window. And David, following her, looked over her head, again so near that his lips almost touched her hair. Andre had come back. He was watching two York boats that were heading for the bateau. "You heard him asking for Black Roger Audemard," she said. "It is strange. I know how it must have shocked you when he stood like that in the door. His mind, like his body, is a wreck, M'sieu David. Years ago, after a great storm, St. Pierre found him in the forest. A tree had fallen on him. St. Pierre carried him in on his shoulders. He lived, but he has always been like that. St. Pierre loves him, and poor Andre worships St. Pierre and follows him about like a dog. His brain is gone. He does not know what his name is, and we call him Andre. And always, day and night, he is asking that same question, 'Has any one seen Black Roger Audemard?' Sometime--if you will, M'sieu David--I should like to have you tell me what it is so terrible that you know about Roger Audemard." The York boats were half-way across the river, and from them came a sudden burst of wild song. David could make out six men in each boat, their oars flashing in the morning sun to the rhythm of their chant. Marie-Anne looked up at him suddenly, and in her face and eyes he saw what the starry gloom of evening had half hidden from him in those thrilling moments when they shot through the rapids of the Holy Ghost. She was girl now. He did not think of her as woman. He did not think of her as St. Pierre's wife. In that upward glance of her eyes was something that thrilled him to the depth of his soul. She seemed, for a moment, to have dropped a curtain from between herself and him. Her red lips trembled, she smiled at him, and then she faced the river again, and he leaned a little forward, so that a breath of wind floated a shimmering tress of her hair against his cheek. An irresistible impulse seized upon him. He leaned still nearer to her, holding his breath, until his lips softly touched one of the velvety coils of her hair. And then he stepped back. Shame swept over him. His heart rose and choked him, and his fists were clenched at his side. She had not noticed what he had done, and she seemed to him like a bird yearning to fly out through the window, throbbing with the desire to answer the chanting song that came over the water. And then she was smiling up again into his face hardened with the struggle which he was making with himself. "My people are happy," she cried. "Even in storm they laugh and sing. Listen, m'sieu. They are singing La Derniere Domaine. That is our song. It is what we call our home, away up there in the lost wilderness where people never come--the Last Domain. Their wives and sweethearts and families are up there, and they are happy in knowing that today we shall travel a few miles nearer to them. They are not like your people in Montreal and Ottawa and Quebec, M'sieu David. They are like children. And yet they are glorious children!" She ran to the wall and took down the banner of St. Pierre Boulain. "St. Pierre is behind us," she explained. "He is coming down with a raft of timber such as we can not get in our country, and we are waiting for him. But each day we must float down with the stream a few miles nearer the homes of my people. It makes them happier, even though it is but a few miles. They are coming now for my bateau. We shall travel slowly, and it will be wonderful on a day like this. It will do you good to come outside, M'sieu David--with me. Would you care for that? Or would you rather be alone?" In her face there was no longer the old restraint. On her lips was the witchery of a half-smile; in her eyes a glow that flamed the blood in his veins. It was not a flash of coquetry. It was something deeper and warmer than that, something real--a new Marie-Anne Boulain telling him plainly that she wanted him to come. He did not know that his hands were still clenched at his side. Perhaps she knew. But her eyes did not leave his face, eyes that were repeating the invitation of her lips, openly asking him not to refuse. "I shall be happy to come," he said. The words fell out of him numbly. He scarcely heard them or knew what he was saying, yet he was conscious of the unnatural note in his voice. He did not know he was betraying himself beyond that, did not see the deepening of the wild-rose flush in the cheeks of St. Pierre's wife. He picked up his pipe from the table and moved to accompany her. "You must wait a little while," she said, and her hand rested for an instant upon his arm. Its touch was as light as the touch of his lips had been against her shining hair, but he felt it in every nerve of his body. "Nepapinas is making a special lotion for your hurt. I will send him in, and then you may come." The wild chant of the rivermen was near as she turned to the door. From it she looked back at him swiftly. "They are happy, M'sieu David," she repeated softly. "And I, too, am happy. I am no longer afraid. And the world is beautiful again. Can you guess why? It is because you have given me your promise, M'sieu David, and because I believe you!" And then she was gone. For many minutes he did not move. The chanting of the rivermen, a sudden wilder shout, the voices of men, and after that the grating of something alongside the bateau came to him like sounds from another world. Within himself there was a crash greater than that of physical things. It was the truth breaking upon him, truth surging over him like the waves of a sea, breaking down the barriers he had set up, inundating him with a force that was mightier than his own will. A voice in his soul was crying out the truth--that above all else in the world he wanted to reach out his arms to this glorious creature who was the wife of St. Pierre, this woman who had tried to kill him and was sorry. He knew that it was not desire for beauty. It was the worship which St. Pierre himself must have for this woman who was his wife. And the shock of it was like a conflagration sweeping through him, leaving him dead and shriven, like the crucified trees standing in the wake of a fire. A breath that was almost a cry came from him, and his fists knotted until they were purple. She was St. Pierre's wife! And he, David Carrigan, proud of his honor, proud of the strength that made him man, had dared covet her in this hour when her husband was gone! He stared at the closed door, beginning to cry out against himself, and over him there swept slowly and terribly another thing--the shame of his weakness, the hopelessness of the thing that for a space had eaten into him and consumed him. And as he stared, the door opened, and Nepapinas came in. XII During the next quarter of an hour David was as silent as the old Indian doctor. He was conscious of no pain when Nepapinas took off his bandage and bathed his head in the lotion he had brought. Before a fresh bandage was put on, he looked at himself for a moment in the mirror. It was the first time he had seen his wound, and he expected to find himself marked with a disfiguring scar. To his surprise there was no sign of his hurt except a slightly inflamed spot above his temple. He stared at Nepapinas, and there was no need of the question that was in his mind. The old Indian understood, and his dried-up face cracked and crinkled in a grin. "Bullet hit a piece of rock, an' rock, not bullet, hit um head," he explained. "Make skull almost break--bend um in--but Nepapinas straighten again with fingers, so-so." He shrugged his thin shoulders with a cackling laugh of pride as he worked his claw-like fingers to show how the operation had been done. David shook hands with him in silence; then Nepapinas put on the fresh bandage, and after that went out, chuckling again in his weird way, as though he had played a great joke on the white man whom his wizardry had snatched out of the jaws of death. For some time there had been a subdued activity outside. The singing of the boatmen had ceased, a low voice was giving commands, and looking through the window, David saw that the bateau was slowly swinging away from the shore. He turned from the window to the table and lighted the cigar St. Pierre's wife had given him. In spite of the mental struggle he had made during the presence of Nepapinas, he had failed to get a grip on himself. For a time he had ceased to be David Carrigan, the man-hunter. A few days ago his blood had run to that almost savage thrill of the great game of one against one, the game in which Law sat on one side of the board and Lawlessness on the other, with the cards between. It was the great gamble. The cards meant life or death; there was never a checkmate--one or the other had to lose. Had some one told him then that soon he would meet the broken and twisted hulk of a man who had known Black Roger Audemard, every nerve in him would have thrilled in anticipation of that hour. He realized this as he paced back and forth over the thick rugs of the bateau floor. And he knew, even as he struggled to bring them back, that the old thrill and the old desire were gone. It was impossible to lie to himself. St. Pierre, in this moment, was of more importance to him than Roger Audemard. And St. Pierre's wife, Marie-Anne-- His eyes fell on the crumpled handkerchief on the piano keys. Again he was crushing it in the palm of his hand, and again the flood of humiliation and shame swept over him. He dropped the handkerchief, and the great law of his own life seemed to rise up in his face and taunt him. He was clean. That had been his greatest pride. He hated the man who was unclean. It was his instinct to kill the man who desecrated another man's home. And here, in the sacredness of St. Pierre's paradise, he found himself at last face to face with that greatest fight of all the ages. He faced the door. He threw back his shoulders until they snapped, and he laughed, as if at the thing that had risen up to point its finger at him. After all, it did not hurt a man to go through a bit of fire--if he came out of it unburned. And deep in his heart he knew it was not a sin to love, even as he loved, if he kept that love to himself. What he had done when Marie-Anne stood at the window he could not undo. St. Pierre would probably have killed him for touching her hair with his lips, and he would not have blamed St. Pierre. But she had not felt that stolen caress. No one knew--but himself. And he was happier because of it. It was a sort of sacred thing, even though it brought the heat of shame into his face. He went to the door, opened it, and stood out in the sunshine. It was good to feel the warmth of the sun in his face again and the sweet air of the open day in his lungs. The bateau was free of the shore and drifting steadily towards midstream. Bateese was at the great birchwood rudder sweep, and to David's surprise he nodded in a friendly way, and his wide mouth broke into a grin. "Ah, it is coming soon, that fight of ours, little coq de bruyere!" he chuckled gloatingly. "An' ze fight will be jus' lak that, m'sieu--you ze little fool-hen's rooster, ze partridge, an' I, Concombre Bateese, ze eagle!" The anticipation in the half-breed's eyes reflected itself for an instant in David's. He turned back into the cabin, bent over his pack, and found among his clothes two pairs of boxing gloves. He fondled them with the loving touch of a brother and comrade, and their velvety smoothness was more soothing to his nerves than the cigar he was smoking. His one passion above all others was boxing, and wherever he went, either on pleasure or adventure, the gloves went with him. In many a cabin and shack of the far hinterland he had taught white men and Indians how to use them, so that he might have the pleasure of feeling the thrill of them on his hands. And now here was Concombre Bateese inviting him on, waiting for him to get well! He went out and dangled the clumsy-looking mittens under the half-breed's nose. Bateese looked at them curiously. "Mitaines," he nodded. "Does ze little partridge rooster keep his claws warm in those in ze winter? They are clumsy, m'sieu. I can make a better mitten of caribou skin." Putting on one of the gloves, David doubled up his fist. "Do you see that, Concombre Bateese?" he asked. "Well, I will tell you this, that they are not mittens to keep your hands warm. I am going to fight you in them when our time comes. With these mittens I will fight you and your naked fists. Why? Because I do not want to hurt you too badly, friend Bateese! I do not want to break your face all to pieces, which I would surely do if I did not put on these soft mittens. Then, when you have really learned to fight--" The bull neck of Concombre Bateese looked as if it were about to burst. His eyes seemed ready to pop out of their sockets, and suddenly he let out a roar. "What!--You dare talk lak that to Concombre Bateese, w'at is great'st fightin' man on all T'ree River? You talk lak that to me, Concombre Bateese, who will kill ze bear wit' hees ban's, who pull down ze tree, who--who--" The word-flood of his outraged dignity sprang to his lips; emotion choked him, and then, looking suddenly over Carrigan's shoulder--he stopped. Something in his look made David turn. Three paces behind him stood Marie-Anne, and he knew that from the corner of the cabin she had heard what had passed between them. She was biting her lips, and behind the flash of her eyes he saw laughter. "You must not quarrel, children," she said. "Bateese, you are steering badly." She reached out her hands, and without a word David gave her the gloves. With her palm and fingers she caressed them softly, yet David saw little lines of doubt come into her white forehead. "They are pretty--and soft, M'sieu David. Surely they can not hurt much! Some day when St. Pierre comes, will you teach me how to use them?" "Always it is 'When St. Pierre comes,'" he replied. "Shall we be waiting long?" "Two or three days, perhaps a little longer. Are you coming with me to the proue, m'sieu?" She did not wait for his answer, but went ahead of him, dangling the two pairs of gloves at her side. David caught a last glimpse of the half-breed's face as he followed Marie-Anne around the end of the cabin. Bateese was making a frightful grimace and shaking his huge fist, but scarcely were they out of sight on the narrow footway that ran between the cabin and the outer timbers of the scow when a huge roar of laughter followed them. Bateese had not done laughing when they reached the proue, or bow-nest, a deck fully ten feet in length by eight in width, sheltered above by an awning, and comfortably arranged with chairs, several rugs, a small table, and, to David's amazement, a hammock. He had never seen anything like this on the Three Rivers, nor had he ever heard of a scow so large or so luxuriously appointed. Over his head, at the tip of a flagstaff attached to the forward end of the cabin, floated the black and white pennant of St. Pierre Boulain. And under this staff was a screened door which undoubtedly opened into the kitchenette which Marie-Anne had told him about. He made no effort to hide his surprise. But St. Pierre's wife seemed not to notice it. The puckery little lines were still in her forehead, and the laughter had faded out of her eyes. The tiny lines deepened as there came another wild roar of laughter from Bateese in the stern. "Is it true that you have given your word to fight Bateese?" she asked. "It is true, Marie-Anne. And I feel that Bateese is looking ahead joyously to the occasion." "He is," she affirmed. "Last night he spread the news among all my people. Those who left to join St. Pierre this morning have taken the news with them, and there is a great deal of excitement and much betting. I am afraid you have made a bad promise. No man has offered to fight Bateese in three years--not even my great St. Pierre, who says that Concombre is more than a match for him." "And yet they must have a little doubt, as there is betting, and it takes two to make a bet," chuckled David. The lines went out of Marie-Anne's forehead, and a half-smile trembled on her red lips. "Yes, there is betting. But those who are for you are offering next autumn's muskrat skins and frozen fish against lynx and fisher and marten. The odds are about thirty to one against you, M'sieu David!" The look of pity which was clearly in her eyes brought a rush of blood to David's face. "If only I had something to wager!" he groaned. "You must not fight. I shall forbid it!" "Then Bateese and I will steal off into the forest and have it out by ourselves." "He will hurt you badly. He is terrible, like a great beast, when he fights. He loves to fight and is always asking if there is not some one who will stand up to him. I think he would desert even me for a good fight. But you, M'sieu David--" "I also love a fight," he admitted, unashamed. St. Pierre's wife studied him thoughtfully for a moment. "With these?" she asked then, holding up the gloves. "Yes, with those. Bateese may use his fists, but I shall use those, so that I shall not disfigure him permanently. His face is none too handsome as it is." For another flash her lips trembled on the edge of a smile. Then she gave him the gloves, a bit troubled, and nodded to a chair with a deep, cushioned seat and wide arms. "Please make yourself comfortable, M'sieu David. I have something to do in the cabin and will return in a little while." He wondered if she had gone back to settle the matter with Bateese at once, for it was clear that she did not regard with favor the promised bout between himself and the half-breed. It was on the spur of a careless moment that he had promised to fight Bateese, and with little thought that it was likely to be carried out or that it would become a matter of importance with all of St. Pierre's brigade. He was evidently in for it, he told himself, and as a fighting man it looked as though Concombre Bateese was at least the equal of his braggadocio. He was glad of that. He grinned as he watched the bending backs of St. Pierre's men. So they were betting thirty to one against him! Even St. Pierre might be induced to bet--with HIM. And if he did-- The hot blood leaped for a moment in Carrigan's veins. The thrill went to the tips of his fingers. He stared out over the river, unseeing, as the possibilities of the thing that had come into his mind made him for a moment oblivious of the world. He possessed one thing against which St. Pierre and St. Pierre's wife would wager a half of all they owned in the world! And if he should gamble that one thing, which had come to him like an inspiration, and should whip Bateese-- He began to pace back and forth over the narrow deck, no longer watching the rowers or the shore. The thought grew, and his mind was consumed by it. Thus far, from the moment the first shot was fired at him from the ambush, he had been playing with adventure in the dark. But fate had at last dealt him a trump card. That something which he possessed was more precious than furs or gold to St. Pierre, and St. Pierre would not refuse the wager when it was offered. He would not dare refuse. More than that, he would accept eagerly, strong in the faith that Bateese would whip him as he had whipped all other fighters who had come up against him along the Three Rivers. And when Marie-Anne knew what that wager was to be, she, too, would pray for the gods of chance to be with Concombre Bateese! He did not hear the light footsteps behind him, and when he turned suddenly in his pacing, he found himself facing Marie-Anne, who carried in her hands the little basket he had seen on the cabin table. She seated herself in the hammock and took from the basket a bit of lace work. For a moment he watched her fingers flashing in and out with the needles. Perhaps his thought went to her. He was almost frightened as he saw her cheeks coloring under the long, dark lashes. He faced the rivermen again, and while he gripped at his own weakness, he tried to count the flashings of their oars. And behind him, the beautiful eyes of St. Pierre's wife were looking at him with a strange glow in their depths. "Do you know," he said, speaking slowly and still looking toward the flashing of the oars, "something tells me that unexpected things are going to happen when St. Pierre returns. I am going to make a bet with him that I can whip Bateese. He will not refuse. He will accept. And St. Pierre will lose, because I shall whip Bateese. It is then that these unexpected things will begin to happen. And I am wondering--after they do happen--if you will care so very much?" There was a moment of silence. And then, "I don't want you to fight Bateese," she said. The needles were working swiftly when he turned toward her again, and a second time the long lashes shadowed what a moment before he might have seen in her eyes. XIII The morning passed like a dream to Carrigan. He permitted himself to live and breathe it as one who finds himself for a space in the heart of a golden mirage. He was sitting so near Marie-Anne that now and then the faint perfume of her came to him like the delicate scent of a flower. It was a breath of crushed violets, sweet as the air he was breathing, violets gathered in the deep cool of the forest, a whisper of sweetness about her, as if on her bosom she wore always the living flowers. He fancied her gathering them last bloom-time, a year ago, alone, her feet seeking out the damp mosses, her little fingers plucking the smiling and laughing faces of the violet flowers to be treasured away in fragrant sachets, as gentle as the wood-thrush's note, compared with the bottled aromas fifteen hundred miles south. It seemed to be a physical part of her, a thing born of the glow in her cheeks, a living exhalation of her soft red lips--and yet only when he was near, very near, did the life of it reach him. She did not know he was thinking these things. There was nothing in his voice, he thought, to betray him. He was sure she was unconscious of the fight he was making. Her eyes smiled and laughed with him, she counted her stitches, her fingers worked, and she talked to him as she might have talked to a friend of St. Pierre's. She told him how St. Pierre had made the barge, the largest that had ever been on the river, and that he had built it entirely of dry cedar, so that it floated like a feather wherever there was water enough to run a York boat. She told him how St. Pierre had brought the piano down from Edmonton, and how he had saved it from pitching in the river by carrying the full weight of it on his shoulders when they met with an accident in running through a dangerous rapids bringing it down. St. Pierre was a very strong man, she said, a note of pride in her voice. And then she added, "Sometimes, when he picks me up in his arms, I feel that he is going to squeeze the life out of me!" Her words were like a sharp thrust into his heart. For an instant they painted a vision for him, a picture of that slim and adorable creature crushed close in the great arms of St. Pierre, so close that she could not breathe. In that mad moment of his hurt it was almost a living, breathing reality for him there on the golden fore-deck of the scow. He turned his face toward the far shore, where the wilderness seemed to reach off into eternity. What a glory it was--the green seas of spruce and cedar and balsam, the ridges of poplar and birch rising like silvery spume above the darker billows, and afar off, mellowed in the sun-mists, the guardian crests of Trout Mountains sentineling the country beyond! Into that mystery-land on the farther side of the Wabiskaw waterways Carrigan would have loved to set his foot four days ago. It was that mystery of the unpeopled places that he most desired, their silence, the comradeship of spaces untrod by the feet of man. And now, what a fool he was! Through vast distances the forests he loved seemed to whisper it to him, and ahead of him the river seemed to look back, nodding over its shoulder, beckoning to him, telling him the word of the forests was true. It streamed on lazily, half a mile wide, as if resting for the splashing and roaring rush it would make among the rocks of the next rapids, and in its indolence it sang the low and everlasting song of deep and slowly passing water. In that song David heard the same whisper, that he was a fool! And the lure of the wilderness shores crept in on him and gripped him as of old. He looked at the rowers in the two York boats, and then his eyes came back to the end of the barge and to St. Pierre's wife. Her little toes were tapping the floor of the deck. She, too, was looking out over the wilderness. And again it seemed to him that she was like a bird that wanted to fly. "I should like to go into those hills," she said, without looking at him. "Away off yonder!" "And I--I should like to go with you." "You love all that, m'sieu?" she asked. "Yes, madame!" "Why 'madame,' when I have given you permission to call me 'Marie-Anne'?" she demanded. "Because you call me 'm'sieu'." "But you--you have not given me permission--" "Then I do now," he interrupted quickly. "Merci! I have wondered why you did not return the courtesy," she laughed softly. "I do not like the m'sieu. I shall call you 'David'!" She rose out of the hammock suddenly and dropped her needles and lace work into the little basket. "I have forgotten something. It is for you to eat when it comes dinner-time, m'sieu--I mean David. So I must turn fille de cuisine for a little while. That is what St. Pierre sometimes calls me, because I love to play at cooking. I am going to bake a pie!" The dark-screened door of the kitchenette closed behind her, and Carrigan walked out from under the awning, so that the sun beat down upon him. There was no longer a doubt in his mind. He was more than fool. He envied St. Pierre, and he coveted that which St. Pierre possessed. And yet, before he would take what did not belong to him, he knew he would put a pistol to his head and blow his life out. He was confident of himself there. Yet he had fallen, and out of the mire into which he had sunk he knew also that he must drag himself, and quickly, or be everlastingly lowered in his own esteem. He stripped himself naked and did not lie to that other and greater thing of life that was in him. He was not only a fool, but a coward. Only a coward would have touched the hair of St. Pierre's wife with his lips; only a coward would have let live the thoughts that burned in his brain. She was St. Pierre's wife--and he was anxious now for the quick homecoming of the chief of the Boulains. After that everything would happen quickly. He thanked God that the inspiration of the wager had come to him. After the fight, after he had won, then once more would he be the old Dave Carrigan, holding the trump hand in a thrilling game. Loud voices from the York boats ahead and answering cries from Bateese in the stern drew him to the open deck. The bateau was close to shore, and the half-breed was working the long stern sweep as if the power of a steam-engine was in his mighty arms. The York boats had shortened their towline and were pulling at right angles within a few yards of a gravelly beach. A few strokes more, and men who were bare to the knees jumped out into shallow water and began tugging at the tow rope with their hands. David looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock. Never in his life had time passed so swiftly as that morning on the forward deck of the barge. And now they were tying up, after a drop of six or eight miles down the river, and he wondered how swiftly St. Pierre was overtaking them with his raft. He was filled with the desire to feel the soft crush of the earth under his feet again, and not waiting for the long plank that Bateese was already swinging from the scow to the shore, he made a leap that put him on the sandy beach, St. Pierre's wife had given him this permission, and he looked to see what effect his act had on the half-breed. The face of Concombre Bateese was like sullen stone. Not a sound came from his thick lips, but in his eyes was a deep and dangerous fire as he looked at Carrigan. There was no need for words. In them were suspicion, warning, the deadly threat of what would happen if he did not come back when it was time to return. David nodded. He understood. Even though St. Pierre's wife had faith in him, Bateese had not. He passed between the men, and to a man their faces turned on him, and in their quiet and watchful eyes he saw again that warning and suspicion, the unspoken threat of what would happen if he forgot his promise to Marie-Anne Boulain. Never, in a single outfit, had he seen such splendid men. They were not a mongrel assortment of the lower country. Slim, tall, clean-cut, sinewy--they were stock of the old voyageurs of a hundred years ago, and all of them were young. The older men had gone to St. Pierre. The reason for this dawned upon Carrigan. Not one of these twelve but could beat him in a race through the forest; not one that could not outrun him and cut him off though he had hours the start! Passing beyond them, he paused and looked back at the bateau. On the forward deck stood Marie-Anne, and she, too, was looking at him now. Even at that distance he saw that her face was quiet and troubled with anxiety. She did not smile when he lifted his hat to her, but gave only a little nod. Then he turned and buried himself in the green balsams that grew within fifty paces of the river. The old joy of life leaped into him as his feet crushed in the soft moss of the shaded places where the sun did not break through. He went on, passing through a vast and silent cathedral of spruce and cedar so dense that the sky was hidden, and came then to higher ground, where the evergreen was sprinkled with birch and poplar. About him was an invisible choir of voices, the low twittering of timid little gray-backs, the song of hidden--warblers, the scolding of distant jays. Big-eyed moose-birds stared at him as he passed, fluttering so close to his face that they almost touched his shoulders in their foolish inquisitiveness. A porcupine crashed within a dozen feet of his trail. And then he came to a beaten path, and other paths worn deep in the cool, damp earth by the hoofs of moose and caribou. Half a mile from the bateau he sat down on a rotting log and filled his pipe with fresh tobacco, while he listened to catch the subdued voice of the life in this land that he loved. It was then that the curious feeling came over him that he was not alone, that other eyes than those of beast and bird were watching him. It was an impression that grew on him. He seemed to feel their stare, seeking him out from the darkest coverts, waiting for him to shove on, dogging him like a ghost. Within him the hound-like instincts of the man-hunter rose swiftly to the suspicion of invisible presence. He began to note the changes in the cries of certain birds. A hundred yards on his right a jay, most talkative of all the forest things, was screeching with a new note in its voice. On the other side of him, in a dense pocket of poplar and spruce, a warbler suddenly brought its song to a jerky end. He heard the excited Pe-wee--Pe-wee--Pe-wee of a startled little gray-back giving warning of an unwelcome intruder near its nest. And he rose to his feet, laughing softly as he thumbed down the tobacco in his pipe. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain might believe in him, but Bateese and her wary henchmen had ways of their own of strengthening their faith. It was close to noon when he turned back, and he did not return by the moose path. Deliberately he struck out a hundred yards on either side of it, traveling where the moss grew thick and the earth was damp and soft. And five times he found the moccasin-prints of men. Bateese, with his sleeves up, was scrubbing the deck of the bateau when David came over the plank. "There are moose and caribou in there, but I fear I disturbed your hunters," said Carrigan, grinning at the half-breed. "They are too clumsy to hunt well, so clumsy that even the birds give them away. I am afraid we shall go without fresh meat tomorrow!" Concombre Bateese stared as if some one had stunned him with a blow, and he spoke no word as David went on to the forward deck. Marie-Anne had come out under the awning. She gave a little cry of relief and pleasure. "I am glad you have come back, M'sieu David!" "So am I, madame," he replied. "I think the woods are unhealthful to travel in!" Out of the earth he felt that a part of the old strength had returned to him. Alone they sat at dinner, and Marie-Anne waited on him and called him David again--and he found it easier now to call her Marie-Anne and look into her eyes without fear that he was betraying himself. A part of the afternoon he spent in her company, and it was not difficult for him to tell her something of his adventuring in the north, and how, body and soul, the northland had claimed him, and that he hoped to die in it when his time came. Her eyes glowed at that. She told him of two years she had spent in Montreal and Quebec, of her homesickness, her joy when she returned to her forests. It seemed, for a time, that they had forgotten St. Pierre. They did not speak of him. Twice they saw Andre, the Broken Man, but the name of Roger Audemard was not spoken. And a little at a time she told him of the hidden paradise of the Boulains away up in the unmapped wildernesses of the Yellowknife beyond the Great Bear, and of the great log chateau that was her home. A part of the afternoon he spent on shore. He filled a moosehide bag full of sand and suspended it from the limb of a tree, and for three-quarters of an hour pommeled it with his fists, much to the curiosity and amusement of St. Pierre's men, who could see nothing of man-fighting in these antics. But the exercise assured David that he had lost but little of his strength and that he would be in form to meet Bateese when the time came. Toward evening Marie-Anne joined him, and they walked for half an hour up and down the beach. It was Bateese who got supper. And after that Carrigan sat with Marie-Anne on the foredeck of the barge and smoked another of St. Pierre's cigars. The camp of the rivermen was two hundred yards below the bateau, screened between by a finger of hardwood, so that except when they broke into a chorus of laughter or strengthened their throats with snatches of song, there was no sound of their voices. But Bateese was in the stern, and Nepapinas was forever flitting in and out among the shadows on the shore, like a shadow himself, and Andre, the Broken Man, hovered near as night came on. At last he sat down in the edge of the white sand of the beach, and there he remained, a silent and lonely figure, as the twilight deepened. Over the world hovered a sleepy quiet. Out of the forest came the droning of the wood-crickets, the last twitterings of the day birds, and the beginning of night sounds. A great shadow floated out over the river close to the bateau, the first of the questing, blood-seeking owls adventuring out like pirates from their hiding-places of the day. One after another, as the darkness thickened, the different tribes of the people of the night answered the summons of the first stars. A mile down the river a loon gave its harsh love-cry; far out of the west came the faint trail-song of a wolf; in the river the night-feeding trout splashed like the tails of beaver; over the roof of the wilderness came the coughing, moaning challenge of a bull moose that yearned for battle. And over these same forest tops rose the moon, the stars grew thicker and brighter, and through the finger of hardwood glowed the fire of St. Pierre Boulain's men--while close beside him, silent in these hours of silence, David felt growing nearer and still nearer to him the presence of St. Pierre's wife. On the strip of sand Andre, the Broken Man, rose and stood like the stub of a misshapen tree. And then slowly he moved on and was swallowed up in the mellow glow of the night. "It is at night that he seeks," said St. Pierre's wife, for it was as if David had spoken the thought that was in his mind. David, for a moment, was silent. And then he said, "You asked me to tell you about Black Roger Audemard. I will, if you care to have me. Do you?" He saw the nodding of her head, though the moon and star-mist veiled her face. "Yes. What do the Police say about Roger Audemard?" He told her. And not once in the telling of the story did she speak or move. It was a terrible story at best, he thought, but he did not weaken it by smoothing over the details. This was his opportunity. He wanted her to know why he must possess the body of Roger Audemard, if not alive, then dead, and he wanted her to understand how important it was that he learn more about Andre, the Broken Man. "He was a fiend, this Roger Audemard," he began. "A devil in man shape, afterward called 'Black Roger' because of the color of his soul." Then he went on. He described Hatchet River Post, where the tragedy had happened; then told of the fight that came about one day between Roger Audemard and the factor of the post and his two sons. It was an unfair fight; he conceded that--three to one was cowardly in a fight. But it could not excuse what happened afterward. Audemard was beaten. He crept off into the forest, almost dead. Then he came back one stormy night in the winter with three strange friends. Who the friends were the Police never learned. There was a fight, but all through the fight Black Roger Audemard cried out not to kill the factor and his sons. In spite of that one of the sons was killed. Then the terrible thing happened. The father and his remaining son were bound hand and foot and fastened in the ancient dungeon room under the Post building. Then Black Roger set the building on fire, and stood outside in the storm and laughed like a madman at the dying shrieks of his victims. It was the season when the trappers were on their lines, and there were but few people at the post. The company clerk and one other attempted to interfere, and Black Roger killed them with his own hands. Five deaths that night--two of them horrible beyond description! Resting for a moment, Carrigan went on to tell of the long years of unavailing search made by the Police after that; how Black Roger was caught once and killed his captor. Then came the rumor that he was dead, and rumor grew into official belief, and the Police no longer hunted for his trails. Then, not long ago, came the discovery that Black Roger was still living, and he, Dave Carrigan, was after him. For a time there was silence after he had finished. Then St. Pierre's wife rose to her feet. "I wonder," she said in a low voice, "what Roger Audemard's own story might be if he were here to tell it?" She stepped out from under the awning, and in the full radiance of the moon he saw the pale beauty of her face and the crowning luster of her hair. "Good night!" she whispered. "Good night!" said David. He listened until her retreating footsteps died away, and for hours after that he had no thought of sleep. He had insisted that she take possession of her cabin again, and Bateese had brought out a bundle of blankets. These he spread under the awning, and when he drowsed off, it was to dream of the lovely face he had seen last in the glow of the moon. It was in the afternoon of the fourth day that two things happened--one that he had prepared himself for, and another so unexpected that for a space it sent his world crashing out of its orbit. With St. Pierre's wife he had gone again to the ridge-line for flowers, half a mile back from the river. Returning a new way, they came to a shallow stream, and Marie-Anne stood at the edge of it, and there was laughter in her shining eyes as she looked to the other side of it. She had twined flowers into her hair. Her cheeks were rich with color. Her slim figure was exquisite in its wild pulse of life. Suddenly she turned on him, her red lips smiling their witchery in his face. "You must carry me across," she said. He did not answer. He was a-tremble as he drew near her. She raised her arms a little, waiting. And then he picked her up. She was against his breast. Her two hands went to his shoulders as he waded into the stream; he slipped, and they clung a little tighter. The soft note of laughter was in her throat when the current came to his knees out in the middle of the stream. He held her tighter; and then stupidly, he slipped again, and the movement brought her lower in his arms, so that for a space her head was against his breast and his face was crushed in the soft masses of her hair. He came with her that way to the opposite shore and stood her on her feet again, standing back quickly so that she would not hear the pounding of his heart. Her face was radiantly beautiful, and she did not look at David, but away from him. "Thank you," she said. And then, suddenly, they heard running feet behind them, and in another moment one of the brigade men came dashing through the stream. At the same time there came from the river a quarter of a mile away a thunderous burst of voice. It was not the voice of a dozen men, but of half a hundred, and Marie-Anne grew tense, listening, her eyes on fire even before the messenger could get the words out of his mouth. "It is St. Pierre!" he cried then. "He has come with the great raft, and you must hurry if you would reach the bateau before he lands!" In that moment it seemed to David that Marie-Anne forgot he was alive. A little cry came to her lips, and then she left him, running swiftly, saying no word to him, flying with the speed of a fawn to St. Pierre Boulain! And when David turned to the man who had come up behind them, there was a strange smile on the lips of the lithe-limbed forest-runner as his eyes followed the hurrying figure of St. Pierre's wife. Until she was out of sight he stood in silence and then he said: "Come, m'sieu. We, also, must meet St. Pierre!" XIV David moved slowly behind the brigade man. He had no desire to hurry. He did not wish to see what happened when Marie-Anne met St. Pierre Boulain. Only a moment ago she had been in his arms; her hair had smothered his face; her hands had clung to his shoulders; her flushed cheeks and long lashes had for an instant lain close against his breast. And now, swiftly, without a word of apology, she was running away from him to meet her husband. He almost spoke that word aloud as he saw the last of her slim figure among the silver birches. She was going to the man to whom she belonged, and there was no hesitation in the manner of her going. She was glad. And she was entirely forgetful of him, Dave Carrigan, in that gladness. He quickened his steps, narrowing the distance between him and the hurrying brigade man. Only the diseased thoughts in his brain had made the happening in the creek anything but an accident. It was all an accident, he told himself. Marie-Anne had asked him to carry her across just as she would have asked any one of her rivermen. It was his fault, and not hers, that he had slipped in mid-stream, and that his arms had closed tighter about her, and that her hair had brushed his face. He remembered she had laughed, when it seemed for a moment that they were going to fall into the stream together. Probably she would tell St. Pierre all about it. Surely she would never guess it had been nearer tragedy than comedy for him. Once more he was convinced he had proved himself a weakling and a fool. His business now was with St. Pierre, and the hour was at hand when the game had ceased to be a woman's game. He had looked ahead to this hour. He had prepared himself for it and had promised himself action that would be both quick and decisive. And yet, as he went on, his heart was still thumping unsteadily, and in his arms and against his face remained still the sweet, warm thrill of his contact with Marie-Anne. He could not drive that from him. It would never completely go. As long as he lived, what had happened in the creek would live with him. He did not deny that crying voice inside him. It was easy for his mouth to make words. He could call himself a fool and a weakling, but those words were purely mechanical, hollow, meaningless. The truth remained. It was a blazing fire in his breast, a conflagration that might easily get the best of him, a thing which he must fight and triumph over for his own salvation. He did not think of danger for Marie-Anne, for such a thought was inconceivable. The tragedy was one-sided. It was his own folly, his own danger. For just as he loved Marie-Anne, so did she love her husband, St. Pierre. He came to the low ridge close to the river and climbed up through the thick birches and poplars. At the top was a bald knob of sandstone, over which the riverman had already passed. David paused there and looked down on the broad sweep of the Athabasca. What he saw was like a picture spread out on the great breast of the river and the white strip of shoreline. Still a quarter of a mile upstream, floating down slowly with the current, was a mighty raft, and for a space his eyes took in nothing else. On the Mackenzie, the Athabasca, the Saskatchewan, and the Peace he had seen many rafts, but never a raft like this of St. Pierre Boulain. It was a hundred feet in width and twice and a half times as long, and with the sun blazing down upon it from out of a cloudless sky it looked to him like a little city swept up from out of some archaic and savage desert land to be transplanted to the river. It was dotted with tents and canvas shelters. Some of these were gray, and some were white, and two or three were striped with broad bands of yellow and red. Behind all these was a cabin, and over this there rose a slender staff from which floated the black and white pennant of St. Pierre. The raft was alive. Men were running between the tents. The long rudder sweeps were flashing in the sun. Rowers with naked arms and shoulders were straining their muscles in four York boats that were pulling like ants at the giant mass of timber. And to David's ears came a deep monotone of human voices, the chanting of the men as they worked. Nearer to him a louder response suddenly made answer to it. A dozen steps carried him round a projecting thumb of brush, and he could see the open shore where the bateau was tied. Marie-Anne had crossed the strip of sand, and Bateese was helping her into a waiting York boat. Then Bateese shoved it off, and the four men in it began to row. Two canoes were already half-way to the raft, and David recognized the occupant of one of them as Andre, the Broken Man. Then he saw Marie-Anne rise in the York boat and wave something white in her hand. He looked again toward the raft. The current and the sweeps and the tugging boats were drawing it steadily nearer. Standing at the very edge of it he saw now a solitary figure, and in the clear sunlight the man stood out clean-cut as a carven statue. He was a giant in size. His head and arms were bare, and he was looking steadily toward the bateau and the approaching York boat. He raised an arm, and a moment later the movement was followed by a voice that rose above all other voices. It boomed over the river like the rumble of a gun. In response to it Marie-Anne waved the white thing in her hand, and David thought he heard her voice in an answering cry. He stared again at the solitary figure of the man, seeing nothing else, hearing no other sound but the booming of the deep cry that came again over the river. His heart was thumping. In his eyes was a gathering fire. His body grew tense. For he knew that at last he was looking at St. Pierre, chief of the Boulains, and husband of the woman he loved. As the significance of the situation grew upon him, a flash of his old humor returned. It was the same grim humor that had possessed him behind the rock, when he had thought he was going to die. Fate had played him a dishonest turn then, and it was doing the same thing by him now. Unless he deliberately turned his face away, he was going to see the reunion of Marie-Anne and St. Pierre. Yesterday he had strapped his binoculars to his belt. Today Marie-Anne had looked through them a dozen times. They had been a source of pleasure and thrill to her. Now, David thought, they would be good medicine for him. He would see the whole thing through, and at close range. He would leave himself no room for doubt. He had laughed behind the rock, when bullets were zipping close to his head, and the same grim smile came to his lips now as he focused his glasses on the solitary figure at the head of the raft. The smile died away when he saw St. Pierre. It was as if he could reach out and touch him with his hand. And never, he thought, had he seen such a man. A moment before, a flashing vision had come to him from out of an Arabian desert; the multitude of colored tents, the half-naked men, the great raft floating almost without perceptible motion on the placid breast of the river had stirred his imagination until he saw a strange picture. But there was nothing Arabic, nothing desert-like, in this man his binoculars brought within a few feet of his eyes. He was more like a viking pirate who had roved the sea a few centuries ago. One great, bare arm was raised as David looked, and his booming voice was rolling over the river again. His hair was shaggy, and untrimmed, and red; he wore a short beard that glistened in the sun--he was laughing as he waved and shouted to Marie-Anne--a joyous, splendid giant of a man who seemed almost on the point of leaping into the water in his eagerness to clasp in his naked arms the woman who was coming to him. David drew a deep breath, and there came an unconscious tightening at his heart as he turned his glasses upon Marie-Anne. She was still standing in the bow of the York boat, and her back was toward him. He could see the glisten of the sun in her hair. She was waving her handkerchief, and the poise of her slim body told him that in her eagerness she would have darted from the bow of the boat had she possessed wings. Again he looked at St. Pierre. And this was the man who was no match for Concombre Bateese! It was inconceivable. Yet he heard Marie-Anne's voice repeating those very words in his ear. But she had surely been joking with him. She had been storing up this little surprise for him. She had wanted him to discover with his own eyes what a splendid man was this chief of the Boulains. And yet, as David stared, there came to him an unpleasant thought of the incongruity of this thing he was looking upon. It struck upon him like a clashing discord, the fact of matehood between these two--a condition inconsistent and out of tune with the beautiful things he had built up in his mind about the woman. In his soul he had enshrined her as a lovely wildflower, easily crushed, easily destroyed, a sweet treasure to be guarded from all that was rough and savage, a little violet-goddess as fragile as she was brave and loyal. And St. Pierre, standing there at the edge of his raft, looked as if he had come up out of the caves of a million years ago! There was something barbaric about him. He needed only a club and a shield and the skin of a beast about his loins to transform him into prehistoric man. At least these were his first impressions--impressions roused by thought of Marie-Anne's slim, beautiful body crushed close in the embrace of that laughing, powerful-lunged giant. Then the reaction swept over him. St. Pierre was not a monster, even though his disturbed mind unconsciously made an effort to conceive him as such. There were gladness and laughter in his face. There was the contagion of joy and good cheer in the voice that boomed over the water. Laughter and shouts answered it from the shore. The rowers in Marie-Anne's York boat burst into a wild and exultant snatch of song and made their oars fairly crack. There came a solitary yell from Andre, the Broken Man, who was close to the head of the raft now. And from the raft itself came a slowly swelling volume of sound, the urge and voice and exultation of red-blooded men a-thrill with the glory of this day and the wild freedom of their world. The truth came to David. St. Pierre Boulain was the beloved Big Brother of his people. He waited, his muscles tense, his jaws set tight. Good medicine, he called it again, a righteous sort of punishment set upon him for the moral cowardice he had betrayed in falling down in worship at the feet of another man's wife. The York boat was very close to the head of the raft now. He saw Marie-Anne herself fling a rope to St. Pierre. Then the boat swung alongside. In another moment St. Pierre had leaned over, and Marie-Anne was with him on the raft. For a space everything else in the world was obliterated for David. He saw St. Pierre's arms gather the slim form into their embrace. He saw Marie-Anne's hands go up fondly to the bearded face. And then-- Carrigan cut the picture there. He turned his shoulder to the raft and snapped the binoculars in the case at his belt. Some one was coming in his direction from the bateau. It was the riverman who had brought to Marie-Anne the news of St. Pierre's arrival. David went down to meet him. From the foot of the ridge he again turned his eyes in the direction of the raft. St. Pierre and Marie-Anne were just about to enter the little cabin built in the center of the drifting mass of timber. XV It was easy for Carrigan to guess why the riverman had turned back for him. Men were busy about the bateau, and Concombre Bateese stood in the stern, a long pole in his hands, giving commands to the others. The bateau was beginning to swing out into the stream when he leaped aboard. A wide grin spread over the half-breed's face. He eyed David keenly and laughed in his deep chest, an unmistakable suggestiveness in the note of it. "You look seek, m'sieu," he said in an undertone, for David's ears alone, "You look ver' unhappy, an' pale lak leetle boy! Wat happen w'en you look t'rough ze glass up there, eh? Or ees it zat you grow frighten because ver' soon you stan' up an' fight Concombre Bateese? Eh, coq de bruyere? Ees it zat?" A quick thought came to David. "Is it true that St. Pierre can not whip you, Bateese?" Bateese threw out his chest with a mighty intake of breath. Then he exploded: "No man on all T'ree River can w'ip Concombre Bateese." "And St. Pierre is a powerful man," mused David, letting his eyes travel slowly from the half-breed's moccasined feet to the top of his head. "I measured him well through the glasses, Bateese. It will be a great fight. But I shall whip you!" He did not wait for the half-breed to reply, but went into the cabin and closed the door behind him. He did not like the taunting note of suggestiveness in the other's words. Was it possible that Bateese suspected the true state of his mind, that he was in love with the wife of St. Pierre, and that his heart was sick because of what he had seen aboard the raft? He flushed hotly. It made him uncomfortable to feel that even the half-breed might have guessed his humiliation. David looked through the window toward the raft. The bateau was drifting downstream, possibly a hundred feet from the shore, but it was quite evident that Concombre Bateese was making no effort to bring it close to the floating mass of timber, which had made no change in its course down the river. David's mind painted swiftly what was happening in the cabin into which Marie-Anne and St. Pierre had disappeared. At this moment Marie-Anne was telling of him, of the adventure in the hot patch of sand. He fancied the suppressed excitement in her voice as she unburdened herself. He saw St. Pierre's face darken, his muscles tighten--and crouching in silence, he seemed to see the misshapen hulk of Andre, the Broken Man, listening to what was passing between the other two. And he heard again the mad monotone of Andre's voice, crying plaintively, "HAS ANY ONE SEEN BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD?" His blood ran a little faster, and his old craft was a dominantly living thing within him once more. Love had dulled both his ingenuity and his desire. For a space a thing had risen before him that was mightier than the majesty of the Law, and he had TRIED to miss the bull's-eye--because of his love for the wife of St. Pierre Boulain. Now he shot squarely for it, and the bell rang in his brain. Two times two again made four. Facts assembled themselves like arguments in flesh and blood. Those facts would have convinced Superintendent McVane, and they now convinced David. He had set out to get Black Roger Audemard, alive or dead. And Black Roger, wholesale murderer, a monster who had painted the blackest page of crime known in the history of Canadian law, was closely and vitally associated with Marie-Anne and St. Pierre Boulain! The thing was a shock, but Carrigan no longer tried to evade the point. His business was no longer with a man supposed to be a thousand or fifteen hundred miles farther north. It was with Marie-Anne, St. Pierre, and Andre, the Broken Man. And also with Concombre Bateese. He smiled a little grimly as he thought of his approaching battle with the half-breed. St. Pierre would be astounded at the proposition he had in store for him. But he was sure that St. Pierre would accept. And then, if he won the fight with Bateese-- The smile faded from his lips. His face grew older as he looked slowly about the bateau cabin, with its sweet and lingering whispers of a woman's presence. It was a part of her. It breathed of her fragrance and her beauty; it seemed to be waiting for her, crying softly for her return. Yet once had there been another woman even lovelier than the wife of St. Pierre. He had not hesitated then. Without great effort he had triumphed over the loveliness of Carmin Fanchet and had sent her brother to the hangman. And now, as he recalled those days, the truth came to him that even in the darkest hour Carmin Fanchet had made not the slightest effort to buy him off with her beauty. She had not tried to lure him. She had fought proudly and defiantly. And had Marie-Anne done that? His fingers clenched slowly, and a thickening came in his throat. Would she tell St. Pierre of the many hours they had spent together? Would she confess to him the secret of that precious moment when she had lain close against his breast, her arms about him, her face pressed to his? Would she speak to him of secret hours, of warm flushes that had come to her face, of glowing fires that at times had burned in her eyes when he had been very near to her? Would she reveal EVERYTHING to St. Pierre--her husband? He was powerless to combat the voice that told him no. Carmin Fanchet had fought him openly as an enemy and had not employed her beauty as a weapon. Marie-Anne had put in his way a great temptation. What he was thinking seemed to him like a sacrilege, yet he knew there could be no discriminating distinctions between weapons, now that he was determined to play the game to the end, for the Law. When Carrigan went out on deck, the half-breed was sweating from his exertion at the stern sweep. He looked at the agent de police who was going to fight him, perhaps tomorrow or the next day. There was a change in Carrigan. He was not the same man who had gone into the cabin an hour before, and the fact impressed itself upon Bateese. There was something in his appearance that held back the loose talk at the end of Concombre's tongue. And so it was Carrigan himself who spoke first. "When will this man St. Pierre come to see me?" he demanded. "If he doesn't come soon, I shall go to him." For an instant Concombre's face darkened. Then, as he bent over the sweep with his great back to David, he chuckled audibly, and said: "Would you go, m'sieu? Ah--it is le malade d'amour over there in the cabin. Surely you would not break in upon their love-making?" Bateese did not look over his shoulder, and so he did not see the hot flush that gathered in David's face. But David was sure he knew it was there and that Concombre had guessed the truth of matters. There was a sly note in his voice, as if he could not quite keep to himself his exultation that beauty and bright eyes had played a clever trick on this man who, if his own judgment had been followed, would now be resting peacefully at the bottom of the river. It was the final stab to Carrigan. His muscles tensed. For the first time he felt the desire to shoot a naked fist into the grinning mouth of Concombre Bateese. He laid a hand on the half-breed's shoulder, and Bateese turned about slowly. He saw what was in the other's eyes. "Until this moment I have not known what a great pleasure it will be to fight you, Bateese," said David quietly. "Make it tomorrow--in the morning, if you wish. Take word to St. Pierre that I will make him a great wager that I win, a gamble so large that I think he will be afraid to cover it. For I don't think much of this St. Pierre of yours, Bateese. I believe him to be a big-winded bluff, like yourself. And also a coward. Mark my word, he will be so much afraid that he will not accept my wager!" Bateese did not answer. He was looking over David's shoulder. He seemed not to have heard what the other had said, yet there had come a sudden gleam of exultation in his eyes, and he replied, still gazing toward the raft, "Diantre, m'sieu coq de bruyere may keep ze beeg word in hees mout'! See!--St. Pierre, he ees comin' to answer for himself. Mon Dieu, I hope he does not wring ze leetle rooster's neck, for zat would spoil wan great, gran' fight tomorrow!" David turned toward the big raft. At the distance which separated them he could make out the giant figure of St. Pierre Boulain getting into a canoe. The humped-up form already in that canoe he knew was the Broken Man. He could not see Marie-Anne. Very lightly Bateese touched his arm. "M'sieu will go into ze cabin," he suggested softly. "If somet'ing happens, it ees bes' too many eyes do not see it. You understan', m'sieu agent de police?" Carrigan nodded. "I understand," he said. XVI In the cabin David waited. He did not look through the window to watch St. Pierre's approach. He sat down and picked up a magazine from the table upon which Marie-Anne's work-basket lay. He was cool as ice now. His blood flowed evenly and his pulse beat unhurriedly. Never had he felt himself more his own master, more like grappling with a situation. St. Pierre was coming to fight. He had no doubt of that. Perhaps not physically, at first. But, one way or another, something dynamic was bound to happen in the bateau cabin within the next half-hour. Now that the impending drama was close at hand, Carrigan's scheme of luring St. Pierre into the making of a stupendous wager seemed to him rather ridiculous. With calculating coldness he was forced to concede that St. Pierre would be somewhat of a fool to accept the wager he had in mind, when he was so completely in St. Pierre's power. For Marie-Anne and the chief of the Boulains, the bottom of the river would undoubtedly be the best and easiest solution, and the half-breed's suggestion might be acted upon after all. As his mind charged itself for the approaching struggle, David found himself staring at a double page in the magazine, given up entirely to impossibly slim young creatures exhibiting certain bits of illusive and mysterious feminine apparel. Marie-Anne had expressed her approbation in the form of pencil notes under several of them. Under a cobwebby affair that wreathed one of the slim figures he read, "St. Pierre will love this!" There were two exclamation points after that particular notation! David replaced the magazine on the table and looked toward the door. No, St. Pierre would not hesitate to put him at the bottom of the river, for her. Not if he, Dave Carrigan, made the solution of the matter a necessity. There were times, he told himself, when it was confoundedly embarrassing to force the letter of the law. And this was one of them. He was not afraid of the river bottom. He was thinking again of Marie-Anne. The scraping of a canoe against the side of the bateau recalled him suddenly to the moment at hand. He heard low voices, and one of them, he knew, was St. Pierre's. For an interval the voices continued, frequently so low that he could not distinguish them at all. For ten minutes he waited impatiently. Then the door swung open, and St. Pierre came in. Slowly and coolly David rose to meet him, and at the same moment the chief of the Boulains closed the door behind him. There was no greeting in Carrigan's manner. He was the Law, waiting, unexcited, sure of himself, impassive as a thing of steel. He was ready to fight. He expected to fight. It only remained for St. Pierre to show what sort of fight it was to be. And he was amazed at St. Pierre, without betraying that amazement. In the vivid light that shot through the western windows the chief of the Boulains stood looking at David. He wore a gray flannel shirt open at the throat, and it was a splendid throat David saw, and a splendid head above it, with its reddish beard and hair. But what he saw chiefly were St. Pierre's eyes. They were the sort of eyes he disliked to find in an enemy--a grayish, steely blue that reflected sunlight like polished flint. But there was no flash of battle-glow in them now. St. Pierre was neither excited nor in a bad humor. Nor did Carrigan's attitude appear to disturb him in the least. He was smiling; his eyes glowed with almost boyish curiosity as he stared appraisingly at David--and then, slowly, a low chuckle of laughter rose in his deep chest, and he advanced with an outstretched hand. "I am St. Pierre Boulain," he said. "I have heard a great deal about you, Sergeant Carrigan. You have had an unfortunate time!" Had the man advanced menacingly, David would have felt more comfortable. It was disturbing to have this giant come to him with an extended hand of apparent friendship when he had anticipated an entirely different sort of meeting. And St. Pierre was laughing at him! There was no doubt of that. And he had the colossal nerve to tell him that he had been unfortunate, as though being shot up by somebody's wife was a fairly decent joke! Carrigan's attitude did not change. He did not reach out a hand to meet the other. There was no responsive glimmer of humor in his eyes or on his lips. And seeing these things, St. Pierre turned his extended hand to the open box of cigars, so that he stood for a moment with his back toward him. "It's funny," he said, as if speaking to himself, and with only a drawling note of the French patois in his voice. "I come home, find my Jeanne in a terrible mix-up, a stranger in her room--and the stranger refuses to let me laugh or shake hands with him. Tonnerre, I say it is funny! And my Jeanne saved his life, and made him muffins, and gave him my own bed, and walked with him in the forest! Ah, the ungrateful cochon!" He turned, laughing openly, so that his deep voice filled the cabin. "Vous aves de la corde de pendu, m'sieu--yes, you are a lucky dog! For only one other man in the world would my Jeanne have done that. You are lucky because you were not ended behind the rock; you are lucky because you are not at the bottom of the river; you are lucky--" He shrugged his big shoulders hopelessly. "And now, after all our kindness and your good luck, you wait for me like an enemy, m'sieu. Diable, I can not understand!" For the life of him Carrigan could not, in these few moments, measure up his man. He had said nothing. He had let St. Pierre talk. And now St. Pierre stood there, one of the finest men he had ever looked upon, as if honestly overcome by a great wonder. And yet behind that apparent incredulity in his voice and manner David sensed the deep underflow of another thing. St. Pierre was all that Marie-Anne had claimed for him, and more. She had given him assurance of her unlimited confidence that her husband could adjust any situation in the world, and Carrigan conceded that St. Pierre measured up splendidly to that particular type of man. The smile had not left his face; the good humor was still in his eyes. David smiled back at him coldly. He recognized the cleverness of the other's play. St. Pierre was a man who would smile like that even as he fought, and Carrigan loved a smiling fighter, even when he had to slip steel bracelets over his wrists. "I am Sergeant Carrigan, of 'N' Division, Royal Northwest Mounted Police," he said, repeating the formula of the law. "Sit down, St. Pierre, and I will tell you a few things that have happened. And then--" "Non, non, it is not necessary, m'sieu. I have already listened for an hour, and I do not like to hear a story twice. You are of the Police. I love the Police. They are brave men, and brave men are my brothers. You are out after Roger Audemard, the rascal! Is it not so? And you were shot at behind the rock back there. You were almost killed. Ma foi, and it was my Jeanne who did the shooting! Yes, she thought you were another man." The chuckling, drum-like note of laughter came again out of St. Pierre's great chest. "It was bad shooting. I have taught her better, but the sun was blinding there in the hot, white sand. And after that--I know everything that has happened. Bateese was wrong. I shall scold him for wanting to put you at the bottom of the river--perhaps. Oui, ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut--that is it. A woman must have her way, and my Jeanne's gentle heart was touched because you were a brave and handsome man, M'sieu Carrigan. But I am not jealous. Jealousy is a worm that does not make friendship! And we shall be friends. Only as a friend could I take you to the Chateau Boulain, far up on the Yellowknife. And we are going there." In spite of what might have been the entirely proper thing to do at this particular moment, Carrigan's face broke into a smile as he drew a second chair up close to the table. He was swift to readjust himself. It came suddenly back to him how he had grinned behind the rock, when death seemed close at hand. And St. Pierre was like that now. David measured him again as the chief of the Boulains sat down opposite him. Such a man could not be afraid of anything on the face of the earth, even of the Law. The gleam that lay in his eyes told David that as they met his own over the table. "We are smiling now because it happens to please us," David read in them. "But in a moment, if it is necessary, we shall fight." Carrigan leaned a little over the table. "You know we are not going to the Chateau Boulain, St. Pierre," he said. "We are going to stop at Fort McMurray, and there you and your wife must answer for a number of things that have happened. There is one way out--possibly. That is largely up to you. Why did your wife try to kill me behind the rock? And what did you know about Black Roger Audemard?" St. Pierre's eyes did not for an instant leave Carrigan's face. Slowly a change came into them; the smile faded, the blue went out, and up from behind seemed to come another pair of eyes that were hard as steel and cold as ice. Yet they were not eyes that threatened, nor eyes that betrayed excitement or passion. And St. Pierre's voice, when he spoke, lacked the deep and vibrant note that had been in it. It was as if he had placed upon it the force of a mighty will, chaining it back, just as something hidden and terrible lay chained behind his eyes. "Why play like little children, M'sieu Carrigan?" he asked. "Why not come out squarely, honestly, like men? I know what has happened. Mon Dieu, it was bad! You were almost killed, and you heard that poor wreck, Andre, call for Roger Audemard. My Jeanne has told you about that--how I found him in the forest with his broken mind and body. And about my Jeanne--" St. Pierre's fists grew into knotted lumps on the table. "Non, I will die--I will kill you--before I will tell you why she shot at you behind the rock! We are men, both of us. We are not afraid. And you--in my place--what would YOU do, m'sieu?" In the moment's silence each man looked steadily at the other. "I would--fight," said David slowly. "If it was for her, I am pretty sure I would fight." He believed that he was drawing the net in now, that it would catch St. Pierre. He leaned a little farther over the table. "And I, too, must fight," he added. "You know our law, St. Pierre. We don't go back without our man--unless we happen to die. And I would be stupid if I did not understand the situation here. It would be quite easy for you to get rid of me. But I don't believe you are a murderer, even if your Jeanne tried to be." A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. "And Marie-Anne--I beg pardon!--your wife--" St. Pierre interrupted him. "It will please me to have you call her Marie-Anne. And it will please her also, m'sieu. Dieu, if we only had eyes that could see what is in a woman's heart! Life is funny, m'sieu. It is a great joke, I swear it on my soul!" He shrugged his shoulders, smiling again straight into David's eyes. "See what has happened! You set out for a murderer. My Jeanne makes a great mistake and shoots you. Then she pities you, saves your life, brings you here, and--ma foi! it is true--learns to care for you more than she should! But that does not make me want to kill you. Non, her happiness is mine. Dead men tell no tales, m'sieu, but there are times when living men also keep tales to themselves. And that is what you are going to do, M'sieu Carrigan. You are going to keep to yourself the thing that happened behind the rock. You are going to keep to yourself the mumblings of our poor mad Andre. Never will they pass your lips. I know. I swear it. I stake my life on it!" St. Pierre was talking slowly and unexcitedly. There was an immeasurable confidence in his deep voice. It did not imply a threat or a warning. He was sure of himself. And his eyes had deepened into blue again and were almost friendly. "You would stake your life?" repeated Carrigan questioningly. "You would do that?" St. Pierre rose to his feet and looked about the cabin with a shining light in his eyes that was both pride and exaltation. He moved toward the end of the room, where the piano stood, and for a moment his big fingers touched the keys; then, seeing the lacy bit of handkerchief that lay there, he picked it up--and placed it back again. Carrigan did not urge his question, but waited. In spite of his effort to fight it down he found himself in the grip of a mysterious and growing thrill as he watched St. Pierre. Never had the presence of another man had the same effect upon him, and strangely the thought came to him that he was matched--even overmatched. It was as if St. Pierre had brought with him into the cabin something more than the splendid strength of his body, a thing that reached out in the interval of silence between them, warning Carrigan that all the law in the world would not swerve the chief of the Boulains from what was already in his mind. For a moment the thought passed from David that fate had placed him up against the hazard of enmity with St. Pierre. His vision centered in the man alone. And as he, too, rose to his feet, an unconscious smile came to his lips as he recalled the boastings of Bateese. "I ask you," said he, "if you would really stake your life in a matter such as that? Of course, if your words were merely accidental, and meant nothing--" "If I had a dozen lives, I would stake them, one on top of the other, as I have said," interrupted St. Pierre. Suddenly his laugh boomed out and his voice became louder. "M'sieu Carrigan, I have come to offer you just that test! Oui, I could kill you now. I could put you at the bottom of the river, as Bateese thinks is right. Mon Dieu, how completely I could make you disappear! And then my Jeanne would be safe. She would not go behind prison bars. She would go on living, and laughing, and singing in the big forests, where she belongs. And Black Roger Audemard, the rascal, would be safe for a time! But that would be like destroying a little child. You are so helpless now. So you are going on to the Chateau Boulain with us, and if at the end of the second month from today you do not willingly say I have won my wager--why--m'sieu--I will go with you into the forest, and you may shoot out of me the life which is my end of the gamble. Is that not fair? Can you suggest a better way--between men like you and me?" "I can at least suggest a way that has the virtue of saving time," replied David. "First, however, I must understand my position here. I am, I take it, a prisoner." "A guest, with certain restrictions placed upon you, m'sieu," corrected St. Pierre. The eyes of the two men met on a dead level. "Tomorrow morning I am going to fight Bateese," said David. "It is a little sporting event we have fixed up between us for the amusement of--your men. I have heard that Bateese is the best fighting man along the Three Rivers. And I--I do not like to have any other man claim that distinction when I am around." For the first time St. Pierre's placidity seemed to leave him. His brow became clouded, a moment's frown grew in his face, and there was a certain disconsolate hopelessness in the shrug of his shoulders. It was as if Carrigan's words had suddenly robbed the day of all its sunshine for the chief of the Boulains. His voice, too, carried an unhappy and disappointed note as he made a gesture toward the window. "M'sieu, on that raft out there are many of my men, and they have scarcely rested or slept since word was brought to them that a stranger was to fight Concombre Bateese. Tonnerre, they have gambled without ever seeing you until the clothes on their backs are in the hazard, and they have cracked their muscles in labor to overtake you! They have prayed away their very souls that it would be a good fight, and that Bateese would not eat you up too quickly. It has been a long time since we have seen a good fight, a long time since the last man dared to stand up against the half-breed. Ugh, it tears out my heart to tell you that the fight can not be!" St. Pierre made no effort to suppress his emotion. He was like a huge, disappointed boy. He walked to the window, peered forth at the raft, and as he shrugged his big shoulders again something like a groan came from him. The thrill of approaching triumph swept through David's blood. The flame of it was in his eyes when St. Pierre turned from the window. "And you are disappointed, St. Pierre? You would like to see that fight!" The blue steel in St. Pierre's eyes flashed back. "If the price were a year of my life, I would give it--if Bateese did not eat you up too quickly. I love to look upon a good fight, where there is no venom of hatred in the blows!" "Then you shall see a good fight, St. Pierre." "Bateese would kill you, m'sieu. You are not big. You are not his match." "I shall whip him, St. Pierre--whip him until he avows me his master." "You do not know the half-breed, m'sieu. Twice I have tried him in friendly combat myself and have been beaten." "But I shall whip him," repeated Carrigan. "I will wager you anything--anything in the world--even life against life--that I whip him!" The gloom had faded from the face of St. Pierre Boulain. But in a moment it clouded again. "My Jeanne has made me promise that I will stop the fight," he said. "And why--why should she insist in a matter such as this, which properly should be settled among men?" asked David. Again St. Pierre laughed; with an effort, it seemed, "She is gentle-hearted, m'sieu. She laughed and thought it quite a joke when Bateese humbled me. 'What! My great St. Pierre, with the blood of old France in his veins, beaten by a man who has been named after a vegetable!' she cried. I tell you she was merry over it, m'sieu! She laughed until the tears came into her eyes. But with you it is different. She was white when she entreated me not to let you fight Bateese. Yes, she is afraid you will be badly hurt. And she does not want to see you hurt again. But I tell you that I am not jealous, m'sieu! She does not try to hide things from me. She tells me everything, like a little child. And so--" "I am going to fight Bateese," said David. He wondered if St. Pierre could hear the thumping of his heart, or if his face gave betrayal of the hot flood it was pumping through his body. "Bateese and I have pledged ourselves. We shall fight, unless you tie one of us hand and foot. And as for a wager--" "Yes--what have you to wager?" demanded St. Pierre eagerly. "You know the odds are great," temporized Carrigan. "That I concede, m'sieu." "But a fight without a wager would be like a pipe without tobacco, St. Pierre." "You speak truly, m'sieu." David came nearer and laid a hand on the other's arm. "St. Pierre, I hope you--and your Jeanne--will understand what I am about to offer. It is this. If Bateese whips me, I will disappear into the forests, and no word shall ever pass my lips of what has passed since that hour behind the rock--and this. No whisper of it will ever reach the Law. I will forget the attempted murder and the suspicious mumblings of your Broken Man. You will be safe. Your Jeanne will be safe--if Bateese whips me." He paused, and waited. St. Pierre made no answer, but amazement came into his face, and after that a slow and burning fire in his eyes which told how deeply and vitally Carrigan's words had struck into his soul. "And if I should happen to win," continued David, turning a bit carelessly toward the window, "why, I should expect as large a payment from you. If I win, your fulfillment of the wager will be to tell me in every detail why your wife tried to kill me behind the rock, and you will also tell me all that you know about the man I am after, Black Roger Audemard. That is all. I am asking for no odds, though you concede the handicap is great." He did not look at St. Pierre. Behind him he heard the other's deep breathing. For a space neither spoke. Outside they could hear the soft swish of water, the low voices of men in the stern, and a shout and the barking of a dog coming from the raft far out on the river. For David the moment was one of suspense. He turned again, a bit carelessly, as if his proposition were a matter of but little significance to him. St. Pierre was not looking at him. He was staring toward the door, as if through it he could see the powerful form of Bateese bending over the stern sweep. And Carrigan could see that his face was flaming with a great desire, and that the blood in his body was pounding to the mighty urge of it. Suddenly he faced Carrigan. "M'sieu, listen to me," he said. "You are a brave man. You are a man of honor, and I know you will bury sacredly in your heart what I am going to tell you now, and never let a word of it escape--even to my Jeanne. I do not blame you for loving her. Non! You could not help that. You have fought well to keep it within yourself, and for that I honor you. How do I know? Mon Dieu, she has told me! A woman's heart understands, and a woman's ears are quick to hear, m'sieu. When you were sick, and your mind was wandering, you told her again and again that you loved her--and when she brought you back to life, her eyes saw more than once the truth of what your lips had betrayed, though you tried to keep it to yourself. Even more, m'sieu--she felt the touch of your lips on her hair that day. She understands. She has told me everything, openly, innocently--yet her heart thrills with that sympathy of a woman who knows she is loved. M'sieu, if you could have seen the light in her eyes and the glow in her cheeks as she told me these secrets. But I am not jealous! Non! It is only because you are a brave man, and one of honor, that I tell you all this. She would die of shame did she know I had betrayed her confidence. Yet it is necessary that I tell you, because if we make the big wager we must drop my Jeanne from the gamble. Do you comprehend me, m'sieu? "We are two men, strong men, fighting men. I--Pierre Boulain--can not feel the shame of jealousy where a woman's heart is pure and sweet, and where a man has fought against love with honor as you have fought. And you, m'sieu--David Carrigan, of the Police--can not strike with your hard man's hand that tender heart, that is like a flower, and which this moment is beating faster than it should with the fear that some harm is going to befall you. Is it not so, m'sieu? We will make the wager, yes. But if you whip Bateese--and you can not do that in a hundred years of fighting--I will not tell you why my Jeanne shot at you behind the rock. Non, never! Yet I swear I will tell you the other. If you win, I will tell you all I know about Roger Audemard, and that is considerable, m'sieu. Do you agree?" Slowly David held out a hand. St. Pierre's gripped it. The fingers of the two men met like bands of steel. "Tomorrow you will fight," said St. Pierre. "You will fight and be beaten so terribly that you may always show the marks of it. I am sorry. Such a man as you I would rather have as a brother than an enemy. And she will never forgive me. She will always remember it. The thought will never die out of her heart that I was a beast to let you fight Bateese. But it is best for all. And my men? Ah! Diable, but it will be great sport for them, m'sieu!" His hand unclasped. He turned to the door. A moment later it closed behind him, and David was alone. He had not spoken. He had not replied to the engulfing truths that had fallen quietly and without a betrayal of passion from St. Pierre's lips. Inwardly he was crushed. Yet his face was like stone, hiding his shame. And then, suddenly, there came a sound from outside that sent the blood through his cold veins again. It was laughter, the great, booming laughter of St. Pierre! It was not the merriment of a man whose heart was bleeding, or into whose life had come an unexpected pain or grief. It was wild and free, and filled with the joy of the sun-filled day. And David, listening to it, felt something that was more than admiration for this man growing within him. And unconsciously his lips repeated St. Pierre's words. "Tomorrow--you will fight." XVII For many minutes David stood at the bateau window and watched the canoe that carried St. Pierre Boulain and the Broken Man back to the raft. It moved slowly, as if St. Pierre was loitering with a purpose and was thinking deeply of what had passed. Carrigan's fingers tightened, and his face grew tense, as he gazed out into the glow of the western sun. Now that the stress of nerve-breaking moments in the cabin was over, he no longer made an effort to preserve the veneer of coolness and decision with which he had encountered the chief of the Boulains. Deep in his soul he was crushed and humiliated. Every nerve in his body was bleeding. He had heard St. Pierre's big laugh a moment before, but it must have been the laugh of a man who was stabbed to the heart. And he was going back to Marie-Anne like that--drifting scarcely faster than the current that he might steal time to strengthen himself before he looked into her eyes again. David could see him, motionless, his giant shoulders hunched forward a little, his head bowed, and in the stern the Broken Man paddled listlessly, his eyes on the face of his master. Without voice David cursed himself. In his egoism he had told himself that he had made a splendid fight in resisting the temptation of a great love for the wife of St. Pierre. But what was his own struggle compared with this tragedy which St. Pierre was now facing? He turned from the window and looked about the cabin room again--the woman's room and St. Pierre's--and his face burned in its silent accusation. Like a living thing it painted another picture for him. For a space he lost his own identity. He saw himself in the place of St. Pierre. He was the husband of Marie-Anne, worshipping her even as St. Pierre must worship her, and he came, as St. Pierre had come, to find a stranger in his home, a stranger who had lain in his bed, a stranger whom his wife had nursed back to life, a stranger who had fallen in love with his most inviolable possession, who had told her of his love, who had kissed her, who had held her close, in his arms, whose presence had brought a warmer flush and a brighter glow into eyes and cheeks that until this stranger's coming had belonged only to him. And he heard her, as St. Pierre had heard her, pleading with him to keep this man from harm; he heard her soft voice, telling of the things that had passed between them, and he saw in her eyes-- With almost a cry he swept the thought and the picture from him. It was an atrocious thing to conceive, impossible of reality. And yet the truth would not go. What would he have done in St. Pierre's place? He went to the window again. Yes, St. Pierre was a bigger man than he. For St. Pierre had come quietly and calmly, offering a hand of friendship, generous, smiling, keeping his hurt to himself, while he, Dave Carrigan, would have come with the murder of man in his heart. His eyes passed from the canoe to the raft, and from the big raft to the hazy billows of green and golden forest that melted off into interminable miles of distance beyond the river. He knew that on the other side of him lay that same distance, north, east, south, and west, vast spaces in an unpeopled world, the same green and golden forests, ten thousand plains and rivers and lakes, a million hiding-places where romance and tragedy might remain forever undisturbed. The thought came to him that it would not be difficult to slip out into that world and disappear. He almost owed it to St. Pierre. It was the voice of Bateese in a snatch of wild and discordant song that brought him back into grim reality. There was, after all, that embarrassing matter of justice--and the accursed Law! After a little he observed that the canoe was moving faster, and that Andre's paddle was working steadily and with force. St. Pierre no longer sat hunched in the bow. His head was erect, and he was waving a hand in the direction of the raft. A figure had come from the cabin on the huge mass of floating timber. David caught the shimmer of a woman's dress, something white fluttering over her head, waving back at St. Pierre. It was Marie-Anne, and he moved away from the window. He wondered what was passing between St. Pierre and his wife in the hour that followed. The bateau kept abreast of the raft, moving neither faster nor slower than it did, and twice he surrendered to the desire to scan the deck of the floating timbers through his binoculars. But the cabin held St. Pierre and Marie-Anne, and he saw neither of them again until the sun was setting. Then St. Pierre came out--alone. Even at that distance over the broad river he heard the booming voice of the chief of the Boulains. Life sprang up where there had been the drowse of inactivity aboard the raft. A dozen more of the great sweeps were swiftly manned by men who appeared suddenly from the shaded places of canvas shelters and striped tents. A murmur of voices rose over the water, and then the murmur was broken by howls and shouts as the rivermen ran to their places at the command of St. Pierre's voice, and as the sweeps began to flash in the setting sun, it gave way entirely to the evening chant of the Paddling Song. David gripped himself as he listened and watched the slowly drifting glory of the world that came down to the shores of the river. He could see St. Pierre clearly, for the bateau had worked its way nearer. He could see the bare heads and naked arms of the rivermen at the sweeps. The sweet breath of the forests filled his lungs, as that picture lay before him, and there came into his soul a covetousness and a yearning where before there had been humiliation and the grim urge of duty. He could breathe the air of that world, he could look at its beauty, he could worship it--and yet he knew that he was not a part of it as those others were a part of it. He envied the men at the sweeps; he felt his heart swelling at the exultation and joy in their song. They were going home--home down the big rivers, home to the heart of God's Country, where wives and sweethearts and happiness were waiting for them, and their visions were his visions as he stared wide-eyed and motionless over the river. And yet he was irrevocably an alien. He was more than that--an enemy, a man-hound sent out on a trail to destroy, an agent of a powerful and merciless force that carried with it punishment and death. The crew of the bateau had joined in the evening song of the rivermen on the raft, and over the ridges and hollows of the forest tops, red and green and gold in the last warm glory of the sun, echoed that chanting voice of men. David understood now what St. Pierre's command had been. The huge raft with its tented city of life was preparing to tie up for the night. A quarter of a mile ahead the river widened, so that on the far side was a low, clean shore toward which the efforts of the men at the sweeps were slowly edging the raft. York boats shot out on the shore side and dropped anchors that helped drag the big craft in. Two others tugged at tow-lines fastened to the shoreside bow, and within twenty minutes the first men were plunging up out of the water on the white strip of beach and were whipping the tie-lines about the nearest trees. David unconsciously was smiling in the thrill and triumph of these last moments, and not until they were over did he sense the fact that Bateese and his crew were bringing the bateau in to the opposite shore. Before the sun was quite down, both raft and house-boat were anchored for the night. As the shadows of the distant forests deepened, Carrigan felt impending about him an oppression of emptiness and loneliness which he had not experienced before. He was disappointed that the bateau had not tied up with the raft. Already he could see men building fires. Spirals of smoke began to rise from the shore, and he knew that the riverman's happiest of all hours, supper time, was close at hand. He looked at his watch. It was after seven o'clock. Then he watched the fading away of the sun until only the red glow of it remained in the west, and against the still thicker shadows the fires of the rivermen threw up yellow flames. On his own side, Bateese and the bateau crew were preparing their meal. It was eight o'clock when a man he had not seen before brought in his supper. He ate, scarcely sensing the taste of his food, and half an hour later the man reappeared for the dishes. It was not quite dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty feet into the air. He wondered what Marie-Anne was doing in this hour. Last night they had been together. He had marveled at the witchery of the moonlight in her hair and eyes, he had told her of the beauty of it, she had smiled, she had laughed softly with him--for hours they had sat in the spell of the golden night and the glory of the river. And tonight--now--was she with St. Pierre, waiting as they had waited last night for the rising of the moon? Had she forgotten? COULD she forget? Or was she, as he thought St. Pierre had painfully tried to make him believe, innocent of all the thoughts and desires that had come to him, as he sat worshipping her in their stolen hours? He could think of them only as stolen, for he did not believe Marie-Anne had revealed to her husband all she might have told him. He was sure he would never see her again as he had seen her then, and something of bitterness rose in him as he thought of that. St. Pierre, could he have seen her face and eyes when he told her that her hair in the moonlight was lovelier than anything he had ever seen, would have throttled him with his naked hands in that meeting in the cabin. For St. Pierre's code would not have had her eyes droop under their long lashes or her cheeks flush so warmly at the words of another man--and he could not take vengeance on the woman herself. No, she had not told St. Pierre all she might have told! There were things which she must have kept to herself, which she dared not reveal even to this great-hearted man who was her husband. Shame, if nothing more, had kept her silent. Did she feel that shame as he was feeling it? It was inconceivable to think otherwise. And for that reason, more than all others, he knew that she would not meet him face to face again--unless he forced that meeting. And there was little chance of that, for his pledge with St. Pierre had eliminated her from the aftermath of tomorrow's drama, his fight with Bateese. Only when St. Pierre might stand in a court of law would there be a possibility of her eyes meeting his own again, and then they would flame with the hatred that at another time had been in the eyes of Carmin Fanchet. With the dull stab of a thing that of late had been growing inside him, he wondered what had happened to Carmin Fanchet in the years that had gone since he had brought about the hanging of her brother. Last night and the night before, strange dreams of her had come to him in restless slumber. It was disturbing to him that he should wake up in the middle of the night dreaming of her, when he had gone to his bed with a mind filled to overflowing with the sweet presence of Marie-Anne Boulain. And now his mind reached out poignantly into mysterious darkness and doubt, even as the darkness of night spread itself in a thickening canopy over the river. Gray clouds had followed the sun of a faultless day, and the stars were veiled overhead. When David turned from the window, it was so dark in the cabin that he could not see. He did not light the lamps, but made his way to St. Pierre's couch and sat down in the silence and gloom. Through the open windows came to him the cadence of the river and the forests. There was silence of human voice ashore, but under him he heard the lapping murmur of water as it rustled under the stern and side of the bateau, and from the deep timber came the never-ceasing whisper of the spruce and cedar tops, and the subdued voice of creatures whose hours of activity had come with the dying out of the sun. For a long time he sat in this darkness. And then there came to him a sound that was different than the other sounds--a low monotone of voices, the dipping of a paddle--and a canoe passed close under his windows and up the shore. He paid small attention to it until, a little later, the canoe returned, and its occupants boarded the bateau. It would have roused little interest in him then had he not heard a voice that was thrillingly like the voice of a woman. He drew his hunched shoulders erect and stared through the darkness toward the door. A moment more and there was no doubt. It was almost shock that sent the blood leaping suddenly through his veins. The inconceivable had happened. It was Marie-Anne out there, talking in a low voice to Bateese! Then there came a heavy knock at his door, and he heard the door open. Through it he saw the grayer gloom of the outside night partly shut out a heavy shadow. "M'sieu!" called the voice of Bateese. "I am here," said David. "You have not gone to bed, m'sieu?" "No." The heavy shadow seemed to fade away, and yet there still remained a shadow there. David's heart thumped as he noted the slenderness of it. For a space there was silence. And then, "Will you light the lamps, M'sieu David?" a soft voice came to him. "I want to come in, and I am afraid of this terrible darkness!" He rose to his feet, fumbling in his pocket for matches. XVIII He did not turn toward Marie-Anne when he had lighted the first of the great brass lamps hanging at the side of the bateau. He went to the second, and struck another match, and flooded the cabin with light. She still stood silhouetted against the darkness beyond the cabin door when he faced her. She was watching him, her eyes intent, her face a little pale, he thought. Then he smiled and nodded. He could not see a great change in her since this afternoon, except that there seemed to be a little more fire in the glow of her eyes. They were looking at him steadily as she smiled and nodded, wide, beautiful eyes in which there was surely no revelation of shame or regret, and no very clear evidence of unhappiness. David stared, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. "Why is it that you sit in darkness?" she asked, stepping within and closing the door. "Did you not expect me to return and apologize for leaving you so suddenly this afternoon? It was impolite. Afterward I was ashamed. But I was excited, M'sieu David. I--" "Of course," he hurried to interrupt her. "I understand. St. Pierre is a lucky man. I congratulate you--as well as him. He is splendid, a man in whom you can place great faith and confidence." "He scolded me for running away from you as I did, M'sieu David. He said I should have shown better courtesy than to leave like that one who was a guest in our--home. So I have returned, like a good child, to make amends." "It was not necessary." "But you were lonesome and in darkness!" He nodded. "Yes." "And besides," she added, so quietly and calmly that he was amazed, "you know my sleeping apartment is also on the bateau. And St. Pierre made me promise to say good night to you." "It is an imposition," cried David, the blood rushing to his face. "You have given up all this to me! Why not let me go into that little room forward, or sleep on the raft and you and St. Pierre--" "St. Pierre would not leave the raft," replied Marie-Anne, turning from him toward the table on which were the books and magazines and her work-basket. "And I like my little room forward." "St. Pierre--" He stopped himself. He could see a sudden color deepening in the cheek of St. Pierre's wife as she made pretense of looking for something in her basket. He felt that if he went on he would blunder, if he had not already blundered. He was uncomfortable, for he believed he had guessed the truth. It was not quite reasonable to expect that Marie-Anne would come to him like this on the first night of St. Pierre's homecoming. Something had happened over in the little cabin on the raft, he told himself. Perhaps there had been a quarrel--at least ironical implications on St. Pierre's part. And his sympathy was with St. Pierre. He caught suddenly a little tremble at the corner of Marie-Anne's mouth as her face was turned partly from him, and he stepped to the opposite side of the table so he could look at her fairly. If there had been unpleasantness in the cabin on the raft, St. Pierre's wife in no way gave evidence of it. The color had deepened to almost a blush in her cheeks, but it was not on account of embarrassment, for one who is embarrassed is not usually amused, and as she looked up at him her eyes were filled with the flash of laughter which he had caught her lips struggling to restrain. Then, finding a bit of lace work with the needles meshed in it, she seated herself, and again he was looking down on the droop of her long lashes and the seductive glow of her lustrous hair. Yesterday, in a moment of irresistible impulse, he had told her how lovely it was as she had dressed it, a bewitching crown of interwoven coils, not drawn tightly, but crumpled and soft, as if the mass of tresses were openly rebelling at closer confinement. She had told him the effect was entirely accidental, largely due to carelessness and haste in dressing it. Accidental or otherwise, it was the same tonight, and in the heart of it were the drooping red petals of a flower she had gathered with him early that afternoon. "St. Pierre brought me over," she said in a calmly matter-of-fact voice, as though she had expected David to know that from the beginning. "He is ashore talking over important matters with Bateese. I am sure he will drop in and say good night before he returns to the raft. He asked me to wait for him--here." She raised her eyes, so clear and untroubled, so quietly unembarrassed under his gaze, that he would have staked his life she had no suspicion of the confessions which St. Pierre had revealed to him. "Do you care? Would you rather put out the lights and go to bed?" He shook his head. "No. I am glad. I was beastly lonesome. I had an idea--" He was on the point of blundering again when he caught himself. The effect of her so near him was more than ever disturbing, in spite of St. Pierre. Her eyes, clear and steady, yet soft as velvet when they looked at him, made his tongue and his thoughts dangerously uncertain. "You had an idea, M'sieu David?" "That you would have no desire to see me again after my talk with St. Pierre," he said. "Did he tell you about it?" "He said you were very fine, M'sieu David--and that he liked you." "And he told you it is determined that I shall fight Bateese in the morning?" "Yes." The one word was spoken with a quiet lack of excitement, even of interest--it seemed to belie some of the things St. Pierre had told him, and he could scarcely believe, looking at her now, that she had entreated her husband to prevent the encounter, or that she had betrayed any unusual emotion in the matter at all. "I was afraid you would object," he could not keep from saying. "It does not seem nice to pull off such a thing as that, when there is a lady about--" "Or LADIES." She caught him up quickly, and he saw a sudden little tightening of her pretty mouth as she turned her eyes to the bit of lace work again. "But I do not object, because what St. Pierre says is right--must be right." And the softness, he thought, went altogether out of the curve of her lips for an instant. In a flash their momentary betrayal of vexation was gone, and St. Pierre's wife had replaced the work-basket on the table and was on her feet, smiling at him. There was something of wild daring in her eyes, something that made him think of the glory of adventure he had seen flaming in her face the night they had run the rapids of the Holy Ghost. "Tomorrow will be very unpleasant, M'sieu David," she cried softly. "Bateese will beat you--terribly. Tonight we must think of things more agreeable." He had never seen her more radiant than when she turned toward the piano. What the deuce did it mean? Had St. Pierre been making a fool of him? She actually appeared unable to restrain her elation at the thought that Bateese would surely beat him up! He stood without moving and made no effort to answer her. Just before they had started on that thrilling adventure into the forest, which had ended with his carrying her in his arms, she had gone to the piano and had played for him. Now her fingers touched softly the same notes. A little humming trill came in her throat, and it seemed to David that she was deliberately recalling his thoughts to the things that had happened before the coming of St. Pierre. He had not lighted the lamp over the piano, and for a flash her dark eyes smiled at him out of the half shadow. After a moment she began to sing. Her voice was low and without effort, untrained, and subdued as if conscious and afraid of its limitations, yet so exquisitely sweet that to David it was a new and still more wonderful revelation of St. Pierre's wife. He drew nearer, until he stood close at her side, the dark luster of her hair almost touching his arm, her partly upturned face a bewitching profile in the shadows. Her voice grew lower, almost a whisper in its melody, as if meant for him alone. Many times he had heard the Canadian Boat Song, but never as its words came now from the lips of Marie-Anne Boulain. "Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune, and our oars keep time. Soon as the woods on shore look dim, We'll sing at St. Ann's our parting hymn; Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, and the daylight's past." She paused. And David, staring down at her shining head, did not speak. Her fingers trembled over the keys, he could see dimly the shadow of her long lashes, and the spirit-like scent of crushed violets rose to him from the soft lace about her throat and her hair. "It is your music," he whispered. "I have never heard the Boat Song like that!" He tried to drag his eyes from her face and hair, sensing that he was a near-criminal, fighting a mighty impulse. The notes under her fingers changed, and again--by chance or design--she was stabbing at him; bringing him face to face with the weakness of his flesh, the iniquity of his desire to reach out his arms and crumple her in them. Yet she did not look up, she did not see him, as she began to sing "Ave Maria." "Ave, Maria, hear my cry! O, guide my path where no harm, no harm is nigh--" As she went on, he knew she had forgotten to think of him. With the reverence of a prayer the holy words came from her lips, slowly, softly, trembling with a pathos and sweetness that told David they came not alone from the lips, but from the very soul of St. Pierre's wife. And then-- "Oh, Mother, hear me where thou art, And guard and guide my aching heart, my aching heart!" The last words drifted away into a whisper, and David was glad that he was not looking into the face of St. Pierre's wife, for there must have been something there now which it would have been sacrilege for him to stare at, as he was staring at her hair. No sound of opening door had come from behind them. Yet St. Pierre had opened it and stood there, watching them with a curious humor in eyes that seemed still to hold a glitter of the fire that had leaped from the half-breed's flaming birch logs. His voice was a shock to Carrigan. "PESTE, but you are a gloomy pair!" he boomed. "Why no light over there in the corner, and why sing that death-song to chase away the devil when there is no devil near?" Guilt was in David's heart, but there was no sting of venom in St. Pierre's words, and he was laughing at them now, as though what he saw were a pretty joke and amused him. "Late hours and shady bowers! I say it should be a love song or something livelier," he cried, closing the door behind him and coming toward them. "Why not En Roulant ma Boule, my sweet Jeanne? You know that is my favorite." He suddenly interrupted himself, and his voice rolled out in a wild chant that rocked the cabin. "The wind is fresh, the wind is free, En roulant ma boule! The wind is fresh--my love waits me, Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant! Behind our house a spring you see, In it three ducks swim merrily, And hunting, the Prince's son went he, With a silver gun right fair to see--" David was conscious that St. Pierre's wife had risen to her feet, and now she came out of shadow into light, and he was amazed to see that she was laughing back at St. Pierre, and that her two fore-fingers were thrust in her ears to keep out the bellow of her husband's voice. She was not at all discomfited by his unexpected appearance, but rather seemed to join in the humor of the thing with St. Pierre, though he fancied he could see something in her face that was forced and uneasy. He believed that under the surface of her composure she was suffering a distress which she did not reveal. St. Pierre advanced and carelessly patted her shoulder with one of his big hands, while he spoke to David. "Has she not the sweetest voice in the world, m'sieu? Did you ever hear a sweeter or as sweet? I say it is enough to get down into the soul of a man, unless he is already half dead! That voice--" He caught Marie-Anne's eyes. Her cheeks were flaming. Her look, for an instant, flashed lightning as she halted him. "Ma foi, I speak it from the heart," he persisted, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Am I not right, M'sieu Carrigan? Did you ever hear a sweeter voice?" "It is wonderful," agreed David, wondering if he was hazarding too much. "Good! It fills me with happiness to know I am right. And now, cherie, good-night! I must return to the raft." A shadow of vexation crossed Marie-Anne's face. "You seem in great haste." "Plagues and pests! You are right, Pretty Voice! I am most anxious to get back to my troubles there, and you--" "Will also bid M'sieu Carrigan good-night," she quickly interrupted him. "You will at least see me to my room, St. Pierre, and safely put away for the night." She held out her hand to David. There was not a tremor in it as it lay for an instant soft and warm in his own. She made no effort to withdraw it quickly, nor did her eyes hide their softness as they looked into his own. Mutely David stood as they went out. He heard St. Pierre's loud voice rumbling about the darkness of the night. He heard them pass along the side of the bateau forward, and half a minute later he knew that St. Pierre was getting into his canoe. The dip of a paddle came to him. For a space there was silence, and then, from far out in the black shadow of the river, rolled back the great voice of St. Pierre Boulain singing the wild river chant, "En Roulant ma Boule." At the open window he listened. It seemed to him that from far over the river, where the giant raft lay, there came a faint answer to the words of the song, XIX With the slow approach of the storm which was advancing over the wilderness, Carrigan felt more poignantly the growing unrest that was in him. He heard the last of St. Pierre's voice, and after that the fires on the distant shore died out slowly, giving way to utter blackness. Faintly there came to him the far-away rumbling of thunder. The air grew heavy and thick, and there was no sound of night-bird over the breast of the river, and out of the thick cedar and spruce and balsam there came no cry or whisper of the nocturnal life waiting in silence for the storm to break. In that stillness David put out the lights in the cabin and sat close to the window in darkness. He was more than sleepless. Every nerve in his body demanded action, and his brain was fired by strange thoughts until their vividness seemed to bring him face to face with a reality that set his blood stirring with an irresistible thrill. He believed he had made a discovery, that St. Pierre had betrayed himself. What he had visioned, the conclusion he had arrived at, seemed inconceivable, yet what his own eyes had seen and his ears had heard pointed to the truth of it all. The least he could say was that St. Pierre's love for Marie-Anne Boulain was a strange sort of love. His attitude toward her seemed more like that of a man in the presence of a child of whom he was fond in a fatherly sort of way. His affection, as he had expressed it, was parental and careless. Not for an instant had there been in it a betrayal of the lover, no suggestion of the husband who cared deeply or who might be made jealous by another man. Sitting in darkness thickening with the nearer approach of storm, David recalled the stab of pain mingled with humiliation that had come into the eyes of St. Pierre's wife when she had stood facing her husband. He heard again, with a new understanding, the low note of pathos in her voice as in song she had called upon the Mother of Christ to hear her--and help her. He had not guessed at the tragedy of it then. Now he knew, and he thought of her lying awake in the gloom beyond the bulkhead, her eyes were with tears. And St. Pierre had gone back to his raft, singing in the night! Where before there had been sympathy for him, there rose a sincere revulsion. There had been a reason for St. Pierre's masterly possession of himself, and it had not been, as he had thought, because of his bigness of soul. It was because he had not cared. He was a splendid hypocrite, playing his game well at the beginning, but betraying the lie at the end. He did not love Marie-Anne as he, Dave Carrigan, loved her. He had spoken of her as a child, and he had treated her as a child, and was serenely dispassionate in the face of a situation which would have roused the spirit in most men. And suddenly, recalling that thrilling hour in the white strip of sand and all that had happened since, it flashed upon David that St. Pierre was using his wife as the vital moving force in a game of his own--that under the masquerade of his apparent faith and bigness of character he was sacrificing her to achieve a certain mysterious something it the scheme of his own affairs. Yet he could not forget the infinite faith Marie-Anne Boulain had expressed in her husband. There had been no hypocrisy in her waiting and her watching for him, or in her belief that he would straighten out the tangles of the dilemma in which she had become involved. Nor had there been make-believe in the manner she had left him that day in her eagerness to go to St. Pierre. Adding these facts as he had added the others, he fancied he saw the truth staring at him out of the darkness of his cabin room. Marie-Anne loved her husband. And St. Pierre was merely the possessor, careless and indifferent, almost brutally dispassionate in his consideration of her. A heavy crash of thunder brought Carrigan back to a realization of the impending storm. He rose to his feet in the chaotic gloom, facing the bulkhead beyond which he was certain St. Pierre's wife lay wide awake. He tried to laugh. It was inexcusable, he told himself, to let his thoughts become involved in the family affairs of St. Pierre and Marie-Anne. That was not his business. Marie-Anne, in the final analysis, did not appear to be especially abused, and her mind was not a child's mind. Probably she would not thank him for his interest in the matter. She would tell him, like any other woman with pride, that it was none of his business and that he was presuming upon forbidden ground. He went to the window. There was scarcely a breath of air, and unfastening the screen, he thrust out his head and shoulders into the night. It was so black that he could not see the shadow of the water almost within reach of his hands, but through the chaos of gloom that lay between him and the opposite shore he made out a single point of yellow light. He was positive the light was in the cabin on the raft. And St. Pierre was probably in that cabin. A huge drop of rain splashed on his hand, and behind him he heard sweeping over the forest tops the quickening march of the deluge. There was no crash of thunder or flash of lightning when it broke. Straight down, in an inundation, it came out of a sky thick enough to slit with a knife. Carrigan drew in his head and shoulders and sniffed the sweet freshness of it. He tried again to make out the light on the raft, but it was obliterated. Mechanically he began taking off his clothes, and in a few moments he stood again at the window, naked. Thunder and lightning had caught up with the rain, and in the flashes of fire Carrigan's ghost-white face stared in the direction of the raft. In his veins was at work an insistent and impelling desire. Over there was St. Pierre, he was undoubtedly in the cabin, and something might happen if he, Dave Carrigan, took advantage of storm and gloom to go to the raft. It was almost a presentiment that drew his bare head and shoulders out through the window, and every hunting instinct in him urged him to the adventure. The stygian darkness was torn again by a flash of fire. In it he saw the river and the vivid silhouette of the distant shore. It would not be a difficult swim, and it would be good training for tomorrow. Like a badger worming his way out of a hole a bit too small for him, Carrigan drew himself through the window. A lightning flash caught him at the edge of the bateau, and he slunk back quickly against the cabin, with the thought that other eyes might be staring out into that same darkness. In the pitch gloom that followed he lowered himself quietly into the river, thrust himself under water, and struck out for the opposite shore. When he came to the surface again it was in the glare of another lightning flash. He flung the water from his face, chose a point several hundred yards above the raft, and with quick, powerful strokes set out in its direction. For ten minutes he quartered the current without raising his head. Then he paused, floating unresistingly with the slow sweep of the river, and waited for another illumination. When it came, he made out the tented raft scarcely a hundred yards away and a little below him. In the next darkness he found the edge of it and dragged himself up on the mass of timbers. The thunder had been rolling steadily westward, and David crouched low, hoping for one more flash to illumine the raft. It came at last from a mass of inky cloud far to the west, so indistinct that it made only dim shadows out of the tents and shelters, but it was sufficient to give him direction. Before its faint glare died out, he saw the deeper shadow of the cabin forward. For many minutes he lay where he had dragged himself, without making a movement in its direction. Nowhere about him could he see a sign of light, nor could he hear any sound of life. St. Pierre's people were evidently deep in slumber. Carrigan had no very definite idea of the next step in his adventure. He had swum from the bateau largely under impulse, with no preconceived scheme of action, urged chiefly by the hope that he would find St. Pierre in the cabin and that something might come of it. As for knocking at the door and rousing the chief of the Boulains from sleep--he had at the present moment no very good excuse for that. No sooner had the thought and its objection come to him than a broad shaft of light shot with startling suddenness athwart the blackness of the raft, darkened in another instant by an obscuring shadow. Swift as the light itself David's eyes turned to the source of the unexpected illumination. The door of St. Pierre's cabin was wide open. The interior was flooded with lampglow, and in the doorway stood St. Pierre himself. The chief of the Boulains seemed to be measuring the weather possibilities of the night. His subdued voice reached David, chuckling with satisfaction, as he spoke to some one who was behind him in the cabin. "Pitch and brimstone, but it's black!" he cried. "You could carve it with a knife, and stand it on end, AMANTE. But it's going west. In a few hours the stars will be out." He drew back into the cabin, and the door closed. David held his breath in amazement, staring at the blackness where a moment before the light had been. Who was it St. Pierre had called sweetheart? AMANTE! He could not have been mistaken. The word had come to him clearly, and there was but one guess to make. Marie-Anne was not on the bateau. She had played him for a fool, had completely hoodwinked him in her plot with St. Pierre. They were cleverer than he had supposed, and in darkness she had rejoined her husband on the raft! But why that senseless play of falsehood? What could be their object in wanting him to believe she was still aboard the bateau? He stood up on his feet and mopped the warm rain from his face, while the gloom hid the grim smile that came slowly to his lips. Close upon the thrill of his astonishment he felt a new stir in his blood which added impetus to his determination and his action. He was not disgusted with himself, nor was he embittered by what he had thought of a moment ago as the lying hypocrisy of his captors. To be beaten in his game of man-hunting was sometimes to be expected, and Carrigan always gave proper credit to the winners. It was also "good medicine" to know that Marie-Anne, instead of being an unhappy and neglected wife, had blinded him with an exquisitely clever simulation. Just why she had done it, and why St. Pierre had played his masquerade, it was his duty now to find out. An hour ago he would have cut off a hand before spying upon St. Pierre's wife or eavesdropping under her window. Now he felt no uneasiness of conscience as he approached the cabin, for Marie-Anne herself had destroyed all reason for any delicate discrimination on his part. The rain had almost stopped, and in one of the near tents he heard a sleepy voice. But he had no fear of chance discovery. The night would remain dark for a long time, and in his bare feet he made no sound the sharpest ears of a dog ten feet away might have heard. Close to the cabin door, yet in such a way that the sudden opening of it would not reveal him, he paused and listened. Distinctly he heard St. Pierre's voice, but not the words. A moment later came the soft, joyous laughter of a woman, and for an instant a hand seemed to grip David's heart, filling it with pain. There was no unhappiness in that laughter. It seemed, instead, to tremble in an exultation of gladness. Suddenly St. Pierre came nearer the door, and his voice was more distinct. "Chere-coeur, I tell you it is the greatest joke of my life," he heard him say. "We are safe. If it should come to the worst, we can settle the matter in another way. I can not but sing and laugh, even in the face of it all. And she, in that very innocence which amuses me so, has no suspicion--" He turned, and vainly David keyed his ears to catch the final words. The voices in the cabin grew lower. Twice he heard the soft laughter of the woman. St. Pierre's voice, when he spoke, was unintelligible. The thought that his random adventure was bringing him to an important discovery possessed Carrigan. St. Pierre, he believed, had been on the very edge of disclosing something which he would have given a great deal to know. Surely in this cabin there must be a window, and the window would be open-- Quietly he felt his way through the darkness to the shore side of the cabin. A narrow bar of light at least partly confirmed his judgment. There was a window. But it was almost entirely curtained, and it was closed. Had the curtain been drawn two inches lower, the thin stream of light would have been shut entirely out from the night. Under this window David crouched for several minutes, hoping that in the calm which was succeeding the storm it might be opened. The voices were still more indistinct inside. He scarcely heard St. Pierre, but twice again he heard the low and musical laughter of the woman. She had laughed differently with HIM--and the grim smile settled on his lips as he looked up at the narrow slit of light over his head. He had an overwhelming desire to look in. After all, it was a matter of professional business--and his duty. He was glad the curtain was drawn so low. From experiments of his own he knew there was small chance of those inside seeing him through the two-inch slit, and he raised himself boldly until his eyes were on a level with the aperture. Directly in the line of his vision was St. Pierre's wife. She was seated, and her back was toward him, so he could not see her face. She was partly disrobed, and her hair was streaming loose about her. Once, he remembered, she had spoken of fiery lights that came into her hair under certain illumination. He had seen them in the sun, but never as they revealed themselves now in that cabin lamp glow. He scarcely looked at St. Pierre, who was on his feet, looking down upon her--not until St. Pierre reached out and crumpled the smothering mass of glowing tresses in his big hands, and laughed. It was a laugh filled with the unutterable joy of possession. The woman rose to her feet. Up through her hair went her two white, bare arms, encircling St. Pierre's neck. The giant drew her close. Her slim form seemed to melt in his, and their lips met. And then the woman threw back her head, laughing, so that her glory of hair fell straight down, and she was out of reach of St. Pierre's lips. They turned. Her face fronted the window, and out in the night Carrigan stifled a cry that almost broke from his lips. For a flash he was looking straight into her eyes. Her parted lips seemed smiling at him; her white throat and bosom were bared to him. He dropped down, his heart choking him as he stumbled through the darkness to the edge of the raft. There, with the lap of the water at his feet, he paused. It was hard for him to get Breath. He stared through the gloom in the direction of the bateau. Marie-Anne Boulain, the woman he loved, was there! In her little cabin, alone, on the bateau, was St. Pierre's wife, her heart crushed. And in this cabin on the raft, forgetful of her degradation and her grief, was the vilest wretch he had ever known--St. Pierre Boulain. And with him, giving herself into his arms, caressing him with her lips and hair, was the sister of the man he had helped to hang--CARMIN FANCHET! XX The shock of the amazing discovery which Carrigan had made was as complete as it was unexpected. His eyes had looked upon the last thing in the world he might have guessed at or anticipated when they beheld through the window of St. Pierre's cabin the beautiful face and partly disrobed figure of Carmin Fanchet. The first effect of that shock had been to drive him away. His action had been involuntary, almost without the benefit of reason, as if Carmin had been Marie-Anne herself receiving the caresses which were rightfully hers, and upon which it was both insult and dishonor for him to spy. He realized now that he had made a mistake in leaving the window too quickly. But he did not move back through the gloom, for there was something too revolting in what he had seen, and with the revulsion of it a swift understanding of the truth which made his hands clench as he sat down on the edge of the raft with his feet and legs submerged in the slow-moving current of the river. The thing was not uncommon. It was the same monstrous story, as old as the river itself, but in this instance it filled him with a sickening sort of horror which gripped him at first even more than the strangeness of the fact that Carmin Fanchet was the other woman. His vision and his soul were reaching out to the bateau lying in darkness on the far side of the river, where St. Pierre's wife was alone in her unhappiness. His first impulse was to fling himself in the river and race to her--his second, to go back to St. Pierre, even in his nakedness, and call him forth to a reckoning. In his profession of man-hunting he had never had the misfortune to kill, but he could kill St. Pierre--now. His fingers dug into the slippery wood of the log under him, his blood ran hot, and in his eyes blazed the fury of an animal as he stared into the wall of gloom between him and Marie-Anne Boulain. How much did she know? That was the first question which pounded in his brain. He suddenly recalled his reference to the fight, his apology to Marie-Anne that it should happen so near to her presence, and he saw again the queer little twist of her mouth as she let slip the hint that she was not the only one of her sex who would know of tomorrow's fight. He had not noticed the significance of it then. But now it struck home. Marie-Anne was surely aware of Carmin Fanchet's presence on the raft. But did she know more than that? Did she know the truth, or was her heart filled only with suspicion and fear, aggravated by St. Pierre's neglect and his too-apparent haste to return to the raft that night? Again David's mind flashed back, recalling her defense of Carmin Fanchet when he had first told her his story of the woman whose brother he had brought to the hangman's justice. There could be but one conclusion. Marie-Anne knew Carmin Fanchet, and she also knew she was on the raft with St. Pierre. As cooler judgment returned to him, Carrigan refused to concede more than that. For any one of a dozen reasons Carmin Fanchet might be on the raft going down the river, and it was also quite within reason that Marie-Anne might have some apprehension of a woman as beautiful as Carmin, and possibly intuition had begun to impinge upon her a disturbing fear of a something that might happen. But until tonight he was confident she had fought against this suspicion, and had overridden it, even though she knew a woman more beautiful than herself was slowly drifting down the stream with her husband. She had betrayed no anxiety to him in the days that had passed; she had waited eagerly for St. Pierre; like a bird she had gone to him when at last he came, and he had seen her crushed close in St. Pierre's arms in their meeting. It was this night, with its gloom and its storm, that had made the shadowings of her unrest a torturing reality. For St. Pierre had brought her back to the bateau and had played a pitiably weak part in concealing his desire to return to the raft. So he told himself Marie-Anne did not know the truth, not as he had seen it through the window of St. Pierre's cabin. She had been hurt, for he had seen the sting of it, and in that same instant he had seen her soul rise up and triumph. He saw again the sudden fire that came into her eyes when St. Pierre urged the necessity of his haste, he saw her slim body grow tense, her red lips curve in a flash of pride and disdain. And as Carrigan thought of her in that way his muscles grew tighter, and he cursed St. Pierre. Marie-Anne might be hurt, she might guess that her husband's eyes and thoughts were too frequently upon another's face--but in the glory of her womanhood it was impossible for her to conceive of a crime such as he had witnessed through the cabin window. Of that he was sure. And then, suddenly, like a blinding sheet of lightning out of a dark sky, came back to him all that St. Pierre had said about Marie-Anne. He had pitied St. Pierre then; he had pitied this great cool-eyed giant of a man who was fighting gloriously, he had thought, in the face of a situation that would have excited most men. Frankly St. Pierre had told him Marie-Anne cared more for him than she should. With equal frankness he had revealed his wife's confessions to him, that she knew of his love for her, of his kiss upon her hair. In the blackness Carrigan's face burned hot. If he had in him the desire to kill St. Pierre now, might not St. Pierre have had an equally just desire to kill him? For he had known, even as he kissed her hair, and as his arms held her close to his breast in crossing the creek, that she was the wife of St. Pierre. And Marie-Anne-- His muscles relaxed. Slowly he lowered himself into the cool wash of the river, and struck out toward the bateau. He did not breast the current with the same fierce determination with which he had crossed through the storm to the raft, but drifted with it and reached the opposite shore a quarter of a mile below the bateau. Here he waited for a time, while the thickness of the clouds broke, and a gray light came through them, revealing dimly the narrow path of pebbly wash along the shore. Silently, a stark naked shadow in the night, he came back to the bateau and crawled through his window. He lighted a lamp, and turned it very low, and in the dim glow of it rubbed his muscles until they burned. He was fit for tomorrow, and the knowledge of that fitness filled him with a savage elation. A good-humored love of sport had induced him to fling his first half-bantering challenge into the face of Concombre Bateese, but that sentiment was gone. The approaching fight was no longer an incident, a foolish error into which he had unwittingly plunged himself. In this hour it was the biggest physical thing that had ever loomed up in his life, and he yearned for the dawn with the eagerness of a beast that waits for the kill which comes with the break of day. But it was not the half-breed's face he saw under the hammering of his blows. He could not hate the half-breed. He could not even dislike him now. He forced himself to bed, and later he slept. In the dream that came to him it was not Bateese who faced him in battle, but St. Pierre Boulain. He awoke with that dream a thing of fire in his brain. The sun was not yet up, but the flush of it was painting the east, and he dressed quietly and carefully, listening for some sound of awakening beyond the bulkhead. If Marie-Anne was awake, she was very still. There was noise ashore. Across the river he could hear the singing of men, and through his window saw the white smoke of early fires rising above the tree-tops. It was the Indian who unlocked the door and brought in his breakfast, and it was the Indian who returned for the dishes half an hour later. After that Carrigan waited, tense with the desire for action to begin. He sensed no premonition of evil about to befall him. Every nerve and sinew in his body was alive for the combat. He thrilled with an overwhelming confidence, a conviction of his ability to win, an almost dangerous, self-conviction of approaching triumph in spite of the odds in weight and brute strength which were pitted against him. A dozen times he listened at the bulkhead between him and Marie-Anne, and still he heard no movement on the other side. It was eight o'clock when one of the bateau men appeared at the door and asked if he was ready. Quickly David joined him. He forgot his taunts to Concombre Bateese, forgot the softly padded gloves in his pack with which he had promised to pommel the half-breed into oblivion. He was thinking only of naked fists. Into a canoe he followed the bateau man, who turned his craft swiftly in the direction of the opposite shore. And as they went, David was sure he caught the slight movement of a curtain at the little window of Marie-Anne's forward cabin. He smiled back and raised his hand, and at that the curtain was drawn back entirely, and he knew that St. Pierre's wife was watching him as he went to the fight. The raft was deserted, but a little below it, on a wide strip of beach made hard and smooth by flood water, had gathered a crowd of men. It seemed odd to David they should remain so quiet, when he knew the natural instinct of the riverman was to voice his emotion at the top of his lungs. He spoke of this to the bateau man, who shrugged his shoulders and grinned. "Eet ees ze command of St. Pierre," he explained. "St. Pierre say no man make beeg noise at--what you call heem--funeral? An' theese goin' to be wan gran' fun-e-RAL, m'sieu!" "I see," David nodded. He did not grin back at the other's humor. He was looking at the crowd. A giant figure had appeared out of the center of it and was coming slowly down to the river. It was St. Pierre. Scarcely had the prow of the canoe touched shore when David leaped out and hurried to meet him. Behind St. Pierre came Bateese, the half-breed. He was stripped to the waist and naked from the knees down. His gorilla-like arms hung huge and loose at his sides, and the muscles of his hulking body stood out like carven mahogany in the glisten of the morning sun. He was like a grizzly, a human beast of monstrous power, something to look at, to back away from, to fear. Yet, David scarcely noticed him. He met St. Pierre, faced him, and stopped--and he had gone swiftly to this meeting, so that the chief of the Boulains was within earshot of all his men. St. Pierre was smiling. He held out his hand as he had held it out once before in the bateau cabin, and his big voice boomed out a greeting. Carrigan did not answer, nor did he look at the extended hand. For an instant the eyes of the two men met, and then, swift as lightning, Carrigan's arm shot out, and with the flat of his hand he struck St. Pierre a terrific blow squarely on the cheek. The sound of the blow was like the smash of a paddle on smooth water. Not a riverman but heard it, and as St. Pierre staggered back, flung almost from his feet by its force, a subdued cry of amazement broke from the waiting men. Concombre Bateese stood like one stupefied. And then, in another flash, St. Pierre had caught himself and whirled like a wild beast. Every muscle in his body was drawn for a gigantic, overwhelming leap; his eyes blazed; the fury of a beast was in his face. Before all his people he had suffered the deadliest insult that could be offered a man of the Three River Country--a blow struck with the flat of another's hand. Anything else one might forgive, but not that. Such a blow, if not avenged, was a brand that passed down into the second and third generations, and even children would call out "Yellow-Back--Yellow-Back," to the one who was coward enough to receive it without resentment. A rumbling growl rose in the throat of Concombre Bateese in that moment when it seemed as though St. Pierre Boulain was about to kill the man who had struck him. He saw the promise of his own fight gone in a flash. For no man in all the northland could now fight David Carrigan ahead of St. Pierre. David waited, prepared to meet the rush of a madman. And then, for a second time, he saw a mighty struggle in the soul of St. Pierre. The giant held himself back. The fury died out of his face, but his great hands remained clenched as he said, for David alone, "That was a playful blow, m'sieu? It was--a joke?" "It was for you, St. Pierre," replied Carrigan, "You are a coward--and a skunk. I swam to the raft last night, looked through your window, and saw what happened there. You are not fit for a decent man to fight, yet I will fight you, if you are not too great a coward--and dare to let our wagers stand as they were made." St. Pierre's eyes widened, and for a breath or two he stared at Carrigan, as if looking into him and not at him. His big hands relaxed, and slowly the panther-like readiness went out of his body. Those who looked beheld the transformation in amazement, for of all who waited only St. Pierre and the half-breed had heard Carrigan's words, though they had seen and heard the blow of insult. "You swam to the raft," repeated St. Pierre in a low voice, as if doubting what he had heard. "You looked through the window--and saw--" David nodded. He could not cover the sneering poison in his voice, his contempt for the man who stood before him. "Yes, I looked through the window. And I saw you, and the lowest woman on the Three Rivers--the sister of a man I helped to hang, I--" "STOP!" St. Pierre's voice broke out of him like the sudden crash of thunder. He came a step nearer, his face livid, his eyes shooting flame. With a mighty effort he controlled himself again. And then, as if he saw something which David could not see, he tried to smile, and in that same instant David caught a grin cutting a great slash across the face of Concombre Bateese. The change that came over St. Pierre now was swift as sunlight coming out from shadowing cloud. A rumble grew in his great chest. It broke in a low note of laughter from his lips, and he faced the bateau across the river. "M'sieu, you are sorry for HER. Is that it? You would fight--" "For the cleanest, finest little girl who ever lived--your wife!" "It is funny," said St. Pierre, as if speaking to himself, and still looking at the bateau. "Yes, it is very funny, ma belle Marie-Anne! He has told you he loves you, and he has kissed your hair and held you in his arms--yet he wants to fight me because he thinks I am steeped in sin, and to make me fight in place of Bateese he has called my Carmin a low woman! So what else can I do? I must fight. I must whip him until he can not walk. And then I will send him back for you to nurse, cherie, and for that blessing I think he will willingly take my punishment! Is it not so, m'sieu?" He was smiling and no longer excited when he turned to David. "M'sieu, I will fight you. And the wagers shall stand. And in this hour let us be honest, like men, and make confession. You love ma belle Jeanne--Marie-Anne? Is it not so? And I--I love my Carmin, whose brother you hanged, as I love no other woman in the world. Now, if you will have it so, let us fight!" He began stripping off his shirt, and with a bellow in his throat Concombre Bateese slouched away like a beaten gorilla to explain to St. Pierre's people the change in the plan of battle. And as that news spread like fire in the fir-tops, there came but a single cry in response--shrill and terrible--and that was from the throat of Andre, the Broken Man. XXI As Carrigan stripped off his shirt, he knew that at least in one way he had met more than his match in St. Pierre Boulain. In the splendid service of which he was a part he had known many men of iron and steel, men whose nerve and coolness not even death could very greatly disturb. Yet St. Pierre, he conceded, was their master--and his own. For a flash he had transformed the chief of the Boulains into a volcano which had threatened to break in savage fury, yet neither the crash nor destruction had come. And now St. Pierre was smiling again, as Carrigan faced him, stripped to the waist. He betrayed no sign of the tempest of passion that had swept him a few minutes before. His cool, steely eyes had in them a look that was positively friendly, as Concombre Bateese marked in the hard sand the line of the circle within which no man might come. And as he did this and St. Pierre's people crowded close about it, St. Pierre himself spoke in a low voice to David. "M'sieu, it seems a shame that we should fight. I like you. I have always loved a man who would fight to protect a woman, and I shall be careful not to hurt you more than is necessary to make you see reason--and to win the wagers. So you need not be afraid of my killing you, as Bateese might have done. And I promise not to destroy your beauty, for the sake of--the lady in the bateau. My Carmin, if she knew you spied through her window last night, would say kill you with as little loss of time as possible, for as regards you her sweet disposition was spoiled when you hung her brother, m'sieu. Yet to me she is an angel!" Contempt for the man who spoke of his wife and the infamous Carmin Fanchet in the same breath drew a sneer to Carrigan's lips. He nodded toward the waiting circle of men. "They are ready for the show, St. Pierre. You talk big. Now let us see if you can fight." For another moment St. Pierre hesitated. "I am so sorry, m'sieu-- "Are you ready, St. Pierre?" "It is not fair, and she will never forgive me. You are no match for me. I am half again as heavy." "And as big a coward as you are a scoundrel, St. Pierre." "It is like a man fighting a boy." "Yet it is less dishonorable than betraying the woman who is your wife for another who should have been hanged along with her brother, St. Pierre." Boulain's face darkened. He drew back half a dozen steps and cried out a word to Bateese. Instantly the circle of waiting men grew tense as the half-breed jerked the big handkerchief from his head and held it out at arm's length. Yet, with that eagerness for the fight there was something else which Carrigan was swift to sense. The attitude of the watchers was not one of uncertainty or of very great expectation, in spite of the staring faces and the muscular tightening of the line. He knew what was passing in their minds and in the low whispers from lip to lip. They were pitying him. Now that he stood stripped, with only a few paces between him and the giant figure of St. Pierre, the unfairness of the fight struck home even to Concombre Bateese. Only Carrigan himself knew how like tempered steel the sinews of his body were built. But to the eye, in size alone, he stood like a boy before St. Pierre. And St. Pierre's people, their voices stilled by the deadly inequality of it, were waiting for a slaughter and not a fight. A smile came to Carrigan's lips as he saw Bateese hesitating to drop the handkerchief, and with the swiftness of the trained fighter he made his first plan for the battle before the cloth fell from the half-breed's fingers, As the handkerchief fluttered to the ground, he faced St. Pierre, the smile gone. "Never smile when you fight," the greatest of all masters of the ring had told him. "Never show anger, Don't betray any emotion at all if you can help it." Carrigan wondered what the old ring-master would say could he see him now, backing away slowly from St. Pierre as the giant advanced upon him, for he knew his face was betraying to St. Pierre and his people the deadliest of all sins--anxiety and indecision. Very closely, yet with eyes that seemed to shift uneasily, he watched the effect of his trick on Boulain. Twice the huge riverman followed him about the ring of sand, and the steely glitter in his eyes changed to laughter, and the tense faces of the men about them relaxed. A subdued ripple of merriment rose where there had been silence. A third time David maneuvered his retreat, and his eyes shot furtively to Concombre Bateese and the men at his back. They were grinning. The half-breed's mouth was wide open, and his grotesque body hung limp and astonished. This was not a fight! It was a comedy--like a rooster following a sparrow around a barnyard! And then a still funnier thing happened, for David began to trot in a circle around St. Pierre, dodging and feinting, and keeping always at a safe distance. A howl of laughter came from Bateese and broke in a roar from the men. St. Pierre stopped in his tracks, a grin on his face, his big arms and shoulders limp and unprepared as Carrigan dodged in close and out again. And then-- A howl broke in the middle of the half-breed's throat. Where there had been laughter, there came a sudden shutting off of sound, a great gasp, as if made by choking men. Swifter than anything they had ever seen in human action Carrigan had leaped in. They saw him strike. They heard the blow. They saw St. Pierre's great head rock back, as if struck from his shoulders by a club, and they saw and heard another blow, and a third--like so many flashes of lightning--and St. Pierre went down as if shot. The man they had laughed at was no longer like a hopping sparrow. He was waiting, bent a little forward, every muscle in his body ready for action. They watched for him to leap upon his fallen enemy, kicking and gouging and choking in the riverman way. But David waited, and St. Pierre staggered to his feet. His mouth was bleeding and choked with sand, and a great lump was beginning to swell over his eye. A deadly fire blazed in his face, as he rushed like a mad bull at the insignificant opponent who had tricked and humiliated him. This time Carrigan did not retreat, but held his ground, and a yell of joy went up from Bateese as the mighty bulk of the giant descended upon his victim. It was an avalanche of brute-force, crushing in its destructiveness, and Carrigan seemed to reach for it as it came upon him. Then his head went down, swifter than a diving grebe, and as St. Pierre's arm swung like an oaken beam over his shoulder, his own shot in straight for the pit of the other's stomach. It was a bull's-eye blow with the force of a pile-driver behind it, and the groan that forced its way out of St. Pierre's vitals was heard by every ear in the cordon of watchers. His weight stopped, his arms opened, and through that opening Carrigan's fist went a second time to the other's jaw, and a second time the great St. Pierre Boulain sprawled out upon the sand. And there he lay, and made no effort to rise. Concombre Bateese, with his great mouth agape, stood for an instant as if the blow had stunned him in place of his master. Then, suddenly he came to life, and leaped to David's side. "Diable! Tonnerre! You have not fight Concombre Bateese yet!" he howled. "Non, you have cheat me, you have lie, you have run lak cat from Concombre Bateese, ze stronges' man on all T'ree River! You are wan' gran' coward, wan poltroon, an' you 'fraid to fight ME, who ees greates' fightin' man in all dees countree! Sapristi! Why you no hit Concombre Bateese, m'sieu? Why you no hit ze greates' fightin' man w'at ees--" David did not hear the rest. The opportunity was too tempting. He swung, and with a huge grunt the gorilla-like body of Concombre Bateese rolled over that of the chief of the Boulains. This time Carrigan did not wait, but followed up so closely that the half-breed had scarcely gathered the crook out of his knees when another blow on the jaw sent him into the sand again. Three times he tried the experiment of regaining his feet, and three times he was knocked down. After the last blow he raised himself groggily to a sitting posture, and there he remained, blinking like a stunned pig, with his big hands clutching in the sand. He stared up unseeingly at Carrigan, who waited over him, and then stupidly at the transfixed cordon of men, whose eyes were bulging and who were holding their breath in the astonishment of this miracle which had descended upon them. They heard Bateese muttering something incoherent as his head wobbled, and St. Pierre himself seemed to hear it, for he stirred and raised himself slowly, until he also was sitting in the sand, staring at Bateese. Carrigan picked up his shirt, and the riverman who had brought him from the bateau returned with him to the canoe. There was no demonstration behind them. To David himself the whole thing had been an amazing surprise, and he was not at all reluctant to leave as quickly as his dignity would permit, before some other of St. Pierre's people offered to put a further test upon his prowess. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to thank God at the top of his voice for the absurd run of luck that had made his triumph not only easy but utterly complete. He had expected to win, but he had also expected a terrific fight before the last blow was struck. And there had been no fight! He was returning to the bateau without a scratch, his hair scarcely ruffled, and he had defeated not only St. Pierre, but the giant half-breed as well! It was inconceivable--and yet it had happened; a veritable burlesque, an opera-bouffe affair that might turn quickly into a tragedy if either St. Pierre or Concombre Bateese guessed the truth of it. For in that event he might have to face them again, with the god of luck playing fairly, and he was honest enough with himself to confess that the idea no longer held either thrill or desire for him. Now that he had seen both St. Pierre and Bateese stripped for battle, he had no further appetite for fistic discussion with them. After all, there was a merit in caution, and he had several lucky stars to bless just at the present moment! Inwardly he was a bit suspicious of the ultimate ending of the affair. St. Pierre had almost no cause for complaint, for it was his own carelessness, coupled with his opponent's luck, that had been his undoing--and luck and carelessness are legitimate factors of every fight, Carrigan told himself. But with Bateese it was different. He had held up his big jaw, uncovered and tempting, entreating some one to hit him, and Carrigan had yielded to that temptation. The blow would have stunned an ox. Three others like it had left the huge half-breed sitting weak-mindedly in the sand, and no one of those three blows were exactly according to the rules of the game. They had been mightily efficacious, but the half-breed might demand a rehearing when he came fully into his senses. Not until they were half-way to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was grinning from ear to ear. "Well, what did you think of it, comrade?" The other gave his shoulders a joyous shrug. "Mon Dieu! Have you heard of wan garcon named Joe Clamart, m'sieu? Non? Well, I am Joe Clamart what was once great fightin' man. Bateese hav' whip' me five times, m'sieu--so I say it was wan gr-r-r-a-n' fight! Many years ago I have seen ze same t'ing in Montreal--ze boxeur de profession. Oui, an' Rene Babin pays me fifteen prime martin against which I put up three scrubby red fox that you would win. They were bad, or I would not have gambled, m'sieu. It ees fonny!" "Yes, it is funny," agreed David. "I think it is a bit too funny. It is a pity they did not stand up on their legs a little longer!" Suddenly an inspiration hit him. "Joe, what do you say--shall you and I return and put up a REAL fight for them?" Like a sprung trap Joe Clamart's grinning mouth dosed. "Non, non, non," he grunted. "Dere has been plenty fight, an' Joe Clamart mus' save hees face tor Antoinette Roland, who hate ze sign of fight lak she hate ze devil, m'sieu! Non, non!" His paddle dug deeper into the water, and David's heart felt lighter. If Joe was an average barometer, and he was a husky and fearless-looking chap, it was probable that neither St. Pierre nor Bateese would demand another chance at him, and St. Pierre would pay his wager. He could see no one aboard the bateau when he climbed from the canoe. Looking back, he saw that two other canoes had started from the opposite shore. Then he went to his cabin door, opened it, and entered, Scarcely had the door closed behind him when he stopped, staring toward the window that opened on the river. Standing full in the morning glow of it was Marie-Anne Boulain. She was facing him. Her cheeks were flushed. Her red lips were parted. Her eyes were aglow with a fire which she made no effort to hide from him. In her hand she still held the binoculars he had left on the cabin table. He guessed the truth. Through the glasses she had watched the whole miserable fiasco. He felt creeping over him a sickening shame, and his eyes fell slowly from her to the table. What he saw there caught his breath in the middle. It was the entire surgical outfit of Nepapinas, the old Indian doctor. And there were basins of water, and white strips of linen ready for use, and a pile of medicated cotton, and all sorts of odds and ends that one might apply to ease the agonies of a dying man, And beyond the table, huddled in so small a heap that he was almost hidden by it, was Nepapinas himself, disappointment writ in his mummy-like face as his beady eyes rested on David. The evidence could not be mistaken. They had expected him to come back more nearly dead than alive, and St. Pierre's wife had prepared for the thing she had thought inevitable. Even his bed was nicely turned down, its fresh white sheets inviting an occupant! And David, looking at St. Pierre's wife again, felt his heart beating hard in his breast at the look which was in her eyes. It was not the scintillation of laughter, and the flame in her cheeks was not embarrassment. She was not amused. The ludicrousness of her mislaid plans had not struck her as they had struck him. She had placed the binoculars on the table, and slowly she came to him. Her hands reached out, and her fingers rested like the touch of velvet on his arms. "It was splendid!" she said softly, "It was splendid!" She was very near, her breast almost touching him, her hands creeping up until the tips of her fingers rested on his shoulders, her scarlet mouth so close he could feel the soft breath of it in his face. "It was splendid!" she whispered again. And then, suddenly, she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him. So swiftly was it done that she was gone before he sensed that wild touch of her lips against his own. Like a swallow she was at the door, and the door opened and closed behind her, and for a moment he heard the quick running of her feet. Then he looked at the old Indian, and the Indian, too, was staring at the door through which St. Pierre's wife had flown. XXII For many seconds that seemed like minutes David stood where she had left him, while Nepapinas rose gruntingly to his feet, and gathered up his belongings, and hobbled sullenly to the bateau door and out. He was scarcely conscious of the Indian's movement, for his soul was aflame with a red-hot fire. Deliberately--with that ravishing glory of something in her eyes--St. Pierre's wife had kissed him! On her tiptoes, her cheeks like crimson flowers, she had given her still redder lips to him! And his own lips burned, and his heart pounded hard, and he stared for a time like one struck dumb at the spot where she had stood by the window. Then suddenly, he turned to the door and flung it wide open, and on his lips was the reckless cry of Marie-Anne's name. But St. Pierre's wife was gone, and Nepapinas was gone, and at the tail of the big sweep sat only Joe Clamart, guarding watchfully. The two canoes were drawing near, and in one of them were two men, and in the other three, and David knew that--like Joe Clamart--they were watchers set over him by St. Pierre. Then a fourth canoe left the far shore, and when it had reached mid-stream, he recognized the figure in the stern as that of Andre, the Broken Man. The other, he thought, must be St. Pierre. He went back into the cabin and stood where Marie-Anne had stood--at the window. Nepapinas had not taken away the basins of water, and the bandages were still there, and the pile of medicated cotton, and the suspiciously made-up bed. After all, he was losing something by not occupying the bed--and yet if St. Pierre or Bateese had messed him up badly, and a couple of fellows had lugged him in between them, it was probable that Marie-Anne would not have kissed him. And that kiss of St. Pierre's wife would remain with him until the day he died! He was thinking of it, the swift, warm thrill of her velvety lips, red as strawberries and twice as sweet, when the door opened and St. Pierre came in. The sight of him, in this richest moment of his life, gave David no sense of humiliation or shame. Between him and St. Pierre rose swiftly what he had seen last night--Carmin Fanchet in all the lure of her disheveled beauty, crushed close in the arms of the man whose wife only a moment before had pressed her lips close to his; and as the eyes of the two met, there came over him a desire to tell the other what had happened, that he might see him writhe with the sting of the two-edged thing with which he was playing. Then he saw that even that would not hurt St. Pierre, for the chief of the Boulains, standing there with the big lump over his eye, had caught sight of the things on the table and the nicely turned down bed, and his one good eye lit up with sudden laughter, and his white teeth flashed in an understanding smile. "TONNERRE, I said she would nurse you with gentle hands," he rumbled. "See what you have missed, M'sieu Carrigan!" "I received something which I shall remember longer than a fine nursing," retorted David. "And yet right now I have a greater interest in knowing what you think of the fight, St. Pierre--and if you have come to pay your wager." St. Pierre was chuckling mysteriously in his throat. "It was splendid--splendid," he said, repeating Marie-Anne's words. "And Joe Clamart says she ran out, blushing like a red rose in August, and that she said no word, but flew like a bird into the white-birch ashore!" "She was dismayed because I beat you, St. Pierre." "Non, non--she was like a lark filled with joy." Suddenly his eyes rested on the binoculars. David nodded. "Yes, she saw it all through the glasses." St. Pierre seated himself at the table and heaved out a groan as he took one of the bandage strips between his fingers. "She saw my disgrace. And she didn't wait to bandage ME up, did she?" "Perhaps she thought Carmin Fanchet would do that, St. Pierre." "And I am ashamed to go to Carmin--with this great lump over my eye, m'sieu. And on top of that disgrace--you insist that I pay the wager?" "I do." St. Pierre's face hardened. "OUI, I am to pay. I am to tell you all I know about that BETE NOIR--Black Roger Audemard. Is it not so?" "That is the wager." "But after I have told you--what then? Do you recall that I gave you any other guarantee, M'sieu Carrigan? Did I say I would let you go? Did I promise I would not kill you and sink your body to the bottom of the river? If I did, I can not remember." "Are you a beast, St. Pierre--a murderer as well as--" "Stop! Do not tell me again what you saw through the window, for it has nothing to do with this. I am not a beast, but a man. Had I been a beast, I should have killed you the first day I saw you in this cabin. I am not threatening to kill you, and yet it may be necessary if you insist that I pay the wager. You understand, m'sieu. To refuse to pay a wager is a greater crime among my people than the killing of a man, if there is a good reason for the killing. I am helpless. I must pay, if you insist. Before I pay it is fair that I give you warning." "You mean?" "I mean nothing, as yet. I can not say what it will be necessary for me to do, after you have heard what I know about Roger Audemard. I am quite settled on a plan just now, m'sieu, but the plan might change at any moment. I am only warning you that it is a great hazard, and that you are playing with a fire of which you know nothing, because it has not burned you yet." Carrigan seated himself slowly in a chair opposite St. Pierre, with the table between them. "You are wasting time in attempting to frighten me," he said. "I shall insist on the payment of the wager, St Pierre." For a moment St. Pierre was clearly troubled. Then his lips tightened, and he smiled grimly over the table at David. "I am sorry, M'sieu David. I like you. You are a fighting man and no coward, and I should like to travel shoulder to shoulder with you in many things. And such a thing might be, for you do not understand. I tell you it would have been many times better for you had I whipped you out there, and it had been you--and not me--to pay the wager!" "It is Roger Audemard I am interested in, St. Pierre. Why do you hesitate?" "I? Hesitate? I am not hesitating, m'sieu. I am giving you a chance." He leaned forward, his great arms bent on the table. "And you insist, M'sieu David?" "Yes, I insist." Slowly the fingers of St. Pierre's hands closed into knotted fists, and he said in a low voice, "Then I will pay, m'sieu. _I_ AM ROGER AUDEMARD!" XXIII The astounding statement of the man who sat opposite him held David speechless. He had guessed at some mysterious relationship between St. Pierre and the criminal he was after, but not this, and Roger Audemard, with his hands unclenching and a slow humor beginning to play about his mouth, waited coolly for him to recover from his amazement. In those moments, when his heart seemed to have stopped beating, Carrigan was staring at the other, but his mind had shot beyond him--to the woman who was his wife. Marie-Anne AUDEMARD--the wife of Black Roger! He wanted to cry out against the possibility of such a fact, yet he sat like one struck dumb, as the monstrous truth took possession of his brain and a whirlwind of understanding swept upon him. He was thinking quickly, and with a terrific lack of sentiment now. Opposite him sat Black Roger, the wholesale murderer. Marie-Anne was his wife. Carmin Fanchet, sister of a murderer, was simply one of his kind. And Bateese, the man-gorilla, and the Broken Man, and all the dark-skinned pack about them were of Black Roger's breed and kind. Love for a woman had blinded him to the facts which crowded upon him now. Like a lamb he had fallen among wolves, and he had tried to believe in them. No wonder Bateese and the man he had known as St. Pierre had betrayed such merriment at times! A fighting coolness possessed him as he spoke to Black Roger. "I will admit this is a surprise. And yet you have cleared up a number of things very quickly. It proves to me again that comedy is not very far removed from tragedy at times." "I am glad you see the humor of it, M'sieu David." Black Roger was smiling as pleasantly as his swollen eye would permit. "We must not be too serious when we die. If I were to die a-hanging, I would sing as the rope choked me, just to show the world one need not be unhappy because his life is coming to an end." "I suppose you understand that ultimately I am going to give you that opportunity," said David. Almost eagerly Black Roger leaned toward him over the table. "You believe you are going to hang me?" "I am sure of it." "And you are willing to wager the point, M'sieu David?" "It is impossible to gamble with a condemned man." Black Roger chuckled, rubbing his big hands together until they made a rasping sound, and his one good eye glowed at Carrigan. "Then I will make a wager with myself, M'sieu David. MA FOI, I swear that before the leaves fall from the trees, you will be pleading for the friendship of Black Roger Audemard, and you will be as much in love with Carmin Fanchet as I am! And as for Marie-Anne--" He thrust back his chair and rose to his feet, the old note of subdued laughter rumbling in his chest. "And because I make this wager with myself, I cannot kill you, M'sieu David--though that might be the best thing to do. I am going to take you to the Chateau Boulain, which is in the forests of the Yellowknife, beyond the Great Slave. Nothing will happen to you if you make no effort to escape. If you do that, you will surely die. And that would hurt me, M'sieu David, because I love you like a brother, and in the end I know you are going to grip the hand of Black Roger Audemard, and get down on your knees to Carmin Fanchet. And as for Marie-Anne--" Again he interrupted himself, and went out of the cabin, laughing. And there was no mistake in the metallic click of the lock outside the door. For a time David did not move from his seat near the table. He had not let Roger Audemard see how completely the confession had upset his inner balance, but he made no pretense of concealing the thing from himself now. He was in the power of a cut-throat, who in turn had an army of cut-throats at his back, and both Marie-Anne and Carmin Fanchet were a part of this ring. And he was not only a prisoner. It was probable, under the circumstances, that Black Roger would make an end of him when a convenient moment came. It was even more than a probability. It was a grim necessity. To let him live and escape would be fatal to Black Roger. From back of these convictions, riding over them as if to demoralize any coherence and logic that might go with the evidence he was building up, came question after question, pounding at him one after the other, until his mind became more than ever a whirling chaos of uncertainty. If St. Pierre was Black Roger, why would he confess to that fact simply to pay a wager? What reason could he have for letting him live at all? Why had not Bateese killed him? Why had Marie-Anne nursed him back to life? His mind shot to the white strip of sand in which he had nearly died. That, at least, was convincing. Learning in some way that he was after Black Roger, they had attempted to do away with him there. But if that were so, why was it Bateese and Black Roger's wife and the Indian Nepapinas had risked so much to make him live, when if they had left him where he had fallen he would have died and caused them no trouble? There was something exasperatingly uncertain and illogical about it all. Was it possible that St. Pierre Boulain was playing a huge joke on him? Even that was inconceivable. For there was Carmin Fanchet, a fitting companion for a man like Black Roger, and there was Marie-Anne, who, if it had been a joke, would not have played her part so well. Suddenly his mind was filled only with her. Had she been his friend, using all her influence to protect him, because her heart was sick of the environment of which she was a part? His own heart jumped at the thought. It was easy to believe. In Marie-Anne he had faith, and that faith refused to be destroyed, but persisted--even clearer and stronger as he thought again of Carmin Fanchet and Black Roger. In his heart grew the conviction it was sacrilege to believe the kiss she had given him that morning was a lie. It was something else--a spontaneous gladness, a joyous exultation that he had returned unharmed, a thing unplanned in the soul of the woman, leaping from her before she could stop it. Then had come shame, and she had run away from him so swiftly he had not seen her face again after the touch of her lips. If it had been a subterfuge, a lie, she would not have done that. He rose to his feet and paced restlessly back and forth as he tried to bring together a few tangled bits of the puzzle. He heard voices outside, and very soon felt the movement of the bateau under his feet, and through one of the shoreward windows he saw trees and sandy beach slowly drifting away. On that shore, as far as his eyes could travel up and down, he saw no sign of Marie-Anne, but there remained a canoe, and near the canoe stood Black Roger Audemard, and beyond him, huddled like a charred stump in the sand, was Andre, the Broken Man. On the opposite shore the raft was getting under way. During the next half-hour several things happened which told him there was no longer a sugar-coating to his imprisonment. On each side of the bateau two men worked at his windows, and when they had finished, no one of them could be opened more than a few inches. Then came the rattle of the lock at the door, the grating of a key, and somewhat to Carrigan's surprise it was Bateese who came in. The half-reed bore no facial evidence of the paralyzing blows which had knocked him out a short time before. His jaw, on which they had landed, was as aggressive as ever, yet in his face and his attitude, as he stared curiously at Carrigan, there was no sign of resentment or unfriendliness. Nor did he seem to be ashamed. He merely stared, with the curious and rather puzzled eyes of a small boy gazing at an inexplicable oddity. Carrigan, standing before him, knew what was passing in the other's mind, and the humor of it brought a smile to his lips. Instantly Concombre's face split into a wide grin. "MON DIEU, w'at if you was on'y brother to Concombre Bateese, m'sieu. T'ink of zat--you--me--FRERE D'ARMES! VENTRE SAINT GRIS, but we mak' all fightin' men in nort' countree run lak rabbits ahead of ze fox! OUI, we mak' gr-r-r-eat pair, m'sieu--you, w'at knock down Bateese--an' Bateese, w'at keel polar bear wit hees naked hands, w'at pull down trees, w'at chew flint w'en hees tobacco gone." His voice had risen, and suddenly there came a laugh from outside the door, and Concombre cut himself short and his mouth closed with a snap. It was Joe Clamart who had laughed. "I w'ip heem five time, an' now I w'ip heem seex!" hissed Bateese in an undertone. "Two time each year I w'ip zat gargon Joe Clamart so he understan' w'at good fightin' man ees. An' you will w'ip heem, eh, m'sieu? Oui? An' I will breeng odder good fightin' mans for you to w'ip--all w'at Concombre Bateese has w'ipped--ten, dozen, forty--an' you w'ip se gran' bunch, m'sieu. Eh, shall we mak' ze bargain?" "You are planning a pleasant time for me, Bateese," said Carrigan, "but I am afraid it will be impossible. You see, this captain of yours, Black Roger Audemard--" "W'at!" Bateese jumped as if stung. "W'at you say, m'sieu?" "I said that Roger Audemard, Black Roger, the man I thought was St. Pierre Boulain--" Carrigan said no more. What he had started to say was unimportant compared with the effect of Roger Audernard's name on Concombre Bateese. A deadly light glittered in the half-breed's eyes, and for the first time David realized that in the grotesque head of the riverman was a brain quick to grip at the significance of things. The fact was evident that Black Roger had not confided in Bateese as to the price of the wager and the confession of his identity, and for a moment after the repetition of Audemard's name came from David's lips the half-breed stood as if something had stunned him. Then slowly, as if forcing the words in the face of a terrific desire that had transformed his body into a hulk of quivering steel, he said: "M'sieu--I come with message--from St. Pierre. You see windows--closed. Outside door--she locked. On bot' sides de bateau, all de time, we watch. You try get away, an' we keel you. Zat ees all. We shoot. We five mans on ze bateau, all ze day, TOUTE LA NUIT. You unnerstan'?" He turned sullenly, waiting for no reply, and the door opened and closed after him--and again came the snap of the lock outside. Steadily the bateau swept down the big river that day. There was no let-up in the steady creaking of the long sweep. Even in the swifter currents David could hear the working of it, and he knew he had seen the last of the more slowly moving raft. Near one of the partly open windows he heard two men talking just before the bateau shot into the Brule Point rapids. They were strange voices. He learned that Audemard's huge raft was made up of thirty-five cribs, seven abreast, and that nine times between the Point Brule and the Yellowknife the raft would be split up, so that each crib could be run through dangerous rapids by itself. That would be a big job, David assured himself. It would be slow work as well as hazardous, and as his own life was in no immediate jeopardy, he would have ample time in which to formulate some plan of action for himself. At the present moment, it seemed, the one thing for him to do was to wait--and behave himself, according to the half-breed's instructions. There was, when he came to think about it, a saving element of humor about it all. He had always wanted to make a trip down the Three Rivers in a bateau. And now--he was making it! At noon a guard brought in his dinner. He could not recall that he had ever seen this man before, a tall, lithe fellow built to run like a hound, and who wore a murderous-looking knife at his belt. As the door opened, David caught a glimpse of two others. They were business-like looking individuals, with muscles built for work or fight; one sitting cross-legged on the bateau deck with a rifle over his knees, and the other standing with a rifle in his hand. The man who brought his dinner wasted no time or words. He merely nodded, murmured a curt bonjour, and went out. And Carrigan, as he began to eat, did not have to tell himself twice that Audemard had been particular in his selection of the bateau's crew, and that the eyes of the men he had seen could be as keen as a hawk's when leveled over the tip of a rifle barrel. They meant business, and he felt no desire to smile in the face of them, as he had smiled at Concombre Bateese. It was another man, and a stranger, who brought in his supper. And for two hours after that, until the sun went down and gloom began to fall, the bateau sped down the river. It had made forty miles that day, he figured. It was still light when the bateau was run ashore and tied up, but tonight there were no singing voices or wild laughter of men whose hours of play-time and rest had come. To Carrigan, looking through his window, there was an oppressive menace about it all. The shadowy figures ashore were more like a death-watch than a guard, and to dispel the gloom of it he lighted two of the lamps in the cabin, whistled, drummed a simple chord he knew on the piano, and finally settled down to smoking his pipe. He would have welcomed the company of Bateese, or Joe Clamart, or one of the guards, and as his loneliness grew upon him there was something of companionship even in the subdued voices he heard occasionally outside. He tried to read, but the printed words jumbled themselves and meant nothing. It was ten o'clock, and clouds had darkened the night, when through his open windows he heard a shout coming from the river. Twice it came before it was answered from the bateau, and the second time Carrigan recognized it as the voice of Roger Audemard. A brief interval passed between that and the scraping of a canoe alongside, and then there was a low conversation in which even Audemard's great voice was subdued, and after that the grating of a key in the lock, and the opening of the door, and Black Roger came in, bearing an Indian reed basket under his arm. Carrigan did not rise to meet him. It was not like the coming of the old St. Pierre, and on Black Roger's lips there was no twist of a smile, nor in his eyes the flash of good-natured greeting. His face was darkly stern, as if he had traveled far and hard on an unpleasant mission, but in it there was no shadow of menace, as there had been in that of Concombre Bateese. It was rather the face of a tired man, and yet David knew what he saw was not physical exhaustion. Black Roger guessed something of his thought, and his mouth for an instant repressed a smile. "Yes, I have been having a rough time," he nodded, "This is for you!" He placed the basket on the table. It held half a bushel, and was filled to the curve of the handle. What lay in it was hidden under a cloth securely tied about it. "And you are responsible," he added, stretching himself in a chair with a gesture of weariness. "I should kill you, Carrigan. And instead of that I bring you good things to eat! Half the day she has been fussing with the things in the basket, and then insisted that I bring them to you. And I have brought them simply to tell you another thing. I am sorry for her. I think, M'sieu Carrigan, you will find as many tears in the basket as anything else, for her heart is crushed and sick because of the humiliation she brought upon herself this morning." He was twisting his big, rough hands, and David's own heart went sick as he saw the furrowed lines that had deepened in the other's face. Black Roger did not look at him as he went on. "Of course, she told me. She tells me everything. And if she knew I was telling you this, I think she would kill herself. But I want you to understand. She is not what you might think she is. That kiss came from the lips of the best woman God ever made, M'sieu Carrigan!" David, with the blood in him running like fire, heard himself answering, "I know it. She was excited, glad you had not stained your hands with my life--" This time Audemard smiled, but it was the smile of a man ten years older than he had appeared yesterday. "Don't try to answer, m'sieu. I only want you to know she is as pure as the stars. It was unfortunate, but to follow the impulse of one's heart can not be a sin. Everything has been unfortunate since you came. But I blame no one, except--" "Carmin Fanchet?" Audemard nodded. "Yes. I have sent her away. Marie-Anne is in the cabin on the raft now. But even Carmin I can not blame very greatly, m'sieu, for it is impossible to hold anything against one you love. Tell me if I am right? You must know. You love my Marie-Anne. Do you hold anything against her?" "It is unfair," protested David. "She is your wife, Audemard, is it possible you don't love her?" "Yes, I love her." "And Carmin Fanchet?" "I love her, too. They are so different. Yet I love them both. Is it not possible for a big heart like mine to do that, m'sieu?" With almost a snort David rose to his feet and stared through one of the windows into the darkness of the river. "Black Roger," he said without turning his head, "the evidence at Headquarters condemns you as one of the blackest-hearted murderers that ever lived. But that crime, to me, is less atrocious than the one you are committing against your own wife. I am not ashamed to confess I love her, because to deny it would be a lie. I love her so much that I would sacrifice myself--soul and body--if that sacrifice could give you back to her, clean and undefiled and with your hand unstained by the crime for which you must hang!" He did not hear Roger Audemard as he rose from his chair. For a moment the riverman stared at the back of David's head, and in that moment he was fighting to keep back what wanted to come from his lips in words. He turned before David faced him again, and did not pause until he stood at the cabin door with his hand at the latch. There he was partly in shadow. "I shall not see you again until you reach the Yellowknife," he said. "Not until then will you know--or will I know--what is going to happen. I think you will understand strange things then, but that is for the hour to tell. Bateese has explained to you that you must not make an effort to escape. You would regret it, and so would I. If you have red blood in you, m'sieu--if you would understand all that you cannot understand now--wait as patiently as you can. Bonne nuit, M'sieu Carrigan!" "Good night!" nodded David. In the pale shadows he thought a mysterious light of gladness illumined Black Roger's face before the door opened and closed, leaving him alone again. XXIV With the going of Black Roger also went the oppressive loneliness which had gripped Carrigan, and as he stood listening to the low voices outside, the undeniable truth came to him that he did not hate this man as he wanted to hate him. He was a murderer, and a scoundrel in another way, but he felt irresistibly the impulse to like him and to feel sorry for him. He made an effort to shake off the feeling, but a small voice which he could not quiet persisted in telling him that more than one good man had committed what the law called murder, and that perhaps he didn't fully understand what he had seen through the cabin window on the raft. And yet, when unstirred by this impulse, he knew the evidence was damning. But his loneliness was gone. With Audemard's visit had come an unexpected thrill, the revival of an almost feverish anticipation, the promise of impending things that stirred his blood as he thought of them. "You will understand strange things then," Roger Audemard had said, and something in his voice had been like a key unlocking mysterious doors for the first time. And then, "Wait, as patiently as you can!" Out of the basket on the table seemed to come to him a whispering echo of that same word--wait! He laid his hands upon it, and a pulse of life came with the imagined whispering. It was from Marie-Anne. It seemed as though the warmth of her hands were still there, and as he removed the cloth the sweet breath of her came to him. And then, in the next instant, he was trying to laugh at himself and trying equally hard to call himself a fool, for it was the breath of newly-baked things which her fingers had made. Yet never had he felt the warmth of her presence more strangely in his heart. He did not try to explain to himself why Roger Audemard's visit had broken down things which had seemed insurmountable an hour ago. Analysis was impossible, because he knew the transformation within himself was without a shred of reason. But it had come, and with it his imprisonment took on another form. Where before there had been thought of escape and a scheming to jail Black Roger, there filled him now an intense desire to reach the Yellowknife and the Chateau Boulain. It was after midnight when he went to bed, and he was up with the early dawn. With the first break of day the bateau men were preparing their breakfast. David was glad. He was eager for the day's work to begin, and in that eagerness he pounded on the door and called out to Joe Clamart that he was ready for his breakfast with the rest of them, but that he wanted only hot coffee to go with what Black Roger had brought to him in the basket. That afternoon the bateau passed Fort McMurray, and before the sun was well down in the west Carrigan saw the green slopes of Thickwood Hills and the rising peaks of Birch Mountains. He laughed outright as he thought of Corporal Anderson and Constable Frazer at Fort McMurray, whose chief duty was to watch the big waterway. How their eyes would pop if they could see through the padlocked door of his prison! But he had no inclination to be discovered now. He wanted to go on, and with a growing exultation he saw there was no intention on the part of the bateau's crew to loiter on the way. There was no stop at noon, and the tie-up did not come until the last glow of day was darkening into the gloom of night in the sky. For sixteen hours the bateau had traveled steadily, and it could not have made less than sixty miles as the river ran. The raft, David figured, had not traveled a third of the distance. The fact that the bateau's progress would bring him to Chateau Boulain many days, and perhaps weeks, before Black Roger and Marie-Anne could arrive on the raft did not check his enthusiasm. It was this interval between their arrivals which held a great speculative promise for him. In that time, if his efficiency had not entirely deserted him, he would surely make discoveries of importance. Day after day the journey continued without rest. On the fourth day after leaving Fort McMurray it was Joe Clamart who brought in David's supper, and he grunted a protest at his long hours of muscle-breaking labor at the sweeps. When David questioned him he shrugged his shoulders, and his mouth closed tight as a clam. On the fifth, the bateau crossed the narrow western neck of Lake Athabasca, slipping past Chipewyan in the night, and on the sixth it entered the Slave River. It was the fourteenth day when the bateau entered Great Slave Lake, and the second night after that, as dusk gathered thickly between the forest walls of the Yellowknife, David knew that at last they had reached the mouth of the dark and mysterious stream which led to the still more mysterious domain of Black Roger Audemard. That night the rejoicing of the bateau men ashore was that of men who had come out from under a strain and were throwing off its tension for the first time in many days. A great fire was built, and the men sang and laughed and shouted as they piled wood upon it. In the flare of this fire a smaller one was built, and kettles and pans were soon bubbling and sizzling over it, and a great coffee pot that held two gallons sent out its steam laden with an aroma that mingled joyously with the balsam and cedar smells in the air. David could see the whole thing from his window, and when Joe Clamart came in with supper, he found the meat they were cooking over the fire was fresh moose steak. As there had been no trading or firing of guns coming down, he was puzzled and when he asked where the meat had come from Joe Clamart only shrugged his shoulders and winked an eye, and went out singing about the allouette bird that had everything plucked from it, one by one. But David noticed there were never more than four men ashore at the same time. At least one was always aboard the bateau, watching his door and windows. And he, too, felt the thrill of an excitement working subtly within him, and this thrill pounded in swifter running blood when he saw the men about the fire jump to their feet suddenly and go to meet new and shadowy figures that came up indistinctly just in the edge of the forest gloom. There they mingled and were lost in identity for a long time, and David wondered if the newcomers were of the people of Chateau Boulain. After that, Bateese and Joe Clamart and two others stamped out the fires and came over the plank to the bateau to sleep. David followed their example and went to bed. The cook fires were burning again before the gray dawn was broken by a tint of the sun, and when the voices of many men roused David, he went to his window and saw a dozen figures where last night there had been only four. When it grew lighter he recognized none of them. All were strangers. Then he realized the significance of their presence. The bateau had been traveling north, but downstream. Now it would still travel north, but the water of the Yellow-knife flowed south into Great Slave Lake, and the bateau must be towed. He caught a glimpse of the two big York boats a little later, and six rowers to a boat, and after that the bateau set out slowly but steadily upstream. For hours David was at one window or the other, with something of awe working inside him as he saw what they were passing through--and between. He fancied the water trail was like an entrance into a forbidden land, a region of vast and unbroken mystery, a country of enchantment, possibly of death, shut out from the world he had known. For the stream narrowed, and the forest along the shores was so dense he could not see into it. The tree-tops hung in a tangled canopy overhead, and a gloom of twilight filled the channel below, so that where the sun shot through, it was like filtered moonlight shining on black oil. There was no sound except the dull, steady beat of the rowers' oars, and the ripple of water along the sides of the bateau. The men did not sing or laugh, and if they talked it must have been in whispers. There was no cry of birds from ashore. And once David saw Joe Clamart's face as he passed the window, and it was set and hard and filled with the superstition of a man who was passing through a devil-country. And then suddenly the end of it came. A flood of sunlight burst in at the windows, and all at once voices came from ahead, a laugh, a shout, and a yell of rejoicing from the bateau, and Joe Clamart started again the everlasting song of the allouette bird that was plucked of everything it had. Carrigan found himself grinning. They were a queer people, these bred-in-the-blood northerners--still moved by the superstitions of children. Yet he conceded that the awesome deadness of the forest passage had put strange thoughts into his own heart. Before nightfall Bateese and Joe Clamart came in and tied his arms behind him, and he was taken ashore with the rumble of a waterfall in his ears. For two hours he watched the labors of the men as they beached the bateau on long rollers of smooth birch and rolled it foot by foot over a cleared trail until it was launched again above the waterfall. Then he was led back into the cabin and his arms freed. That night he went to sleep with the music of the waterfall in his ears. The second day the Yellowknife seemed to be no longer a river, but a narrow lake, and the third day the rowers came into the Nine Lake country at noon, and until another dusk the bateau threaded its way through twisting channels and impenetrable forests, and beached at last at the edge of a great open where the timber had been cut. There was more excitement here, but it was too dark for David to understand the meaning of it. There were many voices; dogs barked. Then voices were at his door, a key rattled in the lock, and it opened. David saw Bateese and Joe Clamart first. And then, to his amazement, Black Roger Audemard stood there, smiling at him and nodding good-evening. It was impossible for David to repress his astonishment. "Welcome to Chateau Boulain," greeted Black Roger. "You are surprised? Well, I beat you out by half a dozen hours--in a canoe, m'sieu. It is only courtesy that I should be here to give you welcome!" Behind him Bateese and Joe Clamart were grinning widely, and then both came in, and Joe Clamart picked up his dunnage-sack and threw it over his shoulder. "If you will come with us, m'sieu--" David followed, and when he stepped ashore there were Bateese, and Joe Clamart and one other behind him, and three or four shadowy figures ahead, with Black Roger walking at his side. There were no more voices, and the dog had ceased barking. Ahead was a wall of darkness, which was the deep black forest beyond the clearing, and into it led a trail which they followed. It was a path worn smooth by the travel of many feet, and for a mile not a star broke through the tree-tops overhead, nor did a flash of light break the utter chaos of the way but once, when Joe Clamart lighted his pipe. No one spoke. Even Black Roger was silent, and David found no word to say. At the end of the mile the trees began to open above their heads, and they soon came to the edge of the timber. In the darkness David caught his breath. Dead ahead, not a rifle shot away, was the Chateau Boulain. He knew it before Black Roger had said a word. He guessed it by the lighted windows, full a score of them, without a curtain drawn to shut out their illumination from the night. He could see nothing but these lights, yet they measured off a mighty place to be built of logs in the heart of a wilderness, and at his side he heard Black Roger chuckling in low exultation. "Our home, m'sieu," he said. "Tomorrow, when you see it in the light of day, you will say it is the finest chateau in the north--all built of sweet cedar where birch is not used, so that even in the deep snows it gives us the perfume of springtime and flowers." David did not answer, and in a moment Audemard said: "Only on Christmas and New Year and at birthdays and wedding feasts is it lighted up like that. Tonight it is in your honor, M'sieu David." Again he laughed softly, and under his breath he added, "And there is some one waiting for you there whom you will be surprised to see!" David's heart gave a jump. There was meaning in Black Roger's words and no double twist to what he meant. Marie-Anne had come ahead with her husband! Now, as they passed on to the brilliantly lighted chateau, David made out the indistinct outlines of other buildings almost hidden in the out-creeping shadows of the forest-edges, with now and then a ray of light to show people were in them. But there was a brooding silence over it all which made him wonder, for there was no voice, no bark of dog, not even the opening or closing of a door. As they drew nearer, he saw a great veranda reaching the length of the chateau, with screening to keep out the summer pests of mosquitoes and flies and the night prowling insects attracted by light. Into this they went, up wide birch steps, and ahead of them was a door so heavy it looked like the postern gate of a castle. Black Roger opened it, and in a moment David stood beside him in a dimly lighted hall where the mounted heads of wild beasts looked down like startled things from the gloom of the walls. And then David heard the low, sweet notes of a piano coming to them very faintly. He looked at Black Roger. A smile was on the lips of the chateau master; his head was up, and his eyes glowed with pride and joy as the music came to him. He spoke no word, but laid a hand on David's arm and led him toward it, while Bateese and Joe Clamart remained standing at the entrance to the hall. David's feet trod in thick rugs of fur; he saw the dim luster of polished birch and cedar in the walls, and over his head the ceiling was rich and matched, as in the bateau cabin. They drew nearer to the music and came to a closed door. This Black Roger opened very quietly, as if anxious not to disturb the one who was playing. They entered, and David held his breath. It was a great room he stood in, thirty feet or more from end to end, and scarcely less in width--a room brilliant with light, sumptuous in its comfort, sweet with the perfume of wild-flowers, and with a great black fireplace at the end of it, from over which there stared at him the glass eyes of a monster moose. Then he saw the figure at the piano, and something rose up quickly and choked him when his eyes told him it was not Marie-Anne. It was a slim, beautiful figure in a soft and shimmering white gown, and its head was glowing gold in the lamplight. Roger Audemard spoke, "Carmin!" The woman at the piano turned about, a little startled at the unexpectedness of the voice, and then rose quickly to her feet--and David Carrigan found himself looking into the eyes of Carmin Fanchet! Never had he seen her more beautiful than in this moment, like an angel in her shimmering dress of white, her hair a radiant glory, her eyes wide and glowing--and, as she looked at him, a smile coming to her red lips. Yes, SHE WAS SMILING AT HIM--this woman whose brother he had brought to the hangman, this woman who had stolen Black Roger from another! She knew him--he was sure of that; she knew him as the man who had believed her a criminal along with her brother, and who had fought to the last against her freedom. Yet from her lips and her eyes and her face the old hatred was gone. She was coming toward him slowly; she was reaching out her hand, and half blindly his own went out, and he felt the warmth of her fingers for a moment, and he heard her voice saying softly, "Welcome to Chateau Boulain, M'sieu Carrigan." He bowed and mumbled something, and Black Roger gently pressed his arm, drawing him back to the door. As he went he saw again that Carmin Fanchet was very beautiful as she stood there, and that her lips were very red--but her face was white, whiter than he had ever seen the face of a woman before. As they went up a winding stair to the second floor, Roger Audemard said, "I am proud of my Carmin, M'sieu David. Would any other woman in the world have given her hand like that to the man who had helped to kill her brother?" They stopped at another door. Black Roger opened it. There were lights within, and David knew it was to be his room. Audemard did not follow him inside, but there was a flashing humor in his eyes. "I say, is there another woman like her in the world, m'sieu?" "What have you done to Marie-Anne--your wife?" asked David. It was hard for him to get the words out. A terrible thing was gripping at his throat, and the clutch of it grew tighter as he saw the wild light in Black Roger's eyes. "Tomorrow you will know, m'sieu. But not to-night. You must wait until tomorrow." He nodded and stepped back, and the door closed--and in the same instant came the harsh grating of a key in the lock. XXV Carrigan turned slowly and looked about his room. There was no other door except one opening into a closet, and but two windows. Curtains were drawn at these windows, and he raised them. A grim smile came to his lips when he saw the white bars of tough birch nailed across each of them, outside the glass. He could see the birch had been freshly stripped of bark and had probably been nailed there that day. Carmin Fanchet and Black Roger had welcomed him to Chateau Boulain, but they were evidently taking no chances with their prisoner. And where was Marie-Anne? The question was insistent, and with it remained that cold grip of something in his heart that had come with the sight of Carmin Fanchet below. Was it possible that Carmin's hatred still lived, deadlier than ever, and that with Black Roger she had plotted to bring him here so that her vengeance might be more complete--and a greater torture to him? Were they smiling and offering him their hands, even as they knew he was about to die? And if that was conceivable, what had they done with Marie-Anne? He looked about the room. It was singularly bare, in an unusual sort of way, he thought. There were rich rugs on the floor--three magnificent black bearskins, and two wolf. The heads of two bucks and a splendid caribou hung against the walls. He could see, from marks on the floor, where a bed had stood, but this bed was now replaced by a couch made up comfortably for one inclined to sleep. The significance of the thing was clear--nowhere in the room could he lay his hand upon an object that might be used as a weapon! His eyes again sought the white-birch bars of his prison, and he raised the two windows so that the cool, sweet breath of the forests reached in to him. It was then that he noticed the mosquito-proof screening nailed outside the bars. It was rather odd, this thinking of his comfort even as they planned to kill him! If there was truth to this new suspicion that Black Roger and his mistress were plotting both vengeance and murder, their plans must also involve Marie-Anne. Suddenly his mind shot back to the raft. Had Black Roger turned a clever coup by leaving his wife there, while he came on ahead of the bateau with Carmin Fanchet? It would be several weeks before the raft reached the Yellowknife, and in that time many things might happen. The thought worried him. He was not afraid for himself. Danger, the combating of physical forces, was his business. His fear was for Marie-Anne. He had seen enough to know that Black Roger was hopelessly infatuated with Carmin Fanchet. And several things might happen aboard the raft, planned by agents as black-souled as himself. If they killed Marie-Anne-- His hand gripped the knob of the door, and for a moment he was filled with the impulse to shout for Black Roger and face him with what was in his mind. And as he stood there, every muscle in his body ready to fight, there came to him faintly the sound of music. He heard the piano first, and then a woman's voice singing. Soon a man's voice joined the woman's, and he knew it was Black Roger, singing with Carmin Fanchet. Suddenly the mad impulse in his heart went out, and he leaned his head nearer to the crack of the door, and strained his ears to hear. He could make out no word of the song, yet the singing came to him with a thrill that set his lips apart and brought a staring wonder into his eyes. In the room below him, fifteen hundred miles from civilization, Black Roger and Carmin Fanchet were singing "Home, Sweet Home!" An hour later David looked through one of the barred windows upon a world lighted by a splendid moon. He could see the dark edge of the distant forest that rimmed in the chateau, and about him seemed to be a level meadow, with here and there the shadow of a building in which the lights were out. Stars were thick in the sky, and a strange quietness hovered over the world he looked upon. From below him floated up now and then a perfume of tobacco smoke. The guard under his window was awake, but he made no sound. A little later he undressed, put out the two lights in his room, and stretched himself between the cool, white sheets on the couch. After a time he slept, but it was a restless slumber filled with troubled dreams. Twice he was half awake, and the second time it seemed to him his nostrils sensed a sharper tang of smoke than that of burning tobacco, yet he did not fully rouse himself, and the hours passed, and new sounds and smells that rose in the night impinged themselves upon him only as a part of the troublous fabric of his dreams. But at last there came a shock, something which beat over these things which chained him, and seized upon his consciousness, demanding that he rouse himself, open his eyes, and get up. He obeyed the command, and before he was fully awake, found himself on his feet. It was still dark, but he heard voices, voices no longer subdued, but filled with a wild note of excitement and command. And what he smelled was not the smell of tobacco smoke! It was heavy in his room. It filled his lungs. His eyes were smarting with the sting of it. Then came vision, and with a startled cry he leaped to a window. To the north and east he looked out upon a flaming world! With his fist he rubbed his smarting eyes. The moon was gone. The gray he saw outside must be the coming of dawn, ghostly with that mist of smoke that had come into his room. He could see shadowy figures of men running swiftly in and out and disappearing, and he could hear the voices of women and children, and from beyond the edge of the forest to the west came the howling of many dogs. One voice rose above the others. It was Black Roger's, and at its commands little groups of figures shot out into the gray smoke-gloom and did not appear again. North and east the sky was flaming sullen red, and a breath of air blowing gently in David's face told him the direction of the wind. The chateau lay almost in the center of the growing line of conflagration. He dressed himself and went again to the window. Quite distinctly now, he could make out Joe Clamart under his window, running toward the edge of the forest at the head of half a dozen men and boys who carried axes and cross-cut saws over their shoulders. It was the last of Black Roger's people that he saw for some time in the open meadow, but from the front of the chateau he could hear many voices, chiefly of women and children, and guessed it was from there that the final operations against the fire were being directed. The wind was blowing stronger in his face. With it came a sharper tang of smoke, and the widening light of day was fighting to hold its own against the deepening pall of flame-lit gloom advancing with the wind. There seemed to come a low and distant sound with that wind, so indistinct that to David's ears it was like a murmur a thousand miles away. He strained his ears to hear, and as he listened, there came another sound--a moaning, sobbing voice below his window! It was grief he heard now, something that went to his heart and held him cold and still. The voice was sobbing like that of a child, yet he knew it was not a child's. Nor was it a woman's. A figure came out slowly in his view, humped over, twisted in its shape, and he recognized Andre, the Broken Man. David could see that he was crying like a child, and he was facing the flaming forests, with his arms reaching out to them in his moaning. Then, of a sudden, he gave a strange cry, as if defiance had taken the place of grief, and he hurried across the meadow and disappeared into the timber where a great lightning-riven spruce gleamed dully white through the settling veil of smoke-mist. For a space David looked after him, a strange beating in his heart. It was as if he had seen a little child going into the face of a deadly peril, and at last he shouted out for some one to bring back the Broken Man. But there was no answer from under his window. The guard was gone. Nothing lay between him and escape--if he could force the white birch bars from the window. He thrust himself against them, using his shoulder as a battering-ram. Not the thousandth part of an inch could he feel them give, yet he worked until his shoulder was sore. Then he paused and studied the bars more carefully. Only one thing would avail him, and that was some object which he might use as a lever. He looked about him, and not a thing was there in the room to answer the purpose. Then his eyes fell on the splendid horns of the caribou head. Black Roger's discretion had failed him there, and eagerly David pulled the head down from the wall. He knew the woodsman's trick of breaking off a horn from the skull, yet in this room, without log or root to help him, the task was difficult, and it was a quarter of an hour after he had last seen the Broken Man before he stood again at the window with the caribou horn in his hands. He no longer had to hold his breath to hear the low moaning in the wind, and where there had been smoke-gloom before there were now black clouds rolling and twisting up over the tops of the north and eastern forests, as if mighty breaths were playing with them from behind. David thrust the big end of the caribou horn between two of the white-birch bars, but before he had put his weight to the lever he heard a great voice coming round the end of the chateau, and it was calling for Andre, the Broken Man. In a moment it was followed by Black Roger Audemard, who ran under the window and faced the lightning-struck spruce as he shouted Andre's name again. Suddenly David called down to him, and Black Roger turned and looked up through the smoke-gloom, his head bare, his arms naked, and his eyes gleaming wildly as he listened. "He went that way twenty minutes ago," David shouted. "He disappeared into the forest where you see the dead spruce yonder. And he was crying, Black Roger--he was crying like a child." If there had been other words to finish, Black Roger would not have heard them. He was running toward the old spruce, and David saw him disappear where the Broken Man had gone. Then he put his weight on the horn, and one of the tough birch bars gave way slowly, and after that a second was wrenched loose, and a third, until the lower half of the window was free of them entirely. He thrust out his head and found no one within the range of his vision. Then he worked his way through the window, feet first, and hanging the length of arms and body from the lower sill, dropped to the ground. Instantly he faced the direction taken by Roger Audemard, it was HIS turn now, and he felt a savage thrill in his blood. For an instant he hesitated, held by the impulse to rush to Carmin Fanchet and with his fingers at her throat, demand what she and her paramour had done with Marie-Anne. But the mighty determination to settle it all with Black Roger himself overwhelmed that impulse like an inundation. Black Roger had gone into the forest. He was separated from his people, and the opportunity was at hand. Positive that Marie-Anne had been left with the raft, the thought that the Chateau Boulain might be devoured by the onrushing conflagration did not appal David. The chateau held little interest for him now. It was Black Roger he wanted. As he ran toward the old spruce, he picked up a club that lay in the path. This path was a faintly-worn trail where it entered the forest beyond the spruce, very narrow, and with brush hanging close to the sides of it, so that David knew it was not in general use and that but few feet had ever used it. He followed swiftly, and in five minutes came suddenly out into a great open thick with smoke, and here he saw why Chateau Boulain would not burn. The break in the forest was a clearing a rifle-shot in width, free of brush and grass, and partly tilled; and it ran in a semi-circle as far as he could see through the smoke in both directions. Thus had Black Roger safeguarded his wilderness castle, while providing tillable fields for his people; and as David followed the faintly beaten path, he saw green stuffs growing on both sides of him, and through the center of the clearing a long strip of wheat, green and very thick. Up and down through the fog of smoke he could hear voices, and he knew it was this great, circular fire-clearing the people of Chateau Boulain were watching and guarding. But he saw no one as he trailed across the open. In soft patches of the earth he found footprints deeply made and wide apart, the footprints of hurrying men, telling him Black Roger and the Broken Man were both ahead of him, and that Black Roger was running when he crossed the clearing. The footprints led him to a still more indistinct trail in the farther forest, a trail which went straight into the face of the fire ahead. He followed it. The distant murmur had grown into a low moaning over the tree-tops, and with it the wind was coming stronger, and the smoke thicker. For a mile he continued along the path, and then he stopped, knowing he had come to the dead-line. Over him was a swirling chaos. The fire-wind had grown into a roar before which the tree-tops bent as if struck by a gale, and in the air he breathed he could feel a swiftly growing heat. For a space he stood there, breathing quickly in the face of a mighty peril. Where had Black Roger and the Broken Man gone? What mad impulse could it be that dragged them still farther into the path of death? Or had they struck aside from the trail? Was he alone in danger? As if in answer to the questions there came from far ahead of him a loud cry. It was Black Roger's voice, and as he listened, it called over and over again the Broken Man's name, "Andre--Andre--Andre--" Something in the cry held Carrigan. There was a note of terror in it, a wild entreaty that was almost drowned in the trembling wind and the moaning that was in the air. David was ready to turn back. He had already approached too near to the red line of death, yet that cry of Black Roger urged him on like the lash of a whip. He plunged ahead into the chaos of smoke, no longer able to distinguish a trail under his feet. Twice again in as many minutes he heard Black Roger's voice, and ran straight toward it. The blood of the hunter rushed over all other things in his veins. The man he wanted was ahead of him and the moment had passed when danger or fear of death could drive him back. Where Black Roger lived, he could live, and he gripped his club and ran through the low brush that whipped in stinging lashes against his face and hands. He came to the foot of a ridge, and from the top of this he knew Black Roger had called. It was a huge hog's-back, rising a hundred feet up out of the forest, and when he reached the top of it, he was panting for breath. It was as if he had come suddenly within the blast of a hot furnace. North and east the forest lay under him, and only the smoke obstructed his vision. But through this smoke he could make out a thing that made him rub his eyes in a fierce desire to see more clearly. A mile away, perhaps two, the conflagration seemed to be splitting itself against the tip of a mighty wedge. He could hear the roar of it to the right of him and to the left, but dead ahead there was only a moaning whirlpool of fire-heated wind and smoke. And out of this, as he looked, came again the cry, "Andre--Andre--Andre!" Again he stared north and south through the smoke-gloom. Mountains of resinous clouds, black as ink, were swirling skyward along the two sides of the giant wedge. Under that death-pall the flames were sweeping through the spruce and cedar tops like race-horses, hidden from his eyes. If they closed in there could be no escape; in fifteen minutes they would inundate him, and it would take him half an hour to reach the safety of the clearing. His heart thumped against his ribs as he hurried down the ridge in the direction of Black Roger's voice. The giant wedge of the forest was not burning--yet, and Audemard was hurrying like mad toward the tip of that wedge, crying out now and then the name of the Broken Man. And always he kept ahead, until at last--a mile from the ridge--David came to the edge of a wide stream and saw what it was that made the wedge of forest. For under his eyes the stream split, and two arms of it widened out, and along each shore of the two streams was a wide fire-clearing made by the axes of Black Roger's people, who had foreseen this day when fire might sweep their world. Carrigan dashed water into his eyes, and it was warm. Then he looked across. The fire had passed, the pall of smoke was clearing away, and what he saw was the black corpse of a world that had been green. It was smoldering; the deep mold was afire. Little tongues of flame still licked at ten thousand stubs charred by the fire-death--and there was no wind here, and only the whisper of a distant moaning sweeping farther and farther away. And then, out of that waste across the river, David heard a terrible cry. It was Black Roger, still calling--even in that place of hopeless death--for Andre, the Broken Man! XXVI Into the stream Carrigan plunged and found it only waist-deep in crossing. He saw where Black Roger had come out of the water and where his feet had plowed deep in the ash and char and smoldering debris ahead. This trail he followed. The air he breathed was hot and filled with stifling clouds of ash and char-dust and smoke. His feet struck red-hot embers under the ash, and he smelled burning leather. A forest of spruce and cedar skeletons still crackled and snapped and burst out into sudden tongues of flame about him, and the air he breathed grew hotter, and his face burned, and into his eyes came a smarting pain--when ahead of him he saw Black Roger. He was no longer calling out the Broken Man's name, but was crashing through the smoking chaos like a great beast that had gone both blind and mad. Twice David turned aside where Black Roger had rushed through burning debris, and a third time, following where Audemard had gone, his feet felt the sudden stab of living coals. In another moment he would have shouted Black Roger's name, but even as the words were on his lips, mingled with a gasp of pain, the giant river-man stopped where the forest seemed suddenly to end in a ghostly, smoke-filled space, and when David came up behind him, he was standing at the black edge of a cliff which leaped off into a smoldering valley below. Out of this narrow valley between two ridges, an hour ago choked with living spruce and cedar, rose up a swirling, terrifying heat. Down into this pit of death Black Roger stood looking, and David heard a strange moaning coming in his breath. His great, bare arms were black and scarred with heat; his hair was burned; his shirt was torn from his shoulders. When David spoke--and Black Roger turned at the sound--his eyes glared wildly out of a face that was like a black mask. And when he saw it was David who had spoken, his great body seemed to sag, and with an unintelligible cry he pointed down. David, staring, saw nothing with his half-blind eyes, but under his feet he felt a sudden giving way, and the fire-eaten tangle of earth and roots broke off like a rotten ledge, and with it both he and Black Roger went crashing into the depths below, smothered in an avalanche of ash and sizzling earth. At the bottom David lay for a moment, partly stunned. Then his fingers clutched a bit of living fire, and with a savage cry he staggered to his feet and looked to see Black Roger. For a space his eyes were blinded, and when at last he could see, he made out Black Roger, fifty feet away, dragging himself on his hands and knees through the blistering muck of the fire. And then, as he stared, the stricken giant came to the charred remnant of a stump and crumpled over it with a great cry, moaning again that name-- "Andre--Andre--" David hurried to him, and as he put his hands under Black Roger's arms to help him to his feet, he saw that the charred stump was not a stump, but the fire-shriveled corpse of Andre, the Broken Man! Horror choked back speech on his own lips. Black Roger looked up at him, and a great breath came in a sob out of his body. Then, suddenly, he seemed to get grip of himself, and his burned and bleeding fingers closed about David's hand at his shoulder. "I knew he was coming here," he said, the words forcing themselves with an effort through his swollen lips. "He came home--to die." "Home--?" "Yes. His mother and father were buried here nearly thirty years ago, and he worshiped them. Look at him, Carrigan. Look at him closely. For he is the man you have wanted all these years, the finest man God ever made, Roger Audemard! When he saw the fire, he came to shield their graves from the flames. And now he is dead!" A moan came to his lips, and the weight of his body grew so heavy that David had to exert his strength to keep him from falling. "And YOU?" he cried. "For God's sake, Audemard--tell me--" "I, m'sieu? Why, I am only St. Pierre Audemard, his brother." And with that his head dropped heavily, and he was like a dead man in David's arms. How at last David came to the edge of the stream again, with the weight of St. Pierre Audemard on his shoulders, was a torturing nightmare which would never be quite clear in his brain. The details were obliterated in the vast agony of the thing. He knew that he fought as he had never fought before; that he stumbled again and again in the fire-muck; that he was burned, and blinded, and his brain was sick. But he held to St. Pierre, with his twisted, broken leg, knowing that he would die if he dropped him into the flesh-devouring heat of the smoldering debris under his feet. Toward the end he was conscious of St. Pierre's moaning, and then of his voice speaking to him. After that he came to the water and fell down in the edge of it with St. Pierre, and inside his head everything went as black as the world over which the fire had swept. He did not know how terribly he was hurt. He did not feel pain after the darkness came. Yet he sensed certain things. He knew that over him St. Pierre was shouting. For days, it seemed, he could hear nothing but that great voice bellowing away in the interminable distance. And then came other voices, now near and now far, and after that he seemed to rise up and float among the clouds, and for a long time he heard no other sound and felt no movement, but was like one dead. Something soft and gentle and comforting roused him out of darkness. He did not move, he did not open his eyes for a time, while reason came to him. He heard a voice, and it was a woman's voice, speaking softly, and another voice replied to it. Then he heard gentle movement, and some one went away from him, and he heard the almost noiseless opening and closing of a door. A very little he began to see. He was in a room, with a patch of sunlight on the wall. Also, he was in a bed. And that gentle, comforting hand was still stroking his forehead and hair, light as thistledown. He opened his eyes wider and looked up. His heart gave a great throb. Over him was a glorious, tender face smiling like an angel into his widening eyes. And it was the face of Carmin Fanchet! He made an effort, as if to speak. "Hush," she whispered, and he saw something shining in her eyes, and something wet fell upon his face. "She is returning--and I will go. For three days and nights she has not slept, and she must be the first to see you open your eyes." She bent over him. Her soft lips touched his forehead, and he heard her sobbing breath. "God bless you, David Carrigan!" Then she was going to the door, and his eyes dropped shut again. He began to experience pain now, a hot, consuming pain all over him, and he remembered the fight through the path of the fire. Then the door opened very softly once more, and some one came in, and knelt down at his side, and was so quiet that she scarcely seemed to breathe. He wanted to open his eyes, to cry out a name, but he waited, and lips soft as velvet touched his own. They lay there for a moment, then moved to his closed eyes, his forehead, his hair--and after that something rested gently against him. His eyes shot open. It was Marie-Anne, with her head nestled in the crook of his arm as she knelt there beside him on the floor. He could see only a bit of her face, but her hair was very near, crumpled gloriously on his breast, and he could see the tips of her long lashes as she remained very still, seeming not to breathe. She did not know he had roused from his sleep--the first sleep of those three days of torture which he could not remember now; and he, looking at her, made no movement to tell her he was awake. One of his hands lay over the edge of the bed, and so lightly he could scarce feel the weight of her fingers she laid one of her own upon it, and a little at a time drew it to her, until the bandaged thing was against her lips. It was strange she did not hear his heart, which seemed all at once to beat like a drum inside him! Suddenly he sensed the fact that his other hand was not bandaged. He was lying on his side, with his right arm partly under him, and against that hand he felt the softness of Marie-Anne's cheek, the velvety crush of her hair! And then he whispered, "Marie-Anne--" She still lay, for a moment, utterly motionless. Then, slowly, as if believing he had spoken her name in his sleep, she raised her head and looked into his wide-open eyes. There was no word between them in that breath or two. His bandaged hand and his well hand went to her face and hair, and then a sobbing cry came from Marie-Anne, and swiftly she crushed her face down to his, holding him close with both her arms for a moment. And after that, as on that other day when she kissed him after the fight, she was up and gone so quickly that her name had scarcely left his lips when the door closed behind her, and he heard her running down the hall. He called after her, "Marie-Anne! Marie-Anne!" He heard another door, and voices, and quick footsteps again, coming his way, and he was waiting eagerly, half on his elbow, when into his room came Nepapinas and Carmin Fanchet. And again he saw the glory of something in the woman's face. His eyes must have burned strangely as he stared at her, but it did not change that light in her own, and her hands were wonderfully gentle as she helped Nepapinas raise him so that he was sitting up straight, with pillows at his back. "It doesn't hurt so much now, does it?" she asked, her voice low with a mothering tenderness. He shook his head. "No. What is the matter?" "You were burned--terribly. For two days and nights you were in great pain, but for many hours you have been sleeping, and Nepapinas says the burns will not hurt any more. If it had not been for you--" She bent over him. Her hand touched his face, and now he began to understand the meaning of that glory shining in her eyes. "If it hadn't been for you--he would have died!" She drew back, turning to the door. "He is coming to see you--alone," she said, a little broken note in her throat. "And I pray God you will see with clear understanding, David Carrigan--and forgive me--as I have forgiven you--for a thing that happened long ago." He waited. His head was in a jumble, and his thoughts were tumbling over one another in an effort to evolve some sort of coherence out of things amazing and unexpected. One thing was impressed upon him--he had saved St. Pierre's life, and because he had done this Carmin Fanchet was very tender to him. She had kissed him, and Marie-Anne had kissed him, and-- A strange dawning was coming to him, thrilling him to his finger-tips. He listened. A new sound was approaching from the hall. His door was opened, and a wheel-chair was rolled in by old Nepapinas. In the chair was St. Pierre Audemard. Feet and hands and arms were wrapped in bandages, but his face was uncovered and wreathed in smiling happiness when he saw David propped up against his pillows. Nepapinas rolled him close to the bed and then shuffled out, and as he closed the door, David was sure he heard the subdued whispering of feminine voices down the hall. "How are you, David?" asked St. Pierre. "Fine," nodded Carrigan. "And you?" "A bit scorched, and a broken leg." He held up his padded hands. "Would be dead if you hadn't carried me to the river. Carmin says she owes you her life for having saved mine." "And Marie-Anne?" "That's what I've come to tell you about," said St. Pierre. "The instant they knew you were able to listen, both Carmin and Marie-Anne insisted that I come and tell you things. But if you don't feel well enough to hear me now--" "Go on!" almost threatened David. The look of cheer which had illumined St. Pierre's face faded away, and David saw in its place the lines of sorrow which had settled there. He turned his gaze toward a window through which the afternoon sun was coming, and nodded slowly. "You saw--out there. He's dead. They buried him in a casket made of sweet cedar. He loved the smell of that. He was like a little child. And once--a long time ago--he was a splendid man, a greater and better man than St. Pierre, his brother, will ever be. What he did was right and just, M'sieu David. He was the oldest--sixteen--when the thing happened. I was only nine, and didn't fully understand. But he saw it all--the death of our father because a powerful factor wanted my mother. And after that he knew how and why our mother died, but not a word of it did he tell us until years later--after the day of vengeance was past. "You understand, David? He didn't want me in that. He did it alone, with good friends from the upper north. He killed the murderers of our mother and father, and then he buried himself deeper into the forests with us, and we took our mother's family names which was Boulain, and settled here on the Yellowknife. Roger--Black Roger, as you know him--brought the bones of our father and mother and buried them over in the edge of that plain where he died and where our first cabin stood. Five years ago a falling tree crushed him out of shape, and his mind went at the same time, so that he has been like a little child, and was always seeking for Roger Audemard--the man he once was. That was the man your law wanted. Roger Audemard. Our brother." "OUR brother," cried David. "Who is the other?" "My sister." "Yes?" "Marie-Anne." "Good God!" choked David. "St. Pierre, do you lie? Is this another bit of trickery?" "It is the truth," said St. Pierre. "Marie-Anne is my sister, and Carmin--whom you saw in my arms through the cabin window--" He paused, smiling into David's staring eyes, taking full measure of recompense in the other's heart-breaking attitude as he waited. "--Is my wife, M'sieu David." A great gasp of breath came out of Carrigan. "Yes, my wife, and the greatest-hearted woman that ever lived, without one exception in all the world!" cried St. Pierre, a fierce pride in his voice. "It was she, and not Marie-Anne, who shot you on that strip of sand, David Carrigan! Mon Dieu, I tell you not one woman in a million would have done what she did--let you live! Why? Listen, m'sieu, and you will understand at last. She had a brother, years younger than she, and to that brother she was mother, sister, everything, because they had no parents almost from babyhood. She worshiped him. And he was bad. Yet the worse he became, the more she loved him and prayed for him. Years ago she became my wife, and I fought with her to save the brother. But he belonged to the devil hand and foot, and at last he left us and went south, and became what he was when you were sent out to get him, Sergeant Carrigan. It was then that my wife went down to make a last fight to save him, to bring him back, and you know how she made that fight, m'sieu--until the day you hanged him!" St. Pierre was leaning from his chair, his face ablaze. "Tell me, did she not fight?" he cried. "And YOU, until the last--did you not fight to have her put behind prison bars with her brother?" "Yes, it is so," murmured Carrigan. "She hated you," went on St. Pierre. "You hanged her brother, who was almost a part of her flesh and body. He was bad, but he had been hers from babyhood, and a mother will love her son if he is a devil. And then--I won't take long to tell the rest of it! Through friends she learned that you, who had hanged her brother, were on your way to run down Roger Audemard. And Roger Audemard, mind you, was the same as myself, for I had sworn to take my brother's place if it became necessary. She was on the bateau with Marie-Anne when the messenger came. She had but one desire--to save me--to kill you. If it had been some other man, but it was you, who had hanged her brother! She disappeared from the bateau that day with a rifle. You know, M'sieu David, what happened. Marie-Anne heard the shooting and came--alone--just as you rolled out in the sand as if dead. It was she who ran out to you first, while my Carmin crouched there with her rifle, ready to send another bullet into you if you moved. It was Marie-Anne you saw standing over you, it was she who knelt down at your side, and then--" St. Pierre paused, and he smiled, and then grimaced as he tried to rub his two bandaged hands together. "David, fate mixes things up in a funny way. My Carmin came out and stood over you, hating you; and Marie-Anne knelt down there at your side, loving you. Yes, it is true. And over you they fought for life or death, and love won, because it is always stronger than hate. Besides, as you lay there bleeding and helpless, you looked different to my Carmin than as you did when you hanged her brother. So they dragged you up under a tree, and after that they plotted together and planned, while I was away up the river on the raft. The feminine mind works strangely, M'sieu David, and perhaps it was that thing we call intuition which made them do what they did. Marie-Anne knew it would never do for you to see and recognize my Carmin, so in their scheming of things she insisted on passing herself off as my wife, while my Carmin came back in a canoe to meet me. They were frightened, and when I came, the whole thing had gone too far for me to mend, and I knew the false game must be played out to the end. When I saw what was happening--that you loved Marie-Anne so well that you were willing to fight for her honor even when you thought she was my wife--I was sure it would all end well. But I could take no chances until I knew. And so there were bars at your windows, and--" St. Pierre shrugged his shoulders, and the lines of grief came into his face again, and in his voice was a little break as he continued: "If Roger had not gone out there to fight back the flames from the graves of his dead, I had planned to tell you as much as I dared, M'sieu David, and I had faith that your love for our sister would win. I did not tell you on the river because I wanted you to see with your own eyes our paradise up here, and I knew you would not destroy it once you were a part of it. And so I could not tell you Carmin was my wife, for that would have betrayed us--and--besides--that fight of yours against a love which you thought was dishonest interested me very much, for I saw in it a wonderful test of the man who might become my brother if he chose wisely between love and what he thought was duty. I loved you for it, even when you sat me there on the sand like a silly loon. And now, even my Carmin loves you for bringing me out of the fire--But you are not listening!" David was looking past him toward the door, and St. Pierre smiled when he saw the look that was in his face. "Nepapinas!" he called loudly. "Nepapinas!" In a moment there was shuffling of feet outside, and Nepapinas came in. St. Pierre held out his two great, bandaged hands, and David met them with his own, one bandaged and one free. Not a word was spoken between them, but their eyes were the eyes of men between whom had suddenly come the faith and understanding of a brotherhood as strong as life itself. Then Nepapinas wheeled St. Pierre from the room and David straightened himself against his pillows, and waited, and listened, until it seemed two hearts were thumping inside him in the place of one. It was an interminable time, he thought, before Marie-Anne stood in the doorway. For a breath she paused there, looking at him as he stretched out his bandaged arm to her, moved by every yearning impulse in her soul to come in, yet ready as a bird to fly away. And then, as he called her name, she ran to him and dropped upon her knees at his side, and his arms went about her, insensible to their hurt--and her hot face was against his neck, and his lips crushed in the smothering sweetness of her hair. He made no effort to speak, beyond that first calling of her name. He could feel her heart throbbing against him, and her hands tightened at his shoulders, and at last she raised her glorious face so near that the breath of it was on his lips. Then, seeing what was in his eyes, her soft mouth quivered in a little smile, and with a broken throb in her throat she whispered, "Has it all ended--right--David?" He drew the red mouth to his own, and with a glad cry which was no word in itself he buried his face in the lustrous tresses he loved. Afterward he could not remember all it was that he said, but at the end Marie-Anne had drawn a little away so that she was looking at him, her eyes shining gloriously and her cheeks beautiful as the petals of a wild rose. And he could see the throbbing in her white throat, like the beating of a tiny heart. "And you'll take me with you?" she whispered joyously. "Yes; and when I show you to the old man--Superintendent Me Vane, you know--and tell him you're my wife, he can't go back on his promise. He said if I settled this Roger Audemard affair, I could have anything I might ask for. And I'll ask for my discharge, I ought to have it in September, and that will give us time to return before the snow flies. You see--" He held out his arms again. "You see," he cried, his face smothered in her hair again, "I've found the place of my dreams up here, and I want to stay--always. Are you a little glad, Marie-Anne?" In a great room at the end of the hall, with windows opening in three directions upon the wilderness, St. Pierre waited in his wheel-chair, grunting uneasily now and then at the long time it was taking Carmin to discover certain things out in the hall. Finally he heard her coming, tiptoeing very quietly from the direction of David Carrigan's door, and St. Pierre chuckled and tried to rub his bandaged hands when she came in, her face pink and her eyes shining with the greatest thrill that can stir a feminine heart. "If we'd only known," he tried to whisper, "I would have had the keyhole made larger, Cherie! He deserves it for having spied on us at the cabin window. But--tell me!--Could you see? Did you hear? What--" Carmin's soft hand went over his mouth. "In another moment you'll be shouting," she warned. "Maybe I didn't see, and maybe I didn't hear, Big Bear--but I know there are four very happy people in Chateau Boulain. And now, if you want to guess who is the happiest--" "I am, chere-coeur." "No." "Well, then, if you insist--YOU are." "Yes. And the next?" St. Pierre chuckled. "David Carrigan," he said. "No, no, no! If you mean that--" "I mean--always--that I am second, unless you will ever let me be first," corrected St. Pierre, kissing the hand that was gently stroking his cheek. And then he leaned his great head back against her where she stood behind him, and Carmin's fingers ran where his hair was crisp with the singe of fire, and for a long time they said no other word, but let their eyes rest upon the dim length of the hall at the far end of which was David Carrigan's room. 
8223	----	EDGAR HUNTLY or, MEMOIRS OF A SLEEP-WALKER by CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN To the Public: The flattering reception that has been given, by the public, to Arthur Mervyn, has prompted the writer to solicit a continuance of the same favour, and to offer to the world a new performance. America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate,--that the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe,--may be readily conceived. The sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart, that are peculiar to ourselves, are equally numerous and inexhaustible. It is the purpose of this work to profit by some of these sources; to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most wonderful diseases or affections of the human frame. One merit the writer may at least claim:--that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable; and for a native of America to overlook these would admit of no apology. These, therefore, are, in part, the ingredients of this tale, and these he has been ambitious of depicting in vivid and faithful colours. The success of his efforts must be estimated by the liberal and candid reader. C. B. B. Chapter I. I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request. At length does the impetuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder, permit me to recollect my promise and perform it. At length am I somewhat delivered from suspense and from tremors. At length the drama is brought to an imperfect close, and the series of events that absorbed my faculties, that hurried away my attention, has terminated in repose. Till now, to hold a steadfast pen was impossible; to disengage my senses from the scene that was passing or approaching; to forbear to grasp at futurity; to suffer so much thought to wander from the purpose which engrossed my fears and my hopes, could not be. Yet am I sure that even now my perturbations are sufficiently stilled for an employment like this? That the incidents I am going to relate can be recalled and arranged without indistinctness and confusion? That emotions will not be reawakened by my narrative, incompatible with order and coherence? Yet when I shall be better qualified for this task I know not. Time may take away these headlong energies, and give me back my ancient sobriety; but this change will only be effected by weakening my remembrance of these events. In proportion as I gain power over words, shall I lose dominion over sentiments. In proportion as my tale is deliberate and slow, the incidents and motives which it is designed to exhibit will be imperfectly revived and obscurely portrayed. Oh, why art thou away at a time like this. Wert thou present, the office to which my pen is so inadequate would easily be executed by my tongue. Accents can scarcely be too rapid; or that which words should fail to convey, my looks and gestures would suffice to communicate. But I know thy coming is impossible. To leave this spot is equally beyond my power. To keep thee in ignorance of what has happened would justly offend thee. There is no method of informing thee except by letter, and this method must I, therefore, adopt. How short is the period that has elapsed since thou and I parted, and yet how full of tumult and dismay has been my soul during that period! What light has burst upon my ignorance of myself and of mankind! How sudden and enormous the transition from uncertainty to knowledge! But let me recall my thoughts; let me struggle for so much composure as will permit my pen to trace intelligible characters. Let me place in order the incidents that are to compose my tale. I need not call on thee to listen. The fate of Waldegrave was as fertile of torment to thee as to me. His bloody and mysterious catastrophe equally awakened thy grief, thy revenge, and thy curiosity. Thou wilt catch from my story every horror and every sympathy which it paints. Thou wilt shudder with my foreboding and dissolve with my tears. As the sister of my friend, and as one who honours me with her affection, thou wilt share in all my tasks and all my dangers. You need not be reminded with what reluctance I left you. To reach this place by evening was impossible, unless I had set out early in the morning; but your society was too precious not to be enjoyed to the last moment. It was indispensable to be here on Tuesday, but my duty required no more than that I should arrive by sunrise on that day. To travel during the night was productive of no formidable inconvenience. The air was likely to be frosty and sharp, but these would not incommode one who walked with speed. A nocturnal journey in districts so romantic and wild as these, through which lay my road, was more congenial to my temper than a noonday ramble. By nightfall I was within ten miles of my uncle's house. As the darkness increased, and I advanced on my way, my sensations sunk into melancholy. The scene and the time reminded me of the friend whom I had lost. I recalled his features, and accents, and gestures, and mused with unutterable feelings on the circumstances of his death. My recollections once more plunged me into anguish and perplexity. Once more I asked, Who was his assassin? By what motives could he be impelled to a deed like this? Waldegrave was pure from all offence. His piety was rapturous. His benevolence was a stranger to remissness or torpor. All who came within the sphere of his influence experienced and acknowledged his benign activity. His friends were few, because his habits were timid and reserved; but the existence of an enemy was impossible. I recalled the incidents of our last interview, my importunities that he should postpone his ill-omened journey till the morning, his inexplicable obstinacy, his resolution to set out on foot during a dark and tempestuous night, and the horrible disaster that befell him. The first intimation I received of this misfortune, the insanity of vengeance and grief into which I was hurried, my fruitless searches for the author of this guilt, my midnight wanderings and reveries beneath the shade of that fatal elm, were revived and reacted. I heard the discharge of the pistol, I witnessed the alarm of Inglefield, I heard his calls to his servants, and saw them issue forth with lights and hasten to the spot whence the sound had seemed to proceed. I beheld my friend, stretched upon the earth, ghastly with a mortal wound, alone, with no traces of the slayer visible, no tokens by which his place of refuge might be sought, the motives of his enmity or his instruments of mischief might be detected. I hung over the dying youth, whose insensibility forbade him to recognise his friend, or unfold the cause of his destruction. I accompanied his remains to the grave; I tended the sacred spot where he lay; I once more exercised my penetration and my zeal in pursuit of his assassin. Once more my meditations and exertions were doomed to be disappointed. I need not remind thee of what is past. Time and reason seemed to have dissolved the spell which made me deaf to the dictates of duty and discretion. Remembrances had ceased to agonize, to urge me to headlong acts and foster sanguinary purposes. The gloom was half dispersed, and a radiance had succeeded sweeter than my former joys. Now, by some unseen concurrence of reflections, my thoughts reverted into some degree of bitterness. Methought that to ascertain the hand who killed my friend was not impossible, and to punish the crime was just. That to forbear inquiry or withhold punishment was to violate my duty to my God and to mankind. The impulse was gradually awakened that bade me once more to seek the elm; once more to explore the ground; to scrutinize its trunk. What could I expect to find? Had it not been a hundred times examined? Had I not extended my search to the neighbouring groves and precipices? Had I not pored upon the brooks, and pried into the pits and hollows, that were adjacent to the scene of blood? Lately I had viewed this conduct with shame and regret; but in the present state of my mind it assumed the appearance of conformity with prudence, and I felt myself irresistibly prompted to repeat my search. Some time had elapsed since my departure from this district,--time enough for momentous changes to occur. Expedients that formerly were useless might now lead instantaneously to the end which I sought. The tree which had formerly been shunned by the criminal might, in the absence of the avenger of blood, be incautiously approached. Thoughtless or fearless of my return, it was possible that he might, at this moment, be detected hovering near the scene of his offences. Nothing can be pleaded in extenuation of this relapse into folly. My return, after an absence of some duration, into the scene of these transactions and sufferings, the time of night, the glimmering of the stars, the obscurity in which external objects were wrapped, and which, consequently, did not draw my attention from the images of fancy, may in some degree account for the revival of those sentiments and resolutions which immediately succeeded the death of Waldegrave, and which, during my visit to you, had been suspended. You know the situation of the elm, in the midst of a private road, on the verge of Norwalk, near the habitation of Inglefield, but three miles from my uncle's house. It was now my intention to visit it. The road in which I was travelling led a different way. It was requisite to leave it, therefore, and make a circuit through meadows and over steeps. My journey would, by these means, be considerably prolonged; but on that head I was indifferent, or rather, considering how far the night had already advanced, it was desirable not to reach home till the dawn. I proceeded in this new direction with speed. Time, however, was allowed for my impetuosities to subside, and for sober thoughts to take place. Still I persisted in this path. To linger a few moments in this shade, to ponder on objects connected with events so momentous to my happiness, promised me a mournful satisfaction. I was familiar with the way, though trackless and intricate, and I climbed the steeps, crept through the brambles, leaped the rivulets and fences with undeviating aim, till at length I reached the craggy and obscure path which led to Inglefield's house. In a short time, I descried through the dusk the widespread branches of the elm. This tree, however faintly seen, cannot be mistaken for another. The remarkable bulk and shape of its trunk, its position in the midst of the way, its branches spreading into an ample circumference, made it conspicuous from afar. My pulse throbbed as I approached it. My eyes were eagerly bent to discover the trunk and the area beneath the shade. These, as I approached, gradually became visible. The trunk was not the only thing which appeared in view. Somewhat else, which made itself distinguishable by its motions, was likewise noted. I faltered and stopped. To a casual observer this appearance would have been unnoticed. To me, it could not but possess a powerful significance. All my surmises and suspicions instantly returned. This apparition was human, it was connected with the fate of Waldegrave, it led to a disclosure of the author of that fate. What was I to do? To approach unwarily would alarm the person. Instant flight would set him beyond discovery and reach. I walked softly to the roadside. The ground was covered with rocky masses, scattered among shrub-oaks and dwarf-cedars, emblems of its sterile and uncultivated state. Among these it was possible to elude observation and yet approach near enough to gain an accurate view of this being. At this time, the atmosphere was somewhat illuminated by the moon, which, though it had already set, was yet so near the horizon as to benefit me by its light. The shape of a man, tall and robust, was now distinguished. Repeated and closer scrutiny enabled me to perceive that he was employed in digging the earth. Something like flannel was wrapped round his waist and covered his lower limbs. The rest of his frame was naked. I did not recognise in him any one whom I knew. A figure, robust and strange, and half naked, to be thus employed, at this hour and place, was calculated to rouse up my whole soul. His occupation was mysterious and obscure. Was it a grave that he was digging? Was his purpose to explore or to hide? Was it proper to watch him at a distance, unobserved and in silence, or to rush upon him and extort from him, by violence or menaces, an explanation of the scene? Before my resolution was formed, he ceased to dig. He cast aside his spade and sat down in the pit that he had dug. He seemed wrapped in meditation; but the pause was short, and succeeded by sobs, at first low and at wide intervals, but presently louder and more vehement. Sorely charged was indeed that heart whence flowed these tokens of sorrow. Never did I witness a scene of such mighty anguish, such heart-bursting grief. What should I think? I was suspended in astonishment. Every sentiment, at length, yielded to my sympathy. Every new accent of the mourner struck upon my heart with additional force, and tears found their way spontaneously to my eyes. I left the spot where I stood, and advanced within the verge of the shade. My caution had forsaken me, and, instead of one whom it was duty to persecute, I beheld, in this man, nothing but an object of compassion. My pace was checked by his suddenly ceasing to lament. He snatched the spade, and, rising on his feet, began to cover up the pit with the utmost diligence. He seemed aware of my presence, and desirous of hiding something from my inspection. I was prompted to advance nearer and hold his hand, but my uncertainty as to his character and views, the abruptness with which I had been ushered into this scene, made me still hesitate; but, though I hesitated to advance, there was nothing to hinder me from calling. "What, ho!" said I. "Who is there? What are you doing?" He stopped: the spade fell from his hand; he looked up and bent forward his face towards the spot where I stood. An interview and explanation were now, methought, unavoidable. I mustered up my courage to confront and interrogate this being. He continued for a minute in his gazing and listening attitude. Where I stood I could not fail of being seen, and yet he acted as if he saw nothing. Again he betook himself to his spade, and proceeded with new diligence to fill up the pit. This demeanour confounded and bewildered me. I had no power but to stand and silently gaze upon his motions. The pit being filled, he once more sat upon the ground, and resigned himself to weeping and sighs with more vehemence than before. In a short time the fit seemed to have passed. He rose, seized the spade, and advanced to the spot where I stood. Again I made preparation as for an interview which could not but take place. He passed me, however, without appearing to notice my existence. He came so near as almost to brush my arm, yet turned not his head to either side. My nearer view of him made his brawny arms and lofty stature more conspicuous; but his imperfect dress, the dimness of the light, and the confusion of my own thoughts, hindered me from discerning his features. He proceeded with a few quick steps along the road, but presently darted to one side and disappeared among the rocks and bushes. My eye followed him as long as he was visible, but my feet were rooted to the spot. My musing was rapid and incongruous. It could not fail to terminate in one conjecture, that this person was _asleep_. Such instances were not unknown to me, through the medium of conversation and books. Never, indeed, had it fallen under my own observation till now, and now it was conspicuous, and environed with all that could give edge to suspicion and vigour to inquiry. To stand here was no longer of use, and I turned my steps towards my uncle's habitation. Chapter II. I had food enough for the longest contemplation. My steps partook, as usual, of the vehemence of my thoughts, and I reached my uncle's gate before I believed myself to have lost sight of the elm. I looked up and discovered the well-known habitation. I could not endure that my reflections should so speedily be interrupted. I therefore passed the gate, and stopped not till I had reached a neighbouring summit, crowned with chestnut-oaks and poplars. Here I more deliberately reviewed the incidents that had just occurred. The inference was just, that the man, half clothed and digging, was a sleeper; but what was the cause of this morbid activity? What was the mournful vision that dissolved him in tears, and extorted from him tokens of inconsolable distress? What did he seek, or what endeavour to conceal, in this fatal spot? The incapacity of sound sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded. It is thus that atrocious criminals denote the possession of some dreadful secret. The thoughts, which considerations of safety enable them to suppress or disguise during wakefulness, operate without impediment, and exhibit their genuine effects, when the notices of sense are partly excluded and they are shut out from a knowledge of their entire condition. This is the perpetrator of some nefarious deed. What but the murder of Waldegrave could direct his steps hither? His employment was part of some fantastic drama in which his mind was busy. To comprehend it demands penetration into the recesses of his soul. But one thing is sure: an incoherent conception of his concern in that transaction bewitches him hither. This it is that deluges his heart with bitterness and supplies him with ever-flowing tears. But whence comes he? He does not start from the bosom of the earth, or hide himself in airy distance. He must have a name and a terrestrial habitation. It cannot be at an immeasurable distance from the haunted elm. Inglefield's house is the nearest. This may be one of its inhabitants. I did not recognise his features, but this was owing to the dusky atmosphere and to the singularity of his garb. Inglefield has two servants, one of whom was a native of this district, simple, guileless, and incapable of any act of violence. He was, moreover, devoutly attached to his sect. He could not be the criminal. The other was a person of a very different cast. He was an emigrant from Ireland, and had been six months in the family of my friend. He was a pattern of sobriety and gentleness. His mind was superior to his situation. His natural endowments were strong, and had enjoyed all the advantage of cultivation. His demeanour was grave, and thoughtful, and compassionate. He appeared not untinctured with religion; but his devotion, though unostentatious, was of a melancholy tenor. There was nothing in the first view of his character calculated to engender suspicion. The neighbourhood was populous. But, as I conned over the catalogue, I perceived that the only foreigner among us was Clithero. Our scheme was, for the most part, a patriarchal one. Each farmer was surrounded by his sons and kinsmen. This was an exception to the rule. Clithero was a stranger, whose adventures and character, previously to his coming hither, were unknown to us. The elm was surrounded by his master's domains. An actor there must be, and no one was equally questionable. The more I revolved the pensive and reserved deportment of this man, the ignorance in which we were placed respecting his former situation, his possible motives for abandoning his country and choosing a station so much below the standard of his intellectual attainments, the stronger my suspicions became. Formerly, when occupied with conjectures relative to the same topic, the image of this man did not fail to occur; but the seeming harmlessness of his ordinary conduct had raised him to a level with others, and placed him equally beyond the reach of suspicion. I did not, till now, advert to the recentness of his appearance among us, and to the obscurity that hung over his origin and past life. But now these considerations appeared so highly momentous as almost to decide the question of his guilt. But how were these doubts to be changed into absolute certainty? Henceforth this man was to become the subject of my scrutiny. I was to gain all the knowledge, respecting him, which those with whom he lived, and were the perpetual witnesses of his actions, could impart. For this end I was to make minute inquiries, and to put seasonable interrogatories. From this conduct I promised myself an ultimate solution of my doubts. I acquiesced in this view of things with considerable satisfaction. It seemed as if the maze was no longer inscrutable. It would be quickly discovered who were the agents and instigators of the murder of my friend. But it suddenly occurred to me, For what purpose shall I prosecute this search? What benefit am I to reap from this discovery? How shall I demean myself when the criminal is detected? I was not insensible, at that moment, of the impulses of vengeance, but they were transient. I detested the sanguinary resolutions that I had once formed. Yet I was fearful of the effects of my hasty rage, and dreaded an encounter in consequence of which I might rush into evils which no time could repair, nor penitence expiate. "But why," said I, "should it be impossible to arm myself with firmness? If forbearance be the dictate of wisdom, cannot it be so deeply engraven on my mind as to defy all temptation, and be proof against the most abrupt surprise? My late experience has been of use to me. It has shown me my weakness and my strength. Having found my ancient fortifications insufficient to withstand the enemy, what should I learn from thence but that it becomes me to strengthen and enlarge them? "No caution, indeed, can hinder the experiment from being hazardous. Is it wise to undertake experiments by which nothing can be gained, and much may be lost? Curiosity is vicious, if undisciplined by reason, and inconducive to benefit." I was not, however, to be diverted from my purpose. Curiosity, like virtue, is its own reward. Knowledge is of value for its own sake, and pleasure is annexed to the acquisition, without regard to any thing beyond. It is precious even when disconnected with moral inducements and heartfelt sympathies; but the knowledge which I sought by its union with these was calculated to excite the most complex and fiery sentiments in my bosom. Hours were employed in revolving these thoughts. At length I began to be sensible of fatigue, and, returning home, explored the way to my chamber without molesting the repose of the family. You know that our doors are always unfastened, and are accessible at all hours of the night. My slumbers were imperfect, and I rejoiced when the morning light permitted me to resume my meditations. The day glided away, I scarcely know how, and, as I had rejoiced at the return of morning, I now hailed, with pleasure, the approach of night. My uncle and sisters having retired, I betook myself, instead of following their example, to the _Chestnut-hill_. Concealed among its rocks, or gazing at the prospect which stretched so far and so wide around it, my fancy has always been accustomed to derive its highest enjoyment from this spot. I found myself again at leisure to recall the scene which I had witnessed during the last night, to imagine its connection with the fate of Waldegrave, and to plan the means of discovering the secret that was hidden under these appearances. Shortly, I began to feel insupportable disquiet at the thoughts of postponing this discovery. Wiles and stratagems were practicable, but they were tedious, and of dubious success. Why should I proceed like a plotter? Do I intend the injury of this person? A generous purpose will surely excuse me from descending to artifices. There are two modes of drawing forth the secrets of another,--by open and direct means and by circuitous and indirect. Why scruple to adopt the former mode? Why not demand a conference, and state my doubts, and demand a solution of them, in a manner worthy of a beneficent purpose? Why not hasten to the spot? He may be, at this moment, mysteriously occupied under this shade. I may note his behaviour; I may ascertain his person, if not by the features that belong to him, yet by tracing his footsteps when he departs, and pursuing him to his retreats. I embraced this scheme, which was thus suggested, with eagerness. I threw myself with headlong speed down the hill and pursued my way to the elm. As I approached the tree, my palpitations increased, though my pace slackened. I looked forward with an anxious glance. The trunk of the tree was hidden in the deepest shade. I advanced close up to it. No one was visible, but I was not discouraged. The hour of his coming was, perhaps, not arrived. I took my station at a small distance, beside a fence, on the right hand. An hour elapsed before my eyes lighted on the object of which they were in search. My previous observation had been roving from one quarter to another. At last, it dwelt upon the tree. The person whom I before described was seated on the ground. I had not perceived him before, and the means by which he placed himself in this situation had escaped my notice. He seemed like one whom an effort of will, without the exercise of locomotion, had transported hither, or made visible. His state of disarray, and the darkness that shrouded him, prevented me, as before, from distinguishing any peculiarities in his figure or countenance. I continued watchful and mute. The appearances already described took place on this occasion, except the circumstance of digging in the earth. He sat musing for a while, then burst into sighs and lamentations. These being exhausted, he rose to depart. He stalked away with a solemn and deliberate pace. I resolved to tread, as closely as possible, in his footsteps, and not to lose sight of him till the termination of his career. Contrary to my expectation, he went in a direction opposite to that which led to Inglefield's. Presently, he stopped at bars, which he cautiously removed, and, when he had passed through them, as deliberately replaced. He then proceeded along an obscure path, which led across stubble-fields, to a wood. The path continued through the wood, but he quickly struck out of it, and made his way, seemingly at random, through a most perplexing undergrowth of bushes and briers. I was, at first, fearful that the noise which I made behind him, in trampling down the thicket, would alarm him; but he regarded it not. The way that he had selected was always difficult: sometimes considerable force was requisite to beat down obstacles; sometimes it led into a deep glen, the sides of which were so steep as scarcely to afford a footing; sometimes into fens, from which some exertions were necessary to extricate the feet, and sometimes through rivulets, of which the water rose to the middle. For some time I felt no abatement of my speed or my resolution. I thought I might proceed, without fear, through brakes and dells which my guide was able to penetrate. He was perpetually changing his direction. I could form no just opinion as to my situation or distance from the place at which we had set out. I began at length to be weary. A suspicion, likewise, suggested itself to my mind, whether my guide did not perceive that he was followed, and thus prolonged his journey in order to fatigue or elude his pursuer. I was determined, however, to baffle his design. Though the air was frosty, my limbs were bedewed with sweat and my joints were relaxed with toil, but I was obstinately bent upon proceeding. At length a new idea occurred to me. On finding me indefatigable in pursuit, this person might resort to more atrocious methods of concealment. But what had I to fear? It was sufficient to be upon my guard. Man to man, I needed not to dread his encounter. We at last arrived at the verge of a considerable precipice. He kept along the edge. From this height, a dreary vale was discoverable, embarrassed with the leafless stocks of bushes, and encumbered with rugged and pointed rocks. This scene reminded me of my situation. The desert tract called Norwalk, which I have often mentioned to you, my curiosity had formerly induced me to traverse in various directions. It was in the highest degree rugged, picturesque, and wild. This vale, though I had never before viewed it by the glimpses of the moon, suggested the belief that I had visited it before. Such a one I knew belonged to this uncultivated region. If this opinion were true, we were at no inconsiderable distance from Inglefield's habitation. "Where," said I, "is this singular career to terminate?" Though occupied with these reflections, I did not slacken my pursuit. The stranger kept along the verge of the cliff, which gradually declined till it terminated in the valley. He then plunged into its deepest thickets. In a quarter of an hour he stopped under a projecture of the rock which formed the opposite side of the vale. He then proceeded to remove the stalks, which, as I immediately perceived, concealed the mouth of a cavern. He plunged into the darkness, and in a few moments his steps were heard no more. Hitherto my courage had supported me, but here it failed. Was this person an assassin, who was acquainted with the windings of the grotto, and who would take advantage of the dark to execute his vengeance upon me, who had dared to pursue him to these forlorn retreats? or was he maniac, or walker in his sleep? Whichever supposition were true, it would be rash in me to follow him. Besides, he could not long remain in these darksome recesses, unless some fatal accident should overtake him. I seated myself at the mouth of the cave, determined patiently to wait till he should think proper to emerge. This opportunity of rest was exceedingly acceptable after so toilsome a pilgrimage. My pulse began to beat more slowly, and the moisture that incommoded me ceased to flow. The coolness, which for a little time was delicious, presently increased to shivering, and I found it necessary to change my posture, in order to preserve my blood from congealing. After I had formed a path before the cavern's mouth, by the removal of obstructions, I employed myself in walking to and fro. In this situation I saw the moon gradually decline to the horizon, and, at length, disappear. I marked the deepenings of the shade, and the mutations which every object successively underwent. The vale was narrow, and hemmed in on all sides by lofty and precipitous cliffs. The gloom deepened as the moon declined, and the faintness of starlight was all that preserved my senses from being useless to my own guidance. I drew nearer the cleft at which this mysterious personage had entered. I stretched my hands before it, determined that he should not emerge from his den without my notice. His steps would, necessarily, communicate the tidings of his approach. He could not move without a noise which would be echoed to, on all sides, by the abruptness by which this valley was surrounded. Here, then, I continued till the day began to dawn, in momentary expectation of the stranger's reappearance. My attention was at length excited by a sound that seemed to issue from the cave. I imagined that the sleeper was returning, and prepared therefore to seize him. I blamed myself for neglecting the opportunities that had already been afforded, and was determined that another should not escape. My eyes were fixed upon the entrance. The rustling increased, and presently an animal leaped forth, of what kind I was unable to discover. Heart-struck by this disappointment, but not discouraged, I continued to watch, but in vain. The day was advancing apace. At length the sun arose, and its beams glistened on the edges of the cliffs above, whose sapless stalks and rugged masses were covered with hoarfrost. I began to despair of success, but was unwilling to depart until it was no longer possible to hope for the return of this extraordinary personage. Whether he had been swallowed up by some of the abysses of this grotto, or lurked near the entrance, waiting my departure, or had made his exit at another and distant aperture, was unknown to me. Exhausted and discouraged, I prepared, at length, to return. It was easy to find my way out of this wilderness by going forward in one direction, regardless of impediments and cross-paths. My absence I believed to have occasioned no alarm to my family, since they knew not of my intention to spend the night abroad. Thus unsatisfactorily terminated this night's adventures. Chapter III. The ensuing day was spent partly in sleep, and partly in languor and disquietude. I incessantly ruminated on the incidents of the last night. The scheme that I had formed was defeated. Was it likely that this unknown person would repeat his midnight visits to the elm? If he did, and could again be discovered, should I resolve to undertake a new pursuit, which might terminate abortively, or in some signal disaster? But what proof had I that the same route would be taken, and that he would again inter himself alive in the same spot? Or, if he did, since his reappearance would sufficiently prove that the cavern was not dangerous, and that he who should adventure in might hope to come out again in safety, why not enter it after him? What could be the inducements of this person to betake himself to subterranean retreats? The basis of all this region is _limestone_; a substance that eminently abounds in rifts and cavities. These, by the gradual decay of their cementing parts, frequently make their appearance in spots where they might have been least expected. My attention has often been excited by the hollow sound which was produced by my casual footsteps, and which showed me that I trod upon the roof of caverns. A mountain-cave and the rumbling of an unseen torrent are appendages of this scene, dear to my youthful imagination. Many of romantic structure were found within the precincts of Norwalk. These I had industriously sought out; but this had hitherto escaped my observation, and I formed the resolution of some time exploring it. At present I determined to revisit the elm, and dig in the spot where this person had been employed in a similar way. It might be that something was here deposited which might exhibit this transaction in a new light. At the suitable hour, on the ensuing night, I took my former stand. The person again appeared. My intention to dig was to be carried into effect on condition of his absence, and was, consequently, frustrated. Instead of rushing on him, and breaking at once the spell by which his senses were bound, I concluded, contrary to my first design, to wait his departure, and allow myself to be conducted whithersoever he pleased. The track into which he now led me was different from the former one. It was a maze, oblique, circuitous, upward and downward, in a degree which only could take place in a region so remarkably irregular in surface, so abounding with hillocks and steeps and pits and brooks, as _Solesbury_. It seemed to be the sole end of his labours to bewilder or fatigue his pursuer, to pierce into the deepest thickets, to plunge into the darkest cavities, to ascend the most difficult heights, and approach the slippery and tremulous verge of the dizziest precipices. I disdained to be outstripped in this career. All dangers were overlooked, and all difficulties defied. I plunged into obscurities, and clambered over obstacles, from which, in a different state of mind, and with a different object of pursuit, I should have recoiled with invincible timidity. When the scene had passed, I could not review the perils I had undergone without shuddering. At length my conductor struck into a path which, compared with the ruggedness of that which we had lately trodden, was easy and smooth. This track led us to the skirt of the wilderness, and at no long time we reached an open field, when a dwelling appeared, at a small distance, which I speedily recognised to be that belonging to Inglefield. I now anticipated the fulfilment of my predictions. My conductor directed his steps towards the barn, into which he entered by a small door. How were my doubts removed! This was no other than Clithero Edny. There was nothing in his appearance incompatible with this conclusion. He and his fellow-servant occupied an apartment in the barn as a lodging-room. This arduous purpose was accomplished, and I retired to the shelter of a neighbouring shed, not so much to repose myself after the fatigues of my extraordinary journey, as to devise further expedients. Nothing now remained but to take Clithero to task; to repeat to him the observations of the two last nights; to unfold to him my conjectures and suspicions; to convince him of the rectitude of my intentions; and to extort from him a disclosure of all the circumstances connected with the death of Waldegrave which it was in his power to communicate. In order to obtain a conference, I resolved to invite him to my uncle's to perform a certain piece of work for me under my own eyes. He would, of course, spend the night with us, and in the evening I would take an opportunity of entering into conversation with him. A period of the deepest deliberation was necessary to qualify myself for performing suitably my part in this projected interview. I attended to the feelings that were suggested in this new state of my knowledge. I found reason to confide in my newly-acquired equanimity. "Remorse," said I, "is an ample and proper expiation for all offences. What does vengeance desire but to inflict misery? If misery come, its desires are accomplished. It is only the obdurate and exulting criminal that is worthy of our indignation. It is common for pity to succeed the bitterest suggestions of resentment. If the vengeful mind be delighted with the spectacle of woes of its own contriving, at least its canine hunger is appeased, and thenceforth its hands are inactive." On the evening of the next day, I paid a visit to Inglefield. I wished to impart to him the discoveries that I had made, and to listen to his reflections on the subject. I likewise desired to obtain all possible information from the family respecting the conduct of Clithero. My friend received me with his usual kindness. Thou art no stranger to his character; thou knowest with what paternal affection I have ever been regarded by this old man; with what solicitude the wanderings of my reason and my freaks of passion have been noted and corrected by him. Thou knowest his activity to save the life of thy brother, and the hours that have been spent by him in aiding my conjectures as to the cause of his death, and inculcating the lessons of penitence and duty. The topics which could not but occur at such a meeting were quickly discussed, and I hastily proceeded to that subject which was nearest my heart. I related the adventures of the two preceding nights, and mentioned the inference to which they irresistibly led. He said that this inference coincided with suspicions he had formed, since our last interview, in consequence of certain communications from his housekeeper. It seems the character of Clithero had, from the first, exercised the inquisitiveness of this old lady. She had carefully marked his musing and melancholy deportment. She had tried innumerable expedients for obtaining a knowledge of his past life, and particularly of his motives for coming to America. These expedients, however profound and addressful, had failed. He took no pains to elude them. He contented himself with turning a deaf ear to all indirect allusions and hints, and, when more explicitly questioned, with simply declaring that he had nothing to communicate worthy of her notice. During the day he was a sober and diligent workman. His evenings he spent in incommunicative silence. On Sundays, he always rambled away, no one knew whither, and without a companion. I have already observed that he and his fellow-servant occupied the same apartment in the barn. This circumstance was not unattended to by Miss Inglefield. The name of Clithero's companion was Ambrose. This man was copiously interrogated by his mistress, and she found him by no means so refractory as the other. Ambrose, in his tedious and confused way, related that, soon after Clithero and he had become bedfellows, the former was considerably disturbed by restlessness and talking in his sleep. His discourse was incoherent. It was generally in the tone of expostulation, and appeared to be entreating to be saved from some great injury. Such phrases as these,--"have pity;" "have mercy," were frequently intermingled with groans, and accompanied with weeping. Sometimes he seemed to be holding conferences with some one who was making him considerable offers on condition of his performing some dangerous service. What he said in his own person, and in answer to his imaginary tempter, testified the utmost reluctance. Ambrose had no curiosity on the subject. As this interruption prevented him at first from sleeping, it was his custom to put an end to the dialogue, by awakening his companion, who betrayed tokens of great alarm and dejection on discovering how he had been employed. He would solicitously inquire what were the words that he had uttered; but Ambrose's report was seldom satisfactory, because he had attended to them but little, and because he grudged every moment in which he was deprived of his accustomed repose. Whether Clithero had ceased from this practice, or habit had reconciled his companion to the sounds, they no longer occasioned any interruption to his slumber. No one appeared more shocked than he at the death of Waldegrave. After this event his dejection suddenly increased. This symptom was observed by the family, but none but the housekeeper took the trouble to notice it to him, or build conjectures on the incident. During nights, however, Ambrose experienced a renewal of his ancient disturbances. He remarked that Clithero, one night, had disappeared from his side. Ambrose's range of reflection was extremely narrow. Quickly falling asleep, and finding his companion beside him when he awoke, he dismissed it from his mind. On several ensuing nights he awakened in like manner, and always found his companion's place empty. The repetition of so strange an incident at length incited him to mention it to Clithero. The latter was confounded at this intelligence. He questioned Ambrose with great anxiety as to the particulars of this event, but he could gain no satisfaction from the stupid inattention of the other. From this time there was a visible augmentation of his sadness. His fits of taciturnity became more obstinate, and a deeper gloom sat upon his brow. There was one other circumstance, of particular importance, mentioned by the housekeeper. One evening some one on horseback stopped at this gate. He rattled at the gate, with an air of authority, in token of his desire that some one would come from the house. Miss Inglefield was employed in the kitchen, from a window of which she perceived who it was that made the signal. Clithero happened, at the same moment, to be employed near her. She, therefore, desired him to go and see whom the stranger wanted. He laid aside his work and went. The conference lasted above five minutes. The length of it excited in her a faint degree of surprise, inducing her to leave her employment and pay an unintermitted attention to the scene. There was nothing, however, but its duration that rendered it remarkable. Clithero at length entered, and the traveller proceeded. The countenance of the former betrayed a degree of perturbation which she had never witnessed before. The muscles of his face were distorted and tremulous. He immediately sat down to his work, but he seemed, for some time, to have lost all power over his limbs. He struggled to avoid the sight of the lady, and his gestures, irresolute or misdirected, betokened the deepest dismay. After some time, he recovered, in some degree, his self-possession; but, while the object was viewed through a new medium, and the change existed only in the imagination of the observer, a change was certainly discovered. These circumstances were related to me by Inglefield and corroborated by his housekeeper. One consequence inevitably flowed from them. The sleep-walker, he who had led me through so devious a tract, was no other than Clithero. There was, likewise, a strong relation between this person and him who stopped at the gate. What was the subject of discourse between them? In answer to Miss Inglefield's interrogatories, he merely said that the traveller inquired whither the road led which, at a small distance forward, struck out of the principal one. Considering the length of the interview, it was not likely that this was the only topic. My determination to confer with him in private acquired new force from these reflections. Inglefield assented to my proposal. His own affairs would permit the absence of his servant for one day. I saw no necessity for delay, and immediately made my request to Clithero. I was fashioning an implement, I told him, with respect to which I could not wholly depend upon my own skill. I was acquainted with the dexterity of his contrivances, and the neatness of his workmanship. He readily consented to assist me on this occasion. Next day he came. Contrary to my expectation, he prepared to return home in the evening. I urged him to spend the night with us: but no; it was equally convenient, and more agreeable to him, to return. I was not aware of this resolution. I might, indeed, have foreseen that, being conscious of his infirmity, he would desire to avoid the scrutiny of strangers. I was painfully disconcerted; but it occurred to me, that the best that could be done was to bear him company, and seize some opportunity, during this interval, of effecting my purpose. I told him, that, since he would not remain, I cared not if, for the sake of recreation, and of a much more momentous purpose, I went along with him. He tacitly, and without apparent reluctance, consented to my scheme, and, accordingly, we set off together. This was an awful crisis. The time had now come that was to dissipate my uncertainty. By what means should I introduce a topic so momentous and singular? I had been qualified by no experience for rightly conducting myself on so critical an emergency. My companion preserved a mournful and inviolable silence. He afforded me no opening by which I might reach the point in view. His demeanour was sedate, while I was almost disabled, by the confusion of my thoughts, to utter a word. It was a dreadful charge that I was about to insinuate. I was to accuse my companion of nothing less than murder. I was to call upon him for an avowal of his guilt. I was to state the ground of my suspicions, and desire him to confute or confirm them. In doing this, I was principally stimulated by an ungovernable curiosity; yet, if I intended not the conferring of a benefit, I did not, at least, purpose the infliction of evil. I persuaded myself that I was able to exclude from my bosom all sanguinary or vengeful impulses; and that, whatever should be the issue of this conversation, my equanimity would be unsubdued. I revolved various modes of introducing the topic by which my mind was engaged. I passed rapidly from one to another. None of them were sufficiently free from objection to allow me to adopt it. My perplexity became, every moment, more painful, and my ability to extricate myself, less. In this state of uncertainty, so much time elapsed, that the elm at length appeared in sight. This object had somewhat of a mechanical influence upon me. I stopped short, and seized the arm of my companion. Till this moment, he appeared to have been engrossed by his own reflections, and not to have heeded those emotions which must have been sufficiently conspicuous in my looks. This action recalled him from his reverie. The first idea that occurred to him, when he had noticed my behaviour, was, that I was assailed by some sudden indisposition. "What is the matter?" said he, in a tone of anxiety: "are you not well?" "Yes," replied I,--"perfectly well. But stop a moment; I have something to say to you." "To me?" answered he, with surprise. "Yes," said I. "Let us turn down this path," (pointing, at the same time, to that along which I had followed him the preceding night.) He now partook, in some degree, of my embarrassment. "Is there any thing particular?" said he, in a doubting accent. There he stopped. "Something," I answered, "of the highest moment. Go with me down this path. We shall be in less danger of interruption." He was irresolute and silent, but, seeing me remove the bars and pass through them, he followed me. Nothing more was said till we entered the wood. I trusted to the suggestions of the moment. I had now gone too far to recede, and the necessity that pressed upon me supplied me with words. I continued:-- "This is a remarkable spot. You may wonder why I have led you to it. I ought not to keep you in suspense. There is a tale connected with it, which I am desirous of telling you. For this purpose I have brought you hither. Listen to me." I then recapitulated the adventures of the two preceding nights. I added nothing, nor retrenched any thing. He listened in the deepest silence. From every incident, he gathered new cause of alarm. Repeatedly he wiped his face with his handkerchief, and sighed deeply. I took no verbal notice of these symptoms. I deemed it incumbent on me to repress nothing. When I came to the concluding circumstance, by which his person was identified, he heard me without any new surprise. To this narrative I subjoined the inquiries that I had made at Inglefield's, and the result of those inquiries. I then continued in these words:-- "You may ask why I subjected myself to all this trouble. The mysteriousness of these transactions would have naturally suggested curiosity in any one. A transient passenger would probably have acted as I have done. But I had motives peculiar to myself. Need I remind you of a late disaster? That it happened beneath the shade of this tree? Am I not justified in drawing certain inferences from your behaviour? What they are, I leave you to judge. Be it your task to confute or confirm them. For this end I have conducted you hither. "My suspicions are vehement. How can they be otherwise? I call upon you to say whether they be just." The spot where we stood was illuminated by the moon, that had now risen, though all around was dark. Hence his features and person were easily distinguished. His hands hung at his side. His eyes were downcast, and he was motionless as a statue. My last words seemed scarcely to have made any impression on his sense. I had no need to provide against the possible suggestions of revenge. I felt nothing but the tenderness of compassion. I continued, for some time, to observe him in silence, and could discover no tokens of a change of mood. I could not forbear, at last, to express my uneasiness at the fixedness of his features and attitude. "Recollect yourself. I mean not to urge you too closely. This topic is solemn, but it need not divest you of the fortitude becoming a man." The sound of my voice startled him. He broke from me, looked up, and fixed his eyes upon me with an expression of affright. He shuddered and recoiled as from a spectre. I began to repent of my experiment. I could say nothing suitable to this occasion. I was obliged to stand a silent and powerless spectator, and to suffer this paroxysm to subside of itself. When its violence appeared to be somewhat abated, I resumed:-- "I can feel for you. I act not thus in compliance with a temper that delights in the misery of others. The explanation that I have solicited is no less necessary for your sake than for mine. You are no stranger to the light in which I viewed this man. You have witnessed the grief which his fate occasioned, and the efforts that I made to discover and drag to punishment his murderer. You heard the execrations that I heaped upon him, and my vows of eternal revenge. You expect that, having detected the offender, I will hunt him to infamy and death. You are mistaken. I consider the deed as sufficiently expiated. "I am no stranger to your gnawing cares; to the deep and incurable despair that haunts you, to which your waking thoughts are a prey, and from which sleep cannot secure you. I know the enormity of your crime, but I know not your inducements. Whatever they were, I see the consequences with regard to yourself. I see proofs of that remorse which must ever be attendant on guilt. "This is enough. Why should the effects of our misdeeds be inexhaustible? Why should we be debarred from a comforter? An opportunity of repairing our errors may, at least, be demanded from the rulers of our destiny. "I once imagined that he who killed Waldegrave inflicted the greatest possible injury on me. That was an error, which reflection has cured. Were futurity laid open to my view, and events, with their consequences, unfolded, I might see reason to embrace the assassin as my best friend. Be comforted." He was still incapable of speaking; but tears came to his relief. Without attending to my remonstrances, he betrayed a disposition to return. I had, hitherto, hoped for some disclosure, but now feared that it was designed to be withheld. He stopped not till we reached Inglefield's piazza. He then spoke, for the first time, but in a hollow and tremulous voice:-- "You demand of me a confession of crimes. You shall have it. Some time you shall have it. When it will be, I cannot tell. Something must be done, and shortly." He hurried from me into the house, and, after a pause, I turned my steps home wards. My reflections, as I proceeded, perpetually revolved round a single point. These were scarcely more than a repetition, with slight variations, of a single idea. When I awoke in the morning, I hied, in fancy, to the wilderness. I saw nothing but the figure of the wanderer before me. I traced his footsteps anew, retold my narrative, and pondered on his gestures and words. My condition was not destitute of enjoyment. My stormy passions had subsided into a calm, portentous and awful. My soul was big with expectation. I seemed as if I were on the eve of being ushered into a world whose scenes were tremendous but sublime. The suggestions of sorrow and malice had, for a time, taken their flight, and yielded place to a generous sympathy, which filled my eyes with tears, but had more in it of pleasure than of pain. That Clithero was instrumental to the death of Waldegrave, that he could furnish the clue explanatory of every bloody and mysterious event that had hitherto occurred, there was no longer the possibility of doubting. "He, indeed," said I, "is the murderer of excellence; and yet it shall be my province to emulate a father's clemency, and restore this unhappy man to purity and to peace." Day after day passed, without hearing any thing of Clithero. I began to grow uneasy and impatient. I had gained so much, and by means so unexpected, that I could more easily endure uncertainty with respect to what remained to be known. But my patience had its limits. I should, doubtless, have made use of new means to accelerate this discovery, had not his timely appearance made them superfluous. Sunday being at length arrived, I resolved to go to Inglefield's, seek an interview with his servant, and urge him, by new importunities, to confide to me the secret. On my way thither, Clithero appeared in sight. His visage was pale and wan, and his form emaciated and shrunk. I was astonished at the alteration which the lapse of a week had made in his appearance. At a small distance I mistook him for a stranger. As soon as I perceived who it was, I greeted him with the utmost friendliness. My civilities made little impression on him, and he hastened to inform me, that he was coming to my uncle's, for the purpose of meeting and talking with me. If I thought proper, we would go into the wood together, and find some spot where we might discourse at our leisure and be exempt from interruption. You will easily conceive with what alacrity I accepted his invitation. We returned from the road into the first path, and proceeded in silence, till the wildness of the surrounding scenery informed us that we were in the heart of Norwalk. We lighted on a recess, to which my companion appeared to be familiar, and which had all the advantages of solitude, and was suitable to rest. Here we stopped. Hitherto my companion had displayed a certain degree of composure. Now his countenance betokened a violent internal struggle. It was a considerable time before he could command his speech. When he had so far effected the conquest of his feelings, he began. Chapter IV. You call upon me for a confession of my offences. What a strange fortune is mine! That a human being, in the present circumstances, should make this demand, and that I should be driven, by an irresistible necessity, to comply with it! That here should terminate my calamitous series! That my destiny should call upon me to lie down and die, in a region so remote from the scene of my crime; at a distance so great from all that witnessed and endured their consequences! You believe me to be an assassin. You require me to explain the motives that induced me to murder the innocent. While this is your belief, and this the scope of your expectations, you may be sure of my compliance. I could resist every demand but this. For what purpose have I come hither? Is it to relate my story? Shall I calmly sit here, and rehearse the incidents of my life? Will my strength be adequate to this rehearsal? Let me recollect the motives that governed me, when I formed this design. Perhaps a strenuousness may be imparted by them which, otherwise, I cannot hope to obtain. For the sake of those, I consent to conjure up the ghost of the past, and to begin a tale that, with a fortitude like mine, I am not sure that I shall live to finish. You are unacquainted with the man before you. The inferences which you have drawn, with regard to my designs and my conduct, are a tissue of destructive errors. You, like others, are blind to the most momentous consequences of your own actions. You talk of imparting consolation. You boast the beneficence of your intentions. You set yourself to do me a benefit. What are the effects of your misguided zeal and random efforts? They have brought my life to a miserable close. They have shrouded the last scene of it in blood. They have put the seal to my perdition. My misery has been greater than has fallen to the lot of mortals. Yet it is but beginning. My present path, full as it is of asperities, is better than that into which I must enter when this is abandoned. Perhaps, if my pilgrimage had been longer, I might, at some future day, have lighted upon hope. In consequence of your interference, I am forever debarred from it. My existence is henceforward to be invariable. The woes that are reserved for me are incapable alike of alleviation or intermission. But I came not hither to recriminate. I came not hither to accuse others, but myself. I know the retribution that is appointed for guilt like mine. It is just. I may shudder at the foresight of my punishment and shrink in the endurance of it; but I shall be indebted for part of my torment to the vigour of my understanding, which teaches me that my punishment is just. Why should I procrastinate my doom and strive to render my burden more light? It is but just that it should crush me. Its procrastination is impossible. The stroke is already felt. Even now I drink of the cup of retribution. A change of being cannot aggravate my woe. Till consciousness itself be extinct, the worm that gnaws me will never perish. Fain would I be relieved from this task. Gladly would I bury in oblivion the transactions of my life. But no! My fate is uniform. The demon that controlled me at first is still in the fruition of power. I am entangled in his fold, and every effort that I make to escape only involves me in deeper ruin. I need not conceal, for all the consequences of disclosure are already experienced. I cannot endure a groundless imputation, though to free me from it I must create and justify imputations still more atrocious. My story may at least be brief. If the agonies of remembrance must be awakened afresh, let me do all that in me lies to shorten them. I was born in the county of Armagh. My parents were of the better sort of peasants, and were able to provide me with the rudiments of knowledge. I should doubtless have trodden in their footsteps, and have spent my life in the cultivation of their scanty fields, if an event had not happened, Which, for a long time, I regarded as the most fortunate of my life, but which I now regard as the scheme of some infernal agent, and as the primary source of all my calamities. My father's farm was a portion of the demesne of one who resided wholly in the metropolis and consigned the management of his estates to his stewards and retainers. This person married a lady who brought him great accession of fortune. Her wealth was her only recommendation in the eyes of her husband, (whose understanding was depraved by the prejudices of luxury and rank,) but was the least of her attractions in the estimate of reasonable beings. They passed some years together. If their union were not a source of misery to the lady, she was indebted for her tranquillity to the force of her mind. She was, indeed, governed, in every action of her life, by the precepts of duty, while her husband listened to no calls but those of pernicious dissipation. He was immersed in all the vices that grow out of opulence and a mistaken education. Happily for his wife, his career was short. He was enraged at the infidelity of his mistress, to purchase whose attachment he had lavished two-thirds of his fortune. He called the paramour, by whom he had been supplanted, to the field. The contest was obstinate, and terminated in the death of the challenger. This event freed the lady from many distressful and humiliating obligations. She determined to profit by her newly-acquired independence, to live thenceforward conformably to her notions of right, to preserve and improve, by schemes of economy, the remains of her fortune, and to employ it in the diffusion of good. Her plans made it necessary to visit her estates in the distant provinces. During her abode in the manor of which my father was a vassal, she visited his cottage. I was at that time a child. She was pleased with my vivacity and promptitude, and determined to take me under her own protection. My parents joyfully acceded to her proposal, and I returned with her to the capital. She had an only son of my own age. Her design, in relation to me, was that I should be educated with her child, and that an affection, in this way, might be excited in me towards my young master, which might render me, when we should attain to manhood, one of his most faithful and intelligent dependants. I enjoyed, equally with him, all the essential benefits of education. There were certain accomplishments, from which I was excluded, from the belief that they were unsuitable to my rank and station. I was permitted to acquire others, which, had she been actuated by true discernment, she would, perhaps, have discovered to be far more incompatible with a servile station. In proportion as my views were refined and enlarged by history and science, I was likely to contract a thirst of independence, and an impatience of subjection and poverty. When the period of childhood and youth was past, it was thought proper to send her son to improve his knowledge and manners by a residence on the continent. This young man was endowed with splendid abilities. His errors were the growth of his condition. All the expedients that maternal solicitude and wisdom could suggest were employed to render him a useful citizen. Perhaps this wisdom was attested by the large share of excellence which he really possessed; and that his character was not unblemished proved only that no exertions could preserve him from the vices that are inherent in wealth and rank, and which flow from the spectacle of universal depravity. As to me, it would be folly to deny that I had benefited by my opportunities of improvement. I fulfilled the expectation of my mistress, in one respect. I was deeply imbued with affection for her son, and reverence for herself. Perhaps the force of education was evinced in those particulars, without reflecting any credit on the directors of it. Those might merit the name of defects, which were regarded by them as accomplishments. My unfavourable qualities, like those of my master, were imputed to my condition, though, perhaps, the difference was advantageous to me, since the vices of servitude are less hateful than those of tyranny. It was resolved that I should accompany my master in his travels, in quality of favourite domestic. My principles, whatever might be their rectitude, were harmonious and flexible. I had devoted my life to the service of my patron. I had formed conceptions of what was really conducive to his interest, and was not to be misled by specious appearances. If my affection had not stimulated my diligence, I should have found sufficient motives in the behaviour of his mother. She condescended to express her reliance on my integrity and judgment. She was not ashamed to manifest, at parting, the tenderness of a mother, and to acknowledge that all her tears were not shed on her son's account. I had my part in the regrets that called them forth. During our absence, I was my master's constant attendant. I corresponded with his mother, and made the conduct of her son the principal theme of my letters. I deemed it my privilege, as well as duty, to sit in judgment on his actions, to form my opinions without regard to selfish considerations, and to avow them whenever the avowal tended to benefit. Every letter which I wrote, particularly those in which his behaviour was freely criticized, I allowed him to peruse. I would, on no account, connive at or participate in the slightest irregularity. I knew the duty of my station, and assumed no other control than that which resulted from the avoiding of deceit, and the open expression of my sentiments. The youth was of a noble spirit, but his firmness was wavering. He yielded to temptations which a censor less rigorous than I would have regarded as venial, or, perhaps, laudable. My duty required me to set before him the consequences of his actions, and to give impartial and timely information to his mother. He could not brook a monitor. The more he needed reproof the less supportable it became. My company became every day less agreeable, till at length there appeared a necessity of parting. A separation took place, but not as enemies. I never lost his respect. In his representations to his mother, he was just to my character and services. My dismission was not allowed to injure my fortune, and his mother considered this event merely as a new proof of the inflexible consistency of my principles. On this change in my situation, she proposed to me to become a member of her own family. No proposal could be more acceptable. I was fully acquainted with the character of this lady, and had nothing to fear from injustice and caprice. I did not regard her with filial familiarity, but my attachment and reverence would have done honour to that relation. I performed for her the functions of a steward. Her estates in the city were put under my direction. She placed boundless confidence in my discretion and integrity, and consigned to me the payment, and, in some degree, the selection and government, of her servants. My station was a servile one, yet most of the evils of servitude were unknown to me. My personal ease and independence were less infringed than that of those who are accounted the freest members of society. I derived a sort of authority and dignity from the receipt and disbursement of money. The tenants and debtors of the lady were, in some respects, mine. It was, for the most part, on my justice and lenity that they depended for their treatment. My lady's household-establishment was large and opulent. Her servants were my inferiors and menials. My leisure was considerable, and my emoluments large enough to supply me with every valuable instrument of improvement or pleasure. These were reasons why I should be contented with my lot. These circumstances alone would have rendered it more eligible than any other, but it had additional and far more powerful recommendations, arising from the character of Mrs. Lorimer, and from the relation in which she allowed me to stand to her. How shall I enter upon this theme? How shall I expatiate upon excellencies which it was my fate to view in their genuine colours, to adore with an immeasurable and inextinguishable ardour, and which, nevertheless, it was my hateful task to blast and destroy? Yet I will not be spared. I shall find, in the rehearsal, new incitements to sorrow. I deserve to be supreme in misery, and will not be denied the full measure of a bitter retribution. No one was better qualified to judge of her excellencies. A casual spectator might admire her beauty, and the dignity of her demeanour. From the contemplation of those, he might gather motives for loving or revering her. Age was far from having withered her complexion, or destroyed the evenness of her skin; but no time could rob her of the sweetness and intelligence which animated her features. Her habitual beneficence was bespoken in every look. Always in search of occasions for doing good, always meditating scenes of happiness, of which she was the author, or of distress, for which she was preparing relief, the most torpid insensibility was, for a time, subdued, and the most depraved smitten by charms of which, in another person, they would not perhaps have been sensible. A casual visitant might enjoy her conversation, might applaud the rectitude of her sentiments, the richness of her elocution, and her skill in all the offices of politeness. But it was only for him who dwelt constantly under the same roof, to mark the inviolable consistency of her actions and opinions, the ceaseless flow of her candour, her cheerfulness, and her benevolence. It was only for one who witnessed her behaviour at all hours, in sickness and in health, her management of that great instrument of evil and good, money, her treatment of her son, her menials, and her kindred, rightly to estimate her merits. The intercourse between us was frequent, but of a peculiar kind. My office in her family required me often to see her, to submit schemes to her consideration, and receive her directions. At these times she treated me in a manner in some degree adapted to the difference of rank and the inferiority of my station, and yet widely dissimilar from that which a different person would have adopted in the same circumstances. The treatment was not that of an equal and a friend, but still more remote was it from that of a mistress. It was merely characterized by affability and condescension, but as such it had no limits. She made no scruple to ask my counsel in every pecuniary affair, to listen to my arguments, and decide conformably to what, after sufficient canvassings and discussions, should appear to be right. When the direct occasions of our interview were dismissed, I did not of course withdraw. To detain or dismiss me was indeed at her option; but, if no engagement interfered, she would enter into general conversation. There was none who could with more safety to herself have made the world her confessor; but the state of society in which she lived imposed certain limitations on her candour. In her intercourse with me there were fewer restraints than on any other occasion. My situation had made me more intimately acquainted with domestic transactions, with her views respecting her son, and with the terms on which she thought proper to stand with those whom old acquaintance or kindred gave some title to her good offices. In addition to all those motives to a candid treatment of me, there were others which owed their efficacy to her maternal regard for me, and to the artless and unsuspecting generosity of her character. Her hours were distributed with the utmost regularity, and appropriated to the best purposes. She selected her society without regard to any qualities but probity and talents. Her associates were numerous, and her evening conversations embellished with all that could charm the senses or instruct the understanding. This was a chosen field for the display of her magnificence; but her grandeur was unostentatious, and her gravity unmingled with haughtiness. From these my station excluded me; but I was compensated by the freedom of her communications in the intervals. She found pleasure in detailing to me the incidents that passed on those occasions, in rehearsing conversations and depicting characters. There was an uncommon portion of dramatic merit in her recitals, besides valuable and curious information. One uniform effect was produced in me by this behaviour. Each day I thought it impossible for my attachment to receive any new accessions, yet the morrow was sure to produce some new emotion of respect or of gratitude, and to set the unrivalled accomplishments of this lady in a new and more favourable point of view. I contemplated no change in my condition. The necessity of change, whatever were the alternative, would have been a subject of piercing regret. I deemed my life a cheap sacrifice in her cause. No time would suffice to discharge the debt of gratitude that was due to her. Yet it was continually accumulating. If an anxious thought ever invaded my bosom, it arose from this source. It was no difficult task faithfully to execute the functions assigned to me. No merit could accrue to me from this source. I was exposed to no temptation. I had passed the feverish period of youth. No contagious example had contaminated my principles. I had resisted, the allurements of sensuality and dissipation incident to my age. My dwelling was in pomp and splendour. I had amassed sufficient to secure me, in case of unforeseen accidents, in the enjoyment of competence. My mental resources were not despicable, and the external means of intellectual gratification were boundless. I enjoyed an unsullied reputation. My character was well known in that sphere which my lady occupied, not only by means of her favourable report, but in numberless ways in which it was my fortune to perform personal services to others. Chapter V. Mrs. Lorimer had a twin-brother. Nature had impressed the same image upon them, and had modelled them after the same pattern. The resemblance between them was exact to a degree almost incredible. In infancy and childhood they were perpetually liable to be mistaken for each other. As they grew up, nothing, to a superficial examination, appeared to distinguish them, but the sexual characteristics. A sagacious observer would, doubtless, have noted the most essential differences. In all those modifications of the features which are produced by habits and sentiments, no two persons were less alike. Nature seemed to have intended them as examples of the futility of those theories which ascribe every thing to conformation and instinct and nothing to external circumstances; in what different modes the same materials may be fashioned, and to what different purposes the same materials may be applied. Perhaps the rudiments of their intellectual character, as well as of their form, were the same; but the powers that in one case were exerted in the cause of virtue were, in the other, misapplied to sordid and flagitious purposes. Arthur Wiatte (that was his name) had ever been the object of his sister's affection. As long as he existed, she never ceased to labour in the promotion of his happiness. All her kindness was repaid by a stern and inexorable hatred. This man was an exception to all the rules which govern us in our judgments of human nature. He exceeded in depravity all that has been imputed to the arch-foe of mankind. His wickedness was without any of those remorseful intermissions from which it has been supposed that the deepest guilt is not entirely exempt. He seemed to relish no food but pure unadulterated evil. He rejoiced in proportion to the depth of that distress of which he was the author. His sister, by being placed most within the reach of his enmity, experienced its worst effects. She was the subject on which, by being acquainted with the means of influencing her happiness, he could try his malignant experiments with most hope of success. Her parents being high in rank and wealth, the marriage of their daughter was, of course, an object of anxious attention. There is no event on which our felicity and usefulness more materially depends, and with regard to which, therefore, the freedom of choice and the exercise of our own understanding ought to be less infringed; but this maxim is commonly disregarded in proportion to the elevation of our rank and extent of our property. The lady made her own election; but she wras one of those who acted on a comprehensive plan, and would not admit her private inclination to dictate her decision. The happiness of others, though founded on mistaken views, she did not consider as unworthy of her regard. The choice was such as was not likely to obtain the parental sanction, to whom the moral qualities of their son-in-law, though not absolutely weightless in the balance, were greatly inferior to the considerations of wealth and dignity. The brother set no value on any thing but the means of luxury and power. He was astonished at that perverseness which entertained a different conception of happiness from himself. Love and friendship he considered as groundless and chimerical, and believed that those delusions would, in people of sense, be rectified by experience; but he knew the obstinacy of his sister's attachment to these phantoms, and that to bereave her of the good they promised was the most effectual means of rendering her miserable. For this end he set himself to thwart her wishes. In the imbecility and false indulgence of his parents he found the most powerful auxiliaries. He prevailed upon them to forbid that union which wanted nothing but their concurrence, and their consent to endow her with a small portion of their patrimony, to render completely eligible. The cause was that of her happiness and the happiness of him on whom she had bestowed her heart. It behooved her, therefore, to call forth all her energies in defence of it, to weaken her brother's influence on the minds of her parents, or to win him to be her advocate. When I reflect upon her mental powers, and the advantages which should seem to flow from the circumstance of pleading in the character of daughter arid sister, I can scarcely believe that her attempts miscarried. I should have imagined that all obstacles would yield before her, and particularly in a case like this, in which she must have summoned all her forces, and never have believed that she had struggled sufficiently. Certain it is that her lot was fixed. She was not only denied the husband of her choice, but another was imposed upon her, whose recommendations were irresistible in every one's apprehension but her own. The discarded lover was treated with every sort of contumely. Deceit and violence were employed by her brother to bring his honour, his liberty, and even his life, into hazard. All these iniquities produced no inconsiderable effect on the mind of the lady. The machinations to which her love was exposed would have exasperated him into madness, had not her most strenuous exertions been directed to appease him. She prevailed on him at length to abandon his country, though she thereby merely turned her brother's depravity into a new channel. Her parents died without consciousness of the evils they inflicted, but they experienced a bitter retribution in the conduct of their son. He was the darling and stay of an ancient and illustrious house, but his actions reflected nothing but disgrace upon his ancestry, and threatened to bring the honours of their line to a period in his person. At their death the bulk of their patrimony devolved upon him. This he speedily consumed in gaming and riot. From splendid he descended to meaner vices. The efforts of his sister to recall him to virtue were unintermitted and fruitless. Her affection for him he converted into a means of prolonging his selfish gratifications. She decided for the best. It was no argument of weakness that she was so frequently deceived. If she had judged truly of her brother, she would have judged not only without example, but in opposition to the general experience of mankind. But she was not to be forever deceived. Her tenderness was subservient to justice. And when his vices had led him from the gaming-table to the highway, when seized at length by the ministers of law, when convicted and sentenced to transportation, her intercession was solicited, when all the world knew that pardon would readily be granted to a suppliant of her rank, fortune, and character, when the criminal himself, his kindred, his friends, and even indifferent persons, implored her interference, her justice was inflexible. She knew full well the incurableness of his depravity; that banishment was the mildest destiny that would befall him; that estrangement from ancient haunts and associates was the condition from which his true friends had least to fear. Finding entreaties unavailing, the wretch delivered himself to the suggestions of his malice, and he vowed to be bloodily revenged on her inflexibility. The sentence was executed. That character must indeed be monstrous from which the execution of such threats was to be dreaded. The event sufficiently showed that our fears on this head were well grounded. This event, however, was at a great distance. It was reported that the felons, of whom he was one, mutinied on board the ship in which they had been embarked. In the affray that succeeded, it was said that he was killed. Among the nefarious deeds which he perpetrated was to be numbered the seduction of a young lady, whose heart was broken by the detection of his perfidy. The fruit of this unhappy union was a daughter. Her mother died shortly after her birth. Her father was careless of her destiny. She was consigned to the care of a hireling, who, happily for the innocent victim, performed the maternal offices for her own sake, and did not allow the want of a stipulated recompense to render hor cruel or neglectful. This orphan was sought out by the benevolence of Mrs. Lorimer and placed under her own protection. She received from her the treatment of a mother. The ties of kindred, corroborated by habit, was not the only thing that united them. That resemblance to herself which had been so deplorably defective in her brother was completely realized in his offspring. Nature seemed to have precluded every difference between them but that of age. This darling object excited in her bosom more than maternal sympathies. Her soul clung to the happiness of her _Clarice_ with more ardour than to that of her own son. The latter was not only less worthy of affection, but their separation necessarily diminished their mutual confidence. It was natural for her to look forward to the future destiny of _Clarice_. On these occasions she could not help contemplating the possibility of a union between her son and niece. Considerable advantages belonged to this scheme, yet it was the subject of hope rather than the scope of a project. The contingencies were numerous and delicate on which the ultimate desirableness of this union depended. She was far from certain that her son would be worthy of this benefit, or that, if he were worthy, his propensities would not select for themselves a different object. It was equally dubious whether the young lady would not think proper otherwise to dispose of her affections. These uncertainties could be dissipated only by time. Meanwhile she was chiefly solicitous to render them virtuous and wise. As they advanced in years, the hopes that she had formed were annihilated. The youth was not exempt from egregious errors. In addition to this, it was manifest that the young people were disposed to regard each other in no other light than that of brother and sister. I was not unapprized of her views. I saw that their union was impossible. I was near enough to judge of the character of Clarice. My youth and intellectual constitution made me peculiarly susceptible to female charms. I was her playfellow in childhood, and her associate in studies and amusements at a maturer age. This situation might have been suspected of a dangerous tendency. This tendency, however, was obviated by motives of which I was, for a long time, scarcely conscious. I was habituated to consider the distinctions of rank as indelible. The obstructions that existed, to any wish that I might form, were like those of time and space, and, in their own nature, as insuperable. Such was the state of things previous to our setting out upon our travels. Clarice was indirectly included in our correspondence. My letters were open to her inspection, and I was sometimes honoured with a few complimentary lines under her own hand. On returning to my ancient abode, I was once more exposed to those sinister influences which absence had at least suspended. Various suitors had, meanwhile, been rejected. Their character, for the most part, had been such as to account for her refusal, without resorting to the supposition of a lurking or unavowed attachment. On our meeting she greeted me in a respectful but dignified manner. Observers could discover in it nothing not corresponding to that difference of fortune which subsisted between us. If her joy, on that occasion, had in it some portion of tenderness, the softness of her temper, and the peculiar circumstances in which we had been placed, being considered, the most rigid censor could find no occasion for blame or suspicion. A year passed away, but not without my attention being solicited by something new and inexplicable in my own sensations. At first I was not aware of their true cause; but the gradual progress of my feelings left me not long in doubt as to their origin. I was alarmed at the discovery, but my courage did not suddenly desert me. My hopes seemed to be extinguished the moment that I distinctly perceived the point to which they led. My mind had undergone a change. The ideas with which it was fraught wrere varied. The sight or recollection of Clarice was sure to occasion my mind to advert to the recent discovery, and to revolve the considerations naturally connected with it. Some latent glows and secret trepidations were likewise experienced, when, by some accident, our meetings were abrupt or our interviews unwitnessed; yet my usual tranquillity was not as yet sensibly diminished. I could bear to think of her marriage with another without painful emotions, and was anxious only that her choice should be judicious and fortunate. My thoughts could not long continue in this state. They gradually became more ardent and museful. The image of Clarice occurred with unseasonable frequency. Its charms were enhanced by some nameless and indefinable additions. When it met me in the way I was irresistibly disposed to stop and survey it with particular attention. The pathetic cast of her features, the deep glow of her cheek, and some catch of melting music she had lately breathed, stole incessantly upon my fancy. On recovering from my thoughtful moods, I sometimes found my cheeks wet with tears that had fallen unperceived, and my bosom heaved with involuntary sighs. These images did not content themselves with invading my wakeful hours, but, likewise, encroached upon my sleep. I could no longer resign myself to slumber with the same ease as before. When I slept, my visions were of the same impassioned tenor. There was no difficulty in judging rightly of my situation. I knew what it was that duty exacted from me. To remain in my present situation was a chimerical project. That time and reflection would suffice to restore me to myself was a notion equally fallacious. Yet I felt an insupportable reluctance to change it. This reluctance was owing, not wholly or chiefly to my growing passion, but to the attachment which bound me to the service of my lady. All my contemplations had hitherto been modelled on the belief of my remaining in my present situation during my life. My mildest anticipations had never fashioned an event like this. Any misfortune was light in comparison with that which tore me from her presence and service. But, should I ultimately resolve to separate, how should I communicate my purpose? The pain of parting would scarcely be less on her side than on mine. Could I consent to be the author of disquietude to her? I had consecrated all my faculties to her service. This was the recompense which it was in my power to make for the benefits that I had received. Would not this procedure bear the appearance of the basest ingratitude? The shadow of an imputation like this was more excruciating than the rack. What motive could I assign for my conduct? The truth must not be told. This would be equivalent to supplicating for a new benefit. It would more become me to lessen than increase my obligations. Among all my imaginations on this subject, the possibility of a mutual passion never occurred to me. I could not be blind to the essential distinctions that subsist among men. I could expatiate, like others, on the futility of ribbons and titles, and on the dignity that was annexed to skill and virtue; but these, for the most part, were the incoherences of speculation, and in no degree influenced the stream of my actions and practical sentiments. The barrier that existed in the present case I deemed insurmountable. This was not even the subject of doubt. In disclosing the truth, I should be conceived to be soliciting my lady's mercy and intercession; but this would be the madness of presumption. Let me impress her with any other opinion than that I go in search of the happiness that I have lost under her roof. Let me save her generous heart from the pangs which this persuasion would infallibly produce. I could form no stable resolutions. I seemed unalterably convinced of the necessity of separation, and yet could not execute my design. When I had wrought up my mind to the intention of explaining myself on the next interview, when the next interview took place my tongue was powerless. I admitted any excuse for postponing my design, and gladly admitted any topic, however foreign to my purpose. It must not be imagined that my health sustained no injury from this conflict of my passions. My patroness perceived this alteration. She inquired with the most affectionate solicitude into the cause. It could not be explained. I could safely make light of it, and represented it as something which would probably disappear of itself, as it originated without any adequate cause. She was obliged to acquiesce in my imperfect account. Day after day passed in this state of fluctuation. I was conscious of the dangers of delay, and that procrastination, without rendering the task less necessary, augmented its difficulties. At length, summoning my resolution, I demanded an audience. She received me with her usual affability. Common topics were started; but she saw the confusion and trepidation of my thoughts, and quickly relinquished them. She then noticed to me what she had observed, and mentioned the anxiety which these appearances had given her She reminded me of the maternal regard which she had always manifested towards me, and appealed to my own heart whether any thing could be said in vindication of that reserve with which I had lately treated her, and urged me, as I valued her good opinion, to explain the cause of a dejection _that was too visible_. To all this I could make but one answer:--"Think me not, madam, perverse or ungrateful. I came just now to apprize you of a resolution that I had formed. I cannot explain the motives that induce me. In this case, to lie to you would be unpardonable, and, since I cannot assign my true motives, I will not mislead you by false representations. I came to inform you of my intention to leave your service, and to retire, with the fruits of your bounty, to my native village, where I shall spend my life, I hope, in peace." Her surprise at this declaration was beyond measure. She could not believe her ears. She had not heard me rightly. She compelled me to repeat it. Still I was jesting. I could not possibly mean what my words imported. I assured her, in terms still more explicit, that my resolution was taken and was unalterable, and again entreated her to spare me the task of assigning my motives. This was a strange determination. What could be the grounds of this new scheme? What could be the necessity of hiding them from her? This mystery was not to be endured. She could by no means away with it. She thought it hard that I should abandon her at this time, when she stood in particular need of my assistance and advice. She would refuse nothing to make my situation eligible. I had only to point out where she was deficient in her treatment of me, and she would endeavour to supply it. She was willing to augment my emoluments in any degree that I desired. She could not think of parting with me; but, at any rate, she must be informed of my motives. "It is a hard task," answered I, "that I have imposed upon myself. I foresaw its difficulties, and this foresight has hitherto prevented me from undertaking it; but the necessity by which I am impelled will no longer be withstood. I am determined to go; but to say why is impossible. I hope I shall not bring upon myself the imputation of ingratitude; but this imputation, more intolerable than any other, must be borne, if it cannot be avoided but by this disclosure. "Keep your motives to yourself," said she. "I have too good an opinion of you to suppose that you would practise concealment without good reason. I merely desire you to remain where you are. Since you will not tell me why you take up this new scheme, I can only say that it is impossible there should be any advantage in this scheme. I will not hear of it, I tell you. Therefore, submit to my decree with a good grace." Notwithstanding this prohibition, I persisted in declaring that my determination was fixed, and that the motives that governed me would allow of no alternative. "So, you will go, will you, whether I will or no? I have no power to detain you? You will regard nothing that I can say?" "Believe me, madam, no resolution ever was formed after a more vehement struggle. If my motives were known, you would not only cease to oppose, but would hasten, my departure. Honour me so far with your good opinion as to believe that, in saying this, I say nothing but the truth, and render my duty less burdensome by cheerfully acquiescing in its dictates." "I would," replied the lady, "I could find somebody that has more power over you than I have. Whom shall I call in to aid me in this arduous task?" "Nay, dear madam, if I can resist your entreaties, surely no other can hope to succeed." "I am not sure of that," said my friend, archly; "there is one person in the world whose supplications, I greatly suspect, you would not withstand." "Whom do you mean?" said I, in some trepidation. "You will know presently. Unless I can prevail upon you, I shall be obliged to call for assistance." "Spare me the pain of repeating that no power on earth can change my resolution." "That's a fib," she rejoined, with increased archness. "You know it is. If a certain person entreat you to stay, you will easily comply. I see I cannot hope to prevail by my own strength. That is a mortifying consideration: but we must not part; that is a point settled. If nothing else will do, I must go and fetch my advocate. Stay here a moment." I had scarcely time to breathe, before she returned, leading in Clarice. I did not yet comprehend the meaning of this ceremony. The lady was overwhelmed with sweet confusion. Averted eyes and reluctant steps might have explained to me the purpose of this meeting, if I had believed that purpose to be possible. I felt the necessity of new fortitude, and struggled to recollect the motives that had hitherto sustained me. "There!" said my patroness; "I have been endeavouring to persuade this young man to live with us a little longer. He is determined, it seems, to change his abode. He will not tell why, and I do not care to know, unless I could show his reasons to be groundless. I have merely remonstrated with him on the folly of his scheme, but he has proved refractory to all I can say. Perhaps your efforts may meet with better success." Clarice said not a word. My own embarrassment equally disabled me from speaking. Regarding us both, for some time, with a benign aspect, Mrs. Lorimer resumed, taking a hand of each and joining them together:-- "I very well know what it was that suggested this scheme. It is strange that you should suppose me so careless an observer as not to note, or not to understand, your situation. I am as well acquainted with what is passing in your heart as you yourself are: but why are you so anxious to conceal it? You know less of the adventurousness of love than I should have suspected. But I will not trifle with your feelings. "You, Clithero, know the wishes that I once cherished. I had hoped that my son would have found, in this darling child, an object worthy of his choice, and that my girl would have preferred him to all others. But I have long since discovered that this could not be. They are nowise suited to each other. There is one thing in the next place desirable, and now my wishes are accomplished. I see that you love each other; and never, in my opinion, was a passion more rational and just. I should think myself the worst of beings if I did not contribute all in my power to your happiness. There is not the shadow of objection to your union. I know your scruples, Clithero, and am sorry to see that you harbour them for a moment. Nothing is more unworthy of your good sense. "I found out this girl long ago. Take my word for it, young man, she does not fall short of you in the purity and tenderness of her attachment. What need is there of tedious preliminaries? I will leave you together, and hope you will not be long in coming to a mutual understanding. Your union cannot be completed too soon for my wishes. Clarice is my only and darling daughter. As to you, Clithero, expect henceforth that treatment from me, not only to which your own merit entitles you, but which is due to the husband of my daughter."--With these words she retired, and left us together. Great God! deliver me from the torments of this remembrance. That a being by whom I was snatched from penury and brutal ignorance, exalted to some rank in the intelligent creation, reared to affluence and honour, and thus, at last, spontaneously endowed with all that remained to complete the sum of my felicity, that a being like this-But such thoughts must not yet be: I must shut them out, or I shall never arrive at the end of my tale. My efforts have been thus far successful. I have hitherto been able to deliver a coherent narrative. Let the last words that I shall speak afford some glimmering of my better days. Let me execute without faltering the only task that remains for me. Chapter VI. How propitious, how incredible, was this event! I could scarcely confide in the testimony of my senses. Was it true that Clarice was before me, that she was prepared to countenance my presumption, that she had slighted obstacles which I had deemed insurmountable, that I was fondly beloved by her, and should shortly be admitted to the possession of so inestimable a good? I will not repeat the terms in which I poured forth, at her feet, the raptures of my gratitude. My impetuosity soon extorted from Clarice a confirmation of her mother's declaration. An unrestrained intercourse was thenceforth established between us. Dejection and languor gave place, in my bosom, to the irradiations of joy and hope. My flowing fortunes seemed to have attained their utmost and immutable height. Alas! They were destined to ebb with unspeakably-greater rapidity, and to leave me, in a moment, stranded and wrecked. Our nuptials would have been solemnized without delay, had not a melancholy duty interfered. Clarice had a friend in a distant part of the kingdom. Her health had long been the prey of a consumption. She was now evidently tending to dissolution. In this extremity she entreated her friend to afford her the consolation of her presence. The only wish that remained was to die in her arms. This request could not but be willingly complied with. It became me patiently to endure the delay that would thence arise to the completion of my wishes. Considering the urgency and mournfulness of the occasion, it was impossible for me to murmur, and the affectionate Clarice would suffer nothing to interfere with the duty which she owed to her dying friend. I accompanied her on this journey, remained with her a few days, and then parted from her to return to the metropolis. It was not imagined that it would be necessary to prolong her absence beyond a month. When I bade her farewell, and informed her on what day I proposed to return for her, I felt no decay of my satisfaction. My thoughts were bright and full of exultation. Why was not some intimation afforded me of the snares that lay in my path? In the train laid for my destruction, the agent had so skilfully contrived that my security was not molested by the faintest omen. I hasten to the crisis of my tale. I am almost dubious of my strength. The nearer I approach to it, the stronger is my aversion. My courage, instead of gathering force as I proceed, decays. I am willing to dwell still longer on preliminary circumstances. There are other incidents without which my story would be lame. I retail them because they afford me a kind of respite from horrors at the thought of which every joint in my frame trembles. They must be endured, but that infirmity may be forgiven which makes me inclined to procrastinate my suffering. I mentioned the lover whom my patroness was compelled, by the machinations of her brother, to discard. More than twenty years had passed since their separation. His birth was mean and he was without fortune. His profession was that of a surgeon. My lady not only prevailed upon him to abandon his country, but enabled him to do this by supplying his necessities from her own purse. His excellent understanding was, for a time, obscured by passion; but it was not difficult for my lady ultimately to obtain his concurrence to all her schemes. He saw and adored the rectitude of her motives, did not disdain to accept her gifts, and projected means for maintaining an epistolary intercourse during their separation. Her interest procured him a post in the service of the East India Company. She was, from time to time, informed of his motions. A war broke out between the Company and some of the native powers. He was present at a great battle in which the English were defeated. She could trace him by his letters and by other circumstances thus far, but here the thread was discontinued, and no means which she employed could procure any tidings of him. Whether he was captive, or dead, continued, for several years, to be merely matter of conjecture. On my return to Dublin, I found my patroness engaged in conversation with a stranger. She introduced us to each other in a manner that indicated the respect which she entertained for us both. I surveyed and listened to him with considerable attention. His aspect was noble and ingenuous, but his sunburnt and rugged features bespoke a various and boisterous pilgrimage. The furrows of his brow were the products of vicissitude and hardship, rather than of age. His accents were fiery and energetic, and the impassioned boldness of his address, as well as the tenor of his discourse, full of allusions to the past, and regrets that the course of events had not been different, made me suspect something extraordinary in his character. As soon as he left us, my lady explained who he was. He was no other than the object of her youthful attachment, who had, a few days before, dropped among us as from the skies. He had a long and various story to tell. He had accounted for his silence by enumerating the incidents of his life. He had escaped from the prisons of Hyder, had wandered on foot, and under various disguises, through the northern district of Hindostan. He was sometimes a scholar of Benares, and sometimes a disciple of the Mosque. According to the exigencies of the times, he was a pilgrim to Mecca or to Juggernaut. By a long, circuitous, and perilous route, he at length arrived at the Turkish capital. Here he resided for several years, deriving a precarious subsistence from the profession of a surgeon. He was obliged to desert this post, in consequence of a duel between two Scotsmen. One of them had embraced the Greek religion, and was betrothed to the daughter of a wealthy trader of that nation. He perished in the conflict, and the family of the lady not only procured the execution of his antagonist, but threatened to involve all those who were known to be connected with him in the same ruin. His life being thus endangered, it became necessary for him to seek a new residence. He fled from Constantinople with such precipitation as reduced him to the lowest poverty. He had traversed the Indian conquests of Alexander, as a mendicant. In the same character, he now wandered over the native country of Philip and Philopoemen. He passed safely through multiplied perils, and finally, embarking at Salonica, he reached Venice. He descended through the passes of the Apennines into Tuscany. In this journey he suffered a long detention from banditti, by whom he was waylaid. In consequence of his harmless deportment, and a seasonable display of his chirurgical skill, they granted him his life, though they, for a time, restrained him of his liberty, and compelled him to endure their society. The time was not misemployed which he spent immured in caverns and carousing with robbers. His details were eminently singular and curious, and evinced the acuteness of his penetration, as well as the steadfastness of his courage. After emerging from these wilds, he found his way along the banks of the Arno to Leghorn. Thence he procured a passage to America, whence he had just returned, with many additions to his experience, but none to his fortune. This was a remarkable event. It did not at first appear how far its consequences would extend. The lady was, at present, disengaged and independent. Though the passion which clouded her early prosperity was extinct, time had not diminished the worth of her friend, and they were far from having reached that age when love becomes chimerical and marriage folly. A confidential intercourse was immediately established between them. The bounty of Mrs. Lorimer soon divested her friend of all fear of poverty. "At any rate," said she, "he shall wander no farther, but shall be comfortably situated for the rest of his life." All his scruples were vanquished by the reasonableness of her remonstrances and the vehemence of her solicitations. A cordial intimacy grew between me and the newly-arrived. Our interviews were frequent, and our communications without reserve. He detailed to me the result of his experience, and expatiated without end on the history of his actions and opinions. He related the adventures of his youth, and dwelt upon all the circumstances of his attachment to my patroness. On this subject I had heard only general details. I continually found cause, in the course of his narrative, to revere the illustrious qualities of my lady, and to weep at the calamities to which the infernal malice of her brother had subjected her. The tale of that man's misdeeds, amplified and dramatized by the indignant eloquence of this historian, oppressed me with astonishment. If a poet had drawn such a portrait, I should have been prone to suspect the soundness of his judgment. Till now I had imagined that no character was uniform and unmixed, and my theory of the passions did not enable me to account for a propensity gratified merely by evil, and delighting in shrieks and agony for their own sake. It was natural to suggest to my friend, when expatiating on this theme, an inquiry as to how far subsequent events had obliterated the impressions that were then made, and as to the plausibility of reviving, at this more auspicious period, his claims on the heart of his friend. When he thought proper to notice these hints, he gave me to understand that time had made no essential alteration in his sentiments in this respect; that he still fostered a hope, to which every day added new vigour; that, whatever was the ultimate event, he trusted in his fortitude to sustain it, if adverse, and in his wisdom to extract from it the most valuable consequences, if it should prove prosperous. The progress of things was not unfavourable to his hopes. She treated his insinuations and professions with levity; but her arguments seemed to be urged with no other view than to afford an opportunity of confutation; and, since there was no abatement of familiarity and kindness, there was room to hope that the affair would terminate agreeably to his wishes. Chapter VII. Clarice, meanwhile, was absent. Her friend seemed, at the end of a month, to be little less distant from the grave than at first. My impatience would not allow me to wait till her death. I visited her, but was once more obliged to return alone. I arrived late in the city, and, being greatly fatigued, I retired almost immediately to my chamber. On hearing of my arrival, Sarsefield hastened to see me. He came to my bedside, and such, in his opinion, was the importance of the tidings which he had to communicate, that he did not scruple to rouse me from a deep sleep---- At this period of his narrative, Clithero stopped. His complexion varied from one degree of paleness to another. His brain appeared to suffer some severe constriction. He desired to be excused, for a few minutes, from proceeding. In a short time he was relieved from this paroxysm, and resumed his tale with an accent tremulous at first, but acquiring stability and force as he went on:-- On waking, as I have said, I found my friend seated at my bedside. His countenance exhibited various tokens of alarm. As soon as I perceived who it was, I started, exclaiming, "What is the matter?" He sighed. "Pardon," said he, "this unseasonable intrusion. A light matter would not have occasioned it. I have waited, for two days past, in an agony of impatience, for your return. Happily you are, at last, come. I stand in the utmost need of your counsel and aid." "Heaven defend!" cried I. "This is a terrible prelude. You may, of course, rely upon my assistance and advice. What is it that you have to propose?" "Tuesday evening," he answered, "I spent here. It was late before I returned to my lodgings. I was in the act of lifting my hand to the bell, when my eye was caught by a person standing close to the wall, at the distance of ten paces. His attitude was that of one employed in watching my motions. His face was turned towards me, and happened, at that moment, to be fully illuminated by the rays of a globe-lamp that hung over the door. I instantly recognised his features. I was petrified. I had no power to execute my design, or even to move, but stood, for some seconds, gazing upon him. He was, in no degree, disconcerted by the eagerness of my scrutiny. He seemed perfectly indifferent to the consequences of being known. At length he slowly turned his eyes to another quarter, but without changing his posture, or the sternness of his looks. I cannot describe to you the shock which this encounter produced in me. At last I went into the house, and have ever since been excessively uneasy." "I do not see any ground for uneasiness." "You do not then suspect who this person is?" "No." "It is Arthur Wiatte." "Good heaven! It is impossible. What! my lady's brother?" "The same." "It cannot be. Were we not assured of his death? That he perished in a mutiny on board the vessel in which he was embarked for transportation?" "Such was rumour, which is easily mistaken. My eyes cannot be deceived in this case. I should as easily fail to recognise his sister, when I first met her, as him. This is the man; whether once dead or not, he is at present alive, and in this city." "But has any thing since happened to confirm you in this opinion?" "Yes, there has. As soon as I had recovered from my first surprise, I began to reflect upon the measures proper to be taken. This was the identical Arthur Wiatte. You know his character. No time was likely to change the principles of such a man, but his appearance sufficiently betrayed the incurableness of his habits. The same sullen and atrocious passions were written in his visage. You recollect the vengeance which Wiatte denounced against his sister. There is every thing to dread from his malignity. How to obviate the danger, I know not. I thought, however, of one expedient. It might serve a present purpose, and something better might suggest itself on your return. "I came hither early the next day. Old Gowan, the porter, is well acquainted with Wiatte's story. I mentioned to him that I had reason to think that he had returned. I charged him to have a watchful eye upon every one that knocked at the gate, and that, if this person should come, by no means to admit him. The old man promised faithfully to abide by my directions. His terrors, indeed, were greater than mine, and he knew the importance of excluding Wiatte from these walls." "Did you not inform my lady of this?" "No. In what way could I tell it to her? What end could it answer? Why should I make her miserable? But I have not done. Yesterday morning Gowan took me aside, and informed me that Wiatte had made his appearance, the day before, at the gate. He knew him, he said, in a moment. He demanded to see the lady, but the old man told him she was engaged, and could not be seen. He assumed peremptory and haughty airs, and asserted that his business was of such importance as not to endure a moment's delay. Gowan persisted in his first refusal. He retired with great reluctance, but said he should return to-morrow, when he should insist upon admission to the presence of the lady. I have inquired, and find that he has not repeated his visit. What is to be done?" I was equally at a loss with my friend. This incident was so unlooked-for. What might not be dreaded from the monstrous depravity of Wiatte? His menaces of vengeance against his sister still rung in my ears. Some means of eluding them were indispensable. Could law be resorted to? Against an evil like this, no legal provision had been made. Nine years had elapsed since his transportation. Seven years was the period of his exile. In returning, therefore, he had committed no crime. His person could not be lawfully molested. We were justified merely in repelling an attack. But suppose we should appeal to law: could this be done without the knowledge and concurrence of the lady? She would never permit it. Her heart was incapable of fear from this quarter. She would spurn at the mention of precautions against the hatred of her brother. Her inquietude would merely be awakened on his own account. I was overwhelmed with perplexity. Perhaps if he were sought out, and some judgment formed of the kind of danger to be dreaded from him, by a knowledge of his situation and views, some expedient might be thence suggested. But how should his haunts be discovered? This was easy. He had intimated the design of applying again for admission to his sister. Let a person be stationed near at hand, who, being furnished with an adequate description of his person and dress, shall mark him when he comes, and follow him when he retires, and shall forthwith impart to us the information on that head which he shall be able to collect. My friend concurred in this scheme. No better could, for the present, be suggested. Here ended our conference. I was thus supplied with a new subject of reflection. It was calculated to fill my mind with dreary forebodings. The future was no longer a scene of security and pleasure. It would be hard for those to partake of our fears who did not partake of our experience. The existence of Wiatte was the canker that had blasted the felicity of my patroness. In his reappearance on the stage there was something portentous. It seemed to include in it consequences of the utmost moment, without my being able to discover what these consequences were. That Sarsefield should be so quickly followed by his arch-foe; that they started anew into existence, without any previous intimation, in a manner wholly unexpected, and at the same period,--it seemed as if there lurked, under those appearances, a tremendous significance, which human sagacity could not uncover. My heart sunk within me when I reflected that this was the father of my Clarice. He by whose cruelty her mother was torn from the enjoyment of untarnished honour, and consigned to infamy and an untimely grave. He by whom herself was abandoned in the helplessness of infancy, and left to be the prey of obdurate avarice, and the victim of wretches who traffic in virgin innocence. Who had done all that in him lay to devote her youth to guilt and misery. What were the limits of his power? How may he exert the parental prerogatives? To sleep, while these images were haunting me, was impossible. I passed the night in continual motion. I strode, without ceasing, across the floor of my apartment. My mind was wrought to a higher pitch than I had ever before experienced. The occasion, accurately considered, was far from justifying the ominous inquietudes which I then felt. How, then, should I account for them? Sarsefield probably enjoyed his usual slumber. His repose might not be perfectly serene, but when he ruminated on impending or possible calamities his tongue did not cleave to his mouth, his throat was not parched with unquenchable thirst, he was not incessantly stimulated to employ his superfluous fertility of thought in motion. If I trembled for the safety of her whom I loved, and whose safety was endangered by being the daughter of this miscreant, had he not equal reason to fear for her whom he also loved, and who, as the sister of this ruffian, was encompassed by the most alarming perils? Yet he probably was calm while I was harassed by anxieties. Alas! The difference was easily explained. Such was the beginning of a series ordained to hurry me to swift destruction. Such were the primary tokens of the presence of that power by whose accursed machinations I was destined to fall. You are startled at this declaration. It is one to which you have been little accustomed. Perhaps you regard it merely as an effusion of frenzy. I know what I am saying. I do not build upon conjectures and surmises. I care not, indeed, for your doubts. Your conclusion may be fashioned at your pleasure. Would to Heaven that my belief were groundless, and that I had no reason to believe my intellects to have been perverted by diabolical instigations! I could procure no sleep that night. After Sarsefield's departure I did not even lie down. It seemed to me that I could not obtain the benefits of repose otherwise than by placing my lady beyond the possibility of danger. I met Sarsefield the next day. In pursuance of the scheme which had been adopted by us on the preceding evening, a person was selected and commissioned to watch the appearance of Wiatte. The day passed as usual with respect to the lady. In the evening she was surrounded by a few friends. Into this number I was now admitted. Sarsefield and myself made a part of this company. Various topics were discussed with ease and sprightliness. Her societies were composed of both sexes, and seemed to have monopolized all the ingenuity and wit that existed in the metropolis. After a slight repast the company dispersed. This separation took place earlier than usual, on account of a slight indisposition in Mrs. _Lorimer_. Sarsefield and I went out together. We took that opportunity of examining our agent, and, receiving no satisfaction from him, we dismissed him for that night, enjoining him to hold himself in readiness for repeating the experiment to-morrow. My friend directed his steps homeward, and I proceeded to execute a commission with which I had charged myself. A few days before, a large sum had been deposited in the hands of a banker, for the use of my lady. It was the amount of a debt which had lately been recovered. It was lodged here for the purpose of being paid on demand of her or her agents. It was my present business to receive this money. I had deferred the performance of this engagement to this late hour, on account of certain preliminaries which were necessary to be adjusted. Having received this money, I prepared to return home. The inquietude which had been occasioned by Sarsefield's intelligence had not incapacitated me from performing my usual daily occupations. It was a theme to which, at every interval of leisure from business or discourse, I did not fail to return. At those times I employed myself in examining the subject on all sides; in supposing particular emergencies, and delineating the conduct that was proper to be observed on each. My daily thoughts were, by no means, so fear-inspiring as the meditations of the night had been. As soon as I left the banker's door, my meditations fell into this channel. I again reviewed the recent occurrences, and imagined the consequences likely to flow from them. My deductions were not, on this occasion, peculiarly distressful. The return of darkness had added nothing to my apprehensions. I regarded Wiatte merely as one against whose malice it was wise to employ the most vigilant precautions. In revolving these precautions nothing occurred that was new. The danger appeared without unusual aggravations, and the expedients that offered themselves to my choice were viewed with a temper not more sanguine or despondent than before. In this state of mind I began and continued my walk. The distance was considerable between my own habitation and that which I had left. My way lay chiefly through populous and well-frequented streets. In one part of the way, however, it was at the option of the passenger either to keep along the large streets, or considerably to shorten the journey by turning into a dark, crooked, and narrow lane. Being familiar with every part of this metropolis, and deeming it advisable to take the shortest and obscurest road, I turned into the alley. I proceeded without interruption to the next turning. One night-officer, distinguished by his usual ensigns, was the only person who passed me. I had gone three steps beyond when I perceived a man by my side. I had scarcely time to notice this circumstance, when a hoarse voice exclaimed, "Damn ye, villain, ye're a dead man!" At the same moment a pistol flashed at my ear, and a report followed. This, however, produced no other effect than, for a short space, to overpower my senses. I staggered back, but did not fall. The ball, as I afterwards discovered, had grazed my forehead, but without making any dangerous impression. The assassin, perceiving that his pistol had been ineffectual, muttered, in an enraged tone, "This shall do your business!" At the same time, he drew a knife forth from his bosom. I was able to distinguish this action by the rays of a distant lamp, which glistened on the blade. All this passed in an instant. The attack was so abrupt that my thoughts could not be suddenly recalled from the confusion into which they were thrown. My exertions were mechanical. My will might be said to be passive, and it was only by retrospect and a contemplation of consequences that I became fully informed of the nature of the scene. If my assailant had disappeared as soon as he had discharged the pistol, my state of extreme surprise might have slowly given place to resolution and activity. As it was, my sense was no sooner struck by the reflection from the blade, than my hand, as if by spontaneous energy, was thrust into my pocket. I drew forth a pistol. He lifted up his weapon to strike, but it dropped from his powerless fingers. He fell, and his groans informed me that I had managed my arms with more skill than my adversary. The noise of this encounter soon attracted spectators. Lights were brought, and my antagonist discovered bleeding at my feet. I explained, as briefly as I was able, the scene which they witnessed. The prostrate person was raised by two men, and carried into a public house nigh at hand. I had not lost my presence of mind. I at once perceived the propriety of administering assistance to the wounded man. I despatched, therefore, one of the bystanders for a surgeon of considerable eminence, who lived at a small distance, and to whom I was well known. The man was carried into an inner apartment and laid upon the floor. It was not till now that I had a suitable opportunity of ascertaining who it was with whom I had been engaged. I now looked upon his face. The paleness of death could not conceal his well-known features. It was Wiatte himself who was breathing his last groans at my feet! The surgeon, whom I had summoned, attended; but immediately perceived the condition of his patient to be hopeless. In a quarter of an hour he expired. During this interval, he was insensible to all around him. I was known to the surgeon, the landlord, and some of the witnesses. The case needed little explanation. The accident reflected no guilt upon me. The landlord was charged with the care of the corpse till the morning, and I was allowed to return home, without further impediment. Chapter VIII. Till now my mind had been swayed by the urgencies of this occasion. These reflections were excluded, which rushed tumultuously upon me the moment I was at leisure to receive them. Without foresight of a previous moment, an entire change had been wrought in my condition. I had been oppressed with a sense of the danger that flowed from the existence of this man. By what means the peril could be annihilated, and we be placed in security from his attempts, no efforts of mind could suggest. To devise these means, and employ them with success, demanded, as I conceived, the most powerful sagacity and the firmest courage. Now the danger was no more. The intelligence in which plans of mischief might be generated was extinguished or flown. Lifeless were the hands ready to execute the dictates of that intelligence. The contriver of enormous evil was, in one moment, bereft of the power and the will to injure. Our past tranquillity had been owing to the belief of his death. Fear and dismay had resumed their dominion when the mistake was discovered. But now we might regain possession of our wonted confidence. I had beheld with my own eyes the lifeless corpse of our implacable adversary. Thus, in a moment, had terminated his long and flagitious career. His restless indignation, his malignant projects, that had so long occupied the stage and been so fertile of calamity, were now at an end! In the course of my meditations, the idea of the death of this man had occurred, and it bore the appearance of a desirable event. Yet it was little qualified to tranquillize my fears. In the long catalogue of contingencies, this, indeed, was to be found; but it was as little likely to happen as any other. It could not happen without a series of anterior events paving the way for it. If his death came from us, it must be the theme of design. It must spring from laborious circumvention and deep-laid stratagems. No. He was dead. I had killed him. What had I done? I had meditated nothing. I was impelled by an unconscious necessity. Had the assailant been my father, the consequence would have been the same. My understanding had been neutral. Could it be? In a space so short, was it possible that so tremendous a deed had been executed? Was I not deceived by some portentous vision? I had witnessed the convulsions and last agonies of Wiatte. He was no more, and I was his destroyer! Such was the state of my mind for some time after this dreadful event. Previously to it I was calm, considerate, and self-collected. I marked the way that I was going. Passing objects were observed. If I adverted to the series of my own reflections, my attention was not seized and fastened by them. I could disengage myself at pleasure, and could pass, without difficulty, from attention to the world within, to the contemplation of that without. Now my liberty, in this respect, was at an end. I was fettered, confounded, smitten with excess of thought, and laid prostrate with wonder! I no longer attended to my steps. When I emerged from my stupor, I found that I had trodden back the way which I had lately come, and had arrived within sight of the banker's door. I checked myself, and once more turned my steps homeward. This seemed to be a hint for entering into new reflections. "The deed," said I, "is irretrievable. I have killed the brother of my patroness, the father of my love." This suggestion was new. It instantly involved me in terror and perplexity. How shall I communicate the tidings? What effect will they produce? My lady's sagacity is obscured by the benevolence of her temper. Her brother was sordidly wicked,--a hoary ruffian, to whom the language of pity was as unintelligible as the gabble of monkeys. His heart was fortified against compunction, by the atrocious habits of forty years; he lived only to interrupt her peace, to confute the promises of virtue, and convert to rancour and reproach the fair dame of fidelity. He was her brother still. As a human being, his depravity was never beyond the health-restoring power of repentance. His heart, so long as it beat, was accessible to remorse. The singularity of his birth had made her regard this being as more intimately her brother, than would have happened in different circumstances. It was her obstinate persuasion that their fates were blended. The rumour of his death she had never credited. It was a topic of congratulation to her friends, but of mourning and distress to her. That he would one day reappear upon the stage, and assume the dignity of virtue, was a source of consolation with which she would never consent to part. Her character was now known. When the doom of exile was pronounced upon him, she deemed it incumbent on her to vindicate herself from aspersions founded on misconceptions of her motives in refusing her interference. The manuscript, though unpublished, was widely circulated. None could resist her simple and touching eloquence, nor rise from the perusal without resigning his heart to the most impetuous impulses of admiration, and enlisting himself among the eulogists of her justice and her fortitude. This was the only monument, in a written form, of her genius. As such it was engraven on my memory. The picture that it described was the perpetual companion of my thoughts. Alas! It had, perhaps, been well for me if it had been buried in eternal oblivion. I read in it the condemnation of my deed, the agonies she was preparing to suffer, and the indignation that would overflow upon the author of so signal a calamity. I had rescued my life by the sacrifice of his. Whereas I should have died. Wretched and precipitate coward! What had become of my boasted gratitude? Such was the zeal that I had vowed to her. Such the services which it was the business of my life to perform. I had snatched her brother from existence. I had torn from her the hope which she so ardently and indefatigably cherished. From a contemptible and dastardly regard to my own safety I had failed in the moment of trial and when called upon by Heaven to evince the sincerity of my professions. She had treated my professions lightly. My vows of eternal devotion she had rejected with lofty disinterestedness. She had arraigned my impatience of obligation as criminal, and condemned every scheme I had projected for freeing myself from the burden which her beneficence had laid upon me. The impassioned and vehement anxiety with which, in former days, she had deprecated the vengeance of her lover against Wiatte, rung in my ears. My senses were shocked anew by the dreadful sounds, "Touch not my brother. Wherever you meet with him, of whatever outrage he be guilty, suffer him to pass in safety. Despise me; abandon me; kill me. All this I can bear even from you; but spare, I implore you, my unhappy brother. The stroke that deprives him of life will not only have the same effect upon me, but will set my portion in everlasting misery." To these supplications I had been deaf. It is true I had not rushed upon him unarmed, intending no injury nor expecting any. Of that degree of wickedness I was, perhaps, incapable. Alas! I have immersed myself sufficiently deep in crimes. I have trampled under foot every motive dear to the heart of honour. I have shown myself unworthy the society of men. Such were the turbulent suggestions of that moment. My pace slackened. I stopped, and was obliged to support myself against a wall. The sickness that had seized my heart penetrated every part of my frame. There was but one thing wanting to complete my distraction.--"My lady," said I, "believed her fate to be blended with that of Wiatte. Who shall affirm that the persuasion is a groundless one? She had lived and prospered, notwithstanding the general belief that her brother was dead. She would not hearken to the rumour. Why? Because nothing less than indubitable evidence would suffice to convince her? Because the counter-intimation flowed from an infallible source? How can the latter supposition be confuted? Has she not predicted the event? "The period of terrible fulfilment has arrived. The same blow that bereaved _him_ of life has likewise ratified her doom. "She has been deceived. It is nothing more, perhaps, than a fond imagination. It matters not. Who knows not the cogency of faith? That the pulses of life are at the command of the will? The bearer of these tidings will be the messenger of death. A fatal sympathy will seize her. She will shrink, and swoon, and perish, at the news! "Fond and short-sighted wretch! This is the price thou hast given for security. In the rashness of thy thought, thou saidst, 'Nothing is wanting but his death to restore us to confidence and safety.' Lo! the purchase is made. Havoc and despair, that were restrained during his life, were let loose by his last sigh. Now only is destruction made sure. Thy lady, thy Clarice, thy friend, and thyself, are, by this act, involved in irretrievable and common ruin!" I started from my attitude. I was scarcely conscious of any transition. The interval was fraught with stupor, and amazement. It seemed as if my senses had been hushed in sleep, while the powers of locomotion were unconsciously exerted to bear me to my chamber. By whatever means the change was effected, there I was. I have been able to proceed thus far. I can scarcely believe the testimony of my memory that assures me of this. My task is almost executed; but whence shall I obtain strength enough to finish it? What I have told is light as gossamer, compared with the insupportable and crushing horrors of that which is to come. Heaven, in token of its vengeance, will enable me to proceed. It is fitting that my scene should thus close. My fancy began to be infected with the errors of my understanding. The mood into which my mind was plunged was incapable of any propitious intermission. All within me was tempestuous and dark. My ears were accessible to no sounds but those of shrieks and lamentations. It was deepest midnight, and all the noises of a great metropolis were hushed. Yet I listened as if to catch some strain of the dirge that was begun. Sable robes, sobs, and a dreary solemnity encompassed me on all sides, I was haunted to despair by images of death, imaginary clamours, and the train of funeral pageantry. I seemed to have passed forward to a distant era of my life. The effects which were come were already realized. The foresight of misery created it, and set me in the midst of that hell which I feared. From a paroxysm like this the worst might reasonably be dreaded, yet the next step to destruction was not suddenly taken. I paused on the brink of the precipice, as if to survey the depth of that frenzy that invaded me; was able to ponder on the scene, and deliberate, in a state that partook of calm, on the circumstances of my situation. My mind was harassed by the repetition of one idea. Conjecture deepened into certainty. I could place the object in no light which did not corroborate the persuasion that, in the act committed, I had insured the destruction of my lady. At length my mind, somewhat relieved from the tempest of my fears, began to trace and analyze the consequences which I dreaded. The fate of Wiatte would inevitably draw along with it that of his sister. In what way would this effect be produced? Were they linked together by a sympathy whose influence was independent of sensible communication? Could she arrive at a knowledge of his miserable and by other than verbal means? I had heard of such extraordinary copartnerships in being and modes of instantaneous intercourse among beings locally distant. Was this a new instance of the subtlety of mind? Had she already endured his agonies, and like him already ceased to breathe? Every hair bristled at this horrible suggestion. But the force of sympathy might be chimerical. Buried in sleep, or engaged in careless meditation, the instrument by which her destiny might be accomplished was the steel of an assassin. A series of events, equally beyond the reach of foresight with those which had just happened, might introduce, with equal abruptness, a similar disaster. What, at that moment, was her condition? Reposing in safety in her chamber, as her family imagined. But were they not deceived? Was she not a mangled corpse? Whatever were her situation, it could not be ascertained, except by extraordinary means, till the morning. Was it wise to defer the scrutiny till then? Why not instantly investigate the truth? These ideas passed rapidly through my mind. A considerable portion of time and amplification of phrase are necessary to exhibit, verbally, ideas contemplated in a space of incalculable brevity. With the same rapidity I conceived the resolution of determining the truth of my suspicions. All the family, but myself, were at rest. Winding passages would conduct me, without danger of disturbing them, to the hall, from which double staircases ascended. One of these led to a saloon above, on the east side of which was a door that communicated with a suite of rooms occupied by the lady of the mansion. The first was an antechamber, in which a female servant usually lay. The second was the lady's own bedchamber. This was a sacred recess, with whose situation, relative to the other apartments of the building, I was well acquainted, but of which I knew nothing from my own examination, having never been admitted into it. Thither I was now resolved to repair. I was not deterred by the sanctity of the place and hour. I was insensible to all consequences but the removal of my doubts. Not that my hopes were balanced by my fears. That the same tragedy had been performed in her chamber and in the street, nothing hindered me from believing with as much cogency as if my own eyes had witnessed it, but the reluctance with which we admit a detestable truth. To terminate a state of intolerable suspense, I resolved to proceed forthwith to her chamber. I took the light and paced, with no interruption, along the galleries. I used no precaution. If I had met a servant or robber, I am not sure that I should have noticed him. My attention was too perfectly engrossed to allow me to spare any to a casual object. I cannot affirm that no one observed me. This, however, was probable from the distribution of the dwelling. It consisted of a central edifice and two wings, one of which was appropriated to domestics and the other, at the extremity of which my apartment was placed, comprehended a library, and rooms for formal and social and literary conferences. These, therefore, were deserted at night, and my way lay along these. Hence it was not likely that my steps would be observed. I proceeded to the hall. The principal parlour was beneath her chamber. In the confusion of my thoughts, I mistook one for the other. I rectified, as soon as I detected, my mistake. I ascended, with a beating heart, the staircase. The door of the antechamber was unfastened. I entered, totally regardless of disturbing the girl who slept within. The bed which she occupied was concealed by curtains. Whether she were there, I did not stop to examine. I cannot recollect that any tokens were given of wakefulness or alarm. It was not till I reached the door of her own apartment that my heart began to falter. It was now that the momentousness of the question I was about to decide rushed with its genuine force upon my apprehension. Appalled and aghast, I had scarcely power to move the bolt. If the imagination of her death was not to be supported, how should I bear the spectacle of wounds and blood? Yet this was reserved for me. A few paces would set me in the midst of a scene of which I was the abhorred contriver. Was it right to proceed? There were still the remnants of doubt. My forebodings might possibly be groundless. All within might be safety and serenity. A respite might be gained from the execution of an irrevocable sentence. What could I do? Was not any thing easy to endure in comparison with the agonies of suspense? If I could not obviate the evil I must bear it, but the torments of suspense were susceptible of remedy. I drew back the bolt, and entered with the reluctance of fear, rather than the cautiousness of guilt. I could not lift my eyes from the ground. I advanced to the middle of the room. Not a sound like that of the dying saluted my-ear. At length, shaking off the fetters of hopelessness, I looked up. I saw nothing calculated to confirm my fears. Everywhere there reigned quiet and order. My heart leaped with exultation. "Can it be," said I, "that I have been betrayed with shadows?--But this is not sufficient." Within an alcove was the bed that belonged to her. If her safety were inviolate, it was here that she reposed. What remained to convert tormenting doubt into ravishing certainty? I was insensible to the perils of my present situation. If she, indeed, were there, would not my intrusion awaken her? She would start and perceive me, at this hour, standing at her bedside. How should I account for an intrusion so unexampled and audacious? I could not communicate my fears. I could not tell her that the blood with which my hands were stained had flowed from the wounds of her brother. My mind was inaccessible to such considerations. They did not even modify my predominant idea. Obstacles like these, had they existed, would have been trampled under foot. Leaving the lamp, that I bore, on the table, I approached the bed. I slowly drew aside the curtain, and beheld her tranquilly slumbering. I listened, but so profound was her sleep, that not even her breathings could be overheard. I dropped the curtain and retired. How blissful and mild were the illuminations of my bosom at this discovery! A joy that surpassed all utterance succeeded the fierceness of desperation. I stood, for some moments, wrapped in delightful contemplation. Alas! it was a luminous but transient interval. The madness to whose black suggestions it bore so strong a contrast began now to make sensible approaches on my understanding. "True," said I, "she lives. Her slumber is serene and happy. She is blind to her approaching destiny. Some hours will at least be rescued from anguish and death. When she wakes, the phantom that soothed her will vanish. The tidings cannot be withheld from her. The murderer of thy brother cannot hope to enjoy thy smiles. Those ravishing accents, with which thou hast used to greet me, will be changed. Scowling and reproaches, the invectives of thy anger and the maledictions of thy justice, will rest upon my head, "What is the blessing which I made the theme of my boastful arrogance? This interval of being and repose is momentary. She will awake, but only to perish at the spectacle of my ingratitude. She will awake only to the consciousness of instantly-impending death. When she again sleeps she will wake no more. I, her son,--I, whom the law of my birth doomed to poverty and hardship, but whom her unsolicited beneficence snatched from those evils, and endowed with the highest good known to intelligent beings, the consolations of science and the blandishments of affluence,--to whom the darling of her life, the offspring in whom are faithfully preserved the lineaments of its angelic mother, she has not denied! What is the recompense that I have made? How have I discharged the measureless debt of gratitude to which she is entitled? Thus!-- "Cannot my guilt be extenuated? Is there not a good that I can do thee? Must I perpetrate unmingled evil? Is the province assigned me that of an infernal emissary, whose efforts are concentred in a single purpose, and that purpose a malignant one? I am the author of thy calamities. Whatever misery is reserved for thee, I am the source whence it flows. Can I not set bounds to the stream? Cannot I prevent thee from returning to a consciousness which, till it ceases to exist, will not cease to be rent and mangled? "Yes. It is in my power to screen thee from the coming storm; to accelerate thy journey to rest. I will do it." The impulse was not to be resisted. I moved with the suddenness of lightning. Armed with a pointed implement that lay----it was a dagger. As I set down the lamp, I struck the edge. Yet I saw it not, or noticed it not till I needed its assistance. By what accident it came hither, to what deed of darkness it had already been subservient, I had no power to inquire. I stepped to the table and seized it. The time which this action required was insufficient to save me. My doom was ratified by powers which no human energies can counterwork.--Need I go further? Did you entertain any imagination of so frightful a catastrophe? I am overwhelmed by turns with dismay and with wonder. I am prompted by turns to tear my heart from my breast and deny faith to the verdict of my senses. Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the demon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the bloody office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles. A little moment for that sufficed. If my destruction had not been decreed, why was the image of Clarice so long excluded? Yet why do I say long? The fatal resolution was conceived, and I hastened to the execution, in a period too brief for more than itself to be viewed by the intellect. What then? Were my hands imbrued in this precious blood? Was it to this extremity of horror that my evil genius was determined to urge me? Too surely this was his purpose; too surely I was qualified to be its minister. I lifted the weapon. Its point was aimed at the bosom of the sleeper. The impulse was given. At the instant a piercing shriek was uttered behind me, and a stretched-out hand, grasping the blade, made it swerve widely from its aim. It descended, but without inflicting a wound. Its force was spent upon the bed. Oh for words to paint that stormy transition! I loosed my hold of the dagger. I started back, and fixed eyes of frantic curiosity on the author of my rescue. He that interposed to arrest my deed, that started into being and activity at a moment so pregnant with fate, without tokens of his purpose or his coming being previously imparted, could not, methought, be less than divinity. The first glance that I darted on this being corroborated my conjecture. It was the figure and lineaments of Mrs. Lorimer. Negligently habited in flowing and brilliant white, with features bursting with terror and wonder, the likeness of that being who was stretched upon the bed now stood before me. All that I am able to conceive of angel was comprised in the moral constitution of this woman. That her genius had overleaped all bounds, and interposed to save her, was no audacious imagination. In the state in which my mind then was, no other belief than this could occupy the first place. My tongue was tied. I gazed by turns upon her who stood before me, and her who lay upon the bed, and who, awakened by the shriek that had been uttered, now opened her eyes. She started from her pillow, and, by assuming a new and more distinct attitude, permitted me to recognise _Clarice herself_! Three days before, I had left her, beside the bed of a dying friend, at a solitary mansion in the mountains of Donegal. Here it had been her resolution to remain till her friend should breathe her last. Fraught with this persuasion, knowing this to be the place and hour of repose of my lady, hurried forward by the impetuosity of my own conceptions, deceived by the faint gleam which penetrated through the curtain and imperfectly-irradiated features which bore, at all times, a powerful resemblance to those of Mrs. Lorimer, I had rushed to the brink of this terrible precipice! Why did I linger on the verge? Why, thus perilously situated, did I not throw myself headlong? The steel was yet in my hand. A single blow would have pierced my heart, and shut out from my remembrance and foresight the past and the future. The moment of insanity had gone by, and I was once more myself. Instead of regarding the act which I had meditated as the dictate of compassion or of justice, it only added to the sum of my ingratitude, and gave wings to the whirlwind that was sent to bear me to perdition. Perhaps I was influenced by a sentiment which I had not leisure to distribute into parts. My understanding was, no doubt, bewildered in the maze of consequences which would spring from my act. How should I explain my coming hither in this murderous guise, my arm lifted to destroy the idol of my soul and the darling child of my patroness? In what words should I unfold the tale of Wiatte, and enumerate the motives that terminated in the present scene? What penalty had not my infatuation and cruelty deserved? What could I less than turn the dagger's point against my own bosom? A second time, the blow was thwarted and diverted. Once more this beneficent interposer held my arm from the perpetration of a new iniquity. Once more frustrated the instigations of that demon, of whose malice a mysterious destiny had consigned me to be the sport and the prey. Every new moment added to the sum of my inexpiable guilt. Murder was succeeded, in an instant, by the more detestable enormity of suicide. She to whom my ingratitude was flagrant in proportion to the benefits of which she was the author, had now added to her former acts that of rescuing me from the last of mischiefs. I threw the weapon on the floor. The zeal which prompted her to seize my arm, this action occasioned to subside, and to yield place to those emotions which this spectacle was calculated to excite. She watched me in silence, and with an air of ineffable solicitude. Clarice, governed by the instinct of modesty, wrapped her bosom and face in the bedclothes, and testified her horror by vehement but scarcely-articulate exclamations. I moved forward, but my steps were random and tottering. My thoughts were fettered by reverie, and my gesticulations destitute of meaning. My tongue faltered without speaking, and I felt as if life and death were struggling within me for the mastery. My will, indeed, was far from being neutral in this contest. To such as I, annihilation is the supreme good. To shake off the ills that fasten on us by shaking off existence, is a lot which the system of nature has denied to man. By escaping from life, I should be delivered from this scene, but should only rush into a world of retribution, and be immersed in new agonies. I was yet to live. No instrument of my deliverance was within reach. I was powerless. To rush from the presence of these women to hide me forever from their scrutiny and their upbraiding, to snatch from their minds all traces of the existence of Clithero, was the scope of unutterable longings. Urged to flight by every motive of which my nature was susceptible, I was yet rooted to the spot. Had the pause been only to be interrupted by me, it would have lasted forever. At length, the lady, clasping her hands and lifting them, exclaimed, in a tone melting into pity and grief,-- "Clithero! what is this? How came you hither, and why?" I struggled for utterance:--"I came to murder you. Your brother has perished by my hands. Fresh from the commission of this deed, I have hastened hither to perpetrate the same crime upon you." "My brother!" replied the lady, with new vehemence. "Oh, say not so! I have just heard of his return, from Sarsefield, and that he lives." "He is dead," repeated I, with fierceness; "I know it. It was I that killed him." "Dead!" she faintly articulated. "And by thee, Clithero? Oh! cursed chance that hindered thee from killing me also! Dead! Then is the omen fulfilled! Then am I undone! Lost forever!" Her eyes now wandered from me, and her countenance sunk into a wild and rueful expression. Hope was utterly extinguished in her heart, and life forsook her at the same moment. She sunk upon the floor pallid and breathless. How she came into possession of this knowledge I know not. It is possible that Sarsefield had repented of concealment, and, in the interval that passed between our separation and my encounter with Wiatte, had returned, and informed her of the reappearance of this miscreant. Thus, then, was my fate consummated. I was rescued from destroying her by a dagger, only to behold her perish by the tidings which I brought. Thus was every omen of mischief and misery fulfilled. Thus was the enmity of Wiatte rendered efficacious, and the instrument of his destruction changed into the executioner of his revenge. Such is the tale of my crimes. It is not for me to hope that the curtain of oblivion will ever shut out the dismal spectacle. It will haunt me forever. The torments that grow out of it can terminate only with the thread of my existence, but that, I know full well, will never end. Death is but a shifting of the scene; and the endless progress of eternity, which to the good is merely the perfection of felicity, is to the wicked an accumulation of woe. The self-destroyer is his own enemy: this has ever been my opinion. Hitherto it has influenced my actions. Now, though the belief continues, its influence on my conduct is annihilated. I am no stranger to the depth of that abyss into which I shall plunge. No matter. Change is precious for its own sake. Well, I was still to live. My abode must be somewhere fixed. My conduct was henceforth the result of a perverse and rebellious principle. I banished myself forever from my native soil. I vowed never more to behold the face of my Clarice, to abandon my friends, my books, all my wonted labours and accustomed recreations. I was neither ashamed nor afraid. I considered not in what way the justice of the country would affect me. It merely made no part of my contemplations. I was not embarrassed by the choice of expedients for trammelling up the visible consequences and for eluding suspicion. The idea of abjuring my country and flying forever from the hateful scene partook, to my apprehension, of the vast, the boundless, and strange; of plunging from the height of fortune to obscurity and indigence, corresponded with my present state of mind. It was of a piece with the tremendous and wonderful events that had just happened. These were the images that haunted me, while I stood speechlessly gazing at the ruin before me. I heard a noise from without, or imagined that I heard it. My reverie was broken, and my muscular power restored. I descended into the street, through doors of which I possessed one set of keys, and hurried by the shortest way beyond the precincts of the city. I had laid no plan. My conceptions with regard to the future were shapeless and confused. Successive incidents supplied me with a clue, and suggested, as they rose, the next step to be taken. I threw off the garb of affluence, and assumed a beggar's attire. That I had money about me for the accomplishment of my purposes was wholly accidental. I travelled along the coast, and, when I arrived at one town, knew not why I should go farther; but my restlessness was unabated, and change was some relief. I it length arrived at Belfast. A vessel was preparing for America. I embraced eagerly the opportunity of passing into a new world. I arrived at Philadelphia. As soon as I landed I wandered hither, and was content to wear out my few remaining days in the service of Inglefield. I have no friends. Why should I trust my story to mother? I have no solicitude about concealment; but who is there who will derive pleasure or benefit from my rehearsal? And why should I expatiate on so hateful a scheme? Yet now have I consented to this. I have confided in you the history of my disasters. I am not fearful of the use that you may be disposed to make of it. I shall quickly set myself beyond the reach of human tribunals. I shall relieve the ministers of law from the trouble of punishing. The recent events which induced you to summon me to this conference have likewise determined me to make this disclosure. I was not aware, for some time, of my perturbed sleep. No wonder that sleep cannot soothe miseries like mine; that I am alike infested by memory in wakefulness and slumber. Yet I was anew distressed by the discovery that my thoughts found their way to my lips, without my being conscious of it, and that my steps wandered forth unknowingly and without the guidance of my will. The story you have told is not incredible. The disaster to which you allude did not fail to excite my regret. I can still weep over the untimely fall of youth and worth. I can no otherwise account for my frequenting his shade than by the distant resemblance which the death of this man bore to that of which I was the perpetrator. This resemblance occurred to me at first. If he were able to weaken the impression which was produced by my crime, this similitude was adapted to revive and enforce them. The wilderness, and the cave to which you followed me, were familiar to my Sunday rambles. Often have I indulged in audible griefs on the cliffs of that valley. Often have I brooded over my sorrows in the recesses of that cavern. This scene is adapted to my temper. Its mountainous asperities supply me with images of desolation and seclusion, and its headlong streams lull me into temporary forgetfulness of mankind. I comprehend you. You suspect me of concern in the death of Waldegrave. You could not do otherwise. The conduct that you have witnessed was that of a murderer. I will not upbraid you for your suspicions, though I have bought exemption from them at a high price. Chapter IX. There ended his narrative. He started from the spot where he stood, and, without affording me any opportunity of replying or commenting, disappeared amidst the thickest of the wood. I had no time to exert myself for his detention. I could have used no arguments for this end, to which it is probable he would have listened. The story I had heard was too extraordinary, too completely the reverse of all my expectations, to allow me to attend to the intimations of self-murder which he dropped. The secret which I imagined was about to be disclosed was as inscrutable as ever. Not a circumstance, from the moment when Clithero's character became the subject of my meditations, till the conclusion of his talk, but served to confirm my suspicion. Was this error to be imputed to credulity. Would not any one, from similar appearances, have drawn similar conclusions? Or is there a criterion by which truth can always be distinguished? Was it owing to my imperfect education that the inquietudes of this man were not traced to a deed performed at the distance of a thousand leagues, to the murder of his patroness and friend? I had heard a tale which apparently related to scenes and persons far distant: but, though my suspicions have appeared to have been misplaced, what should hinder but that the death of my friend was, in like manner, an act of momentary insanity and originated in a like spirit of mistaken benevolence? But I did not consider this tale merely in relation to myself. My life had been limited and uniform. I had communed with romancers and historians, but the impression made upon me by this incident was unexampled in my experience. My reading had furnished me with no instance in any degree parallel to this, and I found that to be a distant and second-hand spectator of events was widely different from witnessing them myself and partaking in their consequences. My judgment was, for a time, sunk into imbecility and confusion. My mind was full of the images unavoidably suggested by this tale, but they existed in a kind of chaos, and not otherwise than gradually was I able to reduce them to distinct particulars, and subject them to a deliberate and methodical inspection. How was I to consider this act of Clithero? What a deplorable infatuation! Yet it was the necessary result of a series of ideas mutually linked and connected. His conduct was dictated by a motive allied to virtue. It was the fruit of an ardent and grateful spirit. The death of Wiatte could not be censured. The life of Clithero was unspeakably more valuable than that of his antagonist. It was the instinct of self-preservation that swayed him. He knew not his adversary in time enough to govern himself by that knowledge. Had the assailant been an unknown ruffian, his death would have been followed by no remorse. The spectacle of his dying agonies would have dwelt upon the memory of his assassin like any other mournful sight, in the production of which he bore no part. It must at least be said that his will was not concerned in this transaction. He acted in obedience to an impulse which he could not control nor resist. Shall we impute guilt where there is no design? Shall a man extract food for self-reproach from an action to which it is not enough to say that he was actuated by no culpable intention, but that he was swayed by no intention whatever? If consequences arise that cannot be foreseen, shall we find no refuge in the persuasion of our rectitude and of human frailty? Shall we deem ourselves criminal because we do not enjoy the attributes of Deity? Because our power and our knowledge are confined by impassable boundaries? But whence arose the subsequent intention? It was the fruit of a dreadful mistake. His intents were noble and compassionate. But this is of no avail to free him from the imputation of guilt. No remembrance of past beneficence can compensate for this crime. The scale loaded with the recriminations of his conscience, is immovable by any counter-weight. But what are the conclusions to be drawn by dispassionate observers? Is it possible to regard this person with disdain or with enmity? The crime originated in those limitations which nature has imposed upon human faculties. Proofs of a just intention are all that are requisite to exempt us from blame; he is thus, in consequence of a double mistake. The light in which he views this event is erroneous. He judges wrong, and is therefore miserable. How imperfect are the grounds of all our decisions Was it of no use to superintend his childhood, to select his instructors and examples, to mark the operations of his principles, to see him emerging into youth, to follow him through various scenes and trying vicissitudes, and mark the uniformity of his integrity? Who would have predicted his future conduct? Who would not have affirmed the impossibility of an action like this? How mysterious was the connection between the fate of Wiatte and his sister! By such circuitous and yet infallible means were the prediction of the lady and the vengeance of the brother accomplished! In how many cases may it be said, as in this, that the prediction was the cause of its own fulfilment! That the very act which considerate observers, and even himself, for a time, imagined to have utterly precluded the execution of Wiatte's menaces, should be that inevitably leading to it! That the execution should be assigned to him who, abounding in abhorrence, and in the act of self-defence, was the slayer of the menacer! As the obstructer of his designs, Wiatte waylaid and assaulted Clithero. He perished in the attempt. Were his designs frustrated? No. It was thus that he secured the gratification of his vengeance. His sister was cut off in the bloom of life and prosperity. By a refinement of good fortune, the voluntary minister of his malice had entailed upon himself exile without reprieve and misery without end. But what chiefly excited my wonder was the connection of this tale with the destiny of Sarsefield. This was he whom I have frequently mentioned to you as my preceptor. About four years previous to this era, he appeared in this district without fortune or friend. He desired, one evening, to be accommodated at my uncle's house. The conversation turning on the objects of his journey and his present situation, he professed himself in search of lucrative employment. My uncle proposed to him to become a teacher, there being a sufficient number of young people in this neighbourhood to afford him occupation and subsistence. He found it his interest to embrace this proposal. I, of course, became his pupil, and demeaned myself in such a manner as speedily to grow into a favourite. He communicated to us no part of his early history, but informed us sufficiently of his adventures in Asia and Italy to make it plain that this was the same person alluded to by Clithero. During his abode among us his conduct was irreproachable. When he left us, he manifested the most poignant regret, but this originated chiefly in his regard to me. He promised to maintain with me an epistolary intercourse. Since his departure, however, I had heard nothing respecting him. It was with unspeakable regret that I now heard of the disappointment of his hopes, and was inquisitive respecting the measures which he would adopt in his new situation. Perhaps he would' once more return to America, and I should again be admitted to the enjoyment of his society. This event I anticipated with the highest satisfaction. At present, the fate of the unhappy Clithero was the subject of abundant anxiety. On his suddenly leaving me, at the conclusion of his tale, I supposed that he had gone upon one of his usual rambles, and that it would terminate only with the day. Next morning a message was received from Inglefield, inquiring if any one knew what had become of his servant. I could not listen to this message with tranquillity, I recollected the hints that he had given of some design upon his life, and admitted the most dreary forebodings. I speeded to Inglefield's. Clithero had not returned, they told me, the preceding evening. He had not apprized them of any intention to change his abode. His boxes, and all that composed his slender property, were found in their ordinary state. He had expressed no dissatisfaction with his present condition. Several days passed, and no tidings could be procured of him. His absence was a topic of general speculation, but was a source of particular anxiety to no one but myself. My apprehensions were surely built upon sufficient grounds. From the moment that we parted, no one had seen or heard of him. What mode of suicide he had selected, he had disabled us from discovering, by the impenetrable secrecy in which he had involved it. In the midst of my reflections upon this subject, the idea of the wilderness occurred. Could he have executed his design in the deepest of its recesses? These were unvisited by human footsteps, and his bones might lie for ages in this solitude without attracting observation. To seek them where they lay, to gather them together and provide for them a grave, was a duty which appeared incumbent on me, and of which the performance was connected with a thousand habitual sentiments and mixed pleasures. Thou knowest my devotion to the spirit that breathes its inspiration in the gloom of forests and on the verge of streams. I love to immerse myself in shades and dells, and hold converse with the solemnities and secrecies of nature in the rude retreats of Norwalk. The disappearance of Clithero had furnished new incitements to ascend its cliffs and pervade its thickets, as I cherished the hope of meeting in my rambles with some traces of this man. But might he not still live? His words had imparted the belief that he intended to destroy himself. This catastrophe, however, was far from certain. Was it not in my power to avert it? Could I not restore a mind thus vigorous, to tranquil and wholesome existence? Could I not subdue his perverse disdain and immeasurable abhorrence of himself? His upbraiding and his scorn were unmerited and misplaced. Perhaps they argued frenzy rather than prejudice; but frenzy, like prejudice, was curable. Reason was no less an antidote to the illusions of insanity like his, than to the illusions of error. I did not immediately recollect that to subsist in this desert was impossible. Nuts were the only fruits it produced, and these were inadequate to sustain human life. If it were haunted by Clithero, he must occasionally pass its limits and beg or purloin victuals. This deportment was too humiliating and flagitious to be imputed to him. There was reason to suppose him smitten with the charms of solitude, of a lonely abode in the midst of mountainous and rugged nature; but this could not be uninterruptedly enjoyed. Life could be supported only by occasionally visiting the haunts of men, in the guise of a thief or a mendicant. Hence, since Clithero was not known to have reappeared at any farm-house in the neighbourhood, I was compelled to conclude either that he had retired far from this district, or that he was dead. Though I designed that my leisure should chiefly be consumed in the bosom of Norwalk, I almost dismissed the hope of meeting with the fugitive. There were indeed two sources of my hopelessness on this occasion. Not only it was probable that Clithero had fled far away, but, should he have concealed himself in some nook or cavern within these precincts, his concealment was not to be traced. This arose from the nature of that sterile region. It would not be easy to describe the face of this district, in a few words. Half of Solesbury, thou knowest, admits neither of plough nor spade. The cultivable space lies along the river, and the desert, lying on the north, has gained, by some means, the appellation of Norwalk. Canst thou imagine a space, somewhat circular, about six miles in diameter, and exhibiting a perpetual and intricate variety of craggy eminences and deep dells? The hollows are single, and walled around by cliffs, ever varying in shape and height, and have seldom any perceptible communication with each other. These hollows are of all dimensions, from the narrowness and depth of a well, to the amplitude of one hundred yards. Winter's snow is frequently found in these cavities at midsummer. The streams that burst forth from every crevice are thrown, by the irregularities of the surface, into numberless cascades, often disappear in mists or in chasms, and emerge from subterranean channels, and, finally, either subside into lakes, or quietly meander through the lower and more level grounds. Wherever nature left a flat it is made rugged and scarcely passable by enormous and fallen trunks, accumulated by the storms of ages, and forming, by their slow decay, a moss-covered soil, the haunt of rabbits and lizards. These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of pines, whose eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the reverberations of the torrents and the whistling of the blasts. Hickory and poplar, which abound in the lowlands, find here no fostering elements. A sort of continued vale, winding and abrupt, leads into the midst of this region and through it. This vale serves the purpose of a road. It is a tedious maze and perpetual declivity, and requires, from the passenger, a cautious and sure foot. Openings and ascents occasionally present themselves on each side, which seem to promise you access to the interior region, but always terminate, sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice or the bottom of a steep. Perhaps no one was more acquainted with this wilderness than I, but my knowledge was extremely imperfect. I had traversed parts of it, at an early age, in pursuit of berries and nuts, or led by a roaming disposition. Afterwards the sphere of my rambles was enlarged and their purpose changed. When Sarsefield came among us, I became his favourite scholar and the companion of all his pedestrian excursions. He was fond of penetrating into these recesses, partly from the love of picturesque scenes, partly to investigate its botanical and mineral productions, and partly to carry on more effectually that species of instruction which he had adopted with regard to me, and which chiefly consisted in moralizing narratives or synthetical reasonings. These excursions had familiarized me with its outlines and most accessible parts; but there was much which, perhaps, could never be reached without wings, and much the only paths to which I might forever overlook. Every new excursion, indeed, added somewhat to my knowledge. New tracks were pursued, new prospects detected, and new summits were gained. My rambles were productive of incessant novelty, though they always terminated in the prospect of limits that could not be overleaped. But none of these had led me wider from my customary paths than that which had taken place when in pursuit of Clithero. I had a faint remembrance of the valley into which I had descended after him; but till then I had viewed it at a distance, and supposed it impossible to reach the bottom but by leaping from a precipice some hundred feet in height. The opposite steep seemed no less inaccessible, and the cavern at the bottom was impervious to any views which my former positions had enabled me to take of it. My intention to re-examine this cave and ascertain whither it led had, for a time, been suspended by different considerations. It was now revived with more energy than ever. I reflected that this had formerly been haunted by Clithero, and might possibly have been the scene of the desperate act which he had meditated. It might at least conceal some token of his past existence. It might lead into spaces hitherto unvisited, and to summits from which wider landscapes might be seen. One morning I set out to explore this scene. The road which Clithero had taken was laboriously circuitous. On my return from the first pursuit of him, I ascended the cliff in my former footsteps, but soon lighted on the beaten track which I have already described. This enabled me to shun a thousand obstacles which had lately risen before me, and opened an easy passage to the cavern. I once more traversed this way. The brow of the hill was gained. The ledges of which it consisted afforded sufficient footing, when the attempt was made, though viewed at a distance they seemed to be too narrow for that purpose. As I descended the rugged stair, I could not but wonder at the temerity and precipitation with which this descent had formerly been made. It seemed as if the noonday light and the tardiest circumspection would scarcely enable me to accomplish it; yet then it had been done with headlong speed, and with no guidance but the moon's uncertain rays. I reached the mouth of the cave. Till now I had forgotten that a lamp or a torch might be necessary to direct my subterranean footsteps. I was unwilling to defer the attempt. Light might possibly be requisite, if the cave had no other outlet. Somewhat might present itself within to the eyes, which might forever elude the hands, but I was more inclined to consider it merely as an avenue terminating in an opening on the summit of the steep, or on the opposite side of the ridge. Caution might supply the place of light, or, having explored the cave as far as possible at present, I might hereafter return, better furnished for the scrutiny. Chapter X. With these determinations, I proceeded. The entrance was low, and compelled me to resort to hands as well as feet. At a few yards from the mouth the light disappeared, and I found myself immersed in the dunnest obscurity. Had I not been persuaded that another had gone before me, I should have relinquished the attempt. I proceeded with the utmost caution, always ascertaining, by outstretched arms, the height and breadth of the cavity before me. In a short time the dimensions expanded on all sides, and permitted me to resume my feet. I walked upon a smooth and gentle declivity. Presently the wall on one side, and the ceiling, receded beyond my reach. I began to fear that I should be involved in a maze, and should be disabled from returning. To obviate this danger it was requisite to adhere to the nearest wall, and conform to the direction which it should take, without straying through the palpable obscurity. Whether the ceiling was lofty or low, whether the opposite wall of the passage was distant or near, this I deemed no proper opportunity to investigate. In a short time, my progress was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such a one I seemed now to have arrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and downward, but all was vacuity. Here it was needful to pause. I had reached the brink of a cavity whose depth it Avas impossible to ascertain. It might be a few inches beyond my reach, or hundreds of feet. By leaping down I might incur no injury, or might plunge into a lake or dash myself to pieces on the points of rocks. I now saw with new force the propriety of being furnished with a light. The first suggestion was to return upon my footsteps, and resume my undertaking on the morrow. Yet, having advanced thus far, I felt reluctance to recede without accomplishing my purposes. I reflected likewise that Clithero had boldly entered this recess, and had certainly come forth at a different avenue from that at which he entered. At length it occurred to me that, though I could not go forward, yet I might proceed along the edge of this cavity. This edge would be as safe a guidance, and would serve as well for a clue by which I might return, as the wall which it was now necessary to forsake. Intense dark is always the parent of fears. Impending injuries cannot in this state be descried, nor shunned, nor repelled. I began to feel some faltering of my courage, and seated myself, for a few minutes, on a stony mass which arose before me. My situation was new. The caverns I had hitherto met with in this desert were chiefly formed of low-browed rocks. They were chambers, more or less spacious, into which twilight was at least admitted; but here it seemed as if I were surrounded by barriers that would forever cut off my return to air and to light. Presently I resumed my courage and proceeded. My road appeared now to ascend. On one side I seemed still upon the verge of a precipice, and on the other all was empty and waste. I had gone no inconsiderable distance, and persuaded myself that my career would speedily terminate. In a short time, the space on the left hand was again occupied, and I cautiously proceeded between the edge of the gulf and a rugged wall. As the space between them widened I adhered to the wall. I was not insensible that my path became more intricate and more difficult to retread in proportion as I advanced. I endeavoured to preserve a vivid conception of the way which I had already passed, and to keep the images of the left and right-hand wall, and the gulf, in due succession in my memory. The path, which had hitherto been considerably smooth, now became rugged and steep. Chilling damps, the secret trepidation which attended me, the length and difficulties of my way, enhanced by the ceaseless caution and the numerous expedients which the utter darkness obliged me to employ, began to overpower my strength. I was frequently compelled to stop and recruit myself by rest. These respites from toil were of use, but they could not enable me to prosecute an endless journey, and to return was scarcely a less arduous task than to proceed. I looked anxiously forward, in the hope of being comforted by some dim ray, which might assure me that my labours were approaching an end. At last this propitious token appeared, and I issued forth into a kind of chamber, one side of which was open to the air and allowed me to catch a portion of the checkered sky. This spectacle never before excited such exquisite sensations in my bosom. The air, likewise, breathed into the cavern, was unspeakably delicious. I now found myself on the projecture of a rock. Above and below, the hill-side was nearly perpendicular. Opposite, and at the distance of fifteen or twenty yards, was a similar ascent. At the bottom was a glen, cold, narrow, and obscure. This projecture, which served as a kind of vestibule to the cave, was connected with a ledge, by which, though not without peril and toil, I was conducted to the summit. This summit was higher than any of those which were interposed between itself and the river. A large part of this chaos of rocks and precipices was subjected, at one view, to the eye. The fertile lawns and vales which lay beyond this, the winding course of the river, and the slopes which rose on its farther side, were parts of this extensive scene. These objects were at any time fitted to inspire rapture. Now my delight was enhanced by the contrast which this lightsome and serene element bore to the glooms from which I had lately emerged. My station, also, was higher, and the limits of my view, consequently, more ample than any which I had hitherto enjoyed. I advanced to the outer verge of the hill, which I found to overlook a steep no less inaccessible, and a glen equally profound. I changed frequently my station in order to diversify the scenery. At length it became necessary to inquire by what means I should return. I traversed the edge of the hill, but on every side it was equally steep and always too lofty to permit me to leap from it. As I kept along the verge, I perceived that it tended in a circular direction, and brought me back, at last, to the spot from which I had set out. From this inspection, it seemed as if return was impossible by any other way than that through the cavern. I now turned my attention to the interior space. If you imagine a cylindrical mass, with a cavity dug in the centre, whose edge conforms to the exterior edge; and if you place in this cavity another cylinder, higher than that which surrounds it, but so small as to leave between its sides and those of the cavity a hollow space, you will gain as distinct an image of this hill as words can convey. The summit of the inner rock was rugged and covered with trees of unequal growth. To reach this summit would not render my return easier; but its greater elevation would extend my view, and perhaps furnish a spot from which the whole horizon was conspicuous. As I had traversed the outer, I now explored the inner, edge of this hill. At length I reached a spot where the chasm, separating the two rocks, was narrower than at any other part. At first view, it seemed as if it were possible to leap over it, but a nearer examination showed me that the passage was impracticable. So far as my eye could estimate it, the breadth was thirty or forty feet. I could scarcely venture to look beneath. The height was dizzy, and the walls, which approached each other at top, receded at the bottom, so as to form the resemblance of an immense hall, lighted from a rift which some convulsion of nature had made in the roof. Where I stood there ascended a perpetual mist, occasioned by a torrent that dashed along the rugged pavement below. From these objects I willingly turned my eye upon those before and above me, on the opposite ascent. A stream, rushing from above, fell into a cavity, which its own force seemed gradually to have made. The noise and the motion equally attracted my attention. There was a desolate and solitary grandeur in the scene, enhanced by the circumstances in which it was beheld, and by the perils through which I had recently passed, that had never before been witnessed by me. A sort of sanctity and awe environed it, owing to the consciousness of absolute and utter loneliness. It was probable that human feet had never before gained this recess, that human eyes had never been fixed upon these gushing waters. The aboriginal inhabitants had no motives to lead them into caves like this and ponder on the verge of such a precipice. Their successors were still less likely to have wandered hither. Since the birth of this continent, I was probably the first who had deviated thus remotely from the customary paths of men. While musing upon these ideas, my eye was fixed upon the foaming current. At length I looked upon the rocks which confined and embarrassed its course. I admired their fantastic shapes and endless irregularities. Passing from one to the other of these, my attention lighted, at length, as if by some magical transition, on--a human countenance! My surprise was so abrupt, and my sensations so tumultuous, that I forgot for a moment the perilous nature of my situation. I loosened my hold of a pine-branch, which had been hitherto one of my supports, and almost started from my seat. Had my station been in a slight degree nearer the brink than it was, I should have fallen headlong into the abyss. To meet a human creature, even on that side of the chasm which I occupied, would have been wholly adverse to my expectation. My station was accessible by no other road than that through which I had passed, and no motives were imaginable by which others could be prompted to explore this road. But he whom I now beheld was seated where it seemed impossible for human efforts to have placed him. But this affected me but little in comparison with other incidents. Not only the countenance was human, but, in spite of shaggy and tangled locks, and an air of melancholy wildness, I speedily recognised the features of the fugitive Clithero! One glance was not sufficient to make me acquainted with this scene. I had come hither partly in pursuit of this man, but some casual appendage of his person, something which should indicate his past rather than his present existence, was all that I hoped to find. That he should be found alive in this desert, that he should have gained this summit, access to which was apparently impossible, were scarcely within the boundaries of belief. His scanty and coarse garb had been nearly rent away by brambles and thorns; his arms, bosom, and cheeks were overgrown and half concealed by hair. There was somewhat in his attitude and looks denoting more than anarchy of thoughts and passions. His rueful, ghastly, and immovable eyes testified not only that his mind was ravaged by despair, but that he was pinched with famine. These proofs of his misery thrilled to my inmost heart. Horror and shuddering invaded me as I stood gazing upon him, and, for a time, I was without the power of deliberating on the measures which it was my duty to adopt for his relief. The first suggestion was, by calling, to inform him of my presence. I knew not what counsel or comfort to offer. By what words to bespeak his attention, or by what topics to mollify his direful passions, I knew not. Though so near, the gulf by which we were separated was impassable. All that I could do was to speak. My surprise and my horror were still strong enough to give a shrill and piercing tone to my voice. The chasm and the rocks loudened and reverberated my accents while I exclaimed,--"_Man! Clithero!_" My summons was effectual. He shook off his trance in a moment. He had been stretched upon his back, with his eyes fixed upon a craggy projecture above, as if he were in momentary expectation of its fall and crushing him to atoms. Now he started on his feet. He was conscious of the voice, but not of the quarter whence it came. He was looking anxiously around when I again spoke:--"Look hither. It is I who called." He looked. Astonishment was now mingled with every other dreadful meaning in his visage. He clasped his hands together and bent forward, as if to satisfy himself that his summoner was real. At the next moment he drew back, placed his hands upon his breast, and fixed his eyes on the ground. This pause was not likely to be broken but by me. I was preparing again to speak. To be more distinctly heard, I advanced closer to the brink. During this action, my eye was necessarily withdrawn from him. Having gained a somewhat nearer station, I looked again, but--he was gone! The seat which he so lately occupied was empty. I was not forewarned of his disappearance or directed to the course of his flight by any rustling among leaves. These, indeed, would have been overpowered by the noise of the cataract. The place where he sat was the bottom of a cavity, one side of which terminated in the verge of the abyss, but the other sides were perpendicular or overhanging. Surely he had not leaped into this gulf; and yet that he had so speedily scaled the steep was impossible. I looked into the gulf, but the depth and the gloom allowed me to see nothing with distinctness. His cries or groans could not be overheard amidst the uproar of the waters. His fall must have instantly destroyed him, and that he had fallen was the only conclusion I could draw. My sensations on this incident cannot be easily described. The image of this man's despair, and of the sudden catastrophe to which my inauspicious interference had led, filled me with compunction and terror. Some of my fears were relieved by the new conjecture, that, behind the rock on which he had lain, there might be some aperture or pit into which he had descended, or in which he might be concealed. I derived consolation from this conjecture. Not only the evil which I dreaded might not have happened, but some alleviation of his misery was possible. Could I arrest his footsteps and win his attention, I might be able to insinuate the lessons of fortitude; but if words were impotent, and arguments were nugatory, yet to sit by him in silence, to moisten his hand with tears, to sigh in unison, to offer him the spectacle of sympathy, the solace of believing that his demerits were not estimated by so rigid a standard by others as by himself, that one at least among his fellow-men regarded him with love and pity, could not fail to be of benign influence. These thoughts inspired me with new zeal. To effect my purpose it was requisite to reach the opposite steep. I was now convinced that this was not an impracticable undertaking, since Clithero had already performed it. I once more made the circuit of the hill. Every side was steep and of enormous height, and the gulf was nowhere so narrow as at this spot. I therefore returned hither, and once more pondered on the means of passing this tremendous chasm in safety. Casting my eyes upward, I noted the tree at the root of which I was standing. I compared the breadth of the gulf with the length of the trunk of this tree, and it appeared very suitable for a bridge. Happily it grew obliquely, and, if felled by an axe, would probably fall of itself, in such a manner as to be suspended across the chasm. The stock was thick enough to afford me footing, and would enable me to reach the opposite declivity without danger or delay. A more careful examination of the spot, the site of the tree, its dimensions, and the direction of its growth, convinced me fully of the practicability of this expedient, and I determined to carry it into immediate execution. For this end I must hasten home, procure an axe, and return with all expedition hither. I took my former way, once more entered the subterranean avenue, and slowly re-emerged into day. Before I reached home, the evening was at hand, and my tired limbs and jaded spirits obliged me to defer my undertaking till the morrow. Though my limbs were at rest, my thoughts were active through the night. I carefully reviewed the situation of this hill, and was unable to conjecture by what means Clithero could place himself upon it. Unless he occasionally returned to the habitable grounds, it was impossible for him to escape perishing by famine. He might intend to destroy himself by this means, and my first efforts were to be employed to overcome this fatal resolution. To persuade him to leave his desolate haunts might be a laborious and tedious task; meanwhile, all my benevolent intentions would be frustrated by his want of sustenance. It was proper, therefore, to carry bread with me, and to place it before him. The sight of food, the urgencies of hunger, and my vehement entreaties, might prevail on him to eat, though no expostulations might suffice to make him seek food at a distance. Chapter XI. Next morning I stored a small bag with meat and bread, and, throwing an axe on my shoulder, set out, without informing any one of my intentions, for the hill. My passage was rendered more difficult by these encumbrances, but my perseverance surmounted every impediment, and I gained, in a few hours, the foot of the tree whose trunk was to serve me for a bridge. In this journey I saw no traces of the fugitive. A new survey of the tree confirmed my former conclusions, and I began my work with diligence. My strokes were repeated by a thousand echoes, and I paused at first, somewhat startled by reverberations which made it appear as if not one but a score of axes were employed at the same time on both sides of the gulf. Quickly the tree fell, and exactly in the manner which I expected arid desired. The wide-spread limbs occupied and choked up the channel of the torrent, and compelled it to seek a new outlet and multiplied its murmurs. I dared not trust myself to cross it in an upright posture, but clung, with hands and feet, to its rugged bark. Having reached the opposite cliff, I proceeded to examine the spot where Clithero had disappeared. My fondest hopes were realized, for a considerable cavity appeared, which, on a former day, had been concealed from my distant view by the rock. It was obvious to conclude that this was his present habitation, or that an avenue, conducting hither and terminating in the unexplored sides of this pit, was that by which he had come hither, and by which he had retired. I could not hesitate long to slide into the pit. I found an entrance through which I fearlessly penetrated. I was prepared to encounter obstacles and perils similar to those which I have already described, but was rescued from them by ascending, in a few minutes, into a kind of passage, open above, but walled by a continued rock on both sides. The sides of this passage conformed with the utmost exactness to each other. Nature, at some former period, had occasioned the solid mass to dispart at this place, and had thus afforded access to the summit of the hill. Loose stones and ragged points formed the flooring of this passage, which rapidly and circuitously ascended. I was now within a few yards of the surface of the rock. The passage opened into a kind of chamber or pit, the sides of which were not difficult to climb. I rejoiced at the prospect of this termination of my journey. Here I paused, and, throwing my weary limbs on the ground, began to examine the objects around me, and to meditate on the steps that were next to be taken. My first glance lighted on the very being of whom I was in search. Stretched upon a bed of moss, at the distance of a few feet from my station, I beheld Clithero. He had not been roused by my approach, though my footsteps were perpetually stumbling and sliding. This reflection gave birth to the fear that he was dead. A nearer inspection dispelled my apprehensions, and showed me that he was merely buried in profound slumber. Those vigils must indeed have been long which were at last succeeded by a sleep so oblivious. This meeting was, in the highest degree, propitious. It not only assured me of his existence, but proved that his miseries were capable of being suspended. His slumber enabled me to pause, to ruminate on the manner by which his understanding might be most successfully addressed; to collect and arrange the topics fitted to rectify his gloomy and disastrous perceptions. Thou knowest that I am qualified for such tasks neither by my education nor my genius. The headlong and ferocious energies of this man could not be repelled or diverted into better paths by efforts so undisciplined as mine. A despair so stormy and impetuous would drown my feeble accents. How should I attempt to reason with him? How should I outroot prepossessions so inveterate,--the fruits of his earliest education, fostered and matured by the observation and experience of his whole life? How should I convince him that, since the death of Wiatte was not intended, the deed was without crime? that, if it had been deliberately concerted, it was still a virtue, since his own life could by no other means be preserved? that when he pointed a dagger at the bosom of his mistress he was actuated, not by avarice, or ambition, or revenge, or malice? He desired to confer on her the highest and the only benefit of which he believed her capable. He sought to rescue her from tormenting regrets and lingering agonies. These positions were sufficiently just to my own view, but I was not called upon to reduce them to practice. I had not to struggle with the consciousness of having been rescued, by some miraculous contingency, from imbruing my hands in the blood of her whom I adored; of having drawn upon myself suspicions of ingratitude and murder too deep to be ever effaced; of having bereft myself of love, and honour, and friends, and spotless reputation; of having doomed myself to infamy and detestation, to hopeless exile, penury, and servile toil. These were the evils which his malignant destiny had made the unalterable portion of Clithero, and how should my imperfect eloquence annihilate these evils? Every man, not himself the victim of irretrievable disasters, perceives the folly of ruminating on the past, and of fostering a grief which cannot reverse or recall the decrees of an immutable necessity; but every man who suffers is unavoidably shackled by the errors which he censures in his neighbour, and his efforts to relieve himself are as fruitless as those with which he attempted the relief of others. No topic, therefore, could be properly employed by me on the present occasion. All that I could do was to offer him food, and, by pathetic supplications, to prevail on him to eat. Famine, however obstinate, would scarcely refrain when bread was placed within sight and reach. When made to swerve from his resolution in one instance, it would be less difficult to conquer it a second time. The magic of sympathy, the perseverance of benevolence, though silent, might work a gradual and secret revolution, and better thoughts might insensibly displace those desperate suggestions which now governed him. Having revolved these ideas, I placed the food which I had brought at his right hand, and, seating myself at his feet, attentively surveyed his countenance. The emotions which were visible during wakefulness had vanished during this cessation of remembrance and remorse, or were faintly discernible. They served to dignify and solemnize his features, and to embellish those immutable lines which betokened the spirit of his better days. Lineaments were now observed which could never coexist with folly or associate with obdurate guilt. I had no inclination to awaken him. This respite was too sweet to be needlessly abridged. I determined to await the operation of nature, and to prolong, by silence and by keeping interruption at a distance, this salutary period of forgetfulness. This interval permitted new ideas to succeed in my mind. Clithero believed his solitude to be unapproachable. What new expedients to escape inquiry and intrusion might not my presence suggest! Might he not vanish, as he had done on the former day, and afford me no time to assail his constancy and tempt his hunger? If, however, I withdrew during his sleep, he would awake without disturbance, and be unconscious, for a time, that his secrecy had been violated. He would quickly perceive the victuals, and would need no foreign inducements to eat. A provision so unexpected and extraordinary might suggest new thoughts, and be construed into a kind of heavenly condemnation of his purpose. He would not readily suspect the motives or person of his visitant, would take no precaution against the repetition of my visit, and, at the same time, our interview would not be attended with so much surprise. The more I revolved these reflections, the greater force they acquired. At length, I determined to withdraw, and, leaving the food where it could scarcely fail of attracting his notice, I returned by the way that I had come. I had scarcely reached home, when a messenger from Inglefield arrived, requesting me to spend the succeeding night at his house, as some engagement had occurred to draw him to the city. I readily complied with this request. It was not necessary, however, to be early in my visit. I deferred going till the evening was far advanced. My way led under the branches of the elm which recent events had rendered so memorable. Hence my reflections reverted to the circumstances which had lately occurred in connection with this tree. I paused, for some time, under its shade. I marked the spot where Clithero had been discovered digging. It showed marks of being unsettled; but the sod which had formerly covered it, and which had lately been removed, was now carefully replaced. This had not been done by him on that occasion in which I was a witness of his behaviour. The earth was then hastily removed, and as hastily thrown again into the hole from which it had been taken. Some curiosity was naturally excited by this appearance. Either some other person, or Clithero, on a subsequent occasion, had been here. I was now likewise led to reflect on the possible motives that prompted the maniac to turn up this earth. There is always some significance in the actions of a sleeper. Somewhat was, perhaps, buried in this spot, connected with the history of Mrs. Lorimer or of Clarice. Was it not possible to ascertain the truth in this respect? There was but one method. By carefully uncovering this hole, and digging as deep as Clithero had already dug, it would quickly appear whether any thing was hidden. To do this publicly by daylight was evidently indiscreet. Besides, a moment's delay was superfluous. The night had now fallen, and before it was past this new undertaking might be finished. An interview was, if possible, to be gained with Clithero on the morrow, and for this interview the discoveries made on this spot might eminently qualify me. Influenced by these considerations, I resolved to dig. I was first, however, to converse an hour with the housekeeper, and then to withdraw to my chamber. When the family were all retired, and there was no fear of observation or interruption, I proposed to rise and hasten, with a proper implement, hither. One chamber in Inglefield's house was usually reserved for visitants. In this chamber thy unfortunate brother died, and here it was that I was to sleep. The image of its last inhabitant could not fail of being called up, and of banishing repose; but the scheme which I had meditated was an additional incitement to watchfulness. Hither I repaired at the due season, having previously furnished myself with candles, since I knew not what might occur to make a light necessary. I did not go to bed, but either sat musing by a table or walked across the room. The bed before me was that on which my friend breathed his last. To rest my head upon the same pillow, to lie on that pallet which sustained his cold and motionless limbs, were provocations to remembrance and grief that I desired to shun. I endeavoured to fill my mind with more recent incidents, with the disasters of Clithero, my subterranean adventures, and the probable issue of the schemes which I now contemplated. I recalled the conversation which had just ended with the housekeeper. Clithero had been our theme, but she had dealt chiefly in repetitions of what had formerly been related by her or by Inglefield. I inquired what this man had left behind, and found that it consisted of a square box, put together by himself with uncommon strength, but of rugged workmanship. She proceeded to mention that she had advised her brother, Mr. Inglefield, to break open this box and ascertain its contents; but this he did not think himself justified in doing. Clithero was guilty of no known crime, was responsible to no one for his actions, and might some time return to claim his property. This box contained nothing with which others had a right to meddle. Somewhat might be found in it, throwing light upon his past or present situation; but curiosity was not to be gratified by these means. What Clithero thought proper to conceal, it was criminal for us to extort from him. The housekeeper was by no means convinced by these arguments, and at length obtained her brother's permission to try whether any of her own keys would unlock this chest. The keys were produced, but no lock nor keyhole were discoverable. The lid was fast, but by what means it was fastened the most accurate inspection could not detect. Hence she was compelled to lay aside her project. This chest had always stood in the chamber which I now occupied. These incidents were now remembered, and I felt disposed to profit by this opportunity of examining this box. It stood in a corner, and was easily distinguished by its form. I lifted it and found its weight by no means extraordinary. Its structure was remarkable. It consisted of six sides, square and of similar dimensions. These were joined, not by mortise and tennon, not by nails, not by hinges, but the junction was accurate. The means by which they were made to cohere were invisible. Appearances on every side were uniform, nor were there any marks by which the lid was distinguishable from its other surfaces. During his residence with Inglefield, many specimens of mechanical ingenuity were given by his servant. This was the workmanship of his own hands. I looked at it for some time, till the desire insensibly arose of opening it and examining its contents. I had no more right to do this than the Inglefields; perhaps, indeed, this curiosity was more absurd, and the gratification more culpable, in me than in them. I was acquainted with the history of Clithero's past life, and with his present condition. Respecting these, I had no new intelligence to gain, and no doubts to solve. What excuse could I make to the proprietor, should he ever reappear to claim his own, or to Inglefield for breaking open a receptacle which all the maxims of society combine to render sacred? But could not my end be gained without violence? The means of opening might present themselves on a patient scrutiny. The lid might be raised and shut down again without any tokens of my act; its contents might be examined, and all things restored to their former condition, in a few minutes. I intended not a theft. I intended to benefit myself without inflicting injury on others. Nay, might not the discoveries I should make throw light upon the conduct of this extraordinary man which his own narrative had withheld? Was there reason to confide implicitly on the tale which I had heard? In spite of the testimony of my own feelings, the miseries of Clithero appeared in some degree fantastic and groundless. A thousand conceivable motives might induce him to pervert or conceal the truth. If he were thoroughly known, his character might assume a new appearance; and what is now so difficult to reconcile to common maxims might prove perfectly consistent with them. I desire to restore him to peace; but a thorough knowledge of his actions is necessary, both to show that he is worthy of compassion, and to suggest the best means of extirpating his errors. It was possible that this box contained the means of this knowledge. There were likewise other motives, which, as they possessed some influence, however small, deserve to be mentioned. Thou knowest that I also am a mechanist. I had constructed a writing-desk and cabinet, in which I had endeavoured to combine the properties of secrecy, security, and strength, in the highest possible degree. I looked upon this, therefore, with the eye of an artist, and was solicitous to know the principles on which it was formed. I determined to examine, and, if possible, to open it. Chapter XII. I surveyed it with the utmost attention. All its parts appeared equally solid and smooth. It could not be doubted that one of its sides served the purpose of a lid, and was possible to be raised. Mere strength could not be applied to raise it, because there was no projecture which might be firmly held by the hand, and by which force could be exerted. Some spring, therefore, secretly existed, which might forever elude the senses, but on which the hand, by being moved over it in all directions, might accidentally light. This process was effectual. A touch, casually applied at an angle, drove back a bolt, and a spring, at the same time, was set in action, by which the lid was raised above half an inch. No event could be supposed more fortuitous than this. A hundred hands might have sought in vain for this spring. The spot in which a certain degree of pressure was sufficient to produce this effect was, of all, the least likely to attract notice or awaken suspicion. I opened the trunk with eagerness. The space within was divided into numerous compartments, none of which contained any thing of moment. Tools of different and curious constructions, and remnants of minute machinery, were all that offered themselves to my notice. My expectations being thus frustrated, I proceeded to restore things to their former state. I attempted to close the lid; but the spring which had raised it refused to bend. No measure that I could adopt enabled me to place the lid in the same situation in which I had found it. In my efforts to press down the lid, which were augmented in proportion to the resistance that I met with, the spring was broken. This obstacle being removed, the lid resumed its proper place; but no means, within the reach of my ingenuity to discover, enabled me to push forward the bolt, and thus to restore the fastening. I now perceived that Clithero had provided not only against the opening of his cabinet, but likewise against the possibility of concealing that it had been opened. This discovery threw me into some confusion. I had been tempted thus far by the belief that my action was without witnesses, and might be forever concealed. This opinion was now confuted. If Clithero should ever reclaim his property, he would not fail to detect the violence of which I had been guilty. Inglefield would disapprove in another what he had not permitted to himself, and the unauthorized and clandestine manner in which I had behaved would aggravate, in his eyes, the heinousness of my offence. But now there was no remedy. All that remained was to hinder suspicion from lighting on the innocent, and to confess, to my friend, the offence which I had committed. Meanwhile my first project was resumed, and, the family being now wrapped in profound sleep, I left my chamber, and proceeded to the elm. The moon was extremely brilliant, but I hoped that this unfrequented road and unseasonable hour would hinder me from being observed. My chamber was above the kitchen, with which it communicated by a small staircase, and the building to which it belonged was connected with the dwelling by a gallery. I extinguished the light, and left it in the kitchen, intending to relight it, by the embers that still glowed on the hearth, on my return. I began to remove the sod and cast out the earth, with little confidence in the success of my project. The issue of my examination of the box humbled and disheartened me. For some time I found nothing that tended to invigorate my hopes. I determined, however, to descend, as long as the unsettled condition of the earth showed me that some one had preceded me. Small masses of stone were occasionally met with, which served only to perplex me with groundless expectations. At length my spade struck upon something which emitted a very different sound. I quickly drew it forth, and found it to be wood. Its regular form, and the crevices which were faintly discernible, persuaded me that it was human workmanship, and that there was a cavity within. The place in which it was found easily suggested some connection between this and the destiny of Clithero. Covering up the hole with speed, I hastened with my prize to the house. The door by which the kitchen was entered was not to be seen from the road. It opened on a field, the farther limit of which was a ledge of rocks, which formed, on this side, the boundary of Inglefield's estate and the westernmost barrier of Norwalk. As I turned the angle of the house, and came in view of this door, methought I saw a figure issue from it. I was startled at this incident, and, stopping, crouched close to the wall, that I might not be discovered. As soon as the figure passed beyond the verge of the shade, it was easily distinguished to be that of Clithero! He crossed the field with a rapid pace, and quickly passed beyond the reach of my eye. This appearance was mysterious. For what end he should visit this habitation could not be guessed. Was the contingency to be lamented in consequence of which an interview had been avoided? Would it have compelled me to explain the broken condition of his trunk? I knew not whether to rejoice at having avoided this interview, or to deplore it. These thoughts did not divert me from examining the nature of the prize which I had gained. I relighted my candle and hied once more to the chamber. The first object which, on entering it, attracted my attention, was the cabinet broken into twenty fragments, on the hearth. I had left it on a low table, at a distant corner of the room. No conclusion could be formed but that Clithero had been here, had discovered the violence which had been committed on his property, and, in the first transport of his indignation, had shattered it to pieces. I shuddered on reflecting how near I had been to being detected by him in the very act, and by how small an interval I had escaped that resentment which, in that case, would have probably been wreaked upon me. My attention was withdrawn, at length, from this object, and fixed upon the contents of the box which I had dug up. This was equally inaccessible with the other. I had not the same motives for caution and forbearance. I was somewhat desperate, as the consequences of my indiscretion could not be aggravated, and my curiosity was more impetuous with regard to the smaller than to the larger cabinet. I placed it on the ground and crushed it to pieces with my heel. Something was within. I brought it to the light, and, after loosing numerous folds, at length drew forth a volume. No object in the circle of nature was more adapted than this to rouse up all my faculties. My feelings were anew excited on observing that it was a manuscript. I bolted the door, and, drawing near the light, opened and began to read. A few pages were sufficient to explain the nature of the work. Clithero had mentioned that his lady had composed a vindication of her conduct towards her brother when her intercession in his favour was solicited and refused. This performance had never been published, but had been read by many, and was preserved by her friends as a precious monument of her genius and her virtue. This manuscript was now before me. That Clithero should preserve this manuscript, amidst the wreck of his hopes and fortunes, was apparently conformable to his temper. That, having formed the resolution to die, he should seek to hide this volume from the profane curiosity of survivors, was a natural proceeding. To bury it rather than to burn, or disperse it into fragments, would be suggested by the wish to conceal, without committing what his heated fancy would regard as sacrilege. To bury it beneath the elm was dictated by no fortuitous or inexplicable caprice. This event could scarcely fail of exercising some influence on the perturbations of his sleep, and thus, in addition to other causes, might his hovering near this trunk, and throwing up this earth, in the intervals of slumber, be accounted for. Clithero, indeed, had not mentioned this proceeding in the course of his narrative; but that would have contravened the end for which he had provided a grave for this book. I read this copious tale with unspeakable eagerness. It essentially agreed with that which had been told by Clithero. By drawing forth events into all their circumstances, more distinct impressions were produced on the mind, and proofs of fortitude and equanimity were here given to which I had hitherto known no parallel. No wonder that a soul like Clithero's, pervaded by these proofs of inimitable excellence, and thrillingly alive to the passion of virtuous fame, and the value of that existence which he had destroyed, should be overborne by horror at the view of the past. The instability of life and happiness was forcibly illustrated, as well as the perniciousness of error. Exempt as this lady was from almost every defect, she was indebted for her ruin to absurd opinions of the sacredness of consanguinity, to her anxiety for the preservation of a ruffian because that ruffian was her brother. The spirit of Clithero was enlightened and erect, but he weakly suffered the dictates of eternal justice to be swallowed up by gratitude. The dread of unjust upbraiding hurried him to murder and to suicide, and the imputation of imaginary guilt impelled him to the perpetration of genuine and enormous crimes. The perusal of this volume ended not but with the night. Contrary to my hopes, the next day was stormy and wet. This did not deter me from visiting the mountain. Slippery paths and muddy torrents were no obstacles to the purposes which I had adopted. I wrapped myself, and a bag of provisions, in a cloak of painted canvas, and speeded to the dwelling of Clithero. I passed through the cave and reached the bridge which my own ingenuity had formed. At that moment, torrents of rain poured from above, and stronger blasts thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound chasms. Instead of lamenting the prevalence of this tempest, I now began to regard it with pleasure. It conferred new forms of sublimity and grandeur on this scene. As I crept with hands and feet along my imperfect bridge, a sudden gust had nearly whirled me into the frightful abyss below. To preserve myself, I was obliged to loose my hold of my burden, and it fell into the gulf. This incident disconcerted and distressed me. As soon as I had effected my dangerous passage, I screened myself behind a cliff and gave myself up to reflection. The purpose of this arduous journey was defeated by the loss of the provisions I had brought. I despaired of winning the attention of the fugitive to supplications, or arguments tending to smother remorse or revive his fortitude. The scope of my efforts was to consist in vanquishing his aversion to food; but these efforts would now be useless, since I had no power to supply his cravings. This deficiency, however, was easily supplied. I had only to return home and supply myself anew. No time was to be lost in doing this; but I was willing to remain under this shelter till the fury of the tempest had subsided. Besides, I was not certain that Clithero had again retreated hither. It was requisite to explore the summit of this hill, and ascertain whether it had any inhabitant. I might likewise discover what had been the success of my former experiment, and whether the food, which had been left here on the former day, was consumed or neglected. While occupied with these reflections, my eyes were fixed upon the opposite steeps. The tops of the trees, waving to and fro in the wildest commotion, and their trunks, occasionally bending to the blast, which, in these lofty regions, blew with a violence unknown in the tracts below, exhibited an awful spectacle. At length, my attention was attracted by the trunk which lay across the gulf, and which I had converted into a bridge. I perceived that it had already somewhat swerved from its original position, that every blast broke or loosened some of the fibres by which its roots were connected with the opposite bank, and that, if the storm did not speedily abate, there was imminent danger of its being torn from the rock and precipitated into the chasm. Thus my retreat would be cut off, and the evils from which I was endeavouring to rescue another would be experienced by myself. I did not just then reflect that Clithero had found access to this hill by other means, and that the avenue by which he came would be equally commodious to me. I believed my destiny to hang upon the expedition with which I should recross this gulf. The moments that were spent in these deliberations were critical, and I shuddered to observe that the trunk was held in its place by one or two fibres which were already stretched almost to breaking. To pass along the trunk, rendered slippery by the wet and unsteadfast by the wind, was imminently dangerous. To maintain my hold, in passing, in defiance of the whirlwind, required the most vigorous exertions. For this end it was necessary to discommode myself of my cloak, and of the volume which I carried in the pocket of my cloak. I believed there was no reason to dread their being destroyed or purloined, if left, for a few hours or a day, in this recess. If laid beside a stone, under shelter of this cliff, they would, no doubt, remain unmolested till the disappearance of the storm should permit me to revisit this spot in the afternoon or on the morrow. Just as I had disposed of these encumbrances and had risen from my seat, my attention was again called to the opposite steep, by the most unwelcome object that, at this time, could possibly occur. Something was perceived moving among the bushes and rocks, which, for a time, I hoped was no more than a raccoon or opossum, but which presently appeared to be a panther. His gray coat, extended claws, fiery eyes, and a cry which he at that moment uttered, and which, by its resemblance to the human voice, is peculiarly terrific, denoted him to be the most ferocious and untamable of that detested race. [Footnote: The gray cougar. This animal has all the essential characteristics of a tiger. Though somewhat inferior in size and strength, these are such as to make him equally formidable to man.] The industry of our hunters has nearly banished animals of prey from these precincts. The fastnesses of Norwalk, however, could not but afford refuge to some of them. Of late I had met them so rarely, that my fears were seldom alive, and I trod, without caution, the ruggedest and most solitary haunts. Still, however, I had seldom been unfurnished in my rambles with the means of defence. My temper never delighted in carnage and blood. I found no pleasure in plunging into bogs, wading through rivulets, and penetrating thickets, for the sake of dispatching woodcocks and squirrels. To watch their gambols and flittings, and invite them to my hand, was my darling amusement when loitering among the woods and the rocks. It was much otherwise, however, with regard to rattlesnakes and panthers. These I thought it no breach of duty to exterminate wherever they could be found. These judicious and sanguinary spoilers were equally the enemies of man and of the harmless race that sported in the trees, and many of their skins are still preserved by me as trophies of my juvenile prowess. As hunting was never my trade or my sport, I never loaded myself with fowling-piece or rifle. Assiduous exercise had made me master of a weapon of much easier carriage, and, within a moderate distance, more destructive and unerring. This was the tomahawk. With this I have often severed an oak-branch, and cut the sinews of a catamount, at the distance of sixty feet. The unfrequency with which I had lately encountered this foe, and the encumbrance of provision, made me neglect, on this occasion, to bring with me my usual arms. The beast that was now before me, when stimulated by hunger, was accustomed to assail whatever could provide him with a banquet of blood. He would set upon the man and the deer with equal and irresistible ferocity. His sagacity was equal to his strength, and he seemed able to discover when his antagonist was armed and prepared for defence. My past experience enabled me to estimate the full extent of my danger. He sat on the brow of the steep, eyeing the bridge, and apparently deliberating whether he should cross it. It was probable that he had scented my footsteps thus far, and, should he pass over, his vigilance could scarcely fail of detecting my asylum. The pit into which Clithero had sunk from my view was at some distance. To reach it was the first impulse of my fear, but this could not be done without exciting the observation and pursuit of this enemy. I deeply regretted the untoward chance that had led me, when I first came over, to a different shelter. Should he retain his present station, my danger was scarcely lessened. To pass over in the face of a famished tiger was only to rush upon my fate. The falling of the trunk, which had lately been so anxiously deprecated, was now, with no less solicitude, desired. Every new gust, I hoped, would tear asunder its remaining bands, and, by cutting off all communication between the opposite steeps, place me in security. My hopes, however, were destined to be frustrated. The fibres of the prostrate tree were obstinately tenacious of their hold, and presently the animal scrambled down the rock and proceeded to cross it. Of all kinds of death, that which now menaced me was the most abhorred. To die by disease, or by the hand of a fellow-creature, was propitious and lenient in comparison with being rent to pieces by the fangs of this savage. To perish in this obscure retreat, by means so impervious to the anxious curiosity of my friends, to lose my portion of existence by so untoward and ignoble a destiny, was insupportable. I bitterly deplored my rashness in coming hither unprovided for an encounter like this. The evil of my present circumstances consisted chiefly in suspense. My death was unavoidable, but my imagination had leisure to torment itself by anticipations. One foot of the savage was slowly and cautiously moved after the other. He struck his claws so deeply into the bark that they were with difficulty withdrawn. At length he leaped upon the ground. We were now separated by an interval of scarcely eight feet. To leave the spot where I crouched was impossible. Behind and beside me, the cliff rose perpendicularly, and before me was this grim and terrific visage. I shrunk still closer to the ground and closed my eyes. From this pause of horror I was aroused by the noise occasioned by a second spring of the animal. He leaped into the pit, in which I had so deeply regretted that I had not taken refuge, and disappeared. My rescue was so sudden, and so much beyond my belief or my hope, that I doubted, for a moment, whether my senses did not deceive me. This opportunity of escape was not to be neglected. I left my place, and scrambled over the trunk with a precipitation which had liked to have proved fatal. The tree groaned and shook under me, the wind blew with unexampled violence, and I had scarcely reached the opposite steep when the roots were severed from the rock and the whole fell thundering to the bottom of the chasm. My trepidations were not speedily quieted. I looked back with wonder on my hairbreadth escape, and on that singular concurrence of events which had placed me, in so short a period, in absolute security. Had the trunk fallen a moment earlier, I should have been imprisoned on the hill or thrown headlong. Had its fall been delayed another moment, I should have been pursued; for the beast now issued from his den, and testified his surprise and disappointment by tokens the sight of which made my blood run cold. He saw me, and hastened to the verge of the chasm. He squatted on his hind-legs and assumed the attitude of one preparing to leap. My consternation was excited afresh by these appearances. It seemed at first as if the rift was too wide for any power of muscles to carry him in safety over; but I knew the unparalleled agility of this animal, and that his experience had made him a better judge of the practicability of this exploit than I was. Still there was hope that he would relinquish this design as desperate. This hope was quickly at an end. He sprung, and his fore-legs touched the verge of the rock on which I stood. In spite of vehement exertions, however, the surface was too smooth and too hard to allow him to make good his hold. He fell, and a piercing cry, uttered below, showed that nothing had obstructed his descent to the bottom. Thus was I again rescued from death. Nothing but the pressure of famine could have prompted this savage to so audacious and hazardous an effort; but, by yielding to this impulse, he had made my future visits to this spot exempt from peril. Clithero was, likewise, relieved from a danger that was imminent and unforeseen. Prowling over these grounds, the panther could scarcely have failed to meet with this solitary fugitive. Had the animal lived, my first duty would have been to have sought him out and assailed him with my tomahawk; but no undertaking would have been more hazardous. Lurking in the grass, or in the branches of a tree, his eye might have descried my approach, he might leap upon me unperceived, and my weapon would be useless. With a heart beating with unwonted rapidity, I once more descended the cliff, entered the cavern, and arrived at Huntly farm, drenched with rain, and exhausted by fatigue. By night the storm was dispelled; but my exhausted strength would not allow me to return to the mountain. At the customary hour I retired to my chamber. I incessantly ruminated on the adventures of the last day, and inquired into the conduct which I was next to pursue. The bridge being destroyed, my customary access was cut off. There was no possibility of restoring this bridge. My strength would not suffice to drag a fallen tree from a distance, and there was none whose position would abridge or supersede that labour. Some other expedient must, therefore, be discovered to pass this chasm. I reviewed the circumstances of my subterranean journey. The cavern was imperfectly explored. Its branches might be numerous. That which I had hitherto pursued terminated in an opening at a considerable distance from the bottom. Other branches might exist, some of which might lead to the foot of the precipice, and thence a communication might be found with the summit of the interior hill. The danger of wandering into dark and untried paths, and the commodiousness of that road which had at first been taken, were sufficient reasons for having hitherto suspended my examination of the different branches of this labyrinth. Now my customary road was no longer practicable, and another was to be carefully explored. For this end, on my next journey to the mountain, I determined to take with me a lamp, and unravel this darksome maze: this project I resolved to execute the next day. I now recollected what, if it had more seasonably occurred, would have taught me caution. Some months before this a farmer, living in the skirts of Norwalk, discovered two marauders in his field, whom he imagined to be a male and female panther. They had destroyed some sheep, and had been hunted by the farmer with long and fruitless diligence. Sheep had likewise been destroyed in different quarters; but the owners had fixed the imputation of the crime upon dogs, many of whom had atoned for their supposed offences by their death. He who had mentioned his discovery of panthers received little credit from his neighbours; because a long time had elapsed since these animals were supposed to have been exiled from this district, and because no other person had seen them. The truth of this seemed now to be confirmed by the testimony of my own senses; but, if the rumour were true, there still existed another of these animals, who might harbour in the obscurities of this desert, and against whom it was necessary to employ some precaution. Henceforth I resolved never to traverse the wilderness unfurnished with my tomahawk. These images, mingled with those which the contemplation of futurity suggested, floated, for a time, in my brain, but at length gave place to sleep. Chapter XIII. Since my return home, my mind had been fully occupied by schemes and reflections relative to Clithero. The project suggested by thee, and to which I had determined to devote my leisure, was forgotten, or remembered for a moment and at wide intervals. What, however, was nearly banished from my waking thoughts, occurred in an incongruous and half-seen form, to my dreams. During my sleep, the image of Waldegrave flitted before me. Methought the sentiment that impelled him to visit me was not affection or complacency, but inquietude and anger. Some service or duty remained to be performed by me, which I had culpably neglected: to inspirit my zeal, to awaken my remembrance, and incite me to the performance of this duty, did this glimmering messenger, this half-indignant apparition, come. I commonly awake soon enough to mark the youngest dawn of the morning. Now, in consequence perhaps of my perturbed sleep, I opened my eyes before the stars had lost any of their lustre. This circumstance produced some surprise, until the images that lately hovered in my fancy were recalled, and furnished somewhat like a solution of the problem. Connected with the image of my dead friend was that of his sister. The discourse that took place at our last interview; the scheme of transcribing, for thy use, all the letters which, during his short but busy life, I received from him; the nature of this correspondence, and the opportunity which this employment would afford me of contemplating these ample and precious monuments of the intellectual existence and moral pre-eminence of my friend, occurred to my thoughts. The resolution to prosecute the task was revived. The obligation of benevolence, with regard to Clithero, was not discharged. This, neither duty nor curiosity would permit to be overlooked or delayed; but why should my whole attention and activity be devoted to this man? The hours which were spent at home and in my chamber could not be more usefully employed than in making my intended copy. In a few hours after sunrise I purposed to resume my way to the mountain. Could this interval be appropriated to a better purpose than in counting over my friend's letters, setting them apart from my own, and preparing them for that transcription from which I expected so high and yet so mournful a gratification? This purpose, by no violent union, was blended with the recollection of my dream. This recollection infused some degree of wavering and dejection into my mind. In transcribing these letters I should violate pathetic and solemn injunctions frequently repeated by the writer. Was there some connection between this purpose and the incidents of my vision? Was the latter sent to enforce the interdictions which had been formerly imposed? Thou art not fully acquainted with the intellectual history of thy brother. Some information on that head will be necessary to explain the nature of that reluctance which I now feel to comply with thy request, and which had formerly so much excited thy surprise. Waldegrave, like other men early devoted to meditation and books, had adopted, at different periods, different systems of opinion on topics connected with religion and morals. His earliest creeds tended to efface the impressions of his education; to deify necessity and universalize matter; to destroy the popular distinctions between soul and body, and to dissolve the supposed connection between the moral condition of man anterior and subsequent to death. This creed he adopted with all the fulness of conviction, and propagated with the utmost zeal. Soon after our friendship commenced, fortune placed us at a distance from each other, and no intercourse was allowed but by the pen. Our letters, however, were punctual and copious. Those of Waldegrave were too frequently devoted to the defence of his favourite tenets. Thou art acquainted with the revolution that afterwards took place in his mind. Placed within the sphere of religious influence, and listening daily to the reasonings and exhortations of Mr. S----, whose benign temper and blameless deportment was a visible and constant lesson, he insensibly resumed the faith which he had relinquished, and became the vehement opponent of all that he had formerly defended. The chief object of his labours, in this new state of his mind, was to counteract the effect of his former reasonings on my opinions. At this time, other changes took place in his situation, in consequence of which we were once more permitted to reside under the same roof. The intercourse now ceased to be by letter, and the subtle and laborious argumentations which he had formerly produced against religion, and which were contained in a permanent form, were combated in transient conversation. He was not only eager to subvert those opinions which he had contributed to instil into me, but was anxious that the letters and manuscripts which had been employed in their support should be destroyed. He did not fear wholly or chiefly on my own account. He believed that the influence of former reasonings on my faith would be sufficiently eradicated by the new; but he dreaded lest these manuscripts might fall into other hands, and thus produce mischiefs which it would not be in his power to repair. With regard to me, the poison had been followed by its antidote; but with respect to others, these letters would communicate the poison when the antidote could not be administered. I would not consent to this sacrifice. I did not entirely abjure the creed which had, with great copiousness and eloquence, been defended in these letters. Besides, mixed up with abstract reasonings were numberless passages which elucidated the character and history of my friend. These were too precious to be consigned to oblivion; and to take them out of their present connection and arrangement would be to mutilate and deform them. His entreaties and remonstrances were earnest and frequent, but always ineffectual. He had too much purity of motives to be angry at my stubbornness; but his sense of the mischievous tendency of these letters was so great, that my intractability cost him many a pang. He was now gone, and I had not only determined to preserve these monuments, but had consented to copy them for the use of another; for the use of one whose present and eternal welfare had been the chief object of his cares and efforts. Thou, like others of thy sex, art unaccustomed to metaphysical refinements. Thy religion is the growth of sensibility and not of argument. Thou art not fortified and prepossessed against the subtleties with which the being and attributes of the Deity have been assailed. Would it be just to expose thee to pollution and depravity from this source? To make thy brother the instrument of thy apostasy, the author of thy fall? That brother whose latter days were so ardently devoted to cherishing the spirit of devotion in thy heart? These ideas now occurred with more force than formerly. I had promised, not without reluctance, to give thee the entire copy of his letters; but I now receded from this promise. I resolved merely to select for thy perusal such as were narrative or descriptive. This could not be done with too much expedition. It was still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and, by a common apparatus, that lay beside my bed, I could instantly produce a light. The light was produced, and I proceeded to the cabinet where all my papers and books are deposited. This was my own contrivance and workmanship, undertaken by the advice of Sarsefield, who took infinite pains to foster that mechanical genius which displayed itself so early and so forcibly in thy friend. The key belonging to this was, like the cabinet itself, of singular structure. For greater safety, it was constantly placed in a closet, which was likewise locked. The key was found as usual, and the cabinet opened. The letters were bound together in a compact form, lodged in a parchment case, and placed in a secret drawer. This drawer would not have been detected by common eyes, and it opened by the motion of a spring, of whose existence none but the maker was conscious. This drawer I had opened before I went to sleep, and the letters were then safe. Thou canst not imagine my confusion and astonishment, when, on opening the drawer, I perceived that the packet was gone. I looked with more attention, and put my hand within it; but the space was empty. Whither had it gone, and by whom was it purloined? I was not conscious of having taken it away, yet no hands but mine could have done it. On the last evening I had doubtless removed it to some other corner, but had forgotten it. I tasked my understanding and my memory. I could not conceive the possibility of any motives inducing me to alter my arrangements in this respect, and was unable to recollect that I had made this change. What remained? This invaluable relic had disappeared. Every thought and every effort must be devoted to the single purpose of regaining it. As yet I did not despair. Until I had opened and ransacked every part of the cabinet in vain, I did not admit the belief that I had lost it. Even then this persuasion was tumultuous and fluctuating. It had vanished to my senses, but these senses were abused and depraved. To have passed, of its own accord, through the pores of this wood, was impossible; but, if it were gone, thus did it escape. I was lost in horror and amazement. I explored every nook a second and a third time, but still it eluded my eye and my touch. I opened my closets and cases. I pried everywhere, unfolded every article of clothing, turned and scrutinized every instrument and tool, but nothing availed. My thoughts were not speedily collected or calmed. I threw myself on the bed and resigned myself to musing. That my loss was irretrievable was a supposition not to be endured. Yet ominous terrors haunted me,--a whispering intimation that a relic which I valued more than life was torn forever away by some malignant and inscrutable destiny. The same power that had taken it from this receptacle was able to waft it over the ocean or the mountains, and condemn me to a fruitless and eternal search. But what was he that committed the theft? Thou only, of the beings who live, wast acquainted with the existence of these manuscripts. Thou art many miles distant, and art utterly a stranger to the mode or place of their concealment. Not only access to the cabinet, but access to the room, without my knowledge and permission, was impossible. Both were locked during this night. Not five hours had elapsed since the cabinet and drawer had been opened, and since the letters had been seen and touched, being in their ordinary position. During this interval, the thief had entered, and despoiled me of my treasure. This event, so inexplicable and so dreadful, threw my soul into a kind of stupor or distraction, from which I was suddenly roused by a footstep softly moving in the entry near my door. I started from my bed, as if I had gained a glimpse of the robber. Before I could run to the door, some one knocked. I did not think upon the propriety of answering the signal, but hastened with tremulous fingers and throbbing heart to open the door. My uncle, in his night-dress, and apparently just risen from his bed, stood before me! He marked the eagerness and perturbation of my looks, and inquired into the cause. I did not answer his inquiries. His appearance in my chamber and in this guise added to my surprise. My mind was full of the late discovery, and instantly conceived some connection between this unseasonable visit and my lost manuscript. I interrogated him in my turn as to the cause of his coming. "Why," said he, "I came to ascertain whether it was you or not who amused himself so strangely at this time of night. What is the matter with you? Why are you up so early?" I told him that I had been roused by my dreams, and, finding no inclination to court my slumber back again, I had risen, though earlier by some hours than the usual period of my rising. "But why did you go up-stairs? You might easily imagine that the sound of your steps would alarm those below, who would be puzzled to guess who it was that had thought proper to amuse himself in this manner." "Up-stairs? I have not left my room this night. It is not ten minutes since I awoke, and my door has not since been opened." "Indeed! That is strange. Nay, it is impossible! It was your feet surely that I heard pacing so solemnly and indefatigably across the _long room_ for near an hour. I could not for my life conjecture, for a time, who it was, but finally concluded that it was you. There was still, however, some doubt, and I came hither to satisfy myself." These tidings were adapted to raise all my emotions to a still higher pitch. I questioned him with eagerness as to the circumstances he had noticed. He said he had been roused by a sound, whose power of disturbing him arose, not from its loudness, but from its uncommonness. He distinctly heard some one pacing to and fro with bare feet, in the long room: this sound continued, with little intermission, for an hour. He then noticed a cessation of the walking, and a sound as if some one were lifting the lid of the large cedar chest that stood in the corner of this room. The walking was not resumed, and all was silent. He listened for a quarter of an hour, and busied himself in conjecturing the cause of this disturbance. The most probable conclusion was, that the walker was his nephew, and his curiosity had led him to my chamber to ascertain the truth. This dwelling has three stories. The two lower stories are divided into numerous apartments. The upper story constitutes a single room whose sides are the four walls of the house, and whose ceiling is the roof. This room is unoccupied, except by lumber, and imperfectly lighted by a small casement at one end. In this room were footsteps heard by my uncle. The staircase leading to it terminated in a passage near my door. I snatched the candle, and, desiring him to follow me, added that I would ascertain the truth in a moment. He followed, but observed that the walking had ceased long enough for the person to escape. I ascended to the room, and looked behind and among the tables, and chairs, and casks, which were confusedly scattered through it, but found nothing in the shape of man. The cedar chest, spoken of by Mr. Huntly, contained old books, and remnants of maps and charts, whose worthlessness unfitted them for accomodation elsewhere. The lid was without hinges or lock. I examined this repository, but there was nothing which attracted my attention. The way between the kitchen-door and the door of the long room had no impediments. Both were usually unfastened; but the motives by which any stranger to the dwelling, or indeed any one within it, could be prompted to choose this place and hour for an employment of this kind, were wholly incomprehensible. When the family rose, inquiries were made; but no satisfaction was obtained. The family consisted only of four persons,--my uncle, my two sisters, and myself. I mentioned to them the loss I had sustained, but their conjectures were no less unsatisfactory on this than on the former incident. There was no end to my restless meditations. Waldegrave was the only being, besides myself, acquainted with the secrets of my cabinet. During his life these manuscripts had been the objects of perpetual solicitude; to gain possession, to destroy or secrete them, was the strongest of his wishes. Had he retained his sensibility on the approach of death, no doubt he would have renewed, with irresistible solemnity, his injunctions to destroy them. Now, however, they had vanished. There were no materials of conjecture; no probabilities to be weighed, or suspicions to revolve. Human artifice or power was unequal to this exploit. Means less than preternatural would not furnish a conveyance for this treasure. It was otherwise with regard to this unseasonable walker. His inducements indeed were beyond my power to conceive; but to enter these doors and ascend these stairs demanded not the faculties of any being more than human. This intrusion, and the pillage of my cabinet, were contemporary events. Was there no more connection between them than that which results from time? Was not the purloiner of my treasure and the wanderer the same person? I could not reconcile the former incident with the attributes of man; and yet a secret faith, not to be outrooted or suspended, swayed me, and compelled me to imagine that the detection of this visitant would unveil the thief. These thoughts were pregnant with dejection and reverie. Clithero, during the day, was forgotten. On the succeeding night, my intentions, with regard to this man, returned. I derived some slender consolation from reflecting, that time, in its long lapse and ceaseless revolutions, might dissipate the gloom that environed me. Meanwhile, I struggled to dismiss the images connected with my loss and to think only of Clithero. My impatience was as strong as ever to obtain another interview with this man. I longed with vehemence for the return of day. I believed that every moment added to his sufferings, intellectual and physical, and confided in the efficacy of my presence to alleviate or suspend them. The provisions I had left would be speedily consumed, and the abstinence of three days was sufficient to undermine the vital energies. I sometimes hesitated whether I ought not instantly to depart. It was night indeed, but the late storm had purified the air, and the radiance of a full moon was universal and dazzling. From this attempt I was deterred by reflecting that my own frame needed the repairs of sleep. Toil and watchfulness, if prolonged another day, would deeply injure a constitution by no means distinguished for its force. I must, therefore, compel, if it were possible, some hours of repose. I prepared to retire to bed, when a new incident occurred to divert my attention for a time from these designs. Chapter XIV. While sitting alone by the parlour-fire, marking the effects of moonlight, I noted one on horseback coming towards the gate. At first sight, methought his shape and guise were not wholly new to me; but all that I could discern was merely a resemblance to some one whom I had before seen. Presently he stopped, and, looking towards the house, made inquiries of a passenger who chanced to be near. Being apparently satisfied with the answers he received, he rode with a quick pace into the court and alighted at the door. I started from my seat, and, going forth, waited with some impatience to hear his purpose explained. He accosted me with the formality of a stranger, and asked if a young man, by name Edgar Huntly, resided here. Being answered in the affirmative, and being requested to come in, he entered, and seated himself, without hesitation, by the fire. Some doubt and anxiety were visible in his looks. He seemed desirous of information upon some topic, and yet betrayed terror lest the answers he might receive should subvert some hope or confirm some foreboding. Meanwhile I scrutinized his features with much solicitude. A nearer and more deliberate view convinced me that the first impression was just; but still I was unable to call up his name or the circumstances of our former meeting. The pause was at length ended by his saying, in a faltering voice,-- "My name is Weymouth. I came hither to obtain information on a subject in which my happiness is deeply concerned." At the mention of his name, I started. It was a name too closely connected with the image of thy brother, not to call up affecting and vivid recollections. Weymouth, thou knowest, was thy brother's friend. It is three years since this man left America, during which time no tidings had been heard of him,--at least, by thy brother. He had now returned, and was probably unacquainted with the fate of his friend. After an anxious pause, he continued:--"Since my arrival I have heard of an event which has, on many accounts, given me the deepest sorrow. I loved Waldegrave, and know not any person in the world whose life was dearer to me than his. There were considerations, however, which made it more precious to me than the life of one whose merits might be greater. With his life, my own existence and property were, I have reason to think, inseparably united. "On my return to my country, after a long absence, I made immediate inquiries after him. I was informed of his untimely death. I had questions, of infinite moment to my happiness, to decide with regard to the state and disposition of his property. I sought out those of his friends who had maintained with him the most frequent and confidential intercourse, but they could not afford me any satisfaction. At length, I was informed that a young man of your name, and living in this district, had enjoyed more of his affection and society than any other, had regulated the property which he left behind, and was best qualified to afford the intelligence which I sought. You, it seems, are this person, and of you I must make inquiries to which I conjure you to return sincere and explicit answers." "That," said I, "I shall find no difficulty in doing. Whatever questions you shall think proper to ask, I will answer with readiness and truth." "What kind of property, and to what amount, was your friend possessed of at his death?" "It was money, and consisted of deposits at the Bank of North America. The amount was little short of eight thousand dollars." "On whom has this property devolved?" "His sister was his only kindred, and she is now in possession of it." "Did he leave any will by which he directed the disposition of his property?" While thus speaking, Weymouth fixed his eyes upon my countenance, and seemed anxious to pierce into my inmost soul. I was somewhat surprised at his questions, but much more at the manner in which they were put. I answered him, however, without delay:--"He left no will, nor was any paper discovered by which we could guess at his intentions. No doubt, indeed, had he made a will, his sister would have been placed precisely in the same condition in which she now is. He was not only bound to her by the strongest ties of kindred, but by affection and gratitude." Weymouth now withdrew his eyes from my face, and sunk into a mournful reverie. He sighed often and deeply. This deportment and the strain of his inquiries excited much surprise. His interest in the fate of Waldegrave ought to have made the information he had received a source of satisfaction rather than of regret. The property which Waldegrave left was much greater than his mode of life and his own professions had given us reason to expect, but it was no more than sufficient to insure to thee an adequate subsistence. It ascertained the happiness of those who were dearest to Waldegrave, and placed them forever beyond the reach of that poverty which had hitherto beset them. I made no attempt to interrupt the silence, but prepared to answer any new interrogatory. At length, Weymouth resumed:-- "Waldegrave was a fortunate man to amass so considerable a sum in so short a time. I remember, when we parted, he was poor. He used to lament that his scrupulous integrity precluded him from all the common roads to wealth. He did not contemn riches, but he set the highest value upon competence, and imagined that he was doomed forever to poverty. His religious duty compelled him to seek his livelihood by teaching a school of blacks. The labour was disproportioned to his feeble constitution, and the profit was greatly disproportioned to the labour. It scarcely supplied the necessities of nature, and was reduced sometimes even below that standard by his frequent indisposition. I rejoice to find that his scruples had somewhat relaxed their force, and that he had betaken himself to some more profitable occupation. Pray, what was his new way of business?" "Nay," said I, "his scruples continued as rigid, in this respect, as ever. He was teacher of the negro freeschool when he died." "Indeed! How, then, came he to amass so much money? Could he blend any more lucrative pursuit with his duty as a schoolmaster?" "So it seems." "What was his pursuit?" "That question, I believe, none of his friends are qualified to answer. I thought myself acquainted with the most secret transactions of his life, but this had been carefully concealed from me. I was not only unapprized of any other employment of his time, but had not the slightest suspicion of his possessing any property besides his clothes and books. Ransacking his papers, with a different view, I lighted on his bank-book, in which was a regular receipt for seven thousand five hundred dollars. By what means he acquired this money, and even the acquisition of it, till his death put us in possession of his papers, was wholly unknown to us." "Possibly he might have held it in trust for another. In this case some memorandums or letters would be found explaining this affair." "True. This supposition could not fail to occur, in consequence of which the most diligent search was made among his papers, but no shred or scrap was to be found which countenanced our conjecture." "You may reasonably be surprised, and perhaps offended," said Weymouth, "at these inquiries; but it is time to explain my motives for making them. Three years ago I was, like Waldegrave, indigent, and earned my bread by daily labour. During seven years' service in a public office, I saved, from the expenses of subsistence, a few hundred dollars. I determined to strike into a new path, and, with this sum, to lay the foundation of better fortune. I turned it into a bulky commodity, freighted and loaded a small vessel, and went with it to Barcelona in Spain. I was not unsuccessful in my projects, and, changing my abode to England, France, and Germany, according as my interest required, I became finally possessed of sufficient for the supply of all my wants. I then resolved to return to my native country, and, laying out my money in land, to spend the rest of my days in the luxury and quiet of an opulent farmer. For this end I invested the greatest part of my property in a cargo of wine from Madeira. The remainder I turned into a bill of exchange for seven thousand five hundred dollars. I had maintained a friendly correspondence with Waldegrave during my absence. There was no one with whom I had lived on terms of so much intimacy, and had boundless confidence in his integrity. To him therefore I determined to transmit this bill, requesting him to take the money into safe-keeping until my return. In this manner I endeavoured to provide against the accidents that might befall my person or my cargo in crossing the ocean. "It was my fate to encounter the worst of these disasters. We were overtaken by a storm, my vessel was driven ashore on the coast of Portugal, my cargo was utterly lost, and the greater part of the crew and passengers were drowned. I was rescued from the same fate by some fishermen. In consequence of the hardships to which I had been exposed, having laboured for several days at the pumps, and spent the greater part of a winter night hanging from the rigging of the ship and perpetually beaten by the waves, I contracted a severe disease, which bereaved me of the use of my limbs. The fishermen who rescued me carried me to their huts, and there I remained three weeks helpless and miserable. "That part of the coast on which I was thrown was, in the highest degree, sterile and rude. Its few inhabitants subsisted precariously on the produce of the ocean. Their dwellings were of mud,--low, filthy, dark, and comfortless. Their fuel was the stalks of shrubs sparingly scattered over a sandy desert. Their poverty scarcely allowed them salt and black bread with their fish, which was obtained in unequal and sometimes insufficient quantities, and which they ate with all its impurities, and half cooked. "My former habits, as well as my present indisposition, required very different treatment from what the ignorance and penury of these people obliged them to bestow. I lay upon the moist earth, imperfectly sheltered from the sky, and with neither raiment nor fire to keep me warm. My hosts had little attention or compassion to spare to the wants of others. They could not remove me to a more hospitable district; and here, without doubt, I should have perished, had not a monk chanced to visit their hovels. He belonged to a convent of St. Jago, some leagues farther from the shore, which used to send one of its members annually to inspect the religious concerns of those outcasts. Happily, this was the period of their visitations. "My abode in Spain had made me somewhat conversant with its language. The dialect of this monk did not so much differ from Castilian but that, with the assistance of Latin, we were able to converse. The jargon of the fishermen was unintelligible, and they had vainly endeavoured to keep up my spirits by informing me of this expected visit. "This monk was touched with compassion at my calamity, and speedily provided the means of my removal to his convent. Here I was charitably entertained, and the aid of a physician was procured for me. He was but poorly skilled in his profession, and rather confirmed than alleviated my disease. The Portuguese of his trade, especially in remoter districts, are little more than dealers in talismans and nostrums. For a long time I was unable to leave my pallet, and had no prospect before me but that of consuming my days in the gloom of this cloister. "All the members of this convent but he who had been my first benefactor, and whose name was Chaledro, were bigoted and sordid. Their chief motive for treating me with kindness was the hope of obtaining a convert from heresy. They spared no pains to subdue my errors, and were willing to prolong my imprisonment, in the hope of finally gaining their end. Had my fate been governed by those, I should have been immured in this convent, and compelled either to adopt their fanatical creed or to put an end to my own life, in order to escape their well-meant persecutions. Chaledro, however, though no less sincere in his faith and urgent in his entreaties, yet finding me invincible, exerted his influence to obtain my liberty. "After many delays, and strenuous exertions of my friend, they consented to remove me to Oporto. The journey was to be performed in an open cart, over a mountainous country, in the heats of summer. The monks endeavoured to dissuade me from the enterprise, for my own sake, it being scarcely possible that one in my feeble state should survive a journey like this; but I despaired of improving my condition by other means. I preferred death to the imprisonment of a Portuguese monastery, and knew that I could hope for no alleviation of my disease but from the skill of Scottish or French physicians, whom I expected to meet with in that city. I adhered to my purpose with so much vehemence and obstinacy, that they finally yielded to my wishes. "My road lay through the wildest and most rugged districts. It did not exceed ninety miles, but seven days were consumed on the way. The motion of the vehicle racked me with the keenest pangs, and my attendants concluded that every stage would be my last. They had been selected without due regard to their characters. They were knavish and inhuman, and omitted nothing but actual violence to hasten my death. They purposely retarded the journey, and protracted to seven what might have been readily performed in four days. They neglected to execute the orders which they had received respecting my lodging and provisions; and from them, as well as from the peasants, who were sure to be informed that I was a heretic, I suffered every species of insult and injury. My constitution, as well as my frame, possessed a fund of strength of which I had no previous conception. In spite of hardship, and exposure, and abstinence, I at last arrived at Oporto. "Instead of being carried, agreeably to Chaledro's direction, to a convent of St. Jago, I was left, late in the evening, in the porch of a common hospital. My attendants, having laid me on the pavement and loaded me with imprecations, left me to obtain admission by my own efforts. I passed the livelong night in this spot, and in the morning was received into the house in a state which left it uncertain whether I was alive or dead. "After recovering my sensibility, I made various efforts to procure a visit from some English merchant. This was no easy undertaking for one in my deplorable condition. I was too weak to articulate my words distinctly, and these words were rendered, by my foreign accent, scarcely intelligible. The likelihood of my speedy death made the people about me more indifferent to my wants and petitions. "I will not dwell upon my repeated disappointments, but content myself with mentioning that I gained the attention of a French gentleman whose curiosity brought him to view the hospital. Through him I obtained a visit from an English merchant, and finally gained the notice of a person who formerly resided in America, and of whom I had imperfect knowledge. By their kindness I was removed from the hospital to a private house. A Scottish surgeon was summoned to my assistance, and in seven months I was restored to my present state of health. "At Oporto, I embarked, in an American ship, for New York. I was destitute of all property, and relied, for the payment of the debts which I was obliged to contract, as well as for my future subsistence, on my remittance to Waldegrave. I hastened to Philadelphia, and was soon informed that my friend was dead. His death had taken place a long time since my remittance to him: hence this disaster was a subject of regret chiefly on his own account. I entertained no doubt but that my property had been secured, and that either some testamentary directions or some papers had been left behind respecting this affair. "I sought out those who were formerly our mutual acquaintance. I found that they were wholly strangers to his affairs. They could merely relate some particulars of his singular death, and point out the lodgings which he formerly occupied. Hither I forthwith repaired, and discovered that he lived in this house with his sister, disconnected with its other inhabitants. They described his mode of life in terms that showed them to be very imperfectly acquainted with it. It was easy indeed to infer, from their aspect and manners, that little sympathy or union could have subsisted between them and their co-tenants; and this inference was confirmed by their insinuations, the growth of prejudice and envy. They told me that Waldegrave's sister had gone to live in the country, but whither, or for how long, she had not condescended to inform them, and they did not care to ask. She was a topping dame, whose notions were much too high for her station; who was more nice than wise, and yet was one who could stoop when it most became her to stand upright. It was no business of theirs; but they could not but mention their suspicions that she had good reasons for leaving the city and for concealing the place of her retreat. Some things were hard to be disguised. They spoke for themselves, and the only way to hinder disagreeable discoveries was to keep out of sight. "I was wholly a stranger to Waldegrave's sister. I knew merely that he had such a relation. There was nothing, therefore, to outbalance this unfavourable report, but the apparent malignity and grossness of those who gave it. It was not, however, her character about which I was solicitous, but merely the place where she might be found and the suitable inquiries respecting her deceased brother be answered. On this head, these people professed utter ignorance, and were either unable or unwilling to direct me to any person in the city who knew more than themselves. After much discourse, they, at length, let fall an intimation that, if any one knew her place of retreat, it was probably a country-lad, by name Huntly, who lived near the _Forks_ of Delaware. After Waldegrave's death this lad had paid his sister a visit, and seemed to be admitted on a very confidential footing. She left the house, for the last time, in his company, and he, therefore, was most likely to know what had become of her. "The name of Huntly was not totally unknown to me. I myself was born and brought up in the neighbouring township of Chetasco. I had some knowledge of your family, and your name used often to be mentioned by Waldegrave as that of one who, at a maturer age, would prove himself useful to his country. I determined, therefore, to apply to you for what information you could give. I designed to visit my father, who lives in Chetasco, and relieve him from that disquiet which his ignorance of my fate could not fail to have inspired, and both these ends could be thus, at the same time, accomplished. "Before I left the city, I thought it proper to apply to the merchant on whom my bill had been drawn. If this bill had been presented and paid, he had doubtless preserved some record of it, and hence a clue might be afforded, though every other expedient should fail. My usual ill fortune pursued me upon this occasion; for the merchant had lately become insolvent, and, to avoid the rage of his creditors, had fled, without leaving any vestige of this or similar transactions behind him. He had, some years since, been an adventurer from Holland, and was suspected to have returned thither." Chapter XV. "I came hither with a heart desponding of success. Adversity had weakened my faith in the promises of the future, and I was prepared to receive just such tidings as you have communicated. Unacquainted with the secret motives of Waldegrave and his sister, it is impossible for me to weigh the probabilities of their rectitude. I have only my own assertion to produce in support of my claim. All other evidence, all vouchers and papers, which might attest my veracity or sanction my claim in a court of law, are buried in the ocean. The bill was transmitted just before my departure from Madeira, and the letters by which it was accompanied informed Waldegrave of my design to follow it immediately. Hence he did not, it is probable, acknowledge the receipt of my letters. The vessels in which they were sent arrived in due season. I was assured that all letters were duly deposited in the post-office, where, at present, mine are not to be found. "You assure me that nothing has been found among his papers, hinting at any pecuniary transaction between him and me. Some correspondence passed between us previous to that event. Have no letters, with my signature, been found? Are you qualified, by your knowledge of his papers, to answer me explicitly? Is it not possible for some letters to have been mislaid?" "I am qualified," said I, "to answer your inquiries beyond any other person in the world. Waldegrave maintained only general intercourse with the rest of mankind. With me his correspondence was copious, and his confidence, as I imagined, without bounds. His books and papers were contained in a single chest at his lodgings, the keys of which he had about him when he died. These keys I carried to his sister, and was authorized by her to open and examine the contents of this chest. This was done with the utmost care. These papers are now in my possession. Among them no paper, of the tenor you mention, was found, and no letter with your signature. Neither Mary Waldegrave nor I are capable of disguising the truth or committing an injustice. The moment she receives conviction of your right, she will restore this money to you. The moment I imbibe this conviction, I will exert all my influence (and it is not small) to induce her to restore it. Permit me, however, to question you in your turn. Who was the merchant on whom your bill was drawn, what was the date of it, and when did the bill and its counterparts arrive?" "I do not exactly remember the date of the bills. They were made out, however, six days before I myself embarked, which happened on the 10th of August, 1784. They were sent by three vessels, one of which was bound to Charleston and the others to New York. The last arrived within two days of each other, and about the middle of November in the same year. The name of the payer was Monteith." After a pause of recollection, I answered, "I will not hesitate to apprize you of every thing which may throw light upon this transaction, and whether favourable or otherwise to your claim. I have told you, among my friend's papers your name is not to be found. I must likewise repeat that the possession of this money by Waldegrave was wholly unknown to us till his death. We are likewise unacquainted with any means by which he could get possession of so large a sum in his own right. He spent no more than his scanty stipend as a teacher, though this stipend was insufficient to supply his wants. This bank-receipt is dated in December, 1784, a fortnight, perhaps, after the date that you have mentioned. You will perceive how much this coincidence, which could scarcely have taken place by chance, is favourable to your claim. "Mary Waldegrave resides, at present, at Abingdon. She will rejoice, as I do, to see one who, as her brother's friend, is entitled to her affection. Doubt not but that she will listen with impartiality and candour to all that you can urge in defence of your title to this money. Her decision will not be precipitate, but it will be generous and just, and founded on such reasons that, even if it be adverse to your wishes, you will be compelled to approve it?" "I can entertain no doubt," he answered, "as to the equity of my claim. The coincidences you mention are sufficient to convince me that this sum was received upon my bill; but this conviction must necessarily be confined to myself. No one but I can be conscious to the truth of my own story. The evidence on which I build my faith, in this case, is that of my own memory and senses; but this evidence cannot make itself conspicuous to you. You have nothing but my bare assertion, in addition to some probabilities flowing from the conduct of Waldegrave. What facts may exist to corroborate my claim, which you have forgotten, or which you may think proper to conceal, I cannot judge. I know not what is passing in the secret of your hearts; I am unacquainted with the character of this lady and with yours. I have nothing on which to build surmises and suspicions of your integrity, and nothing to generate unusual confidence. The frailty of your virtue and the strength of your temptations I know not. However she decides in this case, and whatever opinion I shall form as to the reasonableness of her decision, it will not become me either to upbraid her, or to nourish discontentment and repinings. "I know that my claim has no legal support; that, if this money be resigned to me, it will be the impulse of spontaneous justice, and not the coercion of law, to which I am indebted for it. Since, therefore, the justice of my claim is to be measured not by law, but by simple equity, I will candidly acknowledge that, as yet, it is uncertain whether I ought to receive, even should Miss Waldegrave be willing to give it. I know my own necessities and schemes, and in what degree this money would be subservient to these; but I know not the views and wants of others, and cannot estimate the usefulness of this money to them. However I decide upon your conduct in withholding or retaining it, I shall make suitable allowance for my imperfect knowledge of your motives and wants, as well as for your unavoidable ignorance of mine. "I have related my sufferings from shipwreck and poverty, not to bias your judgment or engage your pity, but merely because the impulse to relate them chanced to awake; because my heart is softened by the remembrance of Waldegrave, who has been my only friend, and by the sight of one whom he loved. "I told you that my father lived in Chetasco. He is now aged, and I am his only child. I should have rejoiced in being able to relieve his gray hairs from labour to which his failing strength cannot be equal. This was one of my inducements in coming to America. Another was, to prepare the way for a woman whom I married in Europe and who is now awaiting intelligence from me in London. Her poverty is not less than my own, and by marrying against the wishes of her kindred she has bereaved herself of all support but that of her husband. Whether I shall be able to rescue her from indigence, whether I shall alleviate the poverty of my father, or increase it by burdening his scanty friends by my own maintenance as well as his, the future alone can determine. "I confess that my stock of patience and hope has never been large, and that my misfortunes have nearly exhausted it. The flower of my years has been consumed in struggling with adversity, and my constitution has received a shock, from sickness and mistreatment in Portugal, which I cannot expect long to survive. But I make you sad," he continued. "I have said all that I meant to say in this interview. I am impatient to see my father, and night has already come. I have some miles yet to ride to his cottage, and over a rough road. I will shortly visit you again, and talk to you at greater leisure on these and other topics. At present I leave you." I was unwilling to part so abruptly with this guest, and entreated him to prolong his visit; but he would not be prevailed upon. Repeating his promise of shortly seeing me again, he mounted his horse and disappeared. I looked after him with affecting and complex emotions. I reviewed the incidents of this unexpected and extraordinary interview, as if it had existed in a dream. An hour had passed, and this stranger had alighted among us as from the clouds, to draw the veil from those obscurities which had bewildered us so long, to make visible a new train of disastrous consequences flowing from the untimely death of thy brother, and to blast that scheme of happiness on which thou and I had so fondly meditated. But what wilt thou think of this new-born claim? The story, hadst thou observed the features and guise of the relater, would have won thy implicit credit. His countenance exhibited deep traces of the afflictions he had endured, and the fortitude which he had exercised. He was sallow and emaciated, but his countenance was full of seriousness and dignity. A sort of ruggedness of brow, the token of great mental exertion and varied experience, argued a premature old age. What a mournful tale! Is such the lot of those who wander from their rustic homes in search of fortune? Our countrymen are prone to enterprise, and are scattered over every sea and every land in pursuit of that wealth which will not screen them from disease and infirmity, which is missed much oftener than found, and which, when gained, by no means compensates them for the hardships and vicissitudes endured in the pursuit. But what if the truth of these pretensions be admitted? The money must be restored to its right owner. I know that, whatever inconveniences may follow the deed, thou wilt not hesitate to act justly. Affluence and dignity, however valuable, may be purchased too dear. Honesty will not take away its keenness from the winter blast, its ignominy and unwholesomeness from servile labour, or strip of its charms the life of elegance and leisure; but these, unaccompanied with self-reproach, are less deplorable than wealth and honour the possession of which is marred by our own disapprobation. I know the bitterness of this sacrifice. I know the impatience with which your poverty has formerly been borne; how much your early education is at war with that degradation and obscurity to which your youth has been condemned; how earnestly your wishes panted after a state which might exempt you from dependence upon daily labour and on the caprices of others, and might secure to you leisure to cultivate and indulge your love of knowledge and your social and beneficent affections. Your motive for desiring a change of fortune has been greatly enforced since we have become known to each other. Thou hast honoured me with thy affection; but that union, on which we rely for happiness, could not take place while both of us were poor. My habits, indeed, have made labour and rustic obscurity less painful than they would prove to my friend, but my present condition is wholly inconsistent with marriage. As long as my exertions are insufficient to maintain us both, it would be unjustifiable to burden you with new cares and duties. Of this you are more thoroughly convinced than I am. The love of independence and ease, and impatience of drudgery, are woven into your constitution. Perhaps they are carried to an erroneous extreme, and derogate from that uncommon excellence by which your character is, in other respects, distinguished; but they cannot be removed. This obstacle was unexpectedly removed by the death of your brother. However justly to be deplored was this catastrophe, yet, like every other event, some of its consequences were good. By giving you possession of the means of independence and leisure, by enabling us to complete a contract which poverty alone had thus long delayed, this event has been, at the same time, the most disastrous and propitious which could have happened. Why thy brother should have concealed from us the possession of this money,--why, with such copious means of indulgence and leisure, he should still pursue his irksome trade, and live in so penurious a manner,--has been a topic of endless and unsatisfactory conjecture between us. It was not difficult to suppose that this money was held in trust for another; but in that case it was unavoidable that some document or memorandum, or at least some claimant, would appear. Much time has since elapsed, and you have thought yourself at length justified in appropriating this money to your own use. Our flattering prospects are now shut in. You must return to your original poverty, and once more depend for precarious subsistence on your needle. You cannot restore the whole, for unavoidable expenses and the change of your mode of living have consumed some part of it. For so much you must consider yourself as Weymouth's debtor. Repine not, my friend, at this unlooked-for reverse. Think upon the merits and misfortunes of your brother's friend; think upon his aged father, whom we shall enable him to rescue from poverty; think upon his desolate wife, whose merits are, probably, at least equal to your own, and whose helplessness is likely to be greater. I am not insensible to the evils which have returned upon us with augmented force, after having, for a moment, taken their flight. I know the precariousness of my condition and that of my sisters; that our subsistence hangs upon the life of an old man. My uncle's death will transfer this property to his son, who is a stranger and an enemy to us, and the first act of whose authority will unquestionably be to turn us forth from these doors. Marriage with thee was anticipated with joyous emotions, not merely on my own account or on thine, but likewise for the sake of those beloved girls to whom that event would enable me to furnish an asylum. But wedlock is now more distant than ever. Mv heart bleeds to think of the sufferings which my beloved Mary is again fated to endure; but regrets are only aggravations of calamity. They are pernicious, and it is our duty to shake them off. I can entertain no doubts as to the equity of Weymouth's claim. So many coincidences could not have happened by chance. The non-appearance of any letters or papers connected with it is indeed a mysterious circumstance; but why should Waldegrave be studious of preserving these? They were useless paper, and might, without impropriety, be cast away or made to serve any temporary purpose. Perhaps, indeed, they still lurk in some unsuspected corner. To wish that time may explain this mystery in a different manner, and so as to permit our retention of this money, is, perhaps, the dictate of selfishness. The transfer to Weymouth will not be productive of less benefit to him and to his family, than we should derive from the use of it. These considerations, however, will be weighed when we meet. Meanwhile I will return to my narrative. Chapter XVI. Here, my friend, thou must permit me to pause. The following incidents are of a kind to which the most ardent invention has never conceived a parallel. Fortune, in her most wayward mood, could scarcely be suspected of an influence like this. The scene was pregnant with astonishment and horror. I cannot, even now, recall it without reviving the dismay and confusion which I then experienced. Possibly, the period will arrive when I shall look back without agony on the perils I have undergone. That period is still distant. Solitude and sleep are now no more than the signals to summon up a tribe of ugly phantoms. Famine, and blindness, and death, and savage enemies, never fail to be conjured up by the silence and darkness of the night. I cannot dissipate them by any efforts of reason. Sly cowardice requires the perpetual consolation of light. My heart droops when I mark the decline of the sun, and I never sleep but with a candle burning at my pillow. If, by any chance, I should awake and find myself immersed in darkness, I know not what act of desperation I might be suddenly impelled to commit. I have delayed this narrative longer than my duty to my friend enjoined. Now that I am able to hold a pen, I will hasten to terminate that uncertainty with regard to my fate in which my silence has involved thee. I will recall that series of unheard-of and disastrous vicissitudes which has constituted the latest portion of my life. I am not certain, however, that I shall relate them in an intelligible manner. One image runs into another; sensations succeed in so rapid a train, that I fear I shall be unable to distribute and express them with sufficient perspicuity. As I look back, my heart is sore, and aches within my bosom. I am conscious to a kind of complex sentiment of distress and forlornness that cannot be perfectly portrayed by words; but I must do as well as I can. In the utmost vigour of my faculties, no eloquence that I possess would do justice to the tale. Now, in my languishing and feeble state, I shall furnish thee with little more than a glimpse of the truth. With these glimpses, transient and faint as they are, thou must be satisfied. I have said that I slept. My memory assures me of this; it informs me of the previous circumstances of my laying aside my clothes, of placing the light upon a chair within reach of my pillow, of throwing myself upon the bed, and of gazing on the rays of the moon reflected on the wall and almost obscured by those of the candle. I remember my occasional relapses into fits of incoherent fancies, the harbingers of sleep. I remember, as it were, the instant when my thoughts ceased to flow and my senses were arrested by the leaden wand of forgetfulness. My return to sensation and to consciousness took place in no such tranquil scene. I emerged from oblivion by degrees so slow and so faint, that their succession cannot be marked. When enabled at length to attend to the information which my senses afforded, I was conscious for a time of nothing but existence. It was unaccompanied with lassitude or pain, but I felt disinclined to stretch my limbs or raise my eyelids. My thoughts were wildering and mazy, and, though consciousness was present, it was disconnected with the locomotive or voluntary power. From this state a transition was speedily effected. I perceived that my posture was supine, and that I lay upon my back. I attempted to open my eyes. The weight that oppressed them was too great for a slight exertion to remove. The exertion which I made cost me a pang more acute than any which I ever experienced. My eyes, however, were opened; but the darkness that environed me was as intense as before. I attempted to rise, but my limbs were cold, and my joints had almost lost their flexibility. My efforts were repeated, and at length I attained a sitting posture. I was now sensible of pain in my shoulders and back. I was universally in that state to which the frame is reduced by blows of a club, mercilessly and endlessly repeated; my temples throbbed, and my face was covered with clammy and cold drops: but that which threw me into deepest consternation was my inability to see. I turned my head to different quarters; I stretched my eyelids, and exerted every visual energy, but in vain. I was wrapped in the murkiest and most impenetrable gloom. The first effort of reflection was to suggest the belief that I was blind: that disease is known to assail us in a moment and without previous warning. This, surely, was the misfortune that had now befallen me. Some ray, however fleeting and uncertain, could not fail to be discerned, if the power of vision were not utterly extinguished. In what circumstances could I possibly be placed, from which every particle of light should, by other means, be excluded? This led my thoughts into a new train. I endeavoured to recall the past; but the past was too much in contradiction to the present, and my intellect was too much shattered by external violence, to allow me accurately to review it. Since my sight availed nothing to the knowledge of my condition, I betook myself to other instruments. The element which I breathed was stagnant and cold. The spot where I lay was rugged and hard. I was neither naked nor clothed: a shirt and trousers composed my dress, and the shoes and stockings, which always accompanied these, were now wanting. What could I infer from this scanty garb, this chilling atmosphere, this stony bed? I had awakened as from sleep. What was my condition when I fell asleep? Surely it was different from the present. Then I inhabited a lightsome chamber and was stretched upon a down bed; now I was supine upon a rugged surface and immersed in palpable obscurity. Then I was in perfect health; now my frame was covered with bruises and every joint was racked with pain. What dungeon or den had received me, and by whose command was I transported hither? After various efforts I stood upon my feet. At first I tottered and staggered. I stretched out my hands on all sides, but met only with vacuity. I advanced forward. At the third step my foot moved something which lay upon the ground: I stooped and took it up, and found, on examination, that it was an Indian tomahawk. This incident afforded me no hint from which I might conjecture my state. Proceeding irresolutely and slowly forward, my hands at length touched a wall. This, like the flooring, was of stone, and was rugged and impenetrable. I followed this wall. An advancing angle occurred at a short distance, which was followed by similar angles. I continued to explore this clue, till the suspicion occurred that I was merely going round the walls of a vast and irregular apartment. The utter darkness disabled me from comparing directions and distances. This discovery, therefore, was not made on a sudden, and was still entangled with some doubt. My blood recovered some warmth, and my muscles some elasticity; but in proportion as my sensibility returned, my pains augmented. Overpowered by my fears and my agonies, I desisted from my fruitless search, and sat down, supporting my back against the wall. My excruciating sensations for a time occupied my attention. These, in combination with other causes, gradually produced a species of delirium. I existed, as it were, in a wakeful dream. With nothing to correct my erroneous perceptions, the images of the past occurred in capricious combinations and vivid hues. Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment. Whether the day was shut out by insuperable walls, or the darkness that surrounded me was owing to the night and to the smallness of those crannies through which daylight was to be admitted, I conjectured in vain. Sometimes I imagined myself buried alive. Methought I had fallen into seeming death, and my friends had consigned me to the tomb, from which a resurrection was impossible. That, in such a case, my limbs would have been confined to a coffin, and my coffin to a grave, and that I should instantly have been suffocated, did not occur to destroy my supposition. Neither did this supposition overwhelm me with terror or prompt my efforts at deliverance. My state was full of tumult and confusion, and my attention was incessantly divided between my painful sensations and my feverish dreams. There is no standard by which time can be measured but the succession of our thoughts and the changes that take place in the external world. From the latter I was totally excluded. The former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months. At length, a new sensation recalled my rambling meditations, and gave substance to my fears. I now felt the cravings of hunger, and perceived that, unless my deliverance were speedily effected, I must suffer a tedious and lingering death. I once more tasked my understanding and my senses to discover the nature of my present situation and the means of escape. I listened to catch some sound. I heard an unequal and varying echo, sometimes near and sometimes distant, sometimes dying away and sometimes swelling into loudness. It was unlike any thing I had before heard, but it was evident that it arose from wind sweeping through spacious halls and winding passages. These tokens were incompatible with the result of the examination I had made. If my hands were true, I was immured between walls through which there was no avenue. I now exerted my voice, and cried as loud as my wasted strength would admit. Its echoes were sent back to me in broken and confused sounds and from above. This effort was casual, but some part of that uncertainty in which I was involved was instantly dispelled by it. In passing through the cavern on the former day, I have mentioned the verge of the pit at which I arrived. To acquaint me as far as was possible with the dimensions of the place, I had hallooed with all my force, knowing that sound is reflected according to the distance and relative positions of the substances from which it is repelled. The effect produced by my voice on this occasion resembled, with remarkable exactness, the effect which was then produced. Was I, then, shut up in the same cavern? Had I reached the brink of the same precipice and been thrown headlong into that vacuity? Whence else could arise the bruises which I had received, but from my fall? Yet all remembrance of my journey hither was lost. I had determined to explore this cave on the ensuing day, but my memory informed me not that this intention had been carried into effect. Still, it was only possible to conclude that I had come hither on my intended expedition, and had been thrown by another, or had, by some ill chance, fallen, into the pit. This opinion was conformable to what I had already observed. The pavement and walls were rugged like those of the footing and sides of the cave through which I had formerly passed. But if this were true, what was the abhorred catastrophe to which I was now reserved? The sides of this pit were inaccessible; human footsteps would never wander into these recesses. My friends were unapprized of my forlorn state. Here I should continue till wasted by famine. In this grave should I linger out a few days in unspeakable agonies, and then perish forever. The inroads of hunger were already experienced; and this knowledge of the desperateness of my calamity urged me to frenzy. I had none but capricious and unseen fate to condemn. The author of my distress, and the means he had taken to decoy me hither, were incomprehensible. Surely my senses were fettered or depraved by some spell. I was still asleep, and this was merely a tormenting vision; or madness had seized me, and the darkness that environed and the hunger that afflicted me existed only in my own distempered imagination. The consolation of these doubts could not last long. Every hour added to the proof that my perceptions were real. My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the linen of my shirt between my teeth and swallowed the fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth. This agony had already passed beyond the limits of endurance. I saw that time, instead of bringing respite or relief, would only aggravate my wants, and that my only remaining hope was to die before I should be assaulted by the last extremes of famine. I now recollected that a tomahawk was at hand, and rejoiced in the possession of an instrument by which I could so effectually terminate my sufferings. I took it in my hand, moved its edge over my fingers, and reflected on the force that was required to make it reach my heart. I investigated the spot where it should enter, and strove to fortify myself with resolution to repeat the stroke a second or third time, if the first should prove insufficient. I was sensible that I might fail to inflict a mortal wound, but delighted to consider that the blood which would be made to flow would finally release me, and that meanwhile my pains would be alleviated by swallowing this blood. You will not wonder that I felt some reluctance to employ so fatal though indispensable a remedy. I once more ruminated on the possibility of rescuing myself by other means. I now reflected that the upper termination of the wall could not be at an immeasurable distance from the pavement. I had fallen from a height; but if that height had been considerable, instead of being merely bruised, should I not have been dashed into pieces? Gleams of hope burst anew upon my soul. Was it not possible, I asked, to reach the top of this pit? The sides were rugged and uneven. Would not their projectures and abruptnesses serve me as steps by which I might ascend in safety? This expedient was to be tried without delay. Shortly my strength would fail, and my doom would be irrevocably sealed. I will not enumerate my laborious efforts, my alternations of despondency and confidence, the eager and unwearied scrutiny with which I examined the surface, the attempts which I made, and the failures which, for a time, succeeded each other. A hundred times, when I had ascended some feet from the bottom, I was compelled to relinquish my undertaking by the _untenable_ smoothness of the spaces which remained to be gone over. A hundred times I threw myself, exhausted by fatigue and my pains, on the ground. The consciousness was gradually restored that, till I had attempted every part of the wall, it was absurd to despair, and I again drew my tottering limbs and aching joints to that part of the wall which had not been surveyed. At length, as I stretched my hand upward, I found somewhat that seemed like a recession in the wall. It was possible that this was the top of the cavity, and this might be the avenue to liberty. My heart leaped with joy, and I proceeded to climb the wall. No undertaking could be conceived more arduous than this. The space between this verge and the floor was nearly smooth. The verge was higher from the bottom than my head. The only means of ascending that were offered me were by my hands, with which I could draw myself upward so as, at length, to maintain my hold with my feet. My efforts were indefatigable, and at length I placed myself on the verge. When this was accomplished, my strength was nearly gone. Had I not found space enough beyond this brink to stretch myself at length, I should unavoidably have fallen backward into the pit, and all my pains had served no other end than to deepen my despair and hasten my destruction. What impediments and perils remained to be encountered I could not judge. I was now inclined to forebode the worst. The interval of repose which was necessary to be taken, in order to recruit my strength, would accelerate the ravages of famine, and leave me without the power to proceed. In this state, I once more consoled myself that an instrument of death was at hand. I had drawn up with me the tomahawk, being sensible that, should this impediment be overcome, others might remain that would prove insuperable. Before I employed it, however, I cast my eyes wildly and languidly around. The darkness was no less intense than in the pit below, and yet two objects were distinctly seen. They resembled a fixed and obscure flame. They were motionless. Though lustrous themselves, they created no illumination around them. This circumstance, added to others, which reminded me of similar objects noted on former occasions, immediately explained the nature of what I beheld. These were the eyes of a panther. Thus had I struggled to obtain a post where a savage was lurking and waited only till my efforts should place me within reach of his fangs. The first impulse was to arm myself against this enemy. The desperateness of my condition was, for a moment, forgotten. The weapon which was so lately lifted against my own bosom was now raised to defend my life against the assault of another. There was no time for deliberation and delay. In a moment he might spring from his station and tear me to pieces. My utmost speed might not enable me to reach him where he sat, but merely to encounter his assault. I did not reflect how far my strength was adequate to save me. All the force that remained was mustered up and exerted in a throw. No one knows the powers that are latent in his constitution. Called forth by imminent dangers, our efforts frequently exceed our most sanguine belief. Though tottering on the verge of dissolution, and apparently unable to crawl from this spot, a force was exerted in this throw, probably greater than I had ever before exerted. It was resistless and unerring. I aimed at the middle space between those glowing orbs. It penetrated the skull, and the animal fell, struggling and shrieking, on the ground. My ears quickly informed me when his pangs were at an end. His cries and his convulsions lasted for a moment and then ceased. The effect of his voice, in these subterranean abodes, was unspeakably rueful. The abruptness of this incident, and the preternatural exertion of my strength, left me in a state of languor and sinking, from which slowly and with difficulty I recovered. The first suggestion that occurred was to feed upon the carcass of this animal. My hunger had arrived at that pitch where all fastidiousness and scruples are at an end. I crept to the spot. I will not shock you by relating the extremes to which dire necessity had driven me. I review this scene with loathing and horror. Now that it is past I look back upon it as on some hideous dream. The whole appears to be some freak of insanity. No alternative was offered, and hunger was capable of being appeased even by a banquet so detestable. If this appetite has sometimes subdued the sentiments of nature, and compelled the mother to feed upon the flesh of her offspring, it will not excite amazement that I did not turn from the yet warm blood and reeking fibres of a brute. One evil was now removed, only to give place to another. The first sensations of fullness had scarcely been felt when my stomach was seized by pangs, whose acuteness exceeded all that I ever before experienced. I bitterly lamented my inordinate avidity. The excruciations of famine were better than the agonies which this abhorred meal had produced. Death was now impending with no less proximity and certainty, though in a different form. Death was a sweet relief for my present miseries, and I vehemently longed for its arrival. I stretched myself on the ground. I threw myself into every posture that promised some alleviation of this evil. I rolled along the pavement of the cavern, wholly inattentive to the dangers that environed me. That I did not fall into the pit whence I had just emerged must be ascribed to some miraculous chance. How long my miseries endured, it is not possible to tell. I cannot even form a plausible conjecture. Judging by the lingering train of my sensations, I should conjecture that some days elapsed in this deplorable condition; but nature could riot have so long sustained a conflict like this. Gradually my pains subsided, and I fell into a deep sleep. I was visited by dreams of a thousand hues. They led me to flowing streams and plenteous banquets, which, though placed within my view, some power forbade me to approach. From this sleep I recovered to the fruition of solitude and darkness, but my frame was in a state less feeble than before That which I had eaten had produced temporary distress, but on the whole had been of use. If this food had not been provided for me I should scarcely have avoided death. I had reason, therefore, to congratulate myself on the danger that had lately occurred. I had acted without foresight, and yet no wisdom could have prescribed more salutary measures. The panther was slain, not from a view to the relief of my hunger, but from the self-preserving and involuntary impulse. Had I foreknown the pangs to which my ravenous and bloody meal would give birth, I should have carefully abstained; and yet these pangs were a useful effort of nature to subdue and convert to nourishment the matter I had swallowed. I was now assailed by the torments of thirst. My invention and my courage were anew bent to obviate this pressing evil. I reflected that there was some recess from this cavern, even from the spot where I now stood. Before, I was doubtful whether in this direction from this pit any avenue could be found; but, since the panther had come hither, there was reason to suppose the existence of some such avenue. I now likewise attended to a sound, which, from its invariable tenor, denoted somewhat different from the whistling of a gale. It seemed like the murmur of a running stream. I now prepared to go forward and endeavour to move along in that direction in which this sound apparently came. On either side, and above my head, there was nothing but vacuity. My steps were to be guided by the pavement, which, though unequal and rugged, appeared, on the whole, to ascend. My safety required that I should employ both hands and feet in exploring my way. I went on thus for a considerable period. The murmur, instead of becoming more distinct, gradually died away. My progress was arrested by fatigue, and I began once more to despond. My exertions produced a perspiration, which, while it augmented my thirst, happily supplied me with imperfect means of appeasing it. This expedient would, perhaps, have been accidentally suggested; but my ingenuity was assisted by remembering the history of certain English prisoners in Bengal, whom their merciless enemy imprisoned in a small room, and some of whom preserved themselves alive merely by swallowing the moisture that flowed from their bodies. This experiment I now performed with no less success. This was slender arid transitory consolation. I knew that, wandering at random, I might never reach the outlet of this cavern, or might be disabled, by hunger and fatigue, from going farther than the outlet. The cravings which had lately been satiated would speedily return, and my negligence had cut me off from the resource which had recently been furnished. I thought not till now that a second meal might be indispensable. To return upon my footsteps to the spot where the dead animal lay was a heartless project. I might thus be placing myself at a hopeless distance from liberty. Besides, my track could not be retraced. I had frequently deviated from a straight direction for the sake of avoiding impediments. All of which I was sensible was, that I was travelling up an irregular acclivity. I hoped some time to reach the summit, but had no reason for adhering to one line of ascent in preference to another. To remain where I was was manifestly absurd. Whether I mounted or descended, a change of place was most likely to benefit me. I resolved to vary my direction, and, instead of ascending, keep along the side of what I accounted a hill. I had gone some hundred feet when the murmur, before described, once more saluted my ear. This sound, being imagined to proceed from a running stream, could not but light up joy in the heart of one nearly perishing with thirst. I proceeded with new courage. The sound approached no nearer, nor became more distinct; but, as long as it died not away, I was satisfied to listen and to hope. I was eagerly observant if any the least glimmering of light should visit this recess. At length, on the right hand, a gleam, infinitely faint, caught my attention. It was wavering and unequal. I directed my steps towards it. It became more vivid and permanent. It was of that kind, however, which proceeded from a fire, kindled with dry sticks, and not from the sun. I now heard the crackling of flames. This sound made me pause, or, at least, to proceed with circumspection. At length the scene opened, and I found myself at the entrance of a cave. I quickly reached a station, when I saw a fire burning. At first no other object was noted, but it was easy to infer that the fire was kindled by men, and that they who kindled it could be at no great distance. Chapter XVII. Thus was I delivered from my prison, and restored to the enjoyment of the air and the light. Perhaps the chance was almost miraculous that led me to this opening. In any other direction, I might have involved myself in an inextricable maze and rendered my destruction sure; but what now remained to place me in absolute security? Beyond the fire I could see nothing; but, since the smoke rolled rapidly away, it was plain that on the opposite side the cavern was open to the air. I went forward, but my eyes were fixed upon the fire: presently, in consequence of changing my station, I perceived several feet, and the skirts of blankets. I was somewhat startled at these appearances. The legs were naked, and scored into uncouth figures. The _moccasins_ which lay beside them, and which were adorned in a grotesque manner, in addition to other incidents, immediately suggested the suspicion that they were Indians. No spectacle was more adapted than this to excite wonder and alarm. Had some mysterious power snatched me from the earth, and cast me, in a moment, into the heart of the wilderness? Was I still in the vicinity of my parental habitation, or was I thousands of miles distant? Were these the permanent inhabitants of this region, or were they wanderers and robbers? While in the heart of the mountain, I had entertained a vague belief that I was still within the precincts of Norwalk. This opinion was shaken for a moment by the objects which I now beheld, but it insensibly returned: yet how was this opinion to be reconciled to appearances so strange and uncouth, and what measure did a due regard to my safety enjoin me to take? I now gained a view of four brawny and terrific figures, stretched upon the ground. They lay parallel to each other, on their left sides; in consequence of which their faces were turned from me. Between each was an interval where lay a musket. Their right hands seemed placed upon the stocks of their guns, as if to seize them on the first moment of alarm. The aperture through which these objects were seen was at the back of the cave, and some feet from the ground. It was merely large enough to suffer a human body to pass. It was involved in profound darkness, and there was no danger of being suspected or discovered as long as I maintained silence and kept out of view. It was easily imagined that these guests would make but a short sojourn in this spot. There was reason to suppose that it was now night, and that, after a short repose, they would start up and resume their journey. It was my first design to remain shrouded in this covert till their departure, and I prepared to endure imprisonment and thirst somewhat longer. Meanwhile my thoughts were busy in accounting for this spectacle. I need not tell thee that Norwalk is the termination of a sterile and narrow tract which begins in the Indian country. It forms a sort of rugged and rocky vein, and continues upwards of fifty miles. It is crossed in a few places by narrow and intricate paths, by which a communication is maintained between the farms and settlements on the opposite sides of the ridge. During former Indian wars, this rude surface was sometimes traversed by the red men, and they made, by means of it, frequent and destructive inroads into the heart of the English settlements. During the last war, notwithstanding the progress of population, and the multiplied perils of such an expedition, a band of them had once penetrated into Norwalk, and lingered long enough to pillage and murder some of the neighbouring inhabitants. I have reason to remember that event. My father's house was placed on the verge of this solitude. Eight of these assassins assailed it at the dead of night. My parents and an infant child were murdered in their beds; the house was pillaged, and then burnt to the ground. Happily, myself and my two sisters were abroad upon a visit. The preceding day had been fixed for our return to our father's house; but a storm occurred, which made it dangerous to cross the river, and, by obliging us to defer our journey, rescued us from captivity or death. Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years. You will not be surprised that the fate of my parents, and the sight of the body of one of this savage band, who, in the pursuit that was made after them, was overtaken and killed, should produce lasting and terrific images in my fancy. I never looked upon or called up the image of a savage without shuddering. I knew that, at this time, some hostilities had been committed on the frontier; that a long course of injuries and encroachments had lately exasperated the Indian tribes; that an implacable and exterminating war was generally expected. We imagined ourselves at an inaccessible distance from the danger; but I could not but remember that this persuasion was formerly as strong as at present, and that an expedition which had once succeeded might possibly be attempted again. Here was every token of enmity and bloodshed. Each prostrate figure was furnished with a rifled musket, and a leathern bag tied round his waist, which was, probably, stored with powder and ball. From these reflections, the sense of my own danger was revived and enforced; but I likewise ruminated on the evils which might impend over others. I should, no doubt, be safe by remaining in this nook; but might not some means be pursued to warn others of their danger? Should they leave this spot without notice of their approach being given to the fearless and pacific tenants of the neighbouring district, they might commit, in a few hours, the most horrid and irreparable devastation. The alarm could only be diffused in one way. Could I not escape, unperceived, and without alarming the sleepers, from this cavern? The slumber of an Indian is broken by the slightest noise; but, if all noise be precluded, it is commonly profound. It was possible, I conceived, to leave my present post, to descend into the cave, and issue forth without the smallest signal. Their supine posture assured me that they were asleep. Sleep usually comes at their bidding, and if, perchance, they should be wakeful at an unseasonable moment, they always sit upon their haunches, and, leaning their elbows on their knees, consume the tedious hours in smoking. My peril would be great. Accidents which I could not foresee, and over which I had no command, might occur to awaken some one at the moment I was passing the fire. Should I pass in safety, I might issue forth into a wilderness, of which I had no knowledge, where I might wander till I perished with famine, or where my footsteps might be noted and pursued and overtaken by these implacable foes. These perils were enormous and imminent; but I likewise considered that I might be at no great distance from the habitations of men, and that my escape might rescue them from the most dreadful calamities. I determined to make this dangerous experiment without delay. I came nearer to the aperture, and had, consequently, a larger view of this recess. To my unspeakable dismay, I now caught a glimpse of one seated at the fire. His back was turned towards me, so that I could distinctly survey his gigantic form and fantastic ornaments. My project was frustrated. This one was probably commissioned to watch and to awaken his companions when a due portion of sleep had been taken. That he would not be unfaithful or remiss in the performance of the part assigned to him was easily predicted. To pass him without exciting his notice (and the entrance could not otherwise be reached) was impossible. Once more I shrunk back, and revolved with hopelessness and anguish the necessity to which I was reduced. This interval of dreary foreboding did not last long. Some motion in him that was seated by the fire attracted my notice. I looked, and beheld him rise from his place and go forth from the cavern. This unexpected incident led my thoughts into a new channel. Could not some advantage be taken of his absence? Could not this opportunity be seized for making my escape? He had left his gun and hatchet on the ground. It was likely, therefore, that he had not gone far, and would speedily return. Might not these weapons be seized, and some provision be thus made against the danger of meeting him without, or of being pursued? Before a resolution could be formed, a new sound saluted my ear. It was a deep groan, succeeded by sobs that seemed struggling for utterance but were vehemently counteracted by the sufferer. This low and bitter lamentation apparently proceeded from some one within the cave. It could not be from one of this swarthy band. It must, then, proceed from a captive, whom they had reserved for torment or servitude, and who had seized the opportunity afforded by the absence of him that watched to give vent to his despair. I again thrust my head forward, and beheld, lying on the ground, apart from the rest, and bound hand and foot, a young girl. Her dress was the coarse russet garb of the country, and bespoke her to be some farmer's daughter. Her features denoted the last degree of fear and anguish, and she moved her limbs in such a manner as showed that the ligatures by which she was confined produced, by their tightness, the utmost degree of pain. My wishes were now bent not only to preserve myself and to frustrate the future attempts of these savages, but likewise to relieve this miserable victim. This could only be done by escaping from the cavern and returning with seasonable aid. The sobs of the girl were likely to rouse the sleepers. My appearance before her would prompt her to testify her surprise by some exclamation or shriek. What could hence be predicted but that the band would start on their feet and level their unerring pieces at my head? I know not why I was insensible to these dangers. My thirst was rendered by these delays intolerable. It took from me, in some degree, the power of deliberation. The murmurs which had drawn me hither continued still to be heard. Some torrent or cascade could not be far distant from the entrance of the cavern, and it seemed as if one draught of clear water was a luxury cheaply purchased by death itself. This, in addition to considerations more disinterested, and which I have already mentioned, impelled me forward. The girl's cheek rested on the hard rock, and her eyes were dim with tears. As they were turned towards me, however, I hoped that my movements would be noticed by her gradually and without abruptness. This expectation was fulfilled. I had not advanced many steps before she discovered me. This moment was critical beyond all others in the course of my existence. My life was suspended, as it were, by a spider's thread. All rested on the effect which this discovery should make upon this feeble victim. I was watchful of the first movement of her eye which should indicate a consciousness of my presence. I laboured, by gestures and looks, to deter her from betraying her emotion. My attention was, at the same time, fixed upon the sleepers, and an anxious glance was cast towards the quarter whence the watchful savage might appear. I stooped and seized the musket and hatchet. The space beyond the fire was, as I expected, open to the air. I issued forth with trembling steps. The sensations inspired by the dangers which environed me, added to my recent horrors, and the influence of the moon, which had now gained the zenith, and whose lustre dazzled my long-benighted senses, cannot be adequately described. For a minute, I was unable to distinguish objects. This confusion was speedily corrected, and I found myself on the verge of a steep. Craggy eminences arose on all sides. On the left hand was a space that offered some footing, and hither I turned. A torrent was below me, and this path appeared to lead to it. It quickly appeared in sight, and all foreign cares were, for a time, suspended. This water fell from the upper regions of the hill, upon a flat projecture which was continued on either side, and on part of which I was now standing. The path was bounded on the left by an inaccessible wall, and on the right terminated, at the distance of two or three feet from the wall, in a precipice. The water was eight or ten paces distant, and no impediment seemed likely to rise between us. I rushed forward with speed. My progress was quickly checked. Close to the falling water, seated on the edge, his back supported by the rock, and his legs hanging over the precipice, I now beheld the savage who left the cave before me. The noise of the cascade and the improbability of interruption, at least from this quarter, had made him inattentive to my motions. I paused. Along this verge lay the only road by which I could reach the water, and by which I could escape. The passage was completely occupied by this antagonist. To advance towards him, or to remain where I was, would produce the same effect. I should, in either case, be detected. He was unarmed; but his outcries would instantly summon his companions to his aid. I could not hope to overpower him, and pass him in defiance of his opposition. But, if this were effected, pursuit would be instantly commenced. I was unacquainted with the way. The way was unquestionably difficult. My strength was nearly annihilated; I should be overtaken in a moment, or their deficiency in speed would be supplied by the accuracy of their aim. Their bullets, at least, would reach me. There was one method of removing this impediment. The piece which I held in my hand was cocked. There could be no doubt that it was loaded. A precaution of this kind would never be omitted by a warrior of this hue. At a greater distance than this, I should not fear to reach the mark. Should I not discharge it, and, at the same moment, rush forward to secure the road which my adversary's death would open to me? Perhaps you will conceive a purpose like this to have argued a sanguinary and murderous disposition. Let it be remembered, however, that I entertained no doubts about the hostile designs of these men. This was sufficiently indicated by their arms, their guise, and the captive who attended them. Let the fate of my parents be, likewise, remembered. I was not certain but that these very men were the assassins of my family, and were those who had reduced me and my sisters to the condition of orphans and dependants. No words can describe the torments of my thirst. Relief to these torments, and safety to my life, were within view. How could I hesitate? Yet I did hesitate. My aversion to bloodshed was not to be subdued but by the direst necessity. I knew, indeed, that the discharge of a musket would only alarm the enemies who remained behind; but I had another and a better weapon in my grasp. I could rive the head of my adversary, and cast him headlong, without any noise which should be heard, into the cavern. Still I was willing to withdraw, to re-enter the cave, and take shelter in the darksome recesses from which I had emerged. Here I might remain, unsuspected, till these detested guests should depart. The hazards attending my re-entrance were to be boldly encountered, and the torments of unsatisfied thirst were to be patiently endured, rather than imbrue my hands in the blood of my fellowmen. But this expedient would be ineffectual if my retreat should be observed by this savage. Of that I was bound to be incontestably assured. I retreated, therefore, but kept my eye fixed at the same time upon the enemy. Some ill fate decreed that I should not retreat unobserved. Scarcely had I withdrawn three paces when he started from his seat, and, turning towards me, walked with a quick pace. The shadow of the rock, and the improbability of meeting an enemy here, concealed me for a moment from his observation. I stood still. The slightest motion would have attracted his notice. At present, the narrow space engaged all his vigilance. Cautious footsteps, and attention to the path, were indispensable to his safety. The respite was momentary, and I employed it in my own defence. How otherwise could I act? The danger that impended aimed at nothing less than my life. To take the life of another was the only method of averting it. The means were in my hand, and they were used. In an extremity like this, my muscles would have acted almost in defiance of my will. The stroke was quick as lightning, and the wound mortal and deep. He had not time to descry the author of his fate, but, sinking on the path, expired without a groan. The hatchet buried itself in his breast, and rolled with him to the bottom of the precipice. Never before had I taken the life of a human creature. On this head I had, indeed, entertained somewhat of religious scruples. These scruples did not forbid me to defend myself, but they made me cautious and reluctant to decide. Though they could not withhold my hand when urged by a necessity like this, they were sufficient to make me look back upon the deed with remorse and dismay. I did not escape all compunction in the present instance, but the tumult of my feelings was quickly allayed. To quench my thirst was a consideration by which all others were supplanted. I approached the torrent, and not only drank copiously, but laved my head, neck, and arms, in this delicious element. Chapter XVIII. Never was any delight worthy of comparison with the raptures which I then experienced. Life, that was rapidly ebbing, appeared to return upon me with redoubled violence. My languors, my excruciating heat, vanished in a moment, and I felt prepared to undergo the labours of Hercules. Having fully supplied the demands of nature in this respect, I returned to reflection on the circumstances of my situation. The path winding round the hill was now free from all impediments. What remained but to precipitate my flight? I might speedily place myself beyond all danger. I might gain some hospitable shelter, where my fatigues might be repaired by repose, and my wounds be cured. I might likewise impart to my protectors seasonable information of the enemies who meditated their destruction. I thought upon the condition of the hapless girl whom I had left in the power of the savages. Was it impossible to rescue her? Might I not relieve her from her bonds, and make her the companion of my flight? The exploit was perilous, but not impracticable. There was something dastardly and ignominious in withdrawing from the danger, and leaving a helpless being exposed to it. A single minute might suffice to snatch her from death or captivity. The parents might deserve that I should hazard or even sacrifice my life in the cause of their child. After some fluctuation, I determined to return to the cavern and attempt the rescue of the girl. The success of this project depended on the continuance of their sleep. It was proper to approach with wariness, and to heed the smallest token which might bespeak their condition. I crept along the path, bending my ear forward to catch any sound that might arise. I heard nothing but the half-stifled sobs of the girl. I entered with the slowest and most anxious circumspection. Every thing was found in its pristine state. The girl noticed my entrance with a mixture of terror and joy. My gestures and looks enjoined upon her silence. I stooped down, and, taking another hatchet, cut asunder the deer-skin thongs by which her wrists and ankles were tied. I then made signs for her to rise and follow me. She willingly complied with my directions; but her benumbed joints and lacerated sinews refused to support her. There was no time to be lost; I therefore lifted her in my arms, and, feeble and tottering as I was, proceeded with this burden along the perilous steep and over a most rugged-path. I hoped that some exertion would enable her to retrieve the use of her limbs. I set her, therefore, on her feet, exhorting her to walk as well as she was able, and promising her my occasional assistance. The poor girl was not deficient in zeal, and presently moved along with light and quick steps. We speedily reached the bottom of the hill. No fancy can conceive a scene more wild and desolate than that which now presented itself. The soil was nearly covered with sharp fragments of stone. Between these, sprung brambles and creeping vines, whose twigs, crossing and intertwining with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space were single cedars with their ragged spines and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks, which were only new emblems of sterility. I was wholly unacquainted with the scene before me. No marks of habitation or culture, no traces of the footsteps of men, were discernible. I scarcely knew in what region of the globe I was placed. I had come hither by means so inexplicable as to leave it equally in doubt whether I was separated from my paternal abode by a river or an ocean. I made inquiries of my companion, but she was unable to talk coherently. She answered my questions with weeping, and sobs, and entreaties to fly from the scene of her distress. I collected from her, at length, that her father's house had been attacked on the preceding evening, and all the family but herself destroyed. Since this disaster she had walked very fast and a great way, but knew not how far or in what direction. In a wilderness like this, my only hope was to light upon obscure paths, made by cattle. Meanwhile I endeavoured to adhere to one line, and to burst through the vexatious obstacles which encumbered our way. The ground was concealed by the bushes, and we were perplexed and fatigued by a continual succession of hollows and prominences. At one moment we were nearly thrown headlong into a pit. At another we struck our feet against the angles of stones. The branches of the oak rebounded in our faces or entangled our legs, and the unseen thorns inflicted on us a thousand wounds. I was obliged, in these arduous circumstances, to support not only myself, but my companion. Her strength was overpowered by her evening journey, and the terror of being overtaken incessantly harassed her. Sometimes we lighted upon tracks which afforded us an easier footing and inspired us with courage to proceed. These, for a time, terminated at a brook or in a bog, and we were once more compelled to go forward at random. One of these tracks insensibly became more beaten, and, at length, exhibited the traces of wheels. To this I adhered, confident that it would finally conduct us to a dwelling. On either side, the undergrowth of shrubs and brambles continued as before. Sometimes small spaces were observed, which had lately been cleared by fire. At length a vacant space, of larger dimensions than had hitherto occurred, presented itself to my view. It was a field of some acres, that had, apparently, been upturned by the hoe. At the corner of this field was a small house. My heart leaped with joy at this sight. I hastened towards it, in the hope that my uncertainties, and toils, and dangers, were now drawing to a close. This dwelling was suited to the poverty and desolation which surrounded it. It consisted of a few unhewn logs laid upon each other, to the height of eight or ten feet, including a quadrangular space of similar dimensions, and covered by a thatch. There was no window, light being sufficiently admitted into the crevices between the logs. These had formerly been loosely plastered with clay; but air and rain had crumbled and washed the greater part of this rude cement away. Somewhat like a chimney, built of half-burnt bricks, was perceived at one corner. The door was fastened by a leathern thong, tied to a peg. All within was silence and darkness. I knocked at the door and called, but no one moved or answered. The tenant, whoever he was, was absent. His leave could not be obtained, and I, therefore, entered without it. The autumn had made some progress, and the air was frosty and sharp. My mind and muscles had been of late so strenuously occupied, that the cold had not been felt. The cessation of exercise, however, quickly restored my sensibility in this respect, but the unhappy girl complained of being half frozen. Fire, therefore, was the first object of my search. Happily, some embers were found upon the hearth, together with potato-stalks and dry chips. Of these, with much difficulty, I kindled a fire, by which some warmth was imparted to our shivering limbs. The light enabled me, as I sat upon the ground, to survey the interior of this mansion. Three saplings, stripped of their branches and bound together at their ends by twigs, formed a kind of bedstead, which was raised from the ground by four stones. Ropes stretched across these, and covered by a blanket, constituted the bed. A board, of which one end rested on the bedstead and the other was thrust between the logs that composed the wall, sustained the stale fragments of a rye-loaf, and a cedar bucket kept entire by withes instead of hoops. In the bucket was a little water, full of droppings from the roof, drowned insects, and sand. A basket or two neatly made, and a hoe, with a stake thrust into it by way of handle, made up all the furniture that was visible. Next to cold, hunger was the most urgent necessity by which we were now pressed. This was no time to give ear to scruples. We, therefore, unceremoniously divided the bread and water between us. I had now leisure to bestow some regards upon the future. These remnants of fire and food convinced me that this dwelling was usually inhabited, and that it had lately been deserted. Some engagement had probably carried the tenant abroad. His absence might be terminated in a few minutes, or might endure through the night. On his return, I questioned not my power to appease any indignation he might feel at the liberties which I had taken. I was willing to suppose him one who would readily afford us all the information and succour that we needed. If he should not return till sunrise, I meant to resume my journey. By the comfortable meal we had made, and the repose of a few hours, we should be considerably invigorated and refreshed, and the road would lead us to some more hospitable tenement. My thoughts were too tumultuous, and my situation too precarious, to allow me to sleep. The girl, on the contrary, soon sank into a sweet oblivion of all her cares. She laid herself, by my advice, upon the bed, and left me to ruminate without interruption. I was not wholly free from the apprehension of danger. What influence this boisterous and solitary life might have upon the temper of the being who inhabited this hut, I could not predict. How soon the Indians might awake, and what path they would pursue, I was equally unable to guess. It was by no means impossible that they might tread upon my footsteps, and knock, in a few minutes, at the door of this cottage. It behooved me to make all the preparations in my power against untoward incidents. I had not parted with the gun which I had first seized in the cavern, nor with the hatchet which I had afterwards used to cut the bands of the girl. These were at once my trophies and my means of defence, which it had been rash and absurd to have relinquished. My present reliance was placed upon these. I now, for the first time, examined the prize that I had made. Other considerations had prevented me, till now, from examining the structure of the piece; but I could not but observe that it had two barrels, and was lighter and smaller than an ordinary musket. The light of the fire now enabled me to inspect it with more accuracy. Scarcely had I fixed my eyes upon the stock, when I perceived marks that were familiar to my apprehension. Shape, ornaments, and ciphers, were evidently the same with those of a piece which I had frequently handled. The marks were of a kind which could not be mistaken. This piece was mine; and, when I left my uncle's house, it was deposited, as I believed, in the closet of my chamber. Thou wilt easily conceive the inference which this circumstance suggested. My hairs rose and my teeth chattered with horror. My whole frame was petrified, and I paced to and fro, hurried from the chimney to the door, and from the door to the chimney, with the misguided fury of a maniac. I needed no proof of my calamity more incontestable than this. My uncle and my sisters had been murdered; the dwelling had been pillaged, and this had been a part of the plunder. Defenceless and asleep, they were assailed by these inexorable enemies, and I, who ought to have been their protector and champion, was removed to an immeasurable distance, and was disabled, by some accursed chance, from affording them the succour which they needed. For a time, I doubted whether I had not witnessed and shared this catastrophe. I had no memory of the circumstances that preceded my awaking in the pit. Had not the cause of my being cast into this abyss some connection with the ruin of my family? Had I not been dragged hither by these savages and reduced, by their malice, to that breathless and insensible condition? Was I born to a malignant destiny never tired of persecuting? Thus had my parents and their infant offspring perished, and thus completed was the fate of all those to whom my affections cleaved, and whom the first disaster had spared. Hitherto the death of the savage, whom I had dispatched with my hatchet, had not been remembered without some remorse. Now my emotions were totally changed. I was somewhat comforted in thinking that thus much of necessary vengeance had been executed. New and more vehement regrets were excited by reflecting on the forbearance I had practised when so much was in my power. All the miscreants had been at my mercy, and a bloody retribution might, with safety and ease, have been inflicted on their prostrate bodies. It was now too late. What of consolation or of hope remained to me? To return to my ancient dwelling, now polluted with blood, or, perhaps, nothing but a smoking ruin, was abhorred. Life, connected with the remembrance of my misfortunes, was detestable. I was no longer anxious for flight. No change of the scene but that which terminated all consciousness could I endure to think of. Amidst these gloomy meditations the idea was suddenly suggested of returning, with the utmost expedition, to the cavern. It was possible that the assassins were still asleep. He who was appointed to watch, and to make, in due season, the signal for resuming their march, was forever silent. Without this signal it was not unlikely that they would sleep till dawn of day. But, if they should be roused, they might be overtaken or met, and, by choosing a proper station, two victims might at least fall. The ultimate event to myself would surely be fatal; but my own death was an object of desire rather than of dread. To die thus speedily, and after some atonement was made for those who had already been slain, was sweet. The way to the mountain was difficult and tedious, but the ridge was distinctly seen from the door of the cottage, and I trusted that auspicious chance would lead me to that part of it where my prey was to be found. I snatched up the gun and tomahawk in a transport of eagerness. On examining the former, I found that both barrels were deeply loaded. This piece was of extraordinary workmanship. It was the legacy of an English officer, who died in Bengal, to Sarsefield. It was constructed for the purposes not of sport but of war. The artist had made it a congeries of tubes and springs, by which every purpose of protection and offence was effectually served. A dagger's blade was attached to it, capable of being fixed at the end, and of answering the destructive purpose of a bayonet. On his departure from Solesbury, my friend left it, as a pledge of his affection, in my possession. Hitherto I had chiefly employed it in shooting at a mark, in order to improve my sight; now was I to profit by the gift in a different way. Thus armed, I prepared to sally forth on my adventurous expedition. Sober views might have speedily succeeded to the present tempest of my passions. I might have gradually discovered the romantic and criminal temerity of my project, the folly of revenge, and the duty of preserving my life for the benefit of mankind. I might have suspected the propriety of my conclusion, and have admitted some doubts as to the catastrophe which I imagined to have befallen my uncle and sisters. I might, at least, have consented to ascertain their condition with my own eyes, and for this end have returned to the cottage, and have patiently waited till the morning light should permit me to resume my journey. This conduct was precluded by a new incident. Before I opened the door I looked through a crevice of the wall, and perceived three human figures at the farther end of the field. They approached the house. Though indistinctly seen, something in their port persuaded me that these were the Indians from whom I had lately parted. I was startled but not dismayed. My thirst of vengeance was still powerful, and I believed that the moment of its gratification was hastening. In a short time they would arrive and enter the house. In what manner should they be received? I studied not my own security. It was the scope of my wishes to kill the whole number of my foes; but, that being done, I was indifferent to the consequences. I desired not to live to relate or to exult in the deed. To go forth was perilous and useless. All that remained was to sit upon the ground opposite the door, and fire at each as he entered. In the hasty survey I had taken of this apartment, one object had been overlooked, or imperfectly noticed. Close to the chimney was an aperture, formed by a cavity partly in the wall and in the ground. It was the entrance of an oven, which resembled, on the outside, a mound of earth, and which was filled with dry stalks of potatoes and other rubbish. Into this it was possible to thrust my body. A sort of screen might be formed of the brushwood, and more deliberate and effectual execution be done upon the enemy. I weighed not the disadvantages of this scheme, but precipitately threw myself into this cavity. I discovered, in an instant, that it was totally unfit for my purpose; but it was too late to repair my miscarriage. This wall of the hovel was placed near the verge of a sand-bank. The oven was erected on the very brink. This bank, being of a loose and mutable soil, could not sustain my weight. It sunk, and I sunk along with it. The height of the bank was three or four feet, so that, though disconcerted and embarrassed, I received no injury. I still grasped my gun, and resumed my feet in a moment. What was now to be done? The bank screened me from the view of the savages. The thicket was hard by, and, if I were eager to escape, the way was obvious and sure. But, though single, though enfeebled by toil, by abstinence, and by disease, and though so much exceeded in number and strength by my foes, I was determined to await and provoke the contest. In addition to the desperate impulse of passion, I was swayed by thoughts of the danger which beset the sleeping girl, and from which my flight would leave her without protection. How strange is the destiny that governs mankind! The consequence of shrouding myself in this cavity had not been foreseen. It was an expedient which courage and not cowardice suggested; and yet it was the only expedient by which flight had been rendered practicable. To have issued from the door would only have been to confront, and not to elude, the danger. The first impulse prompted me to re-enter the cottage by this avenue, but this could not be done with certainty and expedition. What then remained? While I deliberated, the men approached, and, after a moment's hesitation, entered the house, the door being partly open. The fire on the hearth enabled them to survey the room. One of them uttered a sudden exclamation of surprise. This was easily interpreted. They had noticed the girl who had lately been their captive lying asleep on the blanket. Their astonishment at finding her here, and in this condition, may be easily conceived. I now reflected that I might place myself, without being observed, near the entrance, at an angle of the building, and shoot at each as he successively came forth. I perceived that the bank conformed to two sides of the house, and that I might gain a view of the front and of the entrance, without exposing myself to observation. I lost no time in gaining this station. The bank was as high as my breast. It was easy, therefore, to crouch beneath it, to bring my eye close to the verge, and, laying my gun upon the top of it among the grass, with its muzzles pointed to the door, patiently to wait their forthcoming. My eye and my ear were equally attentive to what was passing. A low and muttering conversation was maintained in the house. Presently I heard a heavy stroke descend. I shuddered, and my blood ran cold at the sound. I entertained no doubt but that it was the stroke of a hatchet on the head or breast of the helpless sleeper. It was followed by a loud shriek. The continuance of these shrieks proved that the stroke had not been instantly fatal. I waited to hear it repeated, but the sounds that now arose were like those produced by dragging somewhat along the ground. The shrieks, meanwhile, were incessant and piteous. My heart faltered, and I saw that mighty efforts must be made to preserve my joints and my nerves steadfast. All depended on the strenuous exertions and the fortunate dexterity of a moment. One now approached the door, and came forth, dragging the girl, whom he held by the hair, after him. What hindered me from shooting at his first appearance, I know not. This had been my previous resolution. My hand touched the trigger, and, as he moved, the piece was levelled at his right ear. Perhaps the momentous consequences of my failure made me wait till his ceasing to move might render my aim more sure. Having dragged the girl, still piteously shrieking, to the distance of ten feet from the house, he threw her from him with violence. She fell upon the ground, and, observing him level his piece at her breast, renewed her supplications in a still more piercing tone. Little did the forlorn wretch think that her deliverance was certain and near. I rebuked myself for having thus long delayed. I fired, and my enemy sunk upon the ground without a struggle. Thus far had success attended me in this unequal contest. The next shot would leave me nearly powerless. If that, however, proved as unerring as the first, the chances of defeat were lessened. The savages within, knowing the intentions of their associate with regard to the captive girl, would probably mistake the report which they heard for that of his piece. Their mistake, however, would speedily give place to doubts, and they would rush forth to ascertain the truth. It behooved me to provide a similar reception for him that next appeared. It was as I expected. Scarcely was my eye again fixed upon the entrance, when a tawny and terrific visage was stretched fearfully forth. It was the signal of his fate. His glances, cast wildly and swiftly round, lighted upon me, and on the fatal instrument which was pointed at his forehead. His muscles were at once exerted to withdraw his head, and to vociferate a warning to his fellow; but his movement was too slow. The ball entered above his ear. He tumbled headlong to the ground, bereaved of sensation though not of life, and had power only to struggle and mutter. Chapter XIX. Think not that I relate these things with exultation or tranquillity. All my education and the habits of my life tended to unfit me for a contest and a scene like this. But I was not governed by the soul which usually regulates my conduct. I had imbibed, from the unparalleled events which had lately happened, a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious. There was now an interval for flight. Throwing my weapons away, I might gain the thicket in a moment. I had no ammunition, nor would time be afforded me to reload my piece. My antagonist would render my poniard and my speed of no use to me. Should he miss me as I fled, the girl would remain to expiate, by her agonies and death, the fate of his companions. These thoughts passed through my mind in a shorter time than is demanded to express them. They yielded to an expedient suggested by the sight of the gun that had been raised to destroy the girl, and which now lay upon the ground. I am not large of bone, but am not deficient in agility and strength. All that remained to me of these qualities was now exerted; and, dropping my own piece, I leaped upon the bank, and flew to seize my prize. It was not till I snatched it from the ground, that the propriety of regaining my former post rushed upon my apprehension. He that was still posted in the hovel would mark me through the seams of the wall, and render my destruction sure. I once more ran towards the bank, with the intention to throw myself below it. All this was performed in an instant; but my vigilant foe was aware of his advantage, and fired through an opening between the logs. The bullet grazed my cheek, and produced a benumbing sensation that made me instantly fall to the earth. Though bereaved of strength, and fraught with the belief that I had received a mortal wound, my caution was not remitted. I loosened not my grasp of the gun, and the posture into which I accidentally fell enabled me to keep an eye upon the house and a hand upon the trigger. Perceiving my condition, the savage rushed from his covert in order to complete his work; but at three steps from the threshold he received my bullet in his breast. The uplifted tomahawk fell from his hand, and, uttering a loud shriek, he fell upon the body of his companion. His cries struck upon my heart, and I wished that his better fortune had cast this evil from him upon me. Thus I have told thee a bloody and disastrous tale. When thou reflectest on the mildness of my habits, my antipathy to scenes of violence and bloodshed, my unacquaintance with the use of fire-arms and the motives of a soldier, thou wilt scarcely allow credit to my story. That one rushing into these dangers, unfurnished with stratagems or weapons, disheartened and enfeebled by hardships and pain, should subdue four antagonists trained from their infancy to the artifices and exertions of Indian warfare, will seem the vision of fancy, rather than the lesson of truth. I lifted my head from the ground and pondered upon this scene. The magnitude of this exploit made me question its reality. By attending to my own sensations, I discovered that I had received no wound, or, at least, none of which there was reason to complain. The blood flowed plentifully from my cheek, but the injury was superficial. It was otherwise with my antagonists. The last that had fallen now ceased to groan. Their huge limbs, inured to combat and _war-worn_, were useless to their own defence, and to the injury of others. The destruction that I witnessed was vast. Three beings, full of energy and heroism, endowed with minds strenuous and lofty, poured out their lives before me. I was the instrument of their destruction. This scene of carnage and blood was laid by me. To this havoc and horror was I led by such rapid footsteps! My anguish was mingled with astonishment. In spite of the force and uniformity with which my senses were impressed by external objects, the transition I had undergone was so wild and inexplicable; all that I had performed, all that I had witnessed since my egress from the pit, were so contradictory to precedent events, that I still clung to the belief that my thoughts were confused by delirium. From these reveries I was at length recalled by the groans of the girl, who lay near me on the ground. I went to her and endeavoured to console her. I found that, while lying in the bed, she had received a blow upon the side, which was still productive of acute pain. She was unable to rise or to walk, and it was plain that one or more of her ribs had been fractured by the blow. I knew not what means to devise for our mutual relief. It was possible that the nearest dwelling was many leagues distant. I knew not in what direction to go in order to find it, and my strength would not suffice to carry my wounded companion thither in my arms. There was no expedient but to remain in this field of blood till the morning. I had scarcely formed this resolution before the report of a musket was heard at a small distance. At the same moment, I distinctly heard the whistling of a bullet near me. I now remembered that, of the five Indians whom I saw in the cavern, I was acquainted with the destiny only of four. The fifth might be still alive, and fortune might reserve for him the task of avenging his companions. His steps might now be tending hither in search of them. The musket belonging to him who was shot upon the threshold was still charged. It was discreet to make all the provision in my power against danger. I possessed myself of this gun, and, seating myself on the ground, looked carefully on all sides, to descry the approach of the enemy. I listened with breathless eagerness. Presently voices were heard. They ascended from that part of the thicket from which my view was intercepted by the cottage. These voices had something in them that bespoke them to belong to friends and countrymen. As yet I was unable to distinguish words. Presently my eye was attracted to one quarter, by a sound as of feet trampling down bushes. Several heads were seen moving in succession, and at length the whole person was conspicuous. One after another leaped over a kind of mound which bordered the field, and made towards the spot where I sat. This band was composed of ten or twelve persons, with each a gun upon his shoulder. Their guise, the moment it was perceived, dissipated all my apprehensions. They came within the distance of a few paces before they discovered me. One stopped, and, bespeaking the attention of his followers, called to know who was there. I answered that I was a friend, who entreated their assistance. I shall not paint their astonishment when, on coming nearer, they beheld me surrounded by the arms and dead bodies of my enemies. I sat upon the ground, supporting my head with my left hand, and resting on my knee the stock of a heavy musket. My countenance was wan and haggard, my neck and bosom were dyed in blood, and my limbs, almost stripped by the brambles of their slender covering, were lacerated by a thousand wounds. Three savages, two of whom were steeped in gore, lay at a small distance, with the traces of recent life on their visages. Hard by was the girl, venting her anguish in the deepest groans, and entreating relief from the new-comers. One of the company, on approaching the girl, betrayed the utmost perturbation. "Good God!" he cried, "is this a dream? Can it be you? Speak!" "Ah, my father! my father!" answered she, "it is I indeed." The company, attracted by this dialogue, crowded round the girl, whom her father, clasping in his arms, lifted from the ground, and pressed, in a transport of joy, to his breast. This delight was succeeded by solicitude respecting her condition. She could only answer his inquiries by complaining that her side was bruised to pieces. "How came you here?"--"Who hurt you?"--"Where did the Indians carry you?"--were questions to which she could make no reply but by sobs and plaints. My own calamities were forgotten in contemplating the fondness and compassion of the man for his child. I derived new joy from reflecting that I had not abandoned her, and that she owed her preservation to my efforts. The inquiries which the girl was unable to answer were now put to me. Every one interrogated me who I was, whence I had come, and what had given rise to this bloody contest. I was not willing to expatiate on my story. The spirit which had hitherto sustained me began now to subside. My strength ebbed away with my blood. Tremors, lassitude, and deadly cold, invaded me, and I fainted on the ground. Such is the capricious constitution of the human mind. While dangers were at hand, while my life was to be preserved only by zeal, and vigilance, and courage, I was not wanting to myself. Had my perils continued, or even multiplied, no doubt my energies would have kept equal pace with them; but the moment that I was encompassed by protectors, and placed in security, I grew powerless and faint. My weakness was proportioned to the duration and intensity of my previous efforts, and the swoon into which I now sunk was, no doubt, mistaken by the spectators for death. On recovering from this swoon, my sensations were not unlike those which I had experienced on awaking in the pit. For a moment a mistiness involved every object, and I was able to distinguish nothing. My sight, by rapid degrees, was restored, my painful dizziness was banished, and I surveyed the scene before me with anxiety and wonder. I found myself stretched upon the ground. I perceived the cottage and the neighbouring thicket, illuminated by a declining moon. My head rested upon something, which, on turning to examine, I found to be one of the slain Indians. The other two remained upon the earth, at a small distance, and in the attitudes in which they had fallen. Their arms, the wounded girl, and the troop who were near me when I fainted, were gone. My head had reposed upon the breast of him whom I had shot in this part of his body. The blood had ceased to ooze from the wound, but my dishevelled locks were matted and steeped in that gore which had overflowed and choked up the orifice. I started from this detestable pillow, and regained my feet. I did not suddenly recall what had lately passed, or comprehend the nature of my situation. At length, however, late events were recollected. That I should be abandoned in this forlorn state by these men seemed to argue a degree of cowardice or cruelty of which I should have thought them incapable. Presently, however, I reflected that appearances might have easily misled them into a belief of my death. On this supposition, to have carried me away, or to have stayed beside me, would be useless. Other enemies might be abroad; or their families, now that their fears were somewhat tranquillized, might require their presence and protection. I went into the cottage. The fire still burned, and afforded me a genial warmth. I sat before it, and began to ruminate on the state to which I was reduced, and on the measures I should next pursue. Daylight could not be very distant. Should I remain in this hovel till the morning, or immediately resume my journey? I was feeble, indeed; but, by remaining here, should I not increase my feebleness? The sooner I should gain some human habitation the better; whereas watchfulness and hunger would render me, at each minute, less able to proceed than on the former. This spot might be visited on the next day; but this was involved in uncertainty. The visitants, should any come, would come merely to examine and bury the dead, and bring with them neither the clothing nor the food which my necessities demanded. The road was sufficiently discernible, and would, unavoidably, conduct me to some dwelling. I determined, therefore, to set out without delay. Even in this state I was not unmindful that my safety might require the precaution of being armed. Besides, the fusil which had been given me by Sarsefield, and which I had so unexpectedly recovered, had lost none of its value in my eyes. I hoped that it had escaped the search of the troop who had been here, and still lay below the bank in the spot where I had dropped it. In this hope I was not deceived. It was found. I possessed myself of the powder and shot belonging to one of the savages, and loaded it. Thus equipped for defence, I regained the road, and proceeded, with alacrity, on my way. For the wound in my cheek, nature had provided a styptic, but the soreness was extreme, and I thought of no remedy but water, with which I might wash away the blood. My thirst likewise incommoded me, and I looked with eagerness for the traces of a spring. In a soil like that of the wilderness around me, nothing was less to be expected than to light upon water. In this respect, however, my destiny was propitious. I quickly perceived water in the ruts. It trickled hither from the thicket on one side, and, pursuing it among the bushes, I reached the bubbling source. Though scanty and brackish, it afforded me unspeakable refreshment. Thou wilt think, perhaps, that my perils were now at an end; that the blood I had already shed was sufficient for my safety. I fervently hoped that no new exigence would occur compelling me to use the arms that I bore in my own defence. I formed a sort of resolution to shun the contest with a new enemy, almost at the expense of my own life. I was satiated and gorged with slaughter, and thought upon a new act of destruction with abhorrence and loathing. But, though I dreaded to encounter a new enemy, I was sensible that an enemy might possibly be at hand. I had moved forward with caution, and my sight and hearing were attentive to the slightest tokens. Other troops, besides that which I encountered, might be hovering near, and of that troop I remembered that one at least had survived. The gratification which the spring had afforded me was so great, that I was in no haste to depart. I lay upon a rock, which chanced to be shaded by a tree behind me. From this post I could overlook the road to some distance, and, at the same time, be shaded from the observation of others. My eye was now caught by movements which appeared like those of a beast. In different circumstances, I should have instantly supposed it to be a wolf, or panther, or bear. Now my suspicions were alive on a different account, and my startled fancy figured to itself nothing but a human adversary. A thicket was on either side of the road. That opposite to my station was discontinued at a small distance by the cultivated field. The road continued along this field, bounded by the thicket on the one side and the open space on the other. To this space the being who was now described was cautiously approaching. He moved upon all fours, and presently came near enough to be distinguished. His disfigured limbs, pendants from his ears and nose, and his shorn locks, were indubitable indications of a savage, Occasionally he reared himself above the bushes, and scanned, with suspicious vigilance, the cottage and the space surrounding it. Then he stooped, and crept along as before. I was at no loss to interpret these appearances. This was my surviving enemy. He was unacquainted with the fate of his associates, and was now approaching the theatre of carnage to ascertain their fate. Once more was the advantage afforded me. From this spot might unerring aim be taken, and the last of this hostile troop be made to share the fate of the rest. Should I fire, or suffer him to pass in safety? My abhorrence of bloodshed was not abated. But I had not foreseen this occurrence. My success hitherto had seemed to depend upon a combination of fortunate incidents, which could not be expected again to take place; but now was I invested with the same power. The mark was near; nothing obstructed or delayed; I incurred no danger, and the event was certain. Why should he be suffered to live? He came hither to murder and despoil my friends; this work he has, no doubt, performed. Nay, has he not borne his part in the destruction of my uncle and my sisters? He will live only to pursue the same sanguinary trade; to drink the blood and exult in the laments of his unhappy foes and of my own brethren. Fate has reserved him for a bloody and violent death. For how long a time soever it may be deferred, it is thus that his career will inevitably terminate. Should he be spared, he will still roam in the wilderness, and I may again be fated to encounter him. Then our mutual situation may be widely different, and the advantage I now possess may be his. While hastily revolving these thoughts, I was thoroughly aware that one event might take place which would render all deliberation useless. Should he spy me where I lay, my fluctuations must end. My safety would indispensably require me to shoot. This persuasion made me keep a steadfast eye upon his motions, and be prepared to anticipate his assault. It now most seasonably occurred to me that one essential duty remained to be performed. One operation, without which fire-arms are useless, had been unaccountably omitted. My piece was uncocked. I did not reflect that in moving the spring a sound would necessarily be produced sufficient to alarm him. But I knew that the chances of escaping his notice, should I be perfectly mute and still, were extremely slender, and that, in such a case, his movements would be quicker than the light: it behooved me, therefore, to repair my omission. The sound struck him with alarm. He turned and darted at me an inquiring glance. I saw that forbearance was no longer in my power; but my heart sunk while I complied with what may surely be deemed an indispensable necessity. This faltering, perhaps, it was that made me swerve somewhat from the fatal line. He was disabled by the wound, but not killed. He lost all power of resistance, and was, therefore, no longer to be dreaded. He rolled upon the ground, uttering doleful shrieks, and throwing his limbs into those contortions which bespeak the keenest agonies to which ill-fated man is subject. Horror, and compassion, and remorse, were mingled into one sentiment, and took possession of my heart. To shut out this spectacle, I withdrew from the spot, but I stopped before I had moved beyond hearing of his cries. The impulse that drove me from the scene was pusillanimous and cowardly. The past, however deplorable, could not be recalled; but could not I afford some relief to this wretch? Could not I at least bring his pangs to a speedy close? Thus he might continue, writhing and calling upon death, for hours. Why should his miseries be uselessly prolonged? There was but one way to end them. To kill him outright was the dictate of compassion and of duty. I hastily returned, and once more levelled my piece at his head. It was a loathsome obligation, and was performed with unconquerable reluctance. Thus to assault and to mangle the body of an enemy, already prostrate and powerless, was an act worthy of abhorrence; yet it was, in this case, prescribed by pity. My faltering hand rendered this second bullet ineffectual. One expedient, still more detestable, remained. Having gone thus far, it would have been inhuman to stop short. His heart might easily be pierced by the bayonet, and his struggles would cease. This task of cruel lenity was at length finished. I dropped the weapon and threw myself on the ground, overpowered by the horrors of this scene. Such are the deeds which perverse nature compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness! Such is the spectacle, endlessly prolonged and diversified, which is exhibited in every field of battle; of which habit and example, the temptations of gain, and the illusions of honour, will make us, not reluctant or indifferent, but zealous and delighted actors and beholders! Thus, by a series of events impossible to be computed or foreseen, was the destruction of a band, selected from their fellows for an arduous enterprise, distinguished by prowess and skill, and equally armed against surprise and force, completed by the hand of a boy, uninured to hostility, unprovided with arms, precipitate and timorous! I have noted men who seemed born for no end but by their achievements to belie experience, and baffle foresight, and outstrip belief. Would to God that I had not deserved to be numbered among these! But what power was it that called me from the sleep of death just in time to escape the merciless knife of this enemy? Had my swoon continued till he had reached the spot, he would have effectuated my death by new wounds and torn away the skin from my brows. Such are the subtle threads on which hang the fate of man and of the universe! While engaged in these reflections, I perceived that the moonlight had begun to fade before that of the sun. A dusky and reddish hue spread itself over the east. Cheered by this appearance, I once more resumed my feet and the road. I left the savage where he lay, but made prize of his tomahawk. I had left my own in the cavern; and this weapon added little to my burden. Prompted by some freak of fancy, I stuck his musket in the ground, and left it standing upright in the middle of the road. Chapter XX. I moved forward with as quick a pace as my feeble limbs would permit. I did not allow myself to meditate. The great object of my wishes was a dwelling where food and repose might be procured. I looked earnestly forward, and on each side, in search of some token of human residence; but the spots of cultivation, the _well-pole_, the _worm fence_, and the hayrick, were nowhere to be seen. I did not even meet with a wild hog or a bewildered cow. The path was narrow, and on either side was a trackless wilderness. On the right and left were the waving lines of mountainous ridges, which had no peculiarity enabling me to ascertain whether I had ever before seen them. At length I noticed that the tracks of wheels had disappeared from the path that I was treading; that it became more narrow, and exhibited fewer marks of being frequented. These appearances were discouraging. I now suspected that I had taken a wrong direction, and, instead of approaching, was receding from, the habitation of men. It was wisest, however, to proceed. The road could not but have some origin as well as end. Some hours passed away in this uncertainty. The sun rose, and by noonday I seemed to be farther than ever from the end of my toils. The path was more obscure, and the wilderness more rugged. Thirst more incommoded me than hunger, but relief was seasonably afforded by the brooks that flowed across the path. Coming to one of these, and having slaked my thirst, I sat down upon the bank, to reflect on my situation. The circuity of the path had frequently been noticed, and I began to suspect that, though I had travelled long, I had not moved far from the spot where I had commenced my pilgrimage. Turning my eyes on all sides, I noticed a sort of pool, formed by the rivulet, at a few paces distant from the road. In approaching and inspecting it, I observed the footsteps of cattle, who had retired by a path that seemed much beaten: I likewise noticed a cedar bucket, broken and old, lying on the margin. These tokens revived my drooping spirits, arid I betook myself to this new track. It was intricate, but, at length, led up a steep, the summit of which was of better soil than that of which the flats consisted. A clover-field, and several apple-trees,--sure attendants of man,--were now discovered. From this space I entered a corn-field, and at length, to my inexpressible joy, caught a glimpse of a house. This dwelling was far different from that I had lately left. It was as small and as low, but its walls consisted of boards. A window of four panes admitted the light, and a chimney of brick, well burnt and neatly arranged, peeped over the roof. As I approached, I heard the voice of children and the hum of a spinning-wheel. I cannot make thee conceive the delight which was afforded me by all these tokens. I now found myself, indeed, among beings like myself, and from whom hospitable entertainment might be confidently expected. I compassed the house, and made my appearance at the door. A good woman, busy at her wheel, with two children playing on the ground before her, were the objects that now presented themselves. The uncouthness of my garb, my wild and weatherworn appearance, my fusil and tomahawk, could not but startle them. The woman stopped her wheel, and gazed as if a spectre had started into view. I was somewhat aware of these consequences, and endeavoured to elude them by assuming an air of supplication and humility. I told her that I was a traveller, who had unfortunately lost his way and had rambled in this wild till nearly famished for want. I entreated her to give me some food; any thing, however scanty or coarse, would be acceptable. After some pause she desired me, though not without some marks of fear, to walk in. She placed before me some brown bread and milk. She eyed me while I eagerly devoured this morsel. It was, indeed, more delicious than any I had ever tasted. At length she broke silence, and expressed her astonishment and commiseration at my seemingly-forlorn state, adding that perhaps I was the man whom the men were looking after who had been there some hours before. My curiosity was roused by this intimation. In answer to my interrogations, she said that three persons had lately stopped, to inquire if her husband had not met, within the last three days, a person of whom their description seemed pretty much to suit my person and dress. He was tall, slender, wore nothing but shirt and trousers, and was wounded on the cheek. "What," I asked, "did they state the rank or condition of the person to be?" He lived in Solesbury. He was supposed to have rambled in the mountains, and to have lost his way, or to have met with some mischance. It was three days since he had disappeared, but had been seen by some one, the last night, at Deb's hut. What and where was Deb's hut? It was a hut in the wilderness, occupied by an old Indian woman, known among her neighbours by the name of Old Deb. Some people called her Queen Mab. Her dwelling was eight _long_ miles from this house. A thousand questions were precluded and a thousand doubts solved by this information. _Queen Mab_ were sounds familiar to my ears; for they originated with myself. This woman originally belonged to the tribe of Delawares, or Lenni-lennapee. All these districts were once comprised within the dominions of that nation. About thirty years ago, in consequence of perpetual encroachments of the English colonists, they abandoned their ancient seats and retired to the banks of the Wabash and Muskingum. This emigration was concerted in a general council of the tribe, and obtained the concurrence of all but one female. Her birth, talents, and age, gave her much consideration and authority among her countrymen; and all her zeal and eloquence were exerted to induce them to lay aside their scheme. In this, however, she could not succeed. Finding them refractory, she declared her resolution to remain behind and maintain possession of the land which her countrymen should impiously abandon. The village inhabited by this clan was built upon ground which now constitutes my uncle's barnyard and orchard. On the departure of her countrymen, this female burnt the empty wigwams and retired into the fastnesses of Norwalk. She selected a spot suitable for an Indian dwelling and a small plantation of maize, and in which she was seldom liable to interruption and intrusion. Her only companions were three dogs, of the Indian or wolf species. These animals differed in nothing from their kinsmen of the forest but in their attachment and obedience to their mistress. She governed them with absolute sway. They were her servants and protectors, and attended her person or guarded her threshold, agreeably to her directions. She fed them with corn, and they supplied her and themselves with meat, by hunting squirrels, raccoons, and rabbits. To the rest of mankind they were aliens or enemies. They never left the desert but in company with their mistress, and, when she entered a farm-house, waited her return at a distance. They would suffer none to approach them, but attacked no one who did not imprudently crave their acquaintance, or who kept at a respectful distance from their wigwam. That sacred asylum they would not suffer to be violated, and no stranger could enter it but at the imminent hazard of his life, unless accompanied and protected by their dame. The chief employment of this woman, when at home, besides plucking the weeds from among her corn, bruising the grain between two stones, and setting her snares for rabbits and opossums, was to talk. Though in solitude, her tongue was never at rest but when she was asleep; but her conversation was merely addressed to her dogs. Her voice was sharp and shrill, and her gesticulations were vehement and grotesque. A hearer would naturally imagine that she was scolding; but, in truth, she was merely giving them directions. Having no other object of contemplation or subject of discourse, she always found, in their postures and looks, occasion for praise, or blame, or command. The readiness with which they understood, and the docility with which they obeyed, her movements and words, were truly wonderful. If a stranger chanced to wander near her hut and overhear her jargon, incessant as it was, and shrill, he might speculate in vain on the reason of these sounds. If he waited in expectation of hearing some reply, he waited in vain. The strain, always voluble and sharp, was never intermitted for a moment, and would continue for hours at a time. She seldom left the hut but to visit the neighbouring inhabitants and demand from them food and clothing, or whatever her necessities required. These were exacted as her due; to have her wants supplied was her prerogative, and to withhold what she claimed was rebellion. She conceived that by remaining behind her countrymen she succeeded to the government and retained the possession of all this region. The English were aliens and sojourners, who occupied the land merely by her connivance and permission, and whom she allowed to remain on no terms but those of supplying her wants. Being a woman aged and harmless, her demands being limited to that of which she really stood in need, and which her own industry could not procure, her pretensions were a subject of mirth and good-humour, and her injunctions obeyed with seeming deference and gravity. To me she early became an object of curiosity and speculation. I delighted to observe her habits and humour her prejudices. She frequently came to my uncle's house, and I sometimes visited her: insensibly she seemed to contract an affection for me, and regarded me with more complacency and condescension than any other received. She always disdained to speak English, and custom had rendered her intelligible to most in her native language, with regard to a few simple questions. I had taken some pains to study her jargon, and could make out to discourse with her on the few ideas which she possessed. This circumstance, likewise, wonderfully prepossessed her in my favour. The name by which she was formerly known was Deb; but her pretensions to royalty, the wildness of her aspect and garb, her shrivelled and diminutive form, a constitution that seemed to defy the ravages of time and the influence of the elements, her age, (which some did not scruple to affirm exceeded a hundred years,) her romantic solitude and mountainous haunts, suggested to my fancy the appellation of _Queen Mab_. There appeared to me some rude analogy between this personage and her whom the poets of old time have delighted to celebrate: thou perhaps wilt discover nothing but incongruities between them; but, be that as it may, Old Deb and Queen Mab soon came into indiscriminate and general use. She dwelt in Norwalk upwards of twenty years. She was not forgotten by her countrymen, and generally received from her brothers and sons an autumnal visit; but no solicitations or entreaties could prevail on her to return with them. Two years ago, some suspicion or disgust induced her to forsake her ancient habitation and to seek a hew one. Happily she found a more convenient habitation twenty miles to the westward, and in a spot abundantly sterile and rude. This dwelling was of logs, and had been erected by a Scottish emigrant, who, not being rich enough to purchase land, and entertaining a passion for solitude and independence, cleared a field in the unappropriated wilderness and subsisted on its produce. After some time he disappeared. Various conjectures were formed as to the cause of his absence. None of them were satisfactory; but that, which obtained most credit was, that he had been murdered by the Indians, who, about the same period, paid their annual visit to the _Queen_. This conjecture acquired some force by observing that the old woman shortly after took possession of his hut, his implements of tillage, and his corn-field. She was not molested in her new abode, and her life passed in the same quiet tenor as before. Her periodical rambles, her regal claims, her guardian wolves, and her uncouth volubility, were equally remarkable; but her circuits were new. Her distance made her visits to Solebury more rare, and had prevented me from ever extending my pedestrian excursions to her present abode. These recollections were now suddenly called up by the information of my hostess. The hut where I had sought shelter and relief was, it seems, the residence of Queen Mab. Some fortunate occurrence had called her away during my visit. Had she and her dogs been at home, I should have been set upon by these ferocious sentinels, and, before their dame could have interfered, have been, together with my helpless companion, mangled or killed. These animals never barked: I should have entered unaware of my danger, and my fate could scarcely have been averted by my fusil. Her absence at this unseasonable hour was mysterious. It was now the time of year when her countrymen were accustomed to renew their visit. Was there a league between her and the plunderers whom I had encountered? But who were they by whom my footsteps were so industriously traced? Those whom I had seen at Deb's hut were strangers to me, but the wound upon my face was known only to them. To this circumstance was now added my place of residence and name. I supposed them impressed with the belief that I was dead; but this mistake must have speedily been rectified. Revisiting the spot, finding me gone, and obtaining some intelligence of my former condition, they had instituted a search after me. But what tidings were these? I was supposed to have been bewildered in the mountains, and three days were said to have passed since my disappearance. Twelve hours had scarcely elapsed since I emerged from the cavern. Had two days and a half been consumed in my subterranean prison? These reflections were quickly supplanted by others. I now gained a sufficient acquaintance with the region that was spread around me. I was in the midst of a vale included between ridges that gradually approached each other, and, when joined, were broken up into hollows and steeps, and, spreading themselves over a circular space, assumed the appellation of Norwalk. This vale gradually widened as it tended to the westward, and was, in this place, ten or twelve miles in breadth. My devious footsteps had brought me to the foot of the southern barrier. The outer basis of this was laved by the river; but, as it tended eastward, the mountain and river receded from each other, and one of the cultivable districts lying between them was Solesbury, my natal _township_. Hither it was now my duty to return with the utmost expedition. There were two ways before me. One lay along the interior base of the hill, over a sterile and trackless space, and exposed to the encounter of savages, some of whom might possibly be lurking here. The other was the well-frequented road on the outside and along the river, and which was to be gained by passing over this hill. The practicability of the passage was to be ascertained by inquiries made to my hostess. She pointed out a path that led to the rocky summit and down to the river's brink. The path was not easy to be kept in view or to be trodden, but it was undoubtedly to be preferred to any other. A route somewhat circuitous would terminate in the river-road. Thenceforward the way to Solesbury was level and direct; but the whole space which I had to traverse was not less than thirty miles. In six hours it would be night, and to perform the journey in that time would demand the agile boundings of a leopard and the indefatigable sinews of an elk. My frame was in a miserable plight. My strength had been assailed by anguish, and fear, and watchfulness, by toil, and abstinence, and wounds. Still, however, some remnant was left; would it not enable me to reach my home by nightfall? I had delighted, from my childhood, in feats of agility and perseverance. In roving through the maze of thickets and precipices, I had put my energies, both moral and physical, frequently to the test. Greater achievements than this had been performed, and I disdained to be outdone in perspicacity by the lynx, in his sure-footed instinct by the roe, or in patience under hardship, and contention with fatigue, by the Mohawk. I have ever aspired to transcend the rest of animals in all that is common to the rational and brute, as well as in all by which they are distinguished from each other. Chapter XXI. I likewise burned with impatience to know the condition of my family, to dissipate at once their tormenting doubts and my own with regard to our mutual safety. The evil that I feared had befallen them was too enormous to allow me to repose in suspense, and my restlessness and ominous forebodings would be more intolerable than any hardship or toils to which I could possibly be subjected during this journey. I was much refreshed and invigorated by the food that I had taken, and by the rest of an hour. With this stock of recruited force I determined to scale the hill. After receiving minute directions, and, returning many thanks for my hospitable entertainment, I set out. The path was indeed intricate, and deliberate attention was obliged to be exerted in order to preserve it. Hence my progress was slower than I wished. The first impulse was to fix my eye upon the summit, and to leap from crag to crag till I reached it; but this my experience had taught me was impracticable. It was only by winding through gullies, and coasting precipices and bestriding chasms, that I could hope finally to gain the top; and I was assured that by one way only was it possible to accomplish even this. An hour was spent in struggling with impediments, and I seemed to have gained no way. Hence a doubt was suggested whether I had not missed the true road. In this doubt I was confirmed by the difficulties which now grew up before me. The brooks, the angles, and the hollows, which my hostess had described, were not to be seen. Instead of these, deeper dells, more headlong torrents, and wider-gaping rifts, were incessantly encountered. To return was as hopeless as to proceed. I consoled myself with thinking that the survey which my informant had made of the hill-side might prove inaccurate, and that, in spite of her predictions, the heights might be reached by other means than by those pointed out by her. I will not enumerate my toilsome expedients, my frequent disappointments, and my desperate exertions. Suffice it to say that I gained the upper space not till the sun had dipped beneath the horizon. My satisfaction at accomplishing thus much was not small, and I hied, with renovated spirits, to the opposite brow. This proved to be a steep that could not be descended. The river flowed at its foot. The opposite bank was five hundred yards distant, and was equally towering and steep as that on which I stood. Appearances were adapted to persuade you that these rocks had formerly joined, but by some mighty effort of nature had been severed, that the stream might find way through the chasm. The channel, however, was encumbered with asperities, over which the river fretted and foamed with thundering impetuosity. I pondered for a while on these stupendous scenes. They ravished my attention from considerations that related to myself; but this interval was snort, and I began to measure the descent, in order to ascertain the practicability of treading it. My survey terminated in bitter disappointment. I turned my eye successively eastward and westward. Solesbury lay in the former direction, and thither I desired to go. I kept along the verge in this direction till I reached an impassable rift. Beyond this I saw that the steep grew lower; but it was impossible to proceed farther. Higher up the descent might be practicable, and, though more distant from Solesbury, it was better to reach the road even at that distance than never to reach it. Changing my course, therefore, I explored the spaces above. The night was rapidly advancing; the gray clouds gathered in the southeast, and a chilling blast, the usual attendant of a night in October, began to whistle among the pigmy cedars that scantily grew upon these heights. My progress would quickly be arrested by darkness, and it behooved me to provide some place of shelter and repose. No recess better than a hollow in the rock presented itself to my anxious scrutiny. Meanwhile, I would not dismiss the hope of reaching the road, which I saw some hundred feet below, winding along the edge of the river, before daylight should utterly fail. Speedily these hopes derived new vigour from meeting a ledge that irregularly declined from the brow of the hill. It was wide enough to allow of cautious footing. On a similar stratum, or ledge, projecting still farther from the body of the hill, and close to the surface of the river, was the road. This stratum ascended from the level of the stream, while that on which I trod rapidly descended. I hoped that they would speedily be blended, or, at least, approach so near as to allow me to leap from one to the other without enormous hazard. This fond expectation was frustrated. Presently I perceived that the ledge below began to descend, while that above began to tend upward and was quickly terminated by the uppermost surface of the cliff. Here it was needful to pause. I looked over the brink, and considered whether I might not leap from my present station without endangering my limbs. The road into which I should fall was a rocky pavement far from being smooth. The descent could not be less than forty or fifty feet. Such an attempt was, to the last degree, hazardous; but was it not better to risk my life by leaping from this eminence than to remain and perish on the top of this inhospitable mountain? The toils which I had endured in reaching this height appeared, to my panic-struck fancy, less easy to be borne again than death. I know not but that I should have finally resolved to leap, had not different views been suggested by observing that the outer edge of the road was, in like manner, the brow of a steep which terminated in the river. The surface of the road was twelve or fifteen feet above the level of the stream, which, in this spot, was still and smooth. Hence I inferred that the water was not of inconsiderable depth. To fall upon rocky points was, indeed, dangerous, but to plunge into water of sufficient depth, even from a height greater than that at which I now stood, especially to one to whom habit had rendered water almost as congenial an element as air, was scarcely attended with inconvenience. This expedient was easy and safe. Twenty yards from this spot, the channel was shallow, and to gain the road from the stream was no difficult exploit. Some disadvantages, however, attended this scheme. The water was smooth; but this might arise from some other cause than its depth. My gun, likewise, must be left behind me; and that was a loss to which I felt invincible repugnance. To let it fall upon the road would put it in my power to retrieve the possession, but it was likely to be irreparably injured by the fall. While musing upon this expedient, and weighing injuries with benefits, the night closed upon me. I now considered that, should I emerge in safety from the stream, I should have many miles to travel before I could reach a house. My clothes meanwhile would be loaded with wet. I should be heart-pierced by the icy blast that now blew, and my wounds and bruises would be chafed into insupportable pain. I reasoned likewise on the folly of impatience and the necessity of repose. By thus long continuance in one posture, my sinews began to stiffen, and my reluctance to make new exertions to increase. My brows were heavy, and I felt an irresistible propensity to sleep. I concluded to seek some shelter, and resign myself, my painful recollections, and my mournful presages, to sweet forgetfulness. For this end, I once more ascended to the surface of the cliff. I dragged my weary feet forward, till I found somewhat that promised me the shelter that I sought. A cluster of cedars appeared, whose branches overarched a space that might be called a bower. It was a slight cavity, whose flooring was composed of loose stones and a few faded leaves blown from a distance and finding a temporary lodgment here. On one side was a rock, forming a wall rugged and projecting above. At the bottom of the rock was a rift, somewhat resembling a coffin in shape, and not much larger in dimensions. This rift terminated, on the opposite side of the rock, in an opening that was too small for the body of a man to pass. The distance between each entrance was twice the length of a man. This bower was open to the southeast, whence the gale now blew. It therefore imperfectly afforded the shelter of which I stood in need; but it was the best that the place and the time afforded. To stop the smaller entrance of the cavity with a stone, and to heap before the other branches lopped from the trees with my hatchet, might somewhat contribute to my comfort. This was done, and, thrusting myself into this recess as far as I was able, I prepared for repose. It might have been reasonably suspected to be the den of rattlesnakes or panthers; but my late contention with superior dangers and more formidable enemies made me reckless of these. But another inconvenience remained. In spite of my precautions, my motionless posture and slender covering exposed me so much to the cold that I could not sleep. The air appeared to have suddenly assumed the temperature of midwinter. In a short time, my extremities were benumbed, and my limbs shivered and ached as if I had been seized by an ague. My bed likewise was dank and uneven, and the posture I was obliged to assume, unnatural and painful. It was evident that my purpose could not be answered by remaining here. I therefore crept forth, and began to reflect upon the possibility of continuing my journey. Motion was the only thing that could keep me from freezing, and my frame was in that state which allowed me to take no repose in the absence of warmth, since warmth was indispensable. It now occurred to me to ask whether it were not possible to kindle a fire. Sticks and leaves were at hand. My hatchet and a pebble would enable me to extract a spark. From this, by suitable care and perseverance, I might finally procure sufficient fire to give me comfort and ease, and even enable me to sleep. This boon was delicious, and I felt as if I were unable to support a longer deprivation of it. I proceeded to execute this scheme. I took the driest leaves, and endeavoured to use them as tinder; but the driest leaves were moistened by the dews. They were only to be found in the hollows, in some of which were pools of water and others were dank. I was not speedily discouraged; but my repeated attempts failed, and I was finally compelled to relinquish this expedient. All that now remained was to wander forth and keep myself in motion till the morning. The night was likely to prove tempestuous and long. The gale seemed freighted with ice, and acted upon my body like the points of a thousand needles. There was no remedy, and I mustered my patience to endure it. I returned again to the brow of the hill. I ranged along it till I reached a place where the descent was perpendicular, and, in consequence of affording no sustenance to trees or bushes, was nearly smooth and bare. There was no road to be seen; and this circumstance, added to the sounds which the rippling current produced, afforded me some knowledge of my situation. The ledge along which the road was conducted disappeared near this spot. The opposite sides of the chasm through which flowed the river approached nearer to each other, in the form of jutting promontories. I now stood upon the verge of that on the northern side. The water flowed at the foot, but, for the space of ten or twelve feet from the rock, was so shallow as to permit the traveller and his horse to wade through it, and thus to regain the road which the receding precipice had allowed to be continued on the farther side. I knew the nature and dimensions of this ford. I knew that, at a few yards from the rock, the channel was of great depth. To leap into it, in this place, was a less dangerous exploit than at the spot where I had formerly been tempted to leap. There I was unacquainted with the depth, but here I knew it to be considerable. Still, there was some ground of hesitation and fear. My present station was loftier, and how deeply I might sink into this gulf, how far the fall and the concussion would bereave me of my presence of mind, I could not determine. This hesitation vanished, and, placing my tomahawk and fusil upon the ground, I prepared to leap. This purpose was suspended, in the moment of its execution, by a faint sound, heard from the quarter whence I had come. It was the warning of men, but had nothing in common with those which I had been accustomed to hear. It was not the howling of a wolf or the yelling of a panther. These had often been overheard by night during my last year's excursion to the lakes. My fears whispered that this was the vociferation of a savage. I was unacquainted with the number of the enemies who had adventured into this district. Whether those whom I had encountered at _Deb's hut_ were of that band whom I had met with in the cavern, was merely a topic of conjecture. There might be a half-score of troops, equally numerous, spread over the wilderness, and the signal I had just heard might betoken the approach of one of these. Yet by what means they should gain this nook, and what prey they expected to discover, were not easily conceived. The sounds, somewhat diversified, nearer and rising from different quarters, were again heard. My doubts and apprehensions were increased. What expedient to adopt for my own safety was a subject of rapid meditation:--whether to remain stretched upon the ground or to rise and go forward. Was it likely the enemy would coast along the edge of the steep? Would they ramble hither to look upon the ample scene which spread on all sides around the base of this rocky pinnacle? In that case, how should I conduct myself? My arms were ready for use. Could I not elude the necessity of shedding more blood? Could I not anticipate their assault by casting myself without delay into the stream? The sense of danger demanded more attention to be paid to external objects than to the motives by which my future conduct should be influenced. My post was on a circular prefecture, in some degree detached from the body of the hill, the brow of which continued in a straight line, uninterrupted by this projecture, which was somewhat higher than the continued summit of the ridge. This line ran at the distance of a few paces from my post. Objects moving along this line could merely be perceived to move, in the present obscurity. My scrutiny was entirely directed to this quarter. Presently the treading of many feet was heard, and several figures were discovered, following each other in that straight and regular succession which is peculiar to the Indians. They kept along the brow of the hill joining the promontory. I distinctly marked seven figures in succession. My resolution was formed. Should any one cast his eye hither, suspect or discover an enemy, and rush towards me, I determined to start upon my feet, fire on my foe as he advanced, throw my piece on the ground, and then leap into the river. Happily, they passed unobservant and in silence. I remained in the same posture for several minutes. At length, just as my alarms began to subside, the halloos, before heard, arose, and from the same quarter as before. This convinced me that my perils were not at an end. This now appeared to be merely the vanguard, and would speedily be followed by others, against whom the same caution was necessary to be taken. My eye, anxiously bent the only way by which any one could approach, now discerned a figure, which was indubitably that of a man armed. None other appeared in company; but doubtless others were near. He approached, stood still, and appeared to gaze steadfastly at the spot where I lay. The optics of a _Lenni-lennapee_ I knew to be far keener than my own. A log or a couched fawn would never be mistaken for a man, nor a man for a couched fawn or a log. Not only a human being would be instantly detected, but a decision be unerringly made whether it wrere friend or foe. That my prostrate body was the object on which the attention of this vigilant and steadfast gazer was fixed could not be doubted. Yet, since he continued an inactive gazer, there was ground for a possibility to stand upon that I was not recognised. My fate therefore was still in suspense. This interval was momentary. I marked a movement, which my fears instantly interpreted to be that of levelling a gun at my head. This action was sufficiently conformable to my prognostics. Supposing me to be detected, there was no need for him to change his post. Aim might be too fatally taken, and his prey be secured, from the distance at which he now stood. These images glanced upon my thought, and put an end to my suspense. A single effort placed me on my feet. I fired with a precipitation that precluded the certainty of hitting my mark, dropped my piece upon the ground, and leaped from this tremendous height into the river. I reached the surface, and sunk in a moment to the bottom. Plunging endlong into the water, the impetus created by my fall from such a height would be slowly resisted by this denser element. Had the depth been less, its resistance would not perhaps have hindered me from being mortally injured against the rocky bottom. Had the depth been greater, time enough would not have been allowed me to regain the surface. Had I fallen on my side, I should have been bereft of life or sensibility by the shock which my frame would have received. As it was, my fate was suspended on a thread. To have lost my presence of mind, to have forborne to counteract my sinking, for an instant, after I had reached the water, would have made all exertions to regain the air fruitless. To so fortunate a concurrence of events was thy friend indebted for his safety! Yet I only emerged from the gulf to encounter new perils. Scarcely had I raised my head above the surface, and inhaled the vital breath, when twenty shots were aimed at me from the precipice above. A shower of bullets fell upon the water. Some of them did not fall farther than two inches from my head. I had not been aware of this new danger, and, now that it assailed me, continued gasping the air and floundering at random. The means of eluding it did not readily occur. My case seemed desperate, and all caution was dismissed. This state of discomfiting surprise quickly disappeared. I made myself acquainted, at a glance, with the position of surrounding objects. I conceived that the opposite bank of the river would afford me most security, and thither I tended with all the expedition in my power. Meanwhile, my safety depended on eluding the bullets that continued incessantly to strike the water at an arm's-length from my body. For this end I plunged beneath the surface, and only rose to inhale fresh air. Presently the firing ceased, the flashes that lately illuminated the bank disappeared, and a certain bustle and murmur of confused voices gave place to solitude and silence. Chapter XXII. I reached without difficulty the opposite bank, but the steep was inaccessible. I swam along the edge in hopes of meeting with some projection or recess where I might, at least, rest my weary limbs, and, if it were necessary to recross the river, to lay in a stock of recruited spirits and strength for that purpose. I trusted that the water would speedily become shoal, or that the steep would afford rest to my feet. In both these hopes I was disappointed. There is no one to whom I would yield the superiority in swimming; but my strength, like that of other human beings, had its limits. My previous fatigues had been enormous, and my clothes, heavy with moisture, greatly encumbered and retarded my movements. I had proposed to free myself from this imprisonment; but I foresaw the inconveniences of wandering over this scene in absolute nakedness, and was willing therefore, at whatever hazard, to retain them. I continued to struggle with the current and to search for the means of scaling the steeps. My search was fruitless, and I began to meditate the recrossing of the river. Surely my fate has never been paralleled! Where was this series of hardships and perils to end? No sooner was one calamity eluded, than I was beset by another. I had emerged from abhorred darkness in the heart of the earth, only to endure the extremities of famine and encounter the fangs of a wild beast. From these I was delivered only to be thrown into the midst of savages, to wage an endless and hopeless war with adepts in killing, with appetites that longed to feast upon my bowels and to quaff my heart's blood. From these likewise was I rescued, but merely to perish in the gulfs of the river, to welter on unvisited shores, or to be washed far away from curiosity or pity. Formerly water was not only my field of sport but my sofa and my bed. I could float for hours on its surface, enjoying its delicious cool, almost without the expense of the slightest motion. It was an element as fitted for repose as for exercise; but now the buoyant spirit seemed to have flown. My muscles were shrunk, the air and water were equally congealed, and my most vehement exertions were requisite to sustain me on the surface. At first I had moved along with my wonted celerity and ease, but quickly my forces were exhausted. My pantings and efforts were augmented, and I saw that to cross the river again was impracticable. I must continue, therefore, to search out some accessible spot in the bank along which I was swimming. Each moment diminished my stock of strength, and it behooved me to make good my footing before another minute should escape. I continued to swim, to survey the bank, and to make ineffectual attempts to grasp the rock. The shrubs which grew upon it would not uphold me, and the fragments which, for a moment, inspired me with hope, crumbled away as soon as they were touched. At length I noticed a pine which was rooted in a crevice near the water. The trunk, or any part of the root, was beyond my reach; but I trusted that I could catch hold of the branch which hung lowest, and that, when caught, it would assist me in gaining the trunk, and thus deliver me from the death which could not be otherwise averted. The attempt was arduous. Had it been made when I first reached the bank, no difficulty had attended it; but now to throw myself some feet above the surface could scarcely be expected from one whose utmost efforts seemed to be demanded to keep him from sinking. Yet this exploit, arduous as it was, was attempted and accomplished. Happily the twigs were strong enough to sustain my weight till I caught at other branches and finally placed myself upon the trunk. This danger was now past; but I admitted the conviction that others, no less formidable, remained to be encountered, and that my ultimate destiny was death. I looked upward. New efforts might enable me to gain the summit of this steep, but perhaps I should thus be placed merely in the situation from which I had just been delivered. It was of little moment whether the scene of my imprisonment was a dungeon not to be broken, or a summit from which descent was impossible. The river, indeed, severed me from a road which was level and safe, but my recent dangers were remembered only to make me shudder at the thought of incurring them a second time by attempting to cross it. I blush at the recollection of this cowardice. It was little akin to the spirit which I had recently displayed. It was, indeed, an alien to my bosom, and was quickly supplanted by intrepidity and perseverance. I proceeded to mount the hill. From root to root, and from branch to branch, lay my journey. It was finished, and I sat down upon the highest brow to meditate on future trials. No road lay along this side of the river. It was rugged and sterile, and farms were sparingly dispersed over it. To reach one of these was now the object of my wishes. I had not lost the desire of reaching Solesbury before morning, but my wet clothes and the coldness of the night seemed to have bereaved me of the power. I traversed this summit, keeping the river on my right hand. Happily, its declinations and ascents were by no means difficult, and I was cheered, in the midst of my vexations, by observing that every mile brought me nearer to my uncle's dwelling. Meanwhile I anxiously looked for some tokens of a habitation. These at length presented themselves. A wild heath, whistled over by October blasts, meagrely adorned with the dry stalks of scented shrubs and the bald heads of the sapless mullein, was succeeded by a fenced field and a corn-stack. The dwelling to which these belonged was eagerly sought. I was not surprised that all voices were still and all lights extinguished, for this was the hour of repose. Having reached a piazza before the house, I paused. Whether, at this drowsy time, to knock for admission, to alarm the peaceful tenants and take from them the rest which their daily toils and their rural innocence had made so sweet, or to retire to what shelter a haystack or barn could afford, was the theme of my deliberations. Meanwhile, I looked up at the house. It was the model of cleanliness and comfort. It was built of wood; but the materials had undergone the plane, as well as the axe and the saw. It was painted white, and the windows not only had sashes, but these sashes were supplied, contrary to custom, with glass. In most cases the aperture where glass should be is stuffed with an old hat or a petticoat. The door had not only all its parts entire, but was embellished with mouldings and a pediment. I gathered from these tokens that this was the abode not only of rural competence and innocence, but of some beings raised by education and fortune above the intellectual mediocrity of clowns. Methought I could claim consanguity with such beings. Not to share their charity and kindness would be inflicting as well as receiving injury. The trouble of affording shelter, and warmth, and wholesome diet, to a wretch destitute as I was, would be eagerly sought by them. Still, I was unwilling to disturb them. I bethought myself that their kitchen might be entered, and all that my necessities required be obtained without interrupting their slumber. I needed nothing but the warmth which their kitchen-hearth would afford. Stretched upon the bricks, I might dry my clothes, and perhaps enjoy some unmolested sleep, in spite of presages of ill and the horrid remembrances of what I had performed and endured. I believed that nature would afford a short respite to my cares. I went to the door of what appeared to be a kitchen. The door was wide open. This circumstance portended evil. Though it be not customary to lock or to bolt, it is still less usual to have entrances unclosed. I entered with suspicious steps, and saw enough to confirm my apprehensions. Several pieces of wood, half burned, lay in the midst of the floor. They appeared to have been removed hither from the chimney, doubtless with a view to set fire to the whole building. The fire had made some progress on the floor, but had been seasonably extinguished by pailfuls of water thrown upon it. The floor was still deluged with wet: the pail, not emptied of all its contents, stood Upon the hearth. The earthen vessels and plates, whose proper place was the dresser, were scattered in fragments in all parts of the room. I looked around me for some one to explain this scene, but no one appeared. The last spark of fire was put out, so that, had my curiosity been idle, my purpose could not be accomplished. To retire from this scene, neither curiosity nor benevolence would permit. That some mortal injury had been intended was apparent. What greater mischief had befallen, or whether greater might not, by my interposition, be averted, could only be ascertained by penetrating farther into the house. I opened a door on one side which led to the main body of the building and entered to a bed-chamber. I stood at the entrance and knocked, but no one answered my signals. The sky was not totally clouded, so that some light pervaded the room. I saw that a bed stood in the corner, but whether occupied or not its curtains hindered me from judging. I stood in suspense a few minutes, when a motion in the bed showed me that some one was there. I knocked again, but withdrew to the outside of the door. This roused the sleeper, who, half groaning, and puffing the air through his nostrils, grumbled out, in the hoarsest voice that I ever heard, and in a tone of surly impatience, "Who is there?" I hesitated for an answer; but the voice instantly continued, in the manner of one half asleep and enraged at being disturbed, "Is't you, Peg? Damn ye, stay away, now! I tell ye, stay away, or, by God, I will cut your throat!--I will!" He continued to mutter and swear, but without coherence or distinctness. These were the accents of drunkenness, and denoted a wild and ruffian life. They were little in unison with the external appearances of the mansion, and blasted all the hopes I had formed of meeting under this roof with gentleness and hospitality. To talk with this being, to attempt to reason him into humanity and soberness, was useless. I was at a loss in what manner to address him, or whether it was proper to maintain any parley. Meanwhile, my silence was supplied by the suggestions of his own distempered fancy. "Ay," said he; "ye will, will ye? Well, come on; let's see who's the better at the oak stick. If I part with ye before I have bared your bones!--I'll teach ye to be always dipping in my dish, ye devil's dam ye." So saying, he tumbled out of bed. At the first step, he struck his head against the bedpost, but, setting himself upright, he staggered towards the spot where I stood. Some new obstacle occurred. He stumbled and fell at his length upon the floor. To encounter or expostulate with a man in this state was plainly absurd. I turned and issued forth, with an aching heart, into the court before the house. The miseries which a debauched husband or father inflicted upon all whom their evil destiny allies to him were pictured by my fancy, and wrung from me tears of anguish, These images, however, quickly yielded to reflections on my own state. No expedient now remained but to seek the barn and find a covering and a bed of straw. I had scarcely set foot within the barnyard when I heard a sound as of the crying of an infant. It appeared to issue from the barn. I approached softly and listened at the door. The cries of the babe continued, but were accompanied by the entreaties of a nurse or a mother to be quiet. These entreaties were mingled with heart-breaking sobs, and exclamations of, "Ah, me, my babe! Canst thou not sleep and afford thy unhappy mother some peace? Thou art cold, and I have not sufficient warmth to cherish thee! What will become of us? Thy deluded father cares not if we both perish." A glimpse of the true nature of the scene seemed to be imparted by these words. I now likewise recollected incidents that afforded additional light. Somewhere on this bank of the river there formerly resided one by name Selby. He was an aged person, who united science and taste to the simple and laborious habits of a husbandman. He had a son who resided several years in Europe, but on the death of his father returned home, accompanied by a wife. He had succeeded to the occupation of the farm, but rumour had whispered many tales to the disadvantage of his morals. His wife was affirmed to be of delicate and polished manners, and much unlike her companion. It now occurred to me that this was the dwelling of the Selbys, and I seemed to have gained some insight into the discord and domestic miseries by which the unhappy lady suffered. This was no time to waste my sympathy on others. I could benefit her nothing. Selby had probably returned from a carousal, with all his malignant passions raised into frenzy by intoxication. He had driven his desolate wife from her bed and house, and, to shun outrage and violence, she had fled, with her helpless infant, to the barn. To appease his fury, to console her, to suggest a remedy for this distress, was not in my power. To have sought an interview would be merely to excite her terrors and alarm her delicacy, without contributing to alleviate her calamity. Here, then, was no asylum for me. A place of rest must be sought at some neighbouring habitation. It was probable that one would be found at no great distance: the path that led from the spot where I stood, through a gate, into a meadow, might conduct me to the nearest dwelling; and this path I immediately resolved to explore. I was anxious to open the gate without noise, but I could not succeed. Some creaking of its hinges was unavoidably produced, which I feared would be overheard by the lady and multiply her apprehensions and perplexities. This inconvenience was irremediable. I therefore closed the gate and pursued the footway before me with the utmost expedition. I had not gained the farther end of the meadow when I lighted on something which lay across the path, and which, on being closely inspected, appeared to be a human body. It was the corpse of a girl, mangled by a hatchet. Her head, gory and deprived of its locks, easily explained the kind of enemies by whom she had been assailed. Here was proof that this quiet and remote habitation had been visited, in their destructive progress, by the Indians. The girl had been slain by them, and her scalp, according to their savage custom, had been torn away to be preserved as a trophy. The fire which had been kindled on the kitchen-floor tvas now remembered, and corroborated the inferences which were drawn from this spectacle. And yet that the mischief had been thus limited, that the besotted wretch who lay helpless on his bed and careless of impending danger, and that the mother and her infant, should escape, excited some degree of surprise. Could the savages have been interrupted in their work, and obliged to leave their vengeance unfinished? Their visit had been recent. Many hours had not elapsed since they prowled about these grounds. Had they wholly disappeared, and meant they not to return? To what new danger might I be exposed in remaining thus guideless and destitute of all defence? In consequence of these reflections, I proceeded with more caution. I looked with suspicious glances before and on either side of me. I now approached the fence which, on this side, bounded the meadow. Something was discerned, or imagined, stretched close to the fence, on the ground, and filling up the pathway. My apprehensions of a lurking enemy had been previously awakened, and my fancy instantly figured to itself an armed man lying on the ground and waiting to assail the unsuspecting passenger. At first I was prompted to fly, but a second thought showed me that I had already approached near enough to be endangered. Notwithstanding my pause, the form was motionless. The possibility of being misled in my conjectures was easily supposed. What I saw might be a log, or it might be another victim to savage ferocity. This track was that which my safety required me to pursue. To turn aside or go back would be merely to bewilder myself anew. Urged by these motives, I went nearer, and at last was close enough to perceive that the figure was human. He lay upon his face. Near his right hand was a musket, unclenched. This circumstance, his deathlike attitude, and the garb and ornaments of an Indian, made me readily suspect the nature and cause of this catastrophe. Here the invaders had been encountered and repulsed, and one at least of their number had been left upon the field. I was weary of contemplating these rueful objects. Custom, likewise, even in so short a period, had inured me to spectacles of horror. I was grown callous and immovable. I stayed not to ponder on the scene, but, snatching the musket, which was now without an owner, and which might be indispensable to my defence, I hastened into the wood. On this side the meadow was skirted by a forest; but a beaten road led into it, and might therefore be attempted without danger. Chapter XXIII. The road was intricate and long. It seemed designed to pervade the forest in every possible direction. I frequently noticed cut wood piled in heaps upon either side, and rejoiced in these tokens that the residence of man was near. At length I reached a second fence, which proved to be the boundary of a road still more frequented. I pursued this, and presently beheld before me the river and its opposite barriers. This object afforded me some knowledge of my situation. There was a ford over which travellers used to pass, and in which the road that I was now pursuing terminated. The stream was rapid and tumultuous, but in this place did not rise higher than the shoulders. On the opposite side was a highway, passable by horses and men, though not by carriages, and which led into the midst of Solesbury. Should I not rush into the stream, and still aim at reaching my uncle's house before morning? Why should I delay? Thirty hours of incessant watchfulness and toil, of enormous efforts and perils, preceded and accompanied by abstinence and wounds, were enough to annihilate the strength and courage of ordinary men. In the course of them, I had frequently believed myself to have reached the verge beyond which my force would not carry me; but experience as frequently demonstrated my error. Though many miles were yet to be traversed, though my clothes were once more to be drenched and loaded with moisture, though every hour seemed to add somewhat to the keenness of the blast, yet how should I know, but by trial, whether my stock of energy was not sufficient for this last exploit? My resolution to proceed was nearly formed, when the figure of a man moving slowly across the road at some distance before me was observed. Hard by this ford lived a man by name Bisset, of whom I had slight knowledge. He tended his two hundred acres with a plodding and money-doting spirit, while his son overlooked a grist-mill on the river. He was a creature of gain, coarse and harmless. The man whom I saw before me might be he, or some one belonging to his family. Being armed for defence, I less scrupled at meeting with any thing in the shape of man. I therefore called. The figure stopped and answered me without surliness or anger. The voice was unlike that of Bisset, but this person's information I believed would be of some service. Coming up to him, he proved to be a clown belonging to Bisset's habitation. His panic and surprise on seeing me made him aghast. In my present garb I should not have easily been recognised by my nearest kinsman, and much less easily by one who had seldom met me. It may be easily conceived that my thoughts, when allowed to wander from the objects before me, were tormented with forebodings and inquietudes on account of the ills which I had so much reason to believe had befallen my family. I had no doubt that some evil had happened, but the full extent of it was still uncertain. I desired and dreaded to discover the truth, and was unable to interrogate this person in a direct manner. I could deal only in circuities and hints. I shuddered while I waited for an answer to my inquiries. Had not Indians, I asked, been lately seen in this neighbourhood? Were they not suspected of hostile designs? Had they not already committed some mischief? Some passenger, perhaps, had been attacked, or fire had been set to some house? On which side of the river had their steps been observed or any devastation been committed? Above the ford or below it? At what distance from the river? When his attention could be withdrawn from my person and bestowed upon my questions, he answered that some alarm had indeed been spread about Indians, and that parties from Solesbury and Chetasco were out in pursuit of them, that many persons had been killed by them, and that one house in Solesbury had been rifled and burnt on the night before the last. These tidings were a dreadful confirmation of my fears. There scarcely remained a doubt; but still my expiring hope prompted me to inquire, "To whom did the house belong?" He answered that he had not heard the name of the owner. He was a stranger to the people on the other side of the river. Were any of the inhabitants murdered? Yes; all that were at home, except a girl whom they carried off. Some said that the girl had been retaken. What was the name? Was it Huntly? Huntly? Yes. No. He did not know. He had forgotten. I fixed my eyes upon the ground. An interval of gloomy meditation succeeded. All was lost! All for whose sake I had desired to live had perished by the hands of these assassins! That dear home, the scene of my sportive childhood, of my studies, labours, and recreations, was ravaged by fire and the sword,--was reduced to a frightful ruin! Not only all that embellished and endeared existence was destroyed, but the means of subsistence itself. Thou knowest that my sisters and I were dependants on the bounty of our uncle. His death would make way for the succession of his son, a man fraught with envy and malignity, who always testified a mortal hatred to us, merely because we enjoyed the protection of his father. The ground which furnished me with bread was now become the property of one who, if he could have done it with security, would gladly have mingled poison with my food. All that my imagination or my heart regarded as of value had likewise perished. Whatever my chamber, my closets, my cabinets contained, my furniture, my books, the records of my own skill, the monuments of their existence whom I loved, my very clothing, were involved in indiscriminate and irretrievable destruction. Why should I survive this calamity? But did not he say that one had escaped? The only females in the family were my sisters. One of these had been reserved for a fate worse than death; to gratify the innate and insatiable cruelty of savages, by suffering all the torments their invention can suggest, or to linger out years of weary bondage and unintermitted hardship in the bosom of the wilderness. To restore her to liberty, to cherish this last survivor of my unfortunate race, was a sufficient motive to life and to activity. But soft! Had not rumour whispered that the captive was retaken? Oh! who was her angel of deliverance? Where did she now abide? Weeping over the untimely fall of her protector and her friend? Lamenting and upbraiding the absence of her brother? Why should I not haste to find her?--to mingle my tears with hers, to assure her of my safety, and expatiate the involuntary crime of my desertion by devoting all futurity to the task of her consolation and improvement? The path was open and direct. My new motives would have trampled upon every impediment and made me reckless of all dangers and all toils. I broke from my reverie, and, without taking leave or expressing gratitude to my informant, I ran with frantic expedition towards the river, and, plunging into it, gained the opposite side in a moment. I was sufficiently acquainted with the road. Some twelve or fifteen miles remained to be traversed. I did not fear that my strength would fail in the performance of my journey. It was not my uncle's habitation to which I directed my steps. Inglefield was my friend. If my sister had existence, or was snatched from captivity, it was here that an asylum had been afforded to her, and here was I to seek the knowledge of my destiny. For this reason, having reached a spot where the road divided into two branches, one of which led to Inglefield's and the other to Huntly's, I struck into the former. Scarcely had I passed the angle when I noticed a building on the right hand, at some distance from the road. In the present state of my thoughts, it would not have attracted my attention, had not a light gleamed from an upper window and told me that all within were not at rest. I was acquainted with the owner of this mansion. He merited esteem and confidence, and could not fail to be acquainted with recent events. From him I should obtain all the information that I needed, and I should be delivered from some part of the agonies of my suspense. I should reach his door in a few minutes, and the window-light was a proof that my entrance at this hour would not disturb the family, some of whom were stirring. Through a gate I entered an avenue of tall oaks, that led to the house. I could not but reflect on the effect which my appearance would produce upon the family. The sleek locks, neat apparel, pacific guise, sobriety and gentleness of aspect by which I was customarily distinguished, would in vain be sought in the apparition which would now present itself before them. My legs, neck, and bosom were bare, and their native hue was exchanged for the livid marks of bruises and scarifications. A horrid scar upon my cheek, and my uncombed locks; hollow eyes, made ghastly by abstinence and cold, and the ruthless passions of which my mind had been the theatre, added to the musket which I carried in my hand, would prepossess them with the notion of a maniac or ruffian. Some inconveniences might hence arise, which, however, could not be avoided. I must trust to the speed with which my voice and my words should disclose my true character and rectify their mistake. I now reached the principal door of the house. It was open, and I unceremoniously entered. In the midst of the room stood a German stove, well heated. To thaw my half-frozen limbs was my first care. Meanwhile I gazed around me, and marked the appearances of things. Two lighted candles stood upon the table. Beside them were cider-bottles and pipes of tobacco. The furniture and room was in that state which denoted it to have been lately filled with drinkers and smokers; yet neither voice, nor visage, nor motion, were anywhere observable. I listened; but neither above nor below, within nor without, could any tokens of a human being be perceived. This vacancy and silence must have been lately preceded by noise, and concourse, and bustle. The contrast was mysterious and ambiguous. No adequate cause of so quick and absolute a transition occurred to me. Having gained some warmth and lingered some ten or twenty minutes in this uncertainty, I determined to explore the other apartments of the building. I knew not what might betide in my absence, or what I might encounter in my search to justify precaution, and, therefore, kept the gun in my hand. I snatched a candle from the table and proceeded into two other apartments on the first floor and the kitchen. Neither was inhabited, though chairs and tables were arranged in their usual order, and no traces of violence or hurry were apparent. Having gained the foot of the staircase, I knocked, but my knocking was wholly disregarded. A light had appeared in an upper chamber. It was not, indeed, in one of those apartments which the family permanently occupied, but in that which, according to rural custom, was reserved for guests; but it indubitably betokened the presence of some being by whom my doubts might be solved. These doubts were too tormenting to allow of scruples and delay. I mounted the stairs. At each chamber-door I knocked, but I knocked in vain. I tried to open, but found them to be locked. I at length reached the entrance of that in which a light had been discovered. Here it was certain that some one would be found; but here, as well as elsewhere, my knocking was unnoticed. To enter this chamber was audacious, but no other expedient was afforded me to determine whether the house had any inhabitants. I therefore entered, though with caution and reluctance. No one was within, but there were sufficient traces of some person who had lately been here. On the table stood a travelling-escritoire, open, with pens and inkstand. A chair was placed before it, and a candle on the right hand. This apparatus was rarely seen in this country. Some traveller, it seemed, occupied this room, though the rest of the mansion was deserted. The pilgrim, as these appearances testified, was of no vulgar order, and belonged not to the class of periodical and every-day guests. It now occurred to me that the occupant of this apartment could not be far off, and that some danger and embarrassment could not fail to accrue from being found, thus accoutred and garbed, in a place sacred to the study and repose of another. It was proper, therefore, to withdraw, and either to resume my journey, or wait for the stranger's return, whom perhaps some temporary engagement had called away, in the lower and public room. The former now appeared to be the best expedient, as the return of this unknown person was uncertain, as well as his power to communicate the information which I wanted. Had paper, as well as the implements of writing, lain upon the desk, perhaps my lawless curiosity would not have scrupled to have pried into it. On the first glance nothing of that kind appeared; but now, as I turned towards the door, somewhat, lying beside the desk, on the side opposite the candle, caught my attention. The impulse was instantaneous and mechanical that made me leap to the spot and lay my hand upon it. Till I felt it between my fingers, till I brought it near my eyes and read frequently the inscriptions that appeared upon it, I was doubtful whether my senses had deceived me. Few, perhaps, among mankind, have undergone vicissitudes of peril and wonder equal to mine. The miracles of poetry, the transitions of enchantment, are beggarly and mean compared with those which I had experienced. Passage into new forms, overleaping the bars of time and space, reversal of the laws of inanimate and intelligent existence, had been mine to perform and to witness. No event had been more fertile of sorrow and perplexity than the loss of thy brother's letters. They went by means invisible, and disappeared at a moment when foresight would have least predicted their disappearance. They now placed themselves before me, in a manner equally abrupt, in a place and by means no less contrary to expectation. The papers which I now seized were those letters. The parchment cover, the string that tied and the wax that sealed them, appeared not to have been opened or violated. The power that removed them, from my cabinet, and dropped them in this house,--a house which I rarely visited, which I had not entered during the last year, with whose inhabitants I maintained no cordial intercourse, and to whom my occupations and amusements, my joys and my sorrows, were unknown,--was no object even of conjecture. But they were not possessed by any of the family. Some stranger was here, by whom they had been stolen, or into whose possession they had, by some incomprehensible chance, fallen. That stranger was near. He had left this apartment for a moment. He would speedily return. To go hence might possibly occasion me to miss him. Here, then, I would wait, till he should grant me an interview. The papers were mine, and were recovered. I would never part with them. But to know by whose force or by whose stratagems I had been bereaved of them thus long, was now the supreme passion of my soul. I seated myself near a table and anxiously waited for an interview, on which I was irresistibly persuaded to believe that much of my happiness depended. Meanwhile, I could not but connect this incident with the destruction of my family. The loss of these papers had excited transports of grief; and yet to have lost them thus was perhaps the sole expedient by which their final preservation could be rendered possible. Had they, remained in my cabinet, they could not have escaped the destiny which overtook the house and its furniture. Savages are not accustomed to leave their exterminating work unfinished. The house which they have plundered they are careful to level with the ground. This not only their revenge, but their caution, prescribes. Fire may originate by accident as well as by design, and the traces of pillage and murder are totally obliterated by the flames. These thoughts were interrupted by the shutting of a door below, and by footsteps ascending the stairs. My heart throbbed at the sound. My seat became uneasy and I started on my feet. I even advanced half-way to the entrance of the room. My eyes were intensely fixed upon the door. My impatience would have made me guess at the person of this visitant by measuring his shadow, if his shadow were first seen; but this was precluded by the position of the light. It was only when the figure entered, and the whole person was seen, that my curiosity was gratified. He who stood before me was the parent and fosterer of my mind, the companion and instructor of my youth, from whom I had been parted for years, from whom I believed myself to be forever separated,--Sarsefield himself! Chapter XXIV. My deportment, at an interview so much desired and so wholly unforeseen, was that of a maniac. The petrifying influence of surprise yielded to the impetuosities of passion. I held him in my arms; I wept upon his bosom; I sobbed with emotion which, had it not found passage at my eyes, would have burst my heart-strings. Thus I, who had escaped the deaths that had previously assailed me in so many forms, should have been reserved to solemnize a scene like this by--_dying for joy_! The sterner passions and habitual austerities of my companion exempted him from pouring out this testimony of his feelings. His feelings were, indeed, more allied to astonishment and incredulity than mine had been. My person was not instantly recognised. He shrunk from my embrace as if I were an apparition or impostor. He quickly disengaged himself from my arms, and, withdrawing a few paces, gazed upon me as on one whom he had never before seen. These repulses were ascribed to the loss of his affection. I was not mindful of the hideous guise in which I stood before him, and by which he might justly be misled to imagine me a ruffian or a lunatic. My tears flowed now on a new account, and I articulated, in a broken and faint voice, "My master! my friend! Have you forgotten, have you ceased to love me?" The sound of my voice made him start and exclaim, "Am I alive? am I awake? Speak again, I beseech you, and convince me that I am not dreaming or delirious." "Can you need any proof," I answered, "that it is Edgar Huntly, your pupil, your child, that speaks to you?" He now withdrew his eyes from me and fixed them on the floor. After a pause he resumed, in emphatic accents:--"Well, I have lived to this age in unbelief. To credit or trust in miraculous agency was foreign to my nature, but now I am no longer skeptical. Call me to any bar, and exact from me an oath that you have twice been dead and twice recalled to life; that you move about invisibly, and change your place by the force, not of muscles, but of thought, and I will give it. "How came you hither? Did you penetrate the wall? Did you rise through the floor? "Yet surely 'tis an error. You could not be he whom twenty witnesses affirmed to have beheld a lifeless and mangled corpse upon the ground, whom my own eyes saw in that condition. "In seeking the spot once more to provide you a grave, you had vanished. Again I met you. You plunged into a rapid stream, from a height from which it was impossible to fall and to live; yet, as if to set the limits of nature at defiance, to sport with human penetration, you rose upon the surface; you floated; you swam; thirty bullets were aimed at your head, by marksmen celebrated for the exactness of their sight. I myself was of the number, and I never missed what I desired to hit. "My predictions were confirmed by the event. You ceased to struggle; you sunk to rise no more; and yet, after these accumulated deaths, you light upon this floor, so far distant from the scene of your catastrophe, over spaces only to be passed, in so short a time as has since elapsed, by those who have wings. "My eyes, my ears, bear testimony to your existence now, as they formerly convinced me of your death. What am I to think? what proofs am I to credit?" There he stopped. Every accent of this speech added to the confusion of my thoughts. The allusions that my friend had made were not unintelligible. I gained a glimpse of the complicated errors by which we had been mutually deceived. I had fainted on the area before Deb's hut. I was found by Sarsefield in this condition, and imagined to be dead. The man whom I had seen upon the promontory was not an Indian. He belonged to a numerous band of pursuers, whom my hostile and precipitate deportment caused to suspect me for an enemy. They that fired from the steep were friends. The interposition that screened me from so many bullets was indeed miraculous. No wonder that my voluntary sinking, in order to elude their shots, was mistaken for death, and that, having accomplished the destruction of this foe, they resumed their pursuit of others. But how was Sarsefield apprized that it was I who plunged into the river? No subsequent event was possible to impart to him the incredible truth. A pause of mutual silence ensued. At length Sarsefield renewed his expressions of amazement at this interview, and besought me to explain why I had disappeared by night from my uncle's house, and by what series of unheard-of events this interview was brought about. Was it indeed Huntly whom he examined and mourned over at the threshold of Deb's hut. Whom he had sought in every thicket and cave in the ample circuit of Norwalk and Chetasco? Whom he had seen perish in the current of the Delaware? Instead of noticing his questions, my soul was harrowed with anxiety respecting the fate of my uncle and sisters. Sarsefield could communicate the tidings which would decide on my future lot and set my portion in happiness or misery. Yet I had not breath to speak my inquiries. Hope tottered, and I felt as if a single word would be sufficient for its utter subversion. At length I articulated the name of my uncle. The single word sufficiently imparted my fears, and these fears needed no verbal confirmation. At that dear name my companion's features were overspread by sorrow. "Your uncle," said he, "is dead." "Dead? Merciful Heaven! And my sisters too! Both?" "Your sisters are alive and well." "Nay," resumed I, in faltering accents, "jest not with my feelings. Be not cruel in your pity. Tell me the truth." "I have said the truth. They are well, at Mr. Inglefield's." My wishes were eager to assent to the truth of these tidings. The better part of me was, then, safe: but how did they escape the fate that overtook my uncle? How did they evade the destroying hatchet and the midnight conflagration? These doubts were imparted in a tumultuous and obscure manner to my friend. He no sooner fully comprehended them, than he looked at me with some inquietude and surprise. "Huntly," said he, "are you mad? What has filled you with these hideous prepossessions? Much havoc has indeed been committed in Chetasco and the wilderness, and a log hut has been burnt, by design or by accident, in Solesbury; but that is all. Your house has not been assailed by either firebrand or tomahawk. Every thing is safe and in its ancient order. The master indeed is gone, but the old man fell a victim to his own temerity and hardihood. It is thirty years since he retired with three wounds from the field of Braddock; but time in no degree abated his adventurous and military spirit. On the first alarm, he summoned his neighbours, and led them in pursuit of the invaders. Alas! he was the first to attack them, and the only one who fell in the contest." These words were uttered in a manner that left me no room to doubt of their truth. My uncle had already been lamented, and the discovery of the nature of his death, so contrary to my forebodings, and of the safety of my girls, made the state of my mind partake more of exultation and joy than of grief or regret. But how was I deceived? Had not my fusil been found in the hands of an enemy? Whence could he have plundered it but from my own chamber? It hung against the wall of a closet, from which no stranger could have taken it except by violence. My perplexities and doubts were not at an end, but those which constituted my chief torment were removed. I listened to my friend's entreaties to tell him the cause of my elopement, and the incidents that terminated in the present interview. I began with relating my return to consciousness in the bottom of the pit; my efforts to free myself from this abhorred prison; the acts of horror to which I was impelled by famine, and their excruciating consequences; my gaining the outlet of the cavern, the desperate expedient by which I removed the impediment to my escape, and the deliverance of the captive girl; the contest I maintained before Deb's hut; my subsequent wanderings; the banquet which hospitality afforded me; my journey to the river-bank; my meditations on the means of reaching the road; my motives for hazarding my life by plunging into the stream; and my subsequent perils and fears till I reached the threshold of this habitation. "Thus," continued I, "I have complied with your request. I have told all that I myself know. What were the incidents between my sinking to rest at my uncle's and my awaking in the chambers of the hill; by what means and by whose contrivance, preternatural or human, this transition was effected, I am unable to explain; I cannot even guess. "What has eluded my sagacity may not be beyond the reach of another. Your own reflections on my tale, or some facts that have fallen under your notice, may enable you to furnish a solution. But, meanwhile, how am I to account for your appearance on this spot? This meeting was unexpected and abrupt to you, but it has not been less so to me. Of all mankind, Sarsefield was the furthest from my thoughts when I saw these tokens of a traveller and a stranger. "You were imperfectly acquainted with my wanderings. You saw me on the ground before Deb's hut. You saw me plunge into the river. You endeavoured to destroy me while swimming; and you knew, before my narrative was heard, that Huntly was the object of your enmity. What was the motive of your search in the desert, and how were you apprized of my condition? These things are not less wonderful that any of those which I have already related." During my tale the features of Sarsefield betokened the deepest attention. His eye strayed not a moment from my face. All my perils and forebodings were fresh in my remembrance: they had scarcely gone by; their skirts, so to speak, were still visible. No wonder that my eloquence was vivid and pathetic; that I portrayed the past as if it were the present scene; and that not my tongue only, but every muscle and limb, spoke. When I had finished my relation, Sarsefield sank into thoughtfulness. From this, after a time, he recovered, and said, "Your tale, Huntly, is true; yet, did I not see you before me, were I not acquainted with the artlessness and rectitude of your character, and, above all, had not my own experience, during the last three days, confirmed every incident, I should question its truth. You have amply gratified my curiosity, and deserve that your own should be gratified as fully. Listen to me. "Much has happened since we parted, which shall not be now mentioned. I promised to inform you of my welfare by letter, and did not fail to write; but whether my letters were received, or any were written by you in return, or if written were ever transmitted, I cannot tell: none were ever received. "Some days since, I arrived, in company with a lady who is my wife, in America. You have never been forgotten by me. I knew your situation to be little in agreement with your wishes, and one of the benefits which fortune has lately conferred upon me is the power of snatching you from a life of labour and obscurity, whose goods, scanty as they are, were transient and precarious, and affording you the suitable leisure and means of intellectual gratification and improvement. "Your silence made me entertain some doubts concerning your welfare, and even your existence. To solve these doubts, I hastened to Solesbury. Some delays upon the road hindered me from accomplishing my journey by daylight. It was night before I entered the Norwalk path; but my ancient rambles with you made me familiar with it, and I was not afraid of being obstructed or bewildered. "Just as I gained the southern outlet, I spied a passenger on foot, coming towards me with a quick pace. The incident was of no moment; and yet the time of night, the seeming expedition of the walker, recollection of the mazes and obstacles which he was going to encounter, and a vague conjecture that perhaps he was unacquainted with the difficulties that awaited him, made me eye him with attention as he passed. "He came near, and I thought I recognised a friend in this traveller. The form, the gesture, the stature, bore a powerful resemblance to those of Edgar Huntly. This resemblance was so strong, that I stopped, and, after he had gone by, called him by your name. That no notice was taken of my call proved that the person was mistaken; but, even though it were another, that he should not even hesitate or turn at a summons which he could not but perceive to be addressed, though erroneously, to him, was the source of some surprise. I did not repeat my call, but proceeded on my way. "All had retired to repose in your uncle's dwelling. I did not scruple to rouse them, and was received with affectionate and joyous greetings. That you allowed your uncle to rise before you was a new topic of reflection. To my inquiries concerning you, answers were made that accorded with my wishes. I was told that you were in good health and were then in bed. That you had not heard and risen at my knocking was mentioned with surprise; but your uncle accounted for your indolence by saying that during the last week you had fatigued yourself by rambling, night and day, in search of some maniac or visionary who was supposed to have retreated into Norwalk. "I insisted upon awakening you myself. I anticipated the effect of this sudden and unlooked-for meeting with some emotions of pride as well as of pleasure. To find, in opening your eyes, your old preceptor standing by your bedside and gazing in your face, would place you, I conceived, in an affecting situation. "Your chamber-door was open, but your bed was empty. Your uncle and sisters were made acquainted with this circumstance. Their surprise gave way to conjectures that your restless and romantic spirit had tempted you from your repose, that you had rambled abroad on some fantastic errand, and would probably return before the dawn. I willingly acquiesced in this opinion, and, my feelings being too thoroughly aroused to allow me to sleep, I took possession of your chamber and patiently awaited your return. "The morning returned, but Huntly made not his appearance. Your uncle became somewhat uneasy at this unseasonable absence. Much speculation and inquiry as to the possible reasons of your flight was made. In my survey of your chamber, I noted that only part of your clothing remained beside your bed. Coat, hat, stockings and shoes lay upon the spot where they had probably been thrown when you had disrobed yourself; but the pantaloons, which, according to Mr. Huntly's report, completed your dress, were nowhere to be found. That you should go forth on so cold a night so slenderly apparelled, was almost incredible. Your reason or your senses had deserted you, before so rash an action could be meditated. "I now remembered the person I had met in Norwalk. His resemblance to your figure, his garb, which wanted hat, coat, stockings and shoes, and your absence from your bed at that hour, were remarkable coincidences: but why did you disregard my call? Your name, uttered by a voice that could not be unknown, was surely sufficient to arrest your steps. "Each hour added to the impatience of your friends. To their recollections and conjectures I listened with a view to extract from them some solution of this mystery. At length a story was alluded to of some one who, on the preceding night, had been heard walking in the long room: to this was added the tale of your anxieties and wonders occasioned by the loss of certain manuscripts. "While ruminating upon these incidents, and endeavouring to extract from this intelligence a clue explanatory of your present situation, a single word, casually dropped by your uncle, instantly illuminated my darkness and dispelled my doubts.--'After all,' said the old man, 'ten to one but Edgar himself was the man whom we heard walking, but the lad was asleep, and knew not what he was about.' "'Surely,' said I, 'this inference is just. His manuscripts could not be removed by any hands but his own, since the rest of mankind were unacquainted not only with the place of their concealment, but with their existence. None but a man insane or asleep would wander forth so slightly dressed, and none but a sleeper would have disregarded my calls.' This conclusion was generally adopted; but it gave birth in my mind to infinite inquietudes. You had roved into Norwalk, a scene of inequalities, of prominences and pits, among which, thus destitute of the guidance of your senses, you could scarcely fail to be destroyed, or, at least, irretrievably bewildered. I painted to myself the dangers to which you were subjected. Your careless feet would bear you into some whirlpool or to the edge of some precipice; some internal revolution or outward shock would recall you to consciousness at some perilous moment. Surprise and fear would disable you from taking seasonable or suitable precautions, and your destruction be made sure. "The lapse of every new hour, without bringing tidings of your state, enhanced these fears. At length the propriety of searching for you occurred; Mr. Huntly and I determined to set out upon this pursuit, as well as to commission others. A plan was laid by which every accessible part of Norwalk, the wilderness beyond the flats of Solesbury, and the valley of Chetasco, should be traversed and explored. "Scarcely had we equipped ourselves for this expedition, when a messenger arrived, who brought the disastrous news of Indians being seen within these precincts, and on the last night a farmer was shot in his fields, a dwelling in Chetasco was burnt to the ground, and its inhabitants murdered or made captives. Rumour and inquiry had been busy, and a plausible conjecture had been formed as to the course and number of the enemies. They were said to be divided into bands, and to amount in the whole to thirty or forty warriors. This messenger had come to warn us of danger which might impend, and to summon us to join in the pursuit and extirpation of these detestable foes. "Your uncle, whose alacrity and vigour age had not abated, eagerly engaged in this scheme. I was not averse to contribute my efforts to an end like this. The road which we had previously designed to take, in search of my fugitive pupil, was the same by which we must trace or intercept the retreat of the savages. Thus two purposes, equally momentous, would be answered by the same means. "Mr. Huntly armed himself with your fusil; Inglefield supplied me with a gun. During our absence the dwelling was closed and locked, and your sisters placed under the protection of Inglefield, whose age and pacific sentiments unfitted him for arduous and sanguinary enterprises. A troop of rustics was collected, half of whom remained to traverse Solesbury, and the other, whom Mr. Huntly and I accompanied, hastened to Chetasco." Chapter XXV. "It was noonday before we reached the theatre of action. Fear and revenge combined to make the people of Chetasco diligent and zealous in their own defence. The havoc already committed had been mournful. To prevent a repetition of the same calamities, they resolved to hunt out the hostile footsteps and exact a merciless retribution. "It was likely that the enemy, on the approach of day, had withdrawn from the valley and concealed themselves in the thickets between the parallel ridges of the mountain. This space, which, according to the object with which it is compared, is either a vale or the top of a hill, was obscure and desolate. It was undoubtedly the avenue by which the robbers had issued forth, and by which they would escape to the Ohio. Here they might still remain, intending to emerge from their concealment on the next night and perpetrate new horrors. "A certain distribution was made of our number, so as to move in all directions at the same time. I will not dwell upon particulars. It will suffice to say that keen eyes and indefatigable feet brought us at last to the presence of the largest number of these marauders. Seven of them were slain by the edge of a brook, where they sat wholly unconscious of the danger which hung over them. Five escaped, and one of these secured his retreat by wresting your fusil from your uncle and shooting him dead. Before our companion could be rescued or revenged, the assassin, with the remnant of the troop, disappeared, and bore away with him the fusil as a trophy of his victory. "This disaster was deplored, not only on account of that life which had thus been sacrificed, but because a sagacious guide and intrepid leader was lost. His acquaintance with the habits of the Indians, and his experience in their wars, made him trace their footsteps with more certainty than any of his associates. "The pursuit was still continued, and parties were so stationed that the escape of the enemy was difficult, if not impossible. Our search was unremitted, but, during twelve or fourteen hours, unsuccessful. Queen Mab did not elude all suspicion. Her hut was visited by different parties, but the old woman and her dogs had disappeared. "Meanwhile your situation was not forgotten. Every one was charged to explore your footsteps as well as those of the savages; but this search was no less unsuccessful than the former. None had heard of you or seen you. "This continued till midnight. Three of us made a pause at a brook, and intended to repair our fatigues by a respite of a few hours; but scarcely had we stretched ourselves on the ground when we were alarmed by a shot which seemed to have been fired at a short distance. We started on our feet and consulted with each other on the measures to be taken. A second, a third, and a fourth shot, from the same quarter, excited our attention anew. Mab's hut was known to stand at the distance and in the direction of this sound, and thither we resolved to repair. "This was done with speed, but with the utmost circumspection. We shortly gained the road that leads near this hut, and at length gained a view of the building. Many persons were discovered, in a sort of bustling inactivity, before the hut. They were easily distinguished to be friends, and were therefore approached without scruple. "The objects that presented themselves to a nearer view were five bodies stretched upon the ground. Three of them were savages. The fourth was a girl, who, though alive, seemed to have received a mortal wound. The fifth, breathless and mangled, and his features almost concealed by the blood that overspread his face, was Edgar,--the fugitive for whom I had made such anxious search. "About the same hour on the last night I had met you hastening into Norwalk. Now were you lying in the midst of savages, at the distance of thirty miles from your home, and in a spot which it was impossible for you to have reached unless by an immense circuit over rocks and thickets. That you had found a rift at the basis of a hill, and thus penetrated its solidities, and thus precluded so tedious and circuitous a journey as must otherwise have been made, was not to be imagined. "But whence arose this scene? It was obvious to conclude that my associates had surprised their enemies in this house, and exacted from them the forfeit of their crimes; but how you should have been confounded with their foes, or whence came the wounded girl, was a subject of astonishment. "You will judge how much this surprise was augmented when I was informed that the party whom we found had been attracted hither by the same signals by which we had been alarmed. That on reaching this spot you had been discovered, alive, seated on the ground, and still sustaining the gun with which you had apparently completed the destruction of so many adversaries. In a moment after their arrival you sunk down and expired. "This scene was attended with inexplicable circumstances. The musket which lay beside you appeared to have belonged to one of the savages. The wound by which each had died was single. Of the four shots we had distinguished at a distance, three of them were therefore fatal to the Indians, and the fourth was doubtless that by which you had fallen; yet three muskets only were discoverable. "The arms were collected, and the girl carried to the nearest house in the arms of her father. Her situation was deemed capable of remedy, and the sorrow and wonder which I felt at your untimely and extraordinary fate did not hinder me from endeavouring to restore the health of this unfortunate victim. I reflected, likewise, that some light might be thrown upon transactions so mysterious by the information which might be collected from her story. Numberless questions and hints were necessary to extract from her a consistent or intelligible tale. She had been dragged, it seems, for miles, at the heels of her conquerors, who at length stopped in a cavern for the sake of some repose. All slept but one, who sat and watched. Something called him away, and, at the same moment, you appeared at the bottom of the cave, half naked and without arms. You instantly supplied the last deficiency by seizing the gun and tomahawk of him who had gone forth, and who had negligently left his weapons behind. Then, stepping over the bodies of the sleepers, you rushed out of the cavern. "She then mentioned your unexpected return, her deliverance and flight, and arrival at Deb's hut. You watched upon the hearth, and she fell asleep upon the blanket. From this sleep she was aroused by violent and cruel blows. She looked up: you were gone, and the bed on which she lay was surrounded by the men from whom she had so lately escaped. One dragged her out of the hut and levelled his gun at her breast. At the moment when he touched the trigger, a shot came from an unknown quarter, and he fell at her feet. Of subsequent events she had an incoherent recollection. The Indians were successively slain, and you came to her, and interrogated and consoled her. "In your journey to the hut you were armed. This in some degree accounted for appearances: but where were your arms? Three muskets only were discovered, and these undoubtedly belonged to your enemies. "I now had leisure to reflect upon your destiny. I had arrived soon enough on this shore merely to witness the catastrophe of two beings whom I most loved. Both were overtaken by the same fate, nearly at the same hour. The same hand had possibly accomplished the destruction of uncle and nephew. "Now, however, I began to entertain a hope that your state might not be irretrievable. You had walked and spoken after the firing had ceased and your enemies had ceased to contend with you. A wound had, no doubt, been previously received. I had hastily inferred that the wound was mortal, and that life could not be recalled. Occupied with attention to the wailings of the girl, and full of sorrow and perplexity, I had admitted an opinion which would have never been adopted in different circumstances. My acquaintance with wounds would have taught me to regard sunken muscles, lividness, and cessation of the pulse, as mere indications of a swoon, and not as tokens of death. "Perhaps my error was not irreparable. By hastening to the hut, I might ascertain your condition, and at least transport your remains to some dwelling and finally secure to you the decencies of burial. "Of twelve savages discovered on the preceding day, ten were now killed. Two at least remained, after whom the pursuit was still zealously maintained. Attention to the wounded girl had withdrawn me from the party, and I had now leisure to return to the scene of these disasters. The sun had risen, and, accompanied by two others, I repaired thither. "A sharp turn in the road, at the entrance of a field, set before us a startling spectacle. An Indian, mangled by repeated wounds of bayonet and bullet, was discovered. His musket was stuck in the ground, by way of beacon attracting our attention to the spot. Over this space I had gone a few hours before, and nothing like this was then seen. The parties abroad had hied away to a distant quarter. Some invisible power seemed to be enlisted in our defence and to preclude the necessity of our arms. "We proceeded to the hut. The savages were there, but Edgar had risen and flown! Nothing now seemed to be incredible. You had slain three foes, and the weapon with which the victory had been achieved had vanished. You had risen from the dead, had assailed one of the surviving enemies, had employed bullet and dagger in his destruction, with both of which you could only be supplied by supernatural means, and had disappeared. If any inhabitant of Chetasco had done this, we should have heard of it. "But what remained? You were still alive. Your strength was sufficient to bear you from this spot. Why were you still invisible? and to what dangers might you not be exposed before you could disinvolve yourself from the mazes of this wilderness? "Once more I procured indefatigable search to be made after you. It was continued till the approach of evening, and was fruitless. Inquiries were twice made at the house where you were supplied with food and intelligence. On the second call I was astonished and delighted by the tidings received from the good woman. Your person, and demeanour, and arms, were described, and mention made of your resolution to cross the southern ridge and traverse the Solesbury Road with the utmost expedition. "The greater part of my inquietudes were now removed. You were able to eat and to travel, and there was little doubt that a meeting would take place between us on the next morning. Meanwhile, I determined to concur with those who pursued the remainder of the enemy. I followed you, in the path that you were said to have taken, and quickly joined a numerous party who were searching for those who, on the last night, had attacked a plantation that lies near this, and destroyed the inhabitants. "I need not dwell upon our doublings and circuities. The enemy was traced to the house of Selby. They had entered, they had put fire on the floor, but were compelled to relinquish their prey. Of what number they consisted could not be ascertained; but one, lingering behind his fellows, was shot, at the entrance of the wood, and on the spot where you chanced to light upon him. "Selby's house was empty, and before the fire had made any progress we extinguished it. The drunken wretch whom you encountered had probably returned from his nocturnal debauch after we had left the spot. "The flying enemy was pursued with fresh diligence. They were found, by various tokens, to have crossed the river, and to have ascended the mountain. We trod closely on their heels. When we arrived at the promontory described by you, the fatigues of the night and day rendered me unqualified to proceed. I determined that this should be the bound of my excursions. I was anxious to obtain an interview with you, and, unless I paused here, should not be able to gain Inglefield's as early in the morning as I wished. Two others concurred with me in this resolution, and prepared to return to this house, which had been deserted by its tenants till the danger was past, and which had been selected as the place of rendezvous. "At this moment, dejected and weary, I approached the ledge which severed the headland from the mountain. I marked the appearance of some one stretched upon the ground where you lay. No domestic animal would wander hither and place himself upon this spot. There was something likewise in the appearance of the object that bespoke it to be man; but, if it were man, it was incontrovertibly a savage and a foe. I determined, therefore, to rouse you by a bullet. "My decision was perhaps absurd. I ought to have gained more certainty before I hazarded your destruction. Be that as it will, a moment's lingering on your part would have probably been fatal. You started on your feet, and fired. See the hole which your random shot made through my sleeve! This surely was a day destined to be signalized by hairbreadth escapes. "Your action seemed incontestably to confirm my prognostics. Every one hurried to the spot and was eager to destroy an enemy. No one hesitated to believe that some of the shots aimed at you had reached their mark, and that you had sunk to rise no more. "The gun which was fired and thrown down was taken and examined. It had been my companion in many a toilsome expedition. It had rescued me and my friends from a thousand deaths. In order to recognise it, I needed only to touch and handle it. I instantly discovered that I held in my hand the fusil which I had left with you on parting, with which your uncle had equipped himself, and which had been ravished from him by a savage. What was I hence to infer respecting the person of the last possessor? "My inquiries respecting you, of the woman whose milk and bread you had eaten, were minute. You entered, she said, with a hatchet and gun in your hand. While you ate, the gun was laid upon the table. She sat near, and the piece became the object of inquisitive attention. The stock and barrels were described by her in such terms as left no doubt that this was the _fusil_. "A comparison of incidents enabled me to trace the manner in which you came into possession of this instrument. One of those whom you found in the cavern was the assassin of your uncle. According to the girl's report, on issuing from your hiding-place you seized a gun that was unoccupied, and this gun chanced to be your own. "Its two barrels were probably the cause of your success in that unequal contest at Mab's hut. On recovering from _deliquium_, you found it where it had been dropped by you, out of sight and unsuspected by the party that had afterwards arrived. In your passage to the river, had it once more fallen into hostile hands? or had you missed the way, wandered to this promontory, and mistaken a troop of friends for a band of Indian marauders? "Either supposition was dreadful. The latter was the most plausible. No motives were conceivable by which one of the fugitives could be induced to post himself here, in this conspicuous station; whereas, the road which led you to the summit of the hill, to that spot where descent to the river-road was practicable, could not be found but by those who were accustomed to traverse it. The directions which you had exacted from your hostess proved your previous unacquaintance with these tracts. "I acquiesced in this opinion with a heavy and desponding heart. Fate had led us into a maze which could only terminate in the destruction of one or of the other. By the breadth of a hair had I escaped death from your hand. The same fortune had not befriended you. After my tedious search, I had lighted on you, forlorn, bewildered, perishing with cold and hunger. Instead of recognising and affording you relief, I compelled you to leap into the river, from a perilous height, and had desisted from my persecution only when I had bereaved you of life and plunged you to the bottom of the gulf. "My motives in coming to America were numerous and mixed. Among these was the parental affection with which you had inspired me. I came with fortune, and a better gift than fortune, in my hand. I intended to bestow both upon you, not only to give you competence, but one who would endear to you that competence, who would enhance, by participating, every gratification. "My schemes were now at an end. You were gone, beyond the reach of my benevolence and justice. I had robbed your two sisters of a friend and guardian. It was some consolation to think that it was in my power to stand, with regard to them, in your place; that I could snatch them from the poverty, dependence, and humiliation, to which your death and that of your uncle had reduced them. "I was now doubly weary of the enterprise in which I was engaged, and returned with speed to this rendezvous. My companions have gone to know the state of the family who resided under this roof, and left me to beguile the tedious moments in whatever manner I pleased. "I have omitted mentioning one incident that happened between the detection of your flight and our expedition to Chetasco. Having formed a plausible conjecture as to him who walked in the long room, it was obvious to conclude that he who purloined your manuscript, and the walker, was the same personage. It was likewise easily inferred that the letters were secreted in the cedar chest or in some other part of the room. Instances similar to this have heretofore occurred. Men have employed anxious months in search of that which, in a freak of noctambulation, was hidden by their own hands. "A search was immediately commenced, and your letters were found, carefully concealed between the rafters and shingles of the roof, in a spot where, if suspicion had not been previously excited, they would have remained till the vernal rains and the summer heats had insensibly destroyed them. This packet I carried with me, knowing the value which you set upon it, and there being no receptacle equally safe but your own cabinet, which was locked. "Having, as I said, reached this house, and being left alone, I bethought me of the treasure I possessed. I was unacquainted with the reasons for which these papers were so precious. They probably had some momentous and intimate connection with your own history. As such, they could not be of little value to me, and this moment of inoccupation and regrets was as suitable as any other to the task of perusing them. I drew them forth, therefore, and laid them on the table in this chamber. "The rest is known to you. During a momentary absence you entered. Surely no interview of ancient friends ever took place in so unexpected and abrupt a manner. You were dead. I mourned for you, as one whom I loved, and whom fate had snatched forever from my sight. Now, in a blissful hour, you had risen, and my happiness in thus embracing you is tenfold greater than would have been experienced if no uncertainties and perils had protracted our meeting." Chapter XXVI. Here ended the tale of Sarsefield. Humiliation and joy were mingled in my heart. The events that preceded my awakening in the cave were now luminous and plain. What explication was more obvious? What but this solution ought to have been suggested by the conduct I had witnessed in Clithero? Clithero? Was not this the man whom Clithero had robbed of his friend? Was not this the lover of Mrs. Lorimer, the object of the persecutions of Wiatte? Was it not now given me to investigate the truth of that stupendous tale? To dissipate the doubts which obstinately clung to my imagination respecting it? But soft! Had not Sarsefield said that he was married? Was Mrs. Lorimer so speedily forgotten by him, or was the narrative of Clithero the web of imposture or the raving of insanity? These new ideas banished all personal considerations from my mind. I looked eagerly into the face of my friend, and exclaimed, in a dubious accent, "How say you? Married? When? To whom?" "Yes, Huntly, I am wedded to the most excellent of women. To her am I indebted for happiness, and wealth, and dignity, and honour. To her do I owe the power of being the benefactor and protector of you and your sisters. She longs to embrace you as a son. To become truly her son will depend upon your own choice, and that of one who was the companion of our voyage." "Heavens!" cried I, in a transport of exultation and astonishment. "Of whom do you speak? Of the mother of Clarice? The sister of Wiatte? The sister of the ruffian who laid snares for her life? Who pursued you and the unhappy Clithero with the bitterest animosity?" My friend started at these sounds as if the earth had yawned at his feet. His countenance was equally significant of terror and rage. As soon as he regained the power of utterance, he spoke:--"Clithero! Curses light upon thy lips for having uttered that detested name! Thousands of miles have I flown to shun the hearing of it. Is the madman here? Have you set eyes upon him? Does he yet crawl upon the face of the earth? Unhappy? Unparalleled, unheard-of, thankless miscreant! Has he told his execrable falsehoods here? Has he dared to utter names so sacred as those of Euphemia Lorimer and Clarice?" "He has; he has told a tale that had all the appearances of truth----" "Out upon the villain! The truth! Truth would prove him to be unnatural, devilish; a thing for which no language has yet provided a name! He has called himself unhappy? No doubt, a victim to injustice! Overtaken by unmerited calamity. Say! Has he fooled thee with such tales?" "No. His tale was a catalogue of crimes and miseries of which he was the author and sufferer. You know not his motives, his horrors------" "His deeds were monstrous and infernal. His motives were sordid and flagitious. To display all their ugliness and infamy was not his province. No; he did not tell you that he stole at midnight to the chamber of his mistress; a woman who astonished the world by her loftiness and magnanimity, by indefatigable beneficence and unswerving equity; who had lavished on this wretch, whom she snatched from the dirt, all the goods of fortune, all the benefits of education; all the treasures of love; every provocation to gratitude; every stimulant to justice. "He did not tell you that, in recompense for every benefit, he stole upon her sleep and aimed a dagger at her breast. There was no room for flight, or ambiguity, or prevarication. She whom he meant to murder stood near, saw the lifted weapon, and heard him confess and glory in his purposes. "No wonder that the shock bereft her, for a time, of life. The interval was seized by the ruffian to effect his escape. The rebukes of justice were shunned by a wretch conscious of his inexpiable guilt. These things he has hidden from you, and has supplied their place by a tale specious as false." "No. Among the number of his crimes, hypocrisy is not to be numbered. These things are already known to me: he spared himself too little in the narrative. The excellencies of his lady, her claims to gratitude and veneration, were urged beyond their true bounds. His attempts upon her life were related. It is true that he desired and endeavoured to destroy her." "How? Has he told you this?" "He has told me all. Alas! the criminal intention has been amply expiated." "What mean you? Whence and how came he hither? Where is he now? I will not occupy the same land, the same world, with him. Have this woman and her daughter lighted on the shore haunted by this infernal and implacable enemy?" "Alas! It is doubtful whether he exists. If he lives, he is no longer to be feared; but he lives not. Famine and remorse have utterly consumed him." "Famine? Remorse? You talk in riddles." "He has immured himself in the desert. He has abjured the intercourse of mankind. He has shut himself in caverns where famine must inevitably expedite that death for which he longs as the only solace of his woes. To no imagination are his offences blacker and more odious than to his own. I had hopes of rescuing him from this fate, but my own infirmities and errors have afforded me sufficient occupation." Sarsefield renewed his imprecations on the memory of that unfortunate man, and his inquiries as to the circumstances that led him into this remote district. His inquiries were not to be answered by one in my present condition. My languors and fatigues had now gained a pitch that was insupportable. The wound in my face had been chafed and inflamed by the cold water and the bleak air; and the pain attending it would no longer suffer my attention to stray. I sunk upon the floor, and entreated him to afford me the respite of a few hours' repose. He was sensible of the deplorableness of my condition, and chid himself for the negligence of which he had already been guilty. He lifted me to the bed, and deliberated on the mode he should pursue for my relief. Some mollifying application to my wound was immediately necessary; but, in our present lonely condition, it was not at hand. It could only be procured from a distance. It was proper therefore to hasten to the nearest inhabited dwelling, which belonged to one by name Walton, and supply himself with such medicines as could be found. Meanwhile, there was no danger of molestation and intrusion. There was reason to expect the speedy return of those who had gone in pursuit of the savages. This was their place of rendezvous, and hither they appointed to reassemble before the morrow's dawn. The distance of the neighbouring farm was small, and Sarsefield promised to be expeditious. He left me to myself and my own ruminations. Harassed by fatigue and pain, I had yet power to ruminate on that series of unparalleled events that had lately happened. I wept, but my tears flowed from a double source: from sorrow, on account of the untimely fate of my uncle, and from joy, that my sisters were preserved, that Sarsefield had returned and was not unhappy. I reflected on the untoward destiny of Clithero. Part of his calamity consisted in the consciousness of having killed his patroness; but it now appeared, though by some infatuation I had not previously suspected, that the first impulse of sorrow in the lady had been weakened by reflection and by time; that the prejudice persuading her that her life and that of her brother were to endure and to terminate together was conquered by experience or by argument. She had come, in company with Sarsefield and Clarice, to America. What influence might these events have upon the gloomy meditations of Clithero? Was it possible to bring them together; to win the maniac from his solitude, wrest from him his fatal purposes, and restore him to communion with the beings whose imagined indignation is the torment of his life? These musings were interrupted by a sound from below, which was easily interpreted into tokens of the return of those with whom Sarsefield had parted at the promontory. Voices were confused and busy, but not turbulent. They entered the lower room, and the motion of chairs and tables showed that they were preparing to rest themselves after their toils. Few of them were unacquainted with me, since they probably were residents in this district. No inconvenience, therefore, would follow from an interview, though, on their part, wholly unexpected. Besides, Sarsefield would speedily return, and none of the present visitants would be likely to withdraw to this apartment. Meanwhile, I lay upon the bed, with my face turned towards the door, and languidly gazing at the ceiling and Walls. Just then a musket was discharged in the room below. The shock affected me mechanically, and the first impulse of surprise made me almost start upon my feet. The sound was followed by confusion and bustle. Some rushed forth and called on each other to run different ways, and the words, "That is he,"--"Stop him!" were spoken in a tone of eagerness and rage. My weakness and pain were for a moment forgotten, and my whole attention was bent to discover the meaning of this hubbub. The musket which I had brought with me to this chamber lay across the bed. Unknowing of the consequences of this affray with regard to myself, I was prompted, by a kind of self-preserving instinct, to lay hold of the gun and prepare to repel any attack that might be made upon me. A few moments elapsed, when I thought I heard light footsteps in the entry leading to this room. I had no time to construe these signals, but, watching fearfully the entrance, I grasped my weapon with new force, and raised it so as to be ready at the moment of my danger. I did not watch long. A figure cautiously thrust itself forward. The first glance was sufficient to inform me that this intruder was an Indian, and, of consequence, an enemy. He was unarmed. Looking eagerly on all sides, he at last spied me as I lay. My appearance threw him into consternation, and, after the fluctuation of an instant, he darted to the window, threw up the sash, and leaped out upon the ground. His flight might have been easily arrested by my shot, but surprise, added to my habitual antipathy to bloodshed unless in cases of absolute necessity, made me hesitate. He was gone, and I was left to mark the progress of the drama. The silence was presently broken by firing at a distance. Three shots, in quick succession, were followed by the deepest pause. That the party, recently arrived, had brought with them one or more captives, and that by some sudden effort the prisoners had attempted to escape, was the only supposition that I could form. By wrhat motives either of them could be induced to seek concealment in my chamber could not be imagined. I now heard a single step on the threshold below. Some one entered the common room. He traversed the floor during a few minutes, and then, ascending the staircase, he entered my chamber. It was Sarsefield. Trouble and dismay were strongly written on his countenance. He seemed totally unconscious of my presence; his eyes were fixed upon the floor, and, as he continued to move across the room, he heaved forth deep sighs. This deportment was mournful and mysterious. It was little in unison with those appearances which he wore at our parting, and must have been suggested by some event that had since happened. My curiosity impelled me to recall him from his reverie. I rose, and, seizing him by the arm, looked at him with an air of inquisitive anxiety. It was needless to speak. He noticed my movement, and, turning towards me, spoke in a tone of some resentment:--"Why did you deceive me? Did you not say Clithero was dead?" "I said so because it was my belief. Know you any thing to the contrary? Heaven grant that he is still alive, and that our mutual efforts may restore him to peace!" "Heaven grant," replied my friend, with a vehemence that bordered upon fury,--"Heaven grant that he may live thousands of years, and know not, in their long course, a moment's respite from remorse and from anguish! But this prayer is fruitless. He is not dead, but death hovers over him. Should he live, he will live only to defy justice and perpetrate new horrors. My skill might perhaps save him, but a finger shall not be moved to avert his fate. "Little did I think that the wretch whom my friends rescued from the power of the savages, and brought wounded and expiring hither, was Clithero. They sent for me in haste to afford him surgical assistance. I found him stretched upon the floor below, deserted, helpless, and bleeding. The moment I beheld him, he was recognised. The last of evils was to look upon the face of this assassin; but that evil is past, and shall never be endured again. "Rise, and come with me. Accommodation is prepared for you at Walcot's. Let us leave this house, and, the moment you are able to perform a journey, abandon forever this district." I could not readily consent to this proposal. Clithero had been delivered from captivity, but was dying for want of that aid which Sarsefield was able to afford. Was it not inhuman to desert him in this extremity? What offence had he committed that deserved such implacable vengeance? Nothing I had heard from Sarsefield was in contradiction to his own story. His deed, imperfectly observed, would appear to be atrocious and detestable; but the view of all its antecedent and accompanying events and motives would surely place it in the list, not of crimes, but of misfortunes. But wrhat is that guilt which no penitence can expiate? Had not Clithero's remorse been more than adequate to crimes far more deadly and enormous than this? This, however, was no time to argue with the passions of Sarsefield. Nothing but a repetition of Clithero's tale could vanquish his prepossessions and mollify his rage; but this repetition was impossible to be given by me, till a moment of safety and composure. These thoughts made me linger, but hindered me from attempting to change the determination of my friend. He renewed his importunities for me to fly with him. He dragged me by the arm, and, wavering and reluctant, I followed where he chose to lead. He crossed the common room, with hurried steps, and eyes averted from a figure which instantly fastened my attention. It was indeed Clithero whom I now beheld, supine, polluted with blood, his eyes closed, and apparently insensible. This object was gazed at with emotions that rooted me to the spot. Sarsefield, perceiving me determined to remain where I was, rushed out of the house, and disappeared. Chapter XXVII. I hung over the unhappy wretch, whose emaciated form and rueful features sufficiently bespoke that savage hands had only completed that destruction which his miseries had begun. He was mangled by the tomahawk in a shocking manner, and there was little hope that human skill could save his life. I was sensible of nothing but compassion. I acted without design, when, seating myself on the floor, I raised his head and placed it on my knees. This movement awakened his attention, and, opening his eyes, he fixed them on my countenance. They testified neither insensibility, nor horror, nor distraction. A faint emotion of surprise gave way to an appearance of tranquillity. Having perceived these tokens of a state less hopeless than I at first imagined, I spoke to him:--"My friend, how do you feel? Can any thing be done for you?" He answered me in a tone more firm and with more coherence of ideas than previous appearances had taught me to expect. "No," said he; "thy kindness, good youth, can avail me nothing. The end of my existence here is at hand. May my guilt be expiated by the miseries that I have suffered, and my good deeds only attend me to the presence of my divine Judge! "I am waiting, not with trembling or dismay, for this close of my sorrows. I breathed but one prayer, and that prayer has been answered. I asked for an interview with thee, young man; but, feeling as I now feel, this interview, so much desired, was beyond my hope. Now thou art come, in due season, to hear the last words that I shall need to utter. "I wanted to assure thee that thy efforts for my benefit were not useless. They have saved me from murdering myself, a guilt more inexpiable than any which it was in my power to commit. "I retired to the innermost recess of Norwalk, and gained the summit of a hill, by subterranean paths. This hill I knew to be on all sides inaccessible to human footsteps, and the subterranean passages were closed up by stones. Here I believed my solitude exempt from interruption, and my death, in consequence of famine, sure. "This persuasion was not taken away by your appearance on the opposite steep. The chasm which severed us I knew to be impassable. I withdrew from your sight. "Some time after, awakening from a long sleep, I found victuals beside me. He that brought it was invisible. For a time, I doubted whether some messenger of heaven had not interposed for my salvation. How other than by supernatural means my retreat should be explored, I was unable to conceive. The summit was encompassed by dizzy and profound gulfs, and the subterranean passages were still closed. "This opinion, though corrected by subsequent reflection, tended to change the course of my desperate thoughts. My hunger, thus importunately urged, would not abstain, and I ate of the food that was provided. Henceforth I determined to live, to resume the path of obscurity and labour which I had relinquished, and wait till my God should summon me to retribution. To anticipate his call is only to redouble our guilt. "I designed not to return to Inglefield's service, but to choose some other and remoter district. Meanwhile, I had left in his possession a treasure, which my determination to die had rendered of no value, but which my change of resolution restored. Enclosed in a box at Inglefield's were the memoirs of Euphemia Lorimer, by which, in all my vicissitudes, I had been hitherto accompanied, and from which I consented to part only because I had refused to live. My existence was now to be prolonged, and this manuscript was once more to constitute the torment and the solace of my being. "I hastened to Inglefield's by night. There was no need to warn him of my purpose. I desired that my fate should be an eternal secret to my ancient master and his neighbours. The apartment containing my box was well known, and easily accessible. "The box was found, but broken and rifled of its treasure. My transports of astonishment, and indignation, and grief, yielded to the resumption of my fatal purpose. I hastened back to the hill, and determined anew to perish. "This mood continued to the evening of the ensuing day. Wandering over rocks and pits, I discovered the manuscript lying under a jutting precipice. The chance that brought it hither was not less propitious and miraculous than that by which I had been supplied with food. It produced a similar effect upon my feelings, and, while in possession of this manuscript, I was reconciled to the means of life. I left the mountain, and, traversing the wilderness, stopped in Chetasco. That kind of employment which I sought was instantly procured; but my new vocation was scarcely assumed when a band of savages invaded our security. "Rambling in the desert by moonlight, I encountered these foes. They rushed upon me, and, after numerous wounds, which for the present neither killed nor disabled me, they compelled me to keep pace with them in their retreat. Some hours have passed since the troop was overtaken and my liberty redeemed. Hardships, and repeated wounds, inflicted at the moment when the invaders were surprised and slain, have brought me to my present condition. I rejoice that my course is about to terminate." Here the speaker was interrupted by the tumultuous entrance of the party by whom he had been brought hither. Their astonishment at seeing me sustaining the head of the dying man may be easily conceived. Their surprise was more strongly excited by the disappearance of the captive whom they had left in this apartment, bound hand and foot. It now appeared that, of the savage troop who had adventured thus far in search of pillage and blood, all had been destroyed but two, who had been led hither as prisoners. On their entrance into this house, one of the party had been sent to Walcot's to summon Sarsefield to the aid of the wounded man, while others had gone in search of cords to secure the arms and legs of the captives, who had hitherto been manacled imperfectly. The cords were brought and one of them was bound; but the other, before the same operation was begun upon him, broke, by a sudden effort, the feeble ligatures by which he was at present constrained, and, seizing a musket that lay near him, fired on his enemies, and then rushed out of doors. All eagerly engaged in the pursuit. The savage was fleet as a deer, and finally eluded his pursuers. While their attention was thus engaged abroad, he that remained found means to extricate his wrists and ankles from his bonds, and, betaking himself to the stairs, escaped, as I before described, through the window of the room which I had occupied. They pestered me with their curiosity and wonder, for I was known to all of them; but, waiving the discussion of my own concerns, I entreated their assistance to carry Clithero to the chamber and the bed which I had just deserted. I now, in spite of pain, fatigue, and watchfulness, set out to go to Walton's. Sarsefield was ready to receive me at the door, and the kindness and compassion of the family were active in my behalf. I was conducted to a chamber and provided with suitable attendance and remedies. I was not unmindful of the more deplorable condition of Clithero. I incessantly meditated on the means for his relief. His case stood in need of all the vigilance and skill of a physician, and Sarsefield was the only one of that profession whose aid could be seasonably administered. Sarsefield, therefore, must be persuaded to bestow this aid. There was but one mode of conquering his abhorrence of this man,--to prepossess my friend with the belief of the innocence of Clithero, or to soothe him into pity by a picture of remorse and suffering. This could be done, and in the manner most conformable to truth, by a simple recital of the incidents that had befallen, and by repeating the confession which had been extorted from Clithero. I requested all but my friend to leave my chamber, and then, soliciting a patient hearing, began the narrative of Waldegrave's death; of the detection of Clithero beneath the shade of the elm; of the suspicions which were thence produced; and of the forest interview to which these suspicions gave birth. I then repeated, without variation or addition, the tale which was then told. I likewise mentioned my subsequent transactions in Norwalk, so far as they illustrated the destiny of Clithero. During this recital, I fixed my eyes upon the countenance of Sarsefield, and watched every emotion as it arose or declined. With the progress of my tale, his indignation and his fury grew less, and at length gave place to horror and compassion. His seat became uneasy; his pulse throbbed with new vehemence. When I came to the motives which prompted the unhappy man to visit the chamber of his mistress, he started from his seat, and sometimes strode across the floor in a troubled mood, and sometimes stood before me, with his breath almost suspended in the eagerness of his attention. When I mentioned the lifted dagger, the shriek from behind, and the apparition that interposed, he shuddered and drew back, as if a dagger had been aimed at his breast. When the tale was done, some time elapsed in mutual and profound silence. My friend's thoughts were involved in a mournful and indefinable reverie. From this he at length recovered and spoke:-- "It is true. A tale like this could never be the fruit of invention, or be invented to deceive. He has done himself injustice. His character was spotless and fair. All his moral properties seemed to have resolved themselves into gratitude, fidelity, and honour. "We parted at the door, late in the evening, as he mentioned, and he guessed truly that subsequent reflection had induced me to return and to disclose the truth to Mrs. Lorimer. Clarice, relieved by the sudden death of her friend, and unexpectedly by all, arrived at the same hour. "These tidings astonished, afflicted, and delighted the lady. Her brother's death had been long believed by all but herself. To find her doubts verified, and his existence ascertained, was the dearest consolation that he ever could bestow. She was afflicted at the proofs that had been noted of the continuance of his depravity, but she dreaded no danger to herself from his malignity or vengeance. "The ignorance and prepossessions of this woman were remarkable. On this subject only she was perverse, headstrong, obstinate. Her anxiety to benefit this archruffian occupied her whole thoughts, and allowed her no time to reflect upon the reasonings or remonstrances of others. She could not be prevailed on to deny herself to his visits, and I parted from her in the utmost perplexity. "A messenger came to me at midnight, entreating my immediate presence. Some disaster had happened, but of what kind the messenger was unable to tell. My fears easily conjured up the image of Wiatte. Terror scarcely allowed me to breathe. When I entered the house of Mrs. Lorimer, I was conducted to her chamber. She lay upon the bed in a state of stupefaction, that arose from some mental cause. Clarice sat by her, wringing her hands, and pouring forth her tears without intermission. Neither could explain to me the nature of the scene. I made inquiries of the servants and attendants. They merely said that the family as usual had retired to rest, but their lady's bell rung with great violence, and called them in haste to her chamber, where they found her in a swoon upon the floor, and the young lady in the utmost affright and perturbation. "Suitable means being used, Mrs. Lorimer had, at length, recovered, but was still nearly insensible. I went to Clithero's apartments; but he was not to be found, and the domestics informed me that, since he had gone with me, he had not returned. The doors between this chamber and the court were open; hence, that some dreadful interview had taken place, perhaps with Wiatte, was an unavoidable conjecture. He had withdrawn, however, without committing any personal injury. "I need not mention my reflections upon this scene. All was tormenting doubt and suspense, till the morning arrived, and tidings were received that Wiatte had been killed in the streets. This event was antecedent to that which had occasioned Mrs. Lorimer's distress and alarm. I now remembered that fatal prepossession by which the lady was governed, and her frantic belief that her death and that of her brother were to fall out at the same time. Could some witness of his death have brought her tidings of it? Had he penetrated, unexpected and unlicensed, to her chamber? and were these the effects produced by the intelligence? "Presently I knew that not only Wiatte was dead, but that Clithero had killed him. Clithero had not been known to return, and was nowhere to be found. He, then, was the bearer of these tidings, for none but he could have found access or egress without disturbing the servants. "These doubts were at length at an end. In a broken and confused manner, and after the lapse of some days, the monstrous and portentous truth was disclosed. After our interview, the lady and her daughter had retired to the same chamber; the former had withdrawn to her closet, and the latter to bed. Some one's entrance alarmed the lady, and, coming forth after a moment's pause, the spectacle which Clithero has too faithfully described presented itself. "What could I think? A life of uniform hypocrisy, or a sudden loss of reason, were the only suppositions to be formed. Clithero was the parent of fury and abhorrence in my heart. In either case I started at the name. I shuddered at the image of the apostate or the maniac. "What? Kill the brother whose existence was interwoven with that of his benefactress and his friend? Then hasten to her chamber, and attempt her life? Lift a dagger to destroy her who had been the author of his being and his happiness? "He that could meditate a deed like this was no longer man. An agent from hell had mastered his faculties. He was become the engine of infernal malice, against whom it was the duty of all mankind to rise up in arms and never to desist till, by shattering it to atoms, its power to injure was taken away. "All inquiries to discover the place of his retreat were vain. No wonder, methought, that he wrapped himself in the folds of impenetrable secrecy. Curbed, checked, baffled in the midst of his career, no wonder that he shrunk into obscurity, that he fled from justice and revenge, that he dared not meet the rebukes of that eye which, dissolving in tenderness or flashing with disdain, had ever been irresistible. "But how shall I describe the lady's condition? Clithero she had cherished from his infancy. He was the stay, the consolation, the pride of her life. His projected alliance with her daughter made him still more dear. Her eloquence was never tired of expatiating on his purity and rectitude. No wonder that she delighted in this theme, for he was her own work. His virtues were the creatures of her bounty. "How hard to be endured was this sad reverse! She can be tranquil, but never more will she be happy. To promote her forgetfulness of him, I persuaded her to leave her country, which contained a thousand memorials of past calamity, and which was lapsing fast into civil broils. Clarice has accompanied us, and time may effect the happiness of others by her means, though she can never remove the melancholy of her mother. "I have listened to your tale, not without compassion. What would you have me to do? To prolong his life would be merely to protract his misery. "He can never be regarded with complacency by my wife. He can never be thought of without shuddering by Clarice. Common ills are not without a cure less than death, but here all remedies are vain. Consciousness itself is the malady, the pest, of which he only is cured who ceases to think." I could not but assent to this mournful conclusion: yet, though death was better to Clithero than life, could not some of his mistakes be rectified? Euphemia Lorimer, contrary to his belief, was still alive. He dreamed that she was dead, and a thousand evils were imagined to flow from that death. This death, and its progeny of ills, haunted his fancy, and added keenness to his remorse. Was it not our duty to rectify this error? Sarsefield reluctantly assented to the truth of my arguments on this head. He consented to return, and afford the dying man the consolation of knowing that the being whom he adored as a benefactor and parent had not been deprived of existence, though bereft of peace by his act. During Sarsefield's absence my mind was busy in revolving the incidents that had just occurred. I ruminated on the last words of Clithero. There was somewhat in his narrative that was obscure and contradictory. He had left the manuscript, which he so much and so justly prized, in his cabinet. He entered the chamber in my absence, and found the cabinet unfastened and the manuscript gone. It was I by whom the cabinet was opened; but the manuscript supposed to be contained in it was buried in the earth beneath the elm. How should Clithero be unacquainted with its situation, since none but Clithero could have dug for it this grave? This mystery vanished when I reflected on the history of my own manuscript. Clithero had buried his treasure with his own hands, as mine had been secreted by myself; but both acts had been performed during sleep. The deed was neither prompted by the will nor noticed by the senses of him by whom it was done. Disastrous and humiliating is the state of man! By his own hands is constructed the mass of misery and error in which his steps are forever involved. Thus it was with thy friend. Hurried on by phantoms too indistinct to be now recalled, I wandered from my chamber to the desert. I plunged into some unvisited cavern, and easily proceeded till I reached the edge of a pit. There my step was deceived, and I tumbled headlong from the precipice. The fall bereaved me of sense, and I continued breathless and motionless during the remainder of the night and the ensuing day. How little cognizance have men over the actions and motives of each other! How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances! Who would have sought me in the bowels of this mountain? Ages might have passed away, before my bones would be discovered in this tomb by some traveller whom curiosity had prompted to explore it. I was roused from these reflections by Sarsefield's return. Inquiring into Clithero's condition, he answered that the unhappy man was insensible, but that, notwithstanding numerous and dreadful gashes in different parts of his body, it was possible that, by submitting to the necessary treatment, he might recover. Encouraged by this information, I endeavoured to awaken the zeal and compassion of my friend in Clithero's behalf. He recoiled with involuntary shuddering from any task which would confine him to the presence of this man. Time and reflection, he said, might introduce different sentiments and feelings, but at present he could not but regard this person as a maniac, whose disease was irremediable, and whose existence could not be protracted but to his own misery and the misery of others. Finding him irreconcilably averse to any scheme connected with the welfare of Clithero, I began to think that his assistance as a surgeon was by no means necessary. He had declared that the sufferer needed nothing more than common treatment; and to this the skill of a score of aged women in this district, furnished with simples culled from the forest, and pointed out, of old time, by Indian _leeches_, was no less adequate than that of Sarsefield. These women were ready and officious in their charity, and none of them were prepossessed against the sufferer by a knowledge of his genuine story. Sarsefield, meanwhile, was impatient for my removal to Inglefield's habitation, and that venerable friend was no less impatient to receive me. My hurts were superficial, and my strength sufficiently repaired by a night's repose. Next day I went thither, leaving Clithero to the care of his immediate neighbours. Sarsefield's engagements compelled him to prosecute his journey into Virginia, from which he had somewhat deviated in order to visit Solesbury. He proposed to return in less than a month, and then to take me in his company to New York. He has treated me with paternal tenderness, and insists upon the privilege of consulting for my interest as if he were my real father. Meanwhile these views have been disclosed to Inglefield, and it is with him that I am to remain, with my sisters, until his return. My reflections have been various and tumultuous. They have been busy in relation to you, to Weymouth, and especially to Clithero. The latter, polluted with gore and weakened by abstinence, fatigue, and the loss of blood, appeared in my eyes to be in a much more dangerous condition than the event proved him to be. I was punctually informed of the progress of his cure, and proposed in a few days to visit him. The duty of explaining the truth, respecting the present condition of Mrs. Lorimer, had devolved upon me. By imparting this intelligence, I hoped to work the most auspicious revolutions in his feelings, and prepared, therefore, with alacrity, for an interview. In this hope I was destined to be disappointed. On the morning on which I intended to visit him, a messenger arrived from the house in which he was entertained, and informed us that the family, on entering the sick man's apartment, had found it deserted. It appeared that Clithero had, during the night, risen from his bed and gone secretly forth. No traces of his flight have since been discovered. But, oh, my friend, the death of Waldegrave, thy brother, is at length divested of uncertainty and mystery. Hitherto, I had been able to form no conjecture respecting it; but the solution was found shortly after this time. Queen Mab, three days after my adventure, was seized in her hut on suspicion of having aided and counselled her countrymen in their late depredations. She was not to be awed or intimidated by the treatment she received, but readily confessed and gloried in the mischief she had done, and accounted for it by enumerating the injuries which she had received from her neighbours. These injuries consisted in contemptuous or neglectful treatment, and in the rejection of groundless and absurd claims. The people of Chetasco were less obsequious to her humours than those of Solesbury, her ancient neighbourhood, and her imagination brooded for a long time over nothing but schemes of revenge. She became sullen, irascible, and spent more of her time in solitude than ever. A troop of her countrymen at length visited her hut. Their intentions being hostile, they concealed from the inhabitants their presence in this quarter of the country. Some motives induced them to withdraw and postpone, for the present, the violence which they meditated. One of them, however, more sanguinary and audacious than the rest, would not depart without some gratification of his vengeance. He left his associates and penetrated by night into Solesbury, resolving to attack the first human being whom he should meet. It was the fate of thy unhappy brother to encounter this ruffian, whose sagacity made him forbear to tear away the usual trophy from the dead, lest he should afford grounds for suspicion as to the authors of the evil. Satisfied with this exploit, he rejoined his companions, and, after an interval of three weeks, returned with a more numerous party, to execute a more extensive project of destruction. They were counselled and guided, in all their movements, by Queen Mab, who now explained these particulars and boldly defied her oppressors. Her usual obstinacy and infatuation induced her to remain in her ancient dwelling and prepare to meet the consequences. This disclosure awakened anew all the regrets and anguish which flowed from that disaster. It has been productive, however, of some benefit. Suspicions and doubts, by which my soul was harassed, and which were injurious to the innocent, are now at an end. It is likewise some imperfect consolation to reflect that the assassin has himself been killed, and probably by my own hand. The shedder of blood no longer lives to pursue his vocation, and justice is satisfied. Thus have I fulfilled my promise to compose a minute relation of my sufferings. I remembered my duty to thee, and, as soon as I was able to hold a pen, employed it to inform thee of my welfare. I could not at that time enter into particulars, but reserved a more copious narrative till a period of more health and leisure. On looking back, I am surprised at the length to which my story has run. I thought that a few days would suffice to complete it; but one page has insensibly been added to another, till I have consumed weeks and filled volumes. Here I will draw to a close; I will send you what I have written, and discuss with you in conversation my other immediate concerns, and my schemes for the future. As soon as I have seen Sarsefield, I will visit you. FAREWELL. E. H. SOLESBURY, November 10. Letter I. _To Mr. Sarsefield._ PHILADELPHIA. I came hither but ten minutes ago, and write this letter in the bar of the stage-house. I wish not to lose a moment in informing you of what has happened. I cannot do justice to my own feelings when I reflect upon the rashness of which I have been guilty. I will give you the particulars to-morrow. At present, I shall only say that Clithero is alive, is apprized of your wife's arrival and abode in New York, and has set out with mysterious intentions to visit her. May Heaven avert the consequences of such a design! May you be enabled, by some means, to prevent their meeting! If you cannot prevent it--but I must not reason on such an event, nor lengthen out this letter. E. H. Letter II. _To the Same._ I will now relate the particulars which I yesterday promised to send you. You heard through your niece of my arrival at Inglefield's, in Solesbury: my inquiries, you may readily suppose, would turn upon the fate of my friend's servant Clithero, whose last disappearance was so strange and abrupt, and of whom, since that time, I had heard nothing. You are indifferent to his fate, and are anxious only that his existence and misfortunes may be speedily forgotten. I confess that it is somewhat otherwise with me. I pity him; I wish to relieve him, and cannot admit the belief that his misery is without a cure. I want to find him out. I want to know his condition, and, if possible, to afford him comfort and inspire him with courage and hope. Inglefield replied to my questions:--"Oh yes! He has appeared. The strange being is again upon the stage. Shortly after he left his sick-bed, I heard from Philip Beddington, of Chetasco, that Deb's hut had found a new tenant. At first I imagined that the Scotsman who built it had returned; but, making closer inquiries, I found that the new tenant was my servant. I had no inclination to visit him myself, but frequently inquired respecting him of those who lived or passed that way, and find that he still lives there." "But how!" said I: "what is his mode of subsistence? The winter has been no time for cultivation; and he found, I presume, nothing in the ground." "Deb's hut," replied my friend, "is his lodging and his place of retirement, but food and clothing he procures by labouring on a neighbouring farm. This farm is next to that of Beddington, who consequently knows something of his present situation. I find little or no difference in his present deportment and those appearances which he assumed while living with me, except that he retires every night to his hut, and holds as little intercourse as possible with the rest of mankind. He dines at his employer's table; but his supper, which is nothing but rye-bread, he carries home with him, and, at all those times when disengaged from employment, he secludes himself in his hut, or wanders nobody knows whither." This was the substance of Inglefield's intelligence. I gleaned from it some satisfaction. It proved the condition of Clithero to be less deplorable and desperate than I had previously imagined. His fatal and gloomy thoughts seemed to have somewhat yielded to tranquillity. In the course of my reflections, however, I could not but perceive that his condition, though eligible when compared with what it once was, was likewise disastrous and humiliating, compared with his youthful hopes and his actual merits. For such a one to mope away his life in this unsocial and savage state was deeply to be deplored. It was my duty, if possible, to prevail on him to relinquish his scheme. And what would be requisite, for that end, but to inform him of the truth? The source of his dejection was the groundless belief that he had occasioned the death of his benefactress. It was this alone that could justly produce remorse or grief. It was a distempered imagination both in him and in me that had given birth to this opinion, since the terms of his narrative, impartially considered, were far from implying that catastrophe. To him, however, the evidence which he possessed was incontestable. No deductions from probability could overthrow his belief. This could only be effected by similar and counter evidence. To apprize him that she was now alive, in possession of some degree of happiness, the wife of Sarsefield, and an actual resident on this shore, would dissipate the sanguinary apparition that haunted him, cure his diseased intellects, and restore him to those vocations for which his talents, and that rank in society for which his education, had qualified him. Influenced by these thoughts, I determined to visit his retreat. Being obliged to leave Solesbury the next day, I resolved to set out the same afternoon, and, stopping in Chetasco for the night, seek his habitation at the hour when he had probably retired to it. This was done. I arrived at Beddington's at nightfall. My inquiries respecting Clithero obtained for me the same intelligence from him which I had received from Inglefield. Deb's hut was three miles from this habitation, and thither, when the evening had somewhat advanced, I repaired. This was the spot which had witnessed so many perils during the last year; and my emotions, on approaching it, were awful. With palpitating heart and quick steps I traversed the road, skirted on each side by thickets, and the area before the house. The dwelling was by no means in so ruinous a state as when I last visited it. The crannies between the logs had been filled up, and the light within was perceivable only at a crevice in the door. Looking through this crevice, I perceived a fire in the chimney, but the object of my visit was nowhere to be seen. I knocked and requested admission, but no answer was made. At length I lifted the latch and entered. Nobody was there. It was obvious to suppose that Clithero had gone abroad for a short time, and would speedily return; or perhaps some engagement had detained him at his labour later than usual. I therefore seated myself on some straw near the fire, which, with a woollen rug, appeared to constitute his only bed. The rude bedstead which I formerly met was gone. The slender furniture, likewise, which had then engaged my attention, had disappeared. There was nothing capable of human use but a heap of fagots in the corner, which seemed intended for fuel. How slender is the accommodation which nature has provided for man, and how scanty is the portion which our physical necessities require! While ruminating upon this scene, and comparing past events with the objects before me, the dull whistling of the gale without gave place to the sound of footsteps. Presently the door opened, and Clithero entered the apartment. His aspect and guise were not essentially different from those which he wore when an inhabitant of Solesbury. To find his hearth occupied by another appeared to create the deepest surprise. He looked at me without any tokens of remembrance. His features assumed a more austere expression, and, after scowling on my person for a moment, he withdrew his eyes, and, placing in a corner a bundle which he bore in his hand, he turned and seemed preparing to withdraw. I was anxiously attentive to his demeanour, and, as soon as I perceived his purpose to depart, leaped on my feet to prevent it. I took his hand, and, affectionately pressing it, said, "Do you not know me? Have you so soon forgotten me, who is truly your friend?" He looked at me with some attention, but again withdrew his eyes, and placed himself in silence on the seat which I had left. I seated myself near him, and a pause of mutual silence ensued. My mind was full of the purpose that brought me hither, but I knew not in what manner to communicate my purpose. Several times I opened my lips to speak, but my perplexity continued, and suitable words refused to suggest themselves. At length I said, in a confused tone,-- "I came hither with a view to benefit a man with whose misfortunes his own lips have made me acquainted, and who has awakened in my breast the deepest sympathy. I know the cause and extent of his dejection. I know the event which has given birth to horror and remorse in his heart. He believes that, by his means, his patroness and benefactress has found an untimely death." These words produced a visible shock in my companion, which evinced that I had at least engaged his attention. I proceeded:-- "This unhappy lady was cursed with a wicked and unnatural brother. She conceived a disproportionate affection for this brother, and erroneously imagined that her fate was blended with his, that their lives would necessarily terminate at the same period, and that, therefore, whoever was the contriver of his death was likewise, by a fatal and invincible necessity, the author of her own. "Clithero was her servant, but was raised by her bounty to the station of her son and the rank of her friend. Clithero, in self-defence, took away the life of that unnatural brother, and, in that deed, falsely but cogently believed that he had perpetrated the destruction of his benefactress. "To ascertain the truth, he sought her presence. She was found, the tidings of her brother's death were communicated, and she sank breathless at his feet." At these words Clithero started from the ground, and cast upon me looks of furious indignation. "And come you hither," he muttered, "for this end?--to recount my offences and drive me again to despair?" "No," answered I, with quickness; "I come to outroot a fatal but powerful illusion. I come to assure you that the woman with whose destruction you charge yourself is _not dead_." These words, uttered with the most emphatical solemnity, merely produced looks in which contempt was mingled with anger. He continued silent. "I perceive," resumed I, "that my words are disregarded. Would to Heaven I were able to conquer your incredulity, could show you not only the truth but the probability of my tale! Can you not confide in me? that Euphemia Lorimer is now alive, is happy, is the wife of Sarsefield? that her brother is forgotten and his murderer regarded without enmity or vengeance?" He looked at me with a strange expression of contempt. "Come," said he, at length; "make out thy assertion to be true. Fall on thy knees, and invoke the thunder of Heaven to light on thy head if thy words be false. Swear that Euphemia Lorimer is alive; happy; forgetful of Wiatte and compassionate of me. Swear that thou hast seen her; talked with her; received from her own lips the confession of her pity for him who aimed a dagger at her bosom. Swear that she is Sarsefield's wife." I put my hands together, and, lifting my eyes to heaven, exclaimed, "I comply with your conditions. I call the omniscient God to witness that Euphemia Lorimer is alive; that I have seen her with these eyes; have talked with her; have inhabited the same house for months." These asseverations were listened to with shuddering. He laid not aside, however, an air of incredulity and contempt. "Perhaps," said he, "thou canst point out the place of her abode?--canst guide me to the city, the street, the very door of her habitation?" "I can. She resides at this moment in the city of New York; in Broadway; in a house contiguous to the--." "'Tis well!" exclaimed my companion, in a tone loud, abrupt, and in the utmost degree vehement. "'Tis well! Rash and infatuated youth, thou hast ratified, beyond appeal or forgiveness, thy own doom. Thou hast once more let loose my steps, and sent me on a fearful journey. Thou hast furnished the means of detecting thy imposture. I will fly to the spot which thou describest. I will ascertain thy falsehood with my own eyes. If she be alive, then am I reserved for the performance of a new crime. My evil destiny will have it so. If she be dead, I shall make thee expiate." So saying, he darted through the door, and was gone in a moment beyond my sight and my reach. I ran to the road, looked on every side, and called; but my calls were repeated in vain. He had fled with the swiftness of a deer. My own embarrassment, confusion, and terror were inexpressible. His last words were incoherent. They denoted the tumult and vehemence of frenzy. They intimated his resolution to seek the presence of your wife. I had furnished a clue which could not fail to conduct him to her presence. What might not be dreaded from the interview? Clithero is a maniac. This truth cannot be concealed. Your wife can with difficulty preserve her tranquillity when his image occurs to her remembrance. What must it be when he starts up before her in his neglected and ferocious guise, and armed with purposes perhaps as terrible as those which had formerly led him to her secret chamber and her bedside? His meaning was obscurely conveyed. He talked of a deed for the performance of which his malignant fate had reserved him, which was to ensue their meeting, and which was to afford disastrous testimony of the infatuation which had led me hither. Heaven grant that some means may suggest themselves to you of intercepting his approach! Yet I know not what means can be conceived. Some miraculous chance may befriend you; yet this is scarcely to be hoped. It is a visionary and fantastic base on which to rest our security. I cannot forget that my unfortunate temerity has created this evil. Yet who could foresee this consequence of my intelligence? I imagined that Clithero was merely a victim of erroneous gratitude, a slave of the errors of his education and the prejudices of his rank; that his understanding was deluded by phantoms in the mask of virtue and duty, and not, as you have strenuously maintained, utterly subverted. I shall not escape your censure, but I shall, likewise, gain your compassion. I have erred, not through sinister or malignant intentions, but from the impulse of misguided, indeed, but powerful, benevolence. Letter III. _To Edgar Huntly_. NEW YORK. EDGAR:-- After the fatigues of the day, I returned home. As I entered, my wife was breaking the seal of a letter; but, on seeing me, she forbore, and presented the letter to me. "I saw," said she, "by the superscription of this letter, who the writer was. So, agreeably to your wishes, I proceeded to open it; but you have come just time enough to save me the trouble." This letter was from you. It contained information relative to Clithero. See how imminent a chance it was that saved my wife from a knowledge of its contents! It required all my efforts to hide my perturbation from her and excuse myself from showing her the letter. I know better than you the character of Clithero, and the consequences of a meeting between him and my wife. You may be sure that I would exert myself to prevent a meeting. The method for me to pursue was extremely obvious. Clithero is a madman, whose liberty is dangerous, and who requires to be fettered and imprisoned as the most atrocious criminal. I hastened to the chief-magistrate, who is my friend, and, by proper representations, obtained from him authority to seize Clithero wherever I should meet with him, and effectually debar him from the perpetration of new mischiefs. New York does not afford a place of confinement for lunatics as suitable to his case as Pennsylvania. I was desirous of placing him as far as possible from the place of my wife's residence. Fortunately, there was a packet for Philadelphia on the point of setting out on her voyage. This vessel I engaged to wait a day or two, for the purpose of conveying him to Pennsylvania Hospital. Meanwhile, proper persons were stationed at Powles Hook, and at the quays where the various stage-boats from Jersey arrive. These precautions were effectual. Not many hours after the receipt of your intelligence, this unfortunate man applied for a passage at Elizabethtown, was seized the moment he set his foot on shore, and was forthwith conveyed to the packet, which immediately set sail. I designed that all these proceedings should be concealed from the women, but unfortunately neglected to take suitable measures for hindering the letter, which you gave me reason to expect on the ensuing day, from coming into their hands. It was delivered to my wife in my absence, and opened immediately by her. You know what is, at present, her personal condition. You know what strong reasons I had to prevent any danger or alarm from approaching her. Terror could not assume a shape more ghastly than this. The effects have been what might have been easily predicted. Her own life has been imminently endangered, and an untimely birth has blasted my fondest hope. Her infant, with whose future existence so many pleasures were entwined, is dead. I assure you, Edgar, my philosophy has not found itself lightsome and active under this burden. I find it hard to forbear commenting on your rashness in no very mild terms. You acted in direct opposition to my counsel and to the plainest dictates of propriety. Be more circumspect and more obsequious for the future. You knew the liberty that would be taken of opening my letters; you knew of my absence from home during the greatest part of the day, and the likelihood, therefore, that your letters would fall into my wife's hands before they came into mine. These considerations should have prompted you to send them under cover to Whitworth or Harvey, with directions to give them immediately to me. Some of these events happened in my absence; for I determined to accompany the packet myself, and see the madman safely delivered to the care of the hospital. I will not torture your sensibility by recounting the incidents of his arrest and detention. You will imagine that his strong but perverted reason exclaimed loudly against the injustice of his treatment. It was easy for him to out-reason his antagonist, and nothing but force could subdue his opposition. On me devolved the province of his jailer and his tyrant,--a province which required a heart more steeled by spectacles of suffering and the exercise of cruelty than mine had been. Scarcely had we passed the Narrows, when the lunatic, being suffered to walk the deck, (as no apprehensions were entertained of his escape in such circumstances,) threw himself overboard, with a seeming intention to gain the shore. The boat was immediately manned; the fugitive was pursued; but, at the moment when his flight was overtaken, he forced himself beneath the surface, and was seen no more. With the life of this wretch, let our regrets and our forebodings terminate. He has saved himself from evils for which no time would have provided a remedy, from lingering for years in the noisome dungeon of a hospital. Having no reason to continue my voyage, I put myself on board a coasting-sloop, and regained this city in a few hours. I persuade myself that my wife's indisposition will be temporary. It was impossible to hide from her the death of Clithero, and its circumstances. May this be the last arrow in the quiver of adversity! Farewell. 
20418	----	(This file was produced from images generously made available by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org)) LORDS OF THE NORTH BY A. C. LAUT TORONTO WILLIAM BRIGGS Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred, by WILLIAM BRIGGS, at the Department of Agriculture. [Illustration: LORDS of the NORTH by A. C. LAUT] TO THE Pioneers and their Descendants WHOSE HEROISM WON THE LAND, THIS WORK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED. ACKNOWLEDGMENT. The author desires to express thanks to pioneers and fur traders of the West for information, details and anecdotes bearing on the old life, which are herein embodied; and would also acknowledge the assistance of the history of the North-West Company and manuscripts of the _Bourgeois_, compiled by Senator L. R. Masson; and the value of such early works as those of Dr. George Bryce, Gunn, Hargraves, Ross and others. THE TRAPPER'S DEFIANCE. "The adventurous spirits, who haunted the forest and plain, grew fond of their wild life and affected a great contempt for civilization." You boxed-up, mewed-up artificials, Pent in your piles of mortar and stone, Hugging your finely spun judicials, Adorning externals, externals alone, Vaunting in prideful ostentation Of the Juggernaut car, called Civilization-- What know ye of freedom and life and God? Monkeys, that follow a showman's string, Know more of freedom and less of care, Cage birds, that flutter from perch to ring, Have less of worry and surer fare. Cursing the burdens, yourselves have bound, In a maze of wants, running round and round-- Are ye free men, or manniken slaves? Costly patches, adorning your walls, Are all of earth's beauty ye care to know; But ye strut about in soul-stifled halls To play moth-life by a candle-glow-- What soul has space for upward fling, What manhood room for shoulder-swing, Coffined and cramped from the vasts of God? The Spirit of Life, O atrophied soul, In trappings of ease is not confined; That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined! From hovel-shed come out and be strong! Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong, Of soul-guilt, I charge you as sons of God! INTRODUCTION. I, Rufus Gillespie, trader and clerk for the North-West Company, which ruled over an empire broader than Europe in the beginning of this century, and with Indian allies and its own riotous _Bois-Brulés_, carried war into the very heart of the vast territory claimed by its rivals, the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company, have briefly related a few stirring events of those boisterous days. Should the account here set down be questioned, I appeal for confirmation to that missionary among northern tribes, the famous priest, who is the son of the ill-fated girl stolen by the wandering Iroquois. Lord Selkirk's narration of lawless conflict with the Nor'-Westers and the verbal testimony of Red River settlers, who are still living, will also substantiate what I have stated; though allowance must be made for the violent partisan leaning of witnesses, and from that, I--as a Nor'-Wester--do not claim to be free. On the charges and counter-charges of cruelty bandied between white men and red, I have nothing to say. Remembering how white soldiers from eastern cities took the skin of a native chief for a trophy of victory, and recalling the fiendish glee of Mandanes over a victim, I can only conclude that neither race may blamelessly point the finger of reproach at the other. Any variations in detail from actual occurrences as seen by my own eyes are solely for the purpose of screening living descendants of those whose lives are here portrayed from prying curiosity; but, in truth, many experiences during the thrilling days of the fur companies were far too harrowing for recital. I would fain have tempered some of the incidents herein related to suit the sentiments of a milk-and-water age; but that could be done only at the cost of truth. There is no French strain in my blood, so I have not that passionate devotion to the wild daring of _l'ancien régime_, in which many of my rugged companions under _Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest_ gloried; but he would be very sluggish, indeed, who could not look back with some degree of enthusiasm to the days of gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, in a word, to the workings of the great fur trading companies. Theirs were the trappers and runners, the _Coureurs des Bois_ and _Bois-Brulés_, who traversed the immense solitudes of the pathless west; theirs, the brigades of gay _voyageurs_ chanting hilarious refrains in unison with the rhythmic sweep of paddle blades and following unknown streams until they had explored from St. Lawrence to MacKenzie River; and theirs, the merry lads of the north, blazing a track through the wilderness and leaving from Atlantic to Pacific lonely stockaded fur posts--footprints for the pioneers' guidance. The whitewashed palisades of many little settlements on the rivers and lakes of the far north are poor relics of the fur companies' ancient grandeur. That broad domain stretching from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean, reclaimed from savagery for civilization, is the best monument to the unheralded forerunners of empire. RUFUS GILLESPIE. WINNIPEG--ONE TIME FORT GARRY FORMERLY RED RIVER SETTLEMENT, _19th June, 18--_ Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I. WHEREIN A LAD SEES MAKERS OF HISTORY 9 CHAPTER II. A STRONG MAN IS BOWED 23 CHAPTER III. NOVICE AND EXPERT 38 CHAPTER IV. LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN 55 CHAPTER V. CIVILIZATION'S VENEER RUBS OFF 70 CHAPTER VI. A GIRDLE OF AGATES RECALLED 92 CHAPTER VII. THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL 99 CHAPTER VIII. THE LITTLE STATUE ANIMATE 118 CHAPTER IX. DECORATING A BIT OF STATUARY 131 CHAPTER X. MORE STUDIES IN STATUARY 144 CHAPTER XI. A SHUFFLING OF ALLEGIANCE 163 CHAPTER XII. HOW A YOUTH BECAME A KING 181 CHAPTER XIII. THE BUFFALO HUNT 200 CHAPTER XIV. IN SLIPPERY PLACES 220 CHAPTER XV. THE GOOD WHITE FATHER 234 CHAPTER XVI. LE GRAND DIABLE SENDS BACK OUR MESSENGER 246 CHAPTER XVII. THE PRICE OF BLOOD 253 CHAPTER XVIII. LAPLANTE AND I RENEW ACQUAINTANCE 266 CHAPTER XIX. WHEREIN LOUIS INTRIGUES 281 CHAPTER XX. PLOTS AND COUNTER-PLOTS 297 CHAPTER XXI. LOUIS PAYS ME BACK 313 CHAPTER XXII. A DAY OF RECKONING 327 CHAPTER XXIII. THE IROQUOIS PLAYS HIS LAST CARD 341 CHAPTER XXIV. FORT DOUGLAS CHANGES MASTERS 350 CHAPTER XXV. HIS LORDSHIP TO THE RESCUE 368 CHAPTER XXVI. FATHER HOLLAND AND I IN THE TOILS 378 CHAPTER XXVII. UNDER ONE ROOF 389 CHAPTER XXVIII. THE LAST OF LOUIS' ADVENTURES 409 CHAPTER XXIX. THE PRIEST JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY 433 LORDS OF THE NORTH CHAPTER I WHEREIN A LAD SEES MAKERS OF HISTORY "Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I asked. For an hour, or more, I had been lounging about the sitting-room of a club in Quebec City, waiting for my friend, who had promised to join me at dinner that night. I threw aside a news-sheet, which I had exhausted down to minutest advertisements, stretched myself and strolled across to a group of old fur-traders, retired partners of the North-West Company, who were engaged in heated discussion with some officers from the Citadel. "Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I repeated, indifferent to the merits of their dispute. "That's the tenth time you've asked that question," said my Uncle Jack MacKenzie, looking up sharply, "the tenth time, Sir, by actual count," and he puckered his brows at the interruption, just as he used to when I was a little lad on his knee and chanced to break into one of his hunting stories with a question at the wrong place. "Hang it," drawled Colonel Adderly, a squatty man with an over-fed look on his bulging, red cheeks, "hang it, you don't expect Hamilton? The baby must be teething," and he added more chaff at the expense of my friend, who had been the subject of good-natured banter among club members for devotion to his first-born. I saw Adderly's object was more to get away from the traders' arguments than to answer me; and I returned the insolent challenge of his unconcealed yawn in the faces of the elder men by drawing a chair up to the company of McTavishes and Frobishers and McGillivrays and MacKenzies and other retired veterans of the north country. "I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said I, "what were you saying to Colonel Adderly?" "Talk of your military conquests, Sir," my uncle continued, "Why, Sir, our men have transformed a wilderness into an empire. They have blazed a path from Labrador on the Atlantic to that rock on the Pacific, where my esteemed kinsman, Sir Alexander MacKenzie, left his inscription of discovery. Mark my words, Sir, the day will come when the names of David Thompson and Simon Fraser and Sir Alexander MacKenzie will rank higher in English annals than Braddock's and----" "Egad!" laughed the officer, amused at my uncle, who had been a leading spirit in the North-West Company and whose enthusiasm knew no bounds, "Egad! You gentlemen adventurers wouldn't need to have accomplished much to eclipse Braddock." And he paused with a questioning supercilious smile. "Sir Alexander was a first cousin of yours, was he not?" My uncle flushed hotly. That slighting reference to gentlemen adventurers, with just a perceptible emphasis of the _adventurers_, was not to his taste. "Pardon me, Sir," said he stiffly, "you forget that by the terms of their charter, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company have the privilege of being known as gentlemen adventurers. And by the Lord, Sir, 'tis a gentleman adventurer and nothing else, that stock-jobbing scoundrel of a Selkirk has proved himself! And he, sir, was neither Nor'-Wester, nor Canadian, but an Englishman, like the commander of the Citadel." My uncle puffed out these last words in the nature of a defiance to the English officer, whose cheeks took on a deeper purplish shade; but he returned the charge good-humoredly enough. "Nonsense, MacKenzie, my good friend," laughed he patronizingly, "if the Right Honorable, the Earl of Selkirk, were such an adventurer, why the deuce did the Beaver Club down at Montreal receive him with open mouths and open arms and----" "And open hearts, Sir, you may say," interrupted my Uncle MacKenzie. "And I'd thank you not to 'good-friend' me," he added tartly. Now, the Beaver Club was an organization at Nor'-Westers renowned for its hospitality. Founded in 1785, originally composed of but nineteen members and afterwards extended only to men who had served in the _Pays d'En Haut_, it soon acquired a reputation for entertaining in regal style. Why the vertebrae of colonial gentlemen should sometimes lose the independent, upright rigidity of self-respect on contact with old world nobility, I know not. But instantly, Colonel Adderly's reference to Lord Selkirk and the Beaver Club called up the picture of a banquet in Montreal, when I was a lad of seven, or thereabouts. I had been tricked out in some Highland costume especially pleasing to the Earl--cap, kilts, dirk and all--and was taken by my Uncle Jack MacKenzie to the Beaver Club. Here, in a room, that glittered with lights, was a table steaming with things, which caught and held my boyish eyes; and all about were crowds of guests, gentlemen, who had been invited in the quaint language of the club, "To discuss the merits of bear, beaver and venison." The great Sir Alexander MacKenzie, with his title fresh from the king, and his feat of exploring the river now known by his name and pushing through the mountain fastnesses to the Pacific on all men's lips--was to my Uncle Jack's right. Simon Fraser and David Thompson and other famous explorers, who were heroes to my imagination, were there too. In these men and what they said of their wonderful voyages I was far more interested than in the young, keen-faced man with a tie, that came up in ruffles to his ears, and with an imperial decoration on his breast, which told me he was Lord Selkirk. I remember when the huge salvers and platters were cleared away, I was placed on the table to execute the sword dance. I must have acquitted myself with some credit; for the gentlemen set up a prodigious clapping, though I recall nothing but a snapping of my fingers, a wave of my cap and a whirl of lights and faces around my dizzy head. Then my uncle took me between his knees, promising to let me sit up to the end if I were good, and more wine was passed. "That's enough for you, you young cub," says my kinsman, promptly inverting the wine-glass before me. "O Uncle MacKenzie," said I with a wry face, "do you measure your own wine so?" Whereat, the noble Earl shouted, "Bravo! here's for you, Mr. MacKenzie." And all the gentlemen set up a laugh and my uncle smiled and called to the butler, "Here, Johnson, toddy for one, glass of hot water, pure, for other." But when Johnson brought back the glasses, I observed Uncle MacKenzie kept the toddy. "There, my boy, there's Adam's ale for you," said he, and into the glass of hot water he popped a peppermint lozenge. "Fie!" laughed Sir Alexander to my uncle's right, "Fie to cheat the little man!" "His is the best wine of the cellar," vowed His Lordship; and I drank my peppermint with as much gusto and self-importance as any man of them. Then followed toasts, such a list of toasts as only men inured to tests of strength could take. Ironical toasts to the North-West Passage, whose myth Sir Alexander had dispelled; toasts to the discoverer of the MacKenzie River, which brought storms of applause that shook the house; toasts to "our distinguished guest," whose suave response disarmed all suspicion; toasts to the "Northern winterers," poor devils, who were serving the cause by undergoing a life-long term of Arctic exile; toasts to "the merry lads of the north," who only served in the ranks without attaining to the honor of partnership; toasts enough, in all conscience, to drown the memory of every man present. Thanks to my Uncle Jack MacKenzie, all my toasts were taken in peppermint, and the picture in my mind of that banquet is as clear to-day as it was when I sat at the table. What would I not give to be back at the Beaver Club, living it all over again and hearing Sir Alexander MacKenzie with his flashing hero-eyes and quick, passionate gestures, recounting that wonderful voyage of his with a sulky crew into a region of hostiles; telling of those long interminable winters of Arctic night, when the great explorer sounded the depths of utter despair in service for the company and knew not whether he faced madness or starvation; and thrilling the whole assembly with a description of his first glimpse of the Pacific! Perhaps it was what I heard that night--who can tell--that drew me to the wild life of after years. But I was too young, then, to recognize fully the greatness of those men. Indeed, my country was then and is yet too young; for if their greatness be recognized, it is forgotten and unhonored. I think I must have fallen asleep on my uncle's knee; for I next remember sleepily looking about and noticing that many of the gentlemen had slid down in their chairs and with closed eyes were breathing heavily. Others had slipped to the floor and were sound asleep. This shocked me and I was at once wide awake. My uncle was sitting very erect and his arm around my waist had the tight grasp that usually preceded some sharp rebuke. I looked up and found his face grown suddenly so hard and stern, I was all affright lest my sleeping had offended him. His eyes were fastened on Lord Selkirk with a piercing, angry gaze. His Lordship was not nodding, not a bit of it. How brilliant he seemed to my childish fancy! He was leaning forward, questioning those Nor'-Westers, who had received him with open arms, and open hearts. And the wine had mounted to the head of the good Nor'-Westers and they were now also receiving the strange nobleman with open mouths, pouring out to him a full account of their profits, the extent of the vast, unknown game preserve, and how their methods so far surpassed those of the Hudson's Bay, their rival's stock had fallen in value from 250 to 50 per cent. The more information they gave, the more His Lordship plied them with questions. "I must say," whispered Uncle Jack to Sir Alexander MacKenzie, "if any Hudson's Bay man asked such pointed questions on North-West business, I'd give myself the pleasure of ejecting him from this room." Then, I knew his anger was against Lord Selkirk and not against me for sleeping. "Nonsense," retorted Sir Alexander, who had cut active connection with the Nor'-Westers some years before, "there's no ground for suspicion." But he seemed uneasy at the turn things had taken. "Has your Lordship some colonization scheme that you ask such pointed questions?" demanded my uncle, addressing the Earl. The nobleman turned quickly to him and said something about the Highlanders and Prince Edward's Island, which I did not understand. The rest of that evening fades from my thoughts; for I was carried home in Mr. Jack MacKenzie's arms. And all these things happened some ten or twelve years before that wordy sword-play between this same uncle of mine and the English colonel from the Citadel. "We erred, Sir, through too great hospitality," my uncle was saying to the colonel. "How could we know that Selkirk would purchase controlling interest in Hudson's Bay stock? How could we know he'd secure a land grant in the very heart of our domain?" "I don't object to his land, nor to his colonists, nor to his dower of ponies and muskets and bayonets to every mother's son of them," broke in another of the retired traders, "but I do object to his drilling those same colonists, to his importing a field battery and bringing out that little ram of a McDonell from the Army to egg the settlers on! It's bad enough to pillage our fort; but this proclamation to expel Nor'-Westers from what is claimed as Hudson's Bay Territory----" "Just listen to this," cries my uncle pulling out a copy of the obnoxious proclamation and reading aloud an order for the expulsion of all rivals to the Hudson's Bay Company from the northern territory. "Where can Hamilton be?" said I, losing interest in the traders' quarrel as soon as they went into details. "Home with his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but since marriage, utterly gone to the bad!" "To the what?" I queried, taking him up short. This officer, with the pudding cheeks and patronizing insolence, had a provoking trick of always keeping just inside the bounds of what one might resent. "To the what, did you say Hamilton had gone?" "To the domestics," says he laughing, then to the others, as if he had listened to every word of the explanations, "and if His Little Excellency, Governor MacDonell, by the grace of Lord Selkirk, ruler over gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, expels the good Nor'-Westers from nowhere to somewhere else, what do the good Nor'-Westers intend doing to the Little Tyrant?" "Charles the First him," responds a wag of the club. "Where's your Cromwell?" laughs the colonel. "Our Cromwell's a Cameron, temper of a Lucifer, oaths before action," answers the wag. "Tuts!" exclaims Uncle Jack testily. "We'll settle His Lordship's little martinet of the plains. Warrant for his arrest! Fetch him out!" "Warrant 43rd King George III. will do it," added one of the partners who had looked the matter up. "43rd King George III. doesn't give jurisdiction for trial in Lower Canada, if offense be committed elsewhere," interjects a lawyer with show of importance. "A Daniel come to judgment," laughs the colonel, winking as my uncle's wrath rose. "Pah!" says Mr. Jack MacKenzie in disgust, stamping on the floor with both feet. "You lawyers needn't think you'll have your pickings when fur companies quarrel. We'll ship him out, that's all. Neither of the companies wants to advertise its profits--" "Or its methods--ahem!" interjects the colonel. "And its private business," adds my uncle, looking daggers at Adderly, "by going to court." Then they all rose to go to the dining-room; and as I stepped out to have a look down the street for Hamilton, I heard Colonel Adderly's last fling--"Pretty rascals, you gentlemen adventurers are, so shy and coy about law courts." It was a dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded snow from The Labrador, or sleet from the Gulf. When Eric Hamilton left the Hudson's Bay Company's service at York Factory on Hudson Bay and came to live in Quebec, I was but a student at Laval. It was at my Uncle MacKenzie's that I met the tall, dark, sinewy, taciturn man, whose influence was to play such a strange part in my life; and when these two talked of their adventures in the far, lone land of the north, I could no more conceal my awe-struck admiration than a girl could on first discovering her own charms in a looking-glass. I think he must have noticed my boyish reverence, for once he condescended to ask about the velvet cap and green sash and long blue coat which made up the Laval costume, and in a moment I was talking to him as volubly as if he were the boy and I, the great Hudson's Bay trader. "It makes me feel quite like a boy again," he had said on resuming conversation with Mr. MacKenzie. "By Jove! Sir, I can hardly realize I went into that country a lad of fifteen, like your nephew, and here I am, out of it, an old man." "Pah, Eric man," says my uncle, "you'll be finding a wife one of these days and renewing your youth." "Uncle," I broke out when the Hudson's Bay man had gone home, "how old is Mr. Hamilton?" "Fifteen years older than you are, boy, and I pray Heaven you may have half as much of the man in you at thirty as he has," returns my uncle mentally measuring me with that stern eye of his. At that information, my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. Henceforth, I no longer looked upon Mr. Hamilton with the same awe that a choir boy entertains for a bishop. Something of comradeship sprang up between us, and before that year had passed we were as boon companions as man and boy could be. But Hamilton presently spoiled it all by fulfilling my uncle's prediction and finding a wife, a beautiful, fair-haired, frail slip of a girl, near enough the twenties to patronize me and too much of the young lady to find pleasure in an awkward lad. That meant an end to our rides and walks and sails down the St. Lawrence and long evening talks; but I took my revenge by assuming the airs of a man of forty, at which Hamilton quizzed me not a little and his wife, Miriam, laughed. When I surprised them all by jumping suddenly from boyhood to manhood--"like a tadpole into a mosquito," as my Uncle Jack facetiously remarked. Meanwhile, a son and heir came to my friend's home and I had to be thankful for a humble third place. And so it came that I was waiting for Eric's arrival at the Quebec Club that night, peering from the porch for sight of him and calculating how long it would take to ride from the Chateau Bigot above Charlesbourg, where he was staying. Stepping outside, I was surprised to see the form of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway; and my surprise increased on nearer inspection. As I walked up, the creature gave a whinny and I recognized Hamilton's horse, lathered with sweat, unblanketed and shivering. The possibility of an accident hardly suggested itself before I observed the bridle-rein had been slung over the hitching-post and heard steps hurrying to the side door of the club-house. "Is that you, Eric?" I called. There was no answer; so I led the horse to the stable boy and hurried back to see if Hamilton were inside. The sitting room was deserted; but Eric's well-known, tall figure was entering the dining-room. And a curious figure he presented to the questioning looks of the club men. In one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves. He wore the buckskin coat of a trapper and in the belt were two pistols. One sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow and his boots were scratched as if they had been combed by an iron rake. His broad-brimmed hat was still on, slouched down over his eyes like that of a scout. "Gad! Hamilton," exclaimed Uncle Jack MacKenzie, who was facing Eric as I came up behind, "have you been in a race or a fight?" and he gave him the look of suspicion one might give an intoxicated man. "Is it a cold night?" asked the colonel punctiliously, gazing hard at the still-strapped hat. Not a word came from Hamilton. "How's the cold in your head?" continued Adderly, pompously trying to stare Hamilton's hat off. "Here I am, old man! What's kept you?" and I rushed forward but quickly checked myself; for Hamilton turned slowly towards me and instead of erect bearing, clear glance, firm mouth, I saw a head that was bowed, eyes that burned like fire, and parched, parted, wordless lips. If the colonel had not been stuffing himself like the turkey guzzler that he was, he would have seen something unspeakably terrible written on Hamilton's silent face. "Did the little wifie let him off for a night's play?" sneered Adderly. Barely were the words out, when Hamilton's teeth clenched behind the open lips, giving him an ugly, furious expression, strange to his face. He took a quick stride towards the officer, raised his whip and brought it down with the full strength of his shoulder in one cutting blow across the baggy, purplish cheeks of the insolent speaker. CHAPTER II A STRONG MAN IS BOWED The whole thing was so unexpected that for one moment not a man in the room drew breath. Then the colonel sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush, and a dozen club members were pulling him back from Eric. "Eric Hamilton, are you mad?" I cried. "What do you mean?" But Hamilton stood motionless as if he saw none of us. Except that his breath was labored, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air he had on entering the club. "Hold back!" I implored; for Adderly was striking right and left to get free from the men. "Hold back! There's a mistake! Something's wrong!" "Reptile!" roared the colonel. "Cowardly reptile, you shall pay for this!" "There's a mistake," I shouted, above the clamor of exclamations. "Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same," whispered Uncle Jack MacKenzie in my ear, "but get him out of this. Drunk--or a scandal," says my uncle, who always expressed himself in explosives when excited. "Side room--here--lead him in--drunk--by Jove--drunk!" "Never," I returned passionately. I knew both Hamilton and his wife too well to tolerate either insinuation. But we led him like a dazed being into a side office, where Mr. Jack MacKenzie promptly turned the key and took up a posture with his back against the door. "Now, Sir," he broke out sternly, "if it's neither drink, nor a scandal----" There, he stopped; for Hamilton, utterly unconscious of us, moved, rather than walked, automatically across the room. Throwing his hat down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantel-piece. My uncle and I looked from the silent man to each other. Raising his brows in question, Mr. Jack MacKenzie touched his forehead and whispered across to me--"Mad?" At that, though the word was spoken barely above a breath, Eric turned slowly round and faced us with blood-shot, gleaming eyes. He made as though he would speak, sank into the armchair before the grate and pressed both hands against his forehead. "Mad," he repeated in a voice low as a moan, framing his words slowly and with great effort. "By Jove, men, you should know me better than to mouth such rot under your breath. To-night, I'd sell my soul, sell my soul to be mad, really mad, to know that all I think has happened, hadn't happened at all--" and his speech was broken by a sharp intake of breath. "Out with it, man, for the Lord's sake," shouted my uncle, now convinced that Eric was not drunk and jumping to conclusions--as he was wont to do when excited--regarding a possible scandal. "Out with it, man! We'll stand by you! Has that blasted red-faced turkey----" "Pray, spare your histrionics, for the present," Eric cut in with the icy self-possession bred by a lifetime's danger, dispelling my uncle's second suspicion with a quiet scorn that revealed nothing. "What the----" began my kinsman, "what did you strike him for?" "Did I strike somebody?" asked Hamilton absently. Again my uncle flashed a questioning look at me, but this time his face showed his conviction so plainly no word was needed. "Did I strike somebody? Wish you'd apologize----" "Apologize!" thundered my uncle. "I'll do nothing of the kind. Served him right. 'Twas a pretty way, a pretty way, indeed, to speak of any man's wife----" But the word "wife" had not been uttered before Eric threw out his hands in an imploring gesture. "Don't!" he cried out sharply in the suffering tone of a man under the operating knife. "Don't! It all comes back! It is true! It is true! I can't get away from it! It is no nightmare. My God, men, how can I tell you? There's no way of saying it! It is impossible--preposterous--some monstrous joke--it's quite impossible I tell you--it couldn't have happened--such things don't happen--couldn't happen--to her--of all women! But she's gone--she's gone----" "See here, Hamilton," cried my uncle, utterly beside himself with excitement, "are we to understand you are talking of your wife, or--or some other woman?" "See here, Hamilton," I reiterated, quite heedless of the brutality of our questions and with a thousand wild suspicions flashing into my mind. "Is it your wife, Miriam, and your boy?" But he heard neither of us. "They were there--they waved to me from the garden at the edge of the woods as I entered the forest. Only this morning, both waving to me as I rode away--and when I returned from the city at noon, they were gone! I looked to the window as I came back. The curtain moved and I thought my boy was hiding, but it was only the wind. We've searched every nook from cellar to attic. His toys were littered about and I fancied I heard his voice everywhere, but no! No--no--and we've been hunting house and garden for hours----" "And the forest?" questioned Uncle Jack, the trapper instinct of former days suddenly re-awakening. "The forest is waist-deep with snow! Besides we beat through the bush everywhere, and there wasn't a track, nor broken twig, where they could have passed." His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search. "Nonsense," my uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. "They've been driven to town without leaving word!" "No sleigh was at Chateau Bigot this morning," returned Hamilton. "But the road, Eric?" I questioned, recalling how the old manor-house stood well back in the center of a cleared plateau in the forest. "Couldn't they have gone down the road to those Indian encampments?" "The road is impassable for sleighs, let alone walking, and their winter wraps are all in the house. For Heaven's sake, men, suggest something! Don't madden me with these useless questions!" But in spite of Eric's entreaty my excitable kinsman subjected the frenzied man to such a fire of questions as might have sublimated pre-natal knowledge. And I stood back listening and pieced the distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency till the whole tragic scene at the Chateau on that spring day of the year 1815, became ineffaceably stamped on my memory. Causeless, with neither warning nor the slightest premonition of danger, the greatest curse which can befall a man came upon my friend Eric Hamilton. However fond a husband may be, there are things worse for his wife than death which he may well dread, and it was one of these tragedies which almost drove poor Hamilton out of his reason and changed the whole course of my own life. In broad daylight, his young wife and infant son disappeared as suddenly and completely as if blotted out of existence. That morning, Eric light-heartedly kissed wife and child good-by and waved them a farewell that was to be the last. He rode down the winding forest path to Quebec and they stood where the Chateau garden merged into the forest of Charlesbourg Mountain. At noon, when he returned, for him there existed neither wife nor child. For any trace of them that could be found, both might have been supernaturally spirited away. The great house, that had re-echoed to the boy's prattle, was deathly still; and neither wife, nor child, answered his call. The nurse was summoned. She was positive _Madame_ was amusing the boy across the hall, and reassuringly bustled off to find mother and son in the next room, and the next, and yet the next; to discover each in succession empty. Alarm spread to the Chateau servants. The simple _habitant_ maids were questioned, but their only response was white-faced, blank amazement. _Madame_ not returned! _Madame_ not back! Mon Dieu! What had happened? And all the superstition of hillside lore added to the fear on each anxious face. Shortly after Monsieur went to the city, _Madame_ had taken her little son out as usual for a morning airing, and had been seen walking up and down the paths tracked through the garden snow. Had _Monsieur_ examined the clearing between the house and the forest? _Monsieur_ could see for himself the snow was too deep and crusty among the trees for _Madame_ to go twenty paces into the woods. Besides, foot-marks could be traced from the garden to the bush. He need not fear wild animals. They were receding into the mountains as spring advanced. Let him take another look about the open; and Hamilton tore out-doors, followed by the whole household; but from the Chateau in the center of the glade to the encircling border of snow-laden evergreens there was no trace of wife or child. Then Eric laughed at his own growing fears. Miriam must be in the house. So the search of the old hall, that had once resounded to the drunken tread of gay French grandees, began again. From hidden chamber in the vaulted cellar to attic rooms above, not a corner of the Chateau was left unexplored. Had any one come and driven her to the city? But that was impossible. The roads were drifted the height of a horse and there were no marks of sleigh runners on either side of the riding path. Could she possibly have ventured a few yards down the main road to an encampment of Indians, whose squaws after Indian custom made much of the white baby? Neither did that suggestion bring relief; for the Indians had broken camp early in the morning and there was only a dirty patch of littered snow, where the wigwams had been. The alarm now became a panic. Hamilton, half-crazed and unable to believe his own senses, began wondering whether he had nightmare. He thought he might waken up presently and find the dead weight smothering his chest had been the boy snuggling close. He was vaguely conscious it was strange of him to continue sleeping with that noise of shouting men and whining hounds and snapping branches going on in the forest. The child's lightest cry generally broke the spell of a nightmare; but the din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the white hills convinced him this was no dream-land. Then, the distinct crackle of trampled brushwood and the scratch of spines across his face called him back to an unendurable reality. "The thing is utterly impossible, Hamilton," I cried, when in short jerky sentences, as if afraid to give thought rein, he had answered my uncle's questioning. "Impossible! Utterly impossible!" "I would to God it were!" he moaned. "It was daylight, Eric?" asked Mr. Jack MacKenzie. He nodded moodily. "And she couldn't be lost in Charlesbourg forest?" I added, taking up the interrogations where my uncle left off. "No trace--not a footprint!" "And you're quite sure she isn't in the house?" replied my relative. "Quite!" he answered passionately. "And there was an Indian encampment a few yards down the road?" continued Mr. MacKenzie, undeterred. "Oh! What has that to do with it?" he asked petulantly, springing to his feet. "They'd moved off long before I went back. Besides, Indians don't run off with white women. Haven't I spent my life among them? I should know their ways!" "But my dear fellow!" responded the elder trader, "so do I know their ways. If she isn't in the Chateau and isn't in the woods and isn't in the garden, can't you see, the Indian encampment is the only possible explanation?" The lines on his face deepened. Fire flashed from his gleaming eyes, and if ever I have seen murder written on the countenance of man, it was on Hamilton's. "What tribe were they, anyway?" I asked, trying to speak indifferently, for every question was knife-play on a wound. "Mongrel curs, neither one thing nor the other, Iroquois canoemen, French half-breeds intermarried with Sioux squaws! They're all connected with the North-West Company's crews. The Nor'-Westers leave here for Fort William when the ice breaks up. This riff-raff will follow in their own dug-outs!" "Know any of them?" persisted my uncle. "No, I don't think I--Let me see! By Jove! Yes, Gillespie!" he shouted, "Le Grand Diable was among them!" "What about Diable?" I asked, pinning him down to the subject, for his mind was lost in angry memories. "What about him? He's my one enemy among the Indians," he answered in tones thick and ominously low. "I thrashed him within an inch of his life at Isle à la Crosse. Being a Nor'-Wester, he thought it fine game to pillage the kit of a Hudson's Bay; so he stole a silver-mounted fowling-piece which my grandfather had at Culloden. By Jove, Gillespie! The Nor'-Westers have a deal of blood to answer for, stirring up those Indians against traders; and if they've brought this on me----" "Did you get it back?" I interrupted, referring to the fowling-piece, neither my uncle, nor I, offering any defense for the Nor'-Westers. I knew there were two sides to this complaint from a Hudson's Bay man. "No! That's why I nearly finished him; but the more I clubbed, the more he jabbered impertinence, '_Cooloo! cooloo! qu' importe!_ It doesn't matter!' By Jove! I made it matter!" "Is that all about Diable, Eric?" continued my uncle. He ran his fingers distractedly back through his long, black hair, rose, and, coming over to me, laid a trembling hand on each shoulder. "Gillespie!" he muttered through hard-set teeth. "It isn't all. I didn't think at the time, but the morning after the row with that red devil I found a dagger stuck on the outside of my hut-door. The point was through a fresh sprouted leaflet. A withered twig hung over the blade." "Man! Are you mad?" cried Jack MacKenzie. "He must be the very devil himself. You weren't married then--He couldn't mean----" "I thought it was an Indian threat," interjected Hamilton, "that if I had downed him in the fall, when the branches were bare, he meant to have his revenge in spring when the leaves were green; but you know I left the country that fall." "You were wrong, Eric!" I blurted out impetuously, the terrible significance of that threat dawning upon me. "That wasn't the meaning at all." Then I stopped; for Hamilton was like a palsied man, and no one asked what those tokens of a leaflet pierced by a dagger and an old branch hanging to the knife might mean. Mr. Jack MacKenzie was the first to pull himself together. "Come," he shouted. "Gather up your wits! To the camping ground!" and he threw open the door. Thereupon, we three flung through the club-room to the astonishment of the gossips, who had been waiting outside for developments in the quarrel with Colonel Adderly. At the outer porch, Hamilton laid a hand on Mr. MacKenzie's shoulder. "Don't come," he begged hurriedly. "There's a storm blowing. It's rough weather, and a rough road, full of drifts! Make my peace with the man I struck." Then Eric and I whisked out into the blackness of a boisterous, windy night. A moment later, our horses were dashing over iced cobble-stones with the clatter of pistol-shots. "It will snow," said I, feeling a few flakes driven through the darkness against my face; but to this remark Hamilton was heedless. "It will snow, Eric," I repeated. "The wind's veered north. We must get out to the camp before all traces are covered. How far by the Beauport road?" "Five miles," said he, and I knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into raw sides. We turned down that steep, break-neck, tortuous street leading from Upper Town to the valley of the St. Charles. The wet thaw of mid-day had frozen and the road was slippery as a toboggan slide. We reined our horses in tightly, to prevent a perilous stumbling of fore-feet, and by zigzagging from side to side managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall. Here, we again gave them the bit; and we were presently thundering across the bridge in a way that brought the keeper out cursing and yelling for his toll. I tossed a coin over my shoulder and we galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that Charlesbourg retreat, where French Bacchanalians caroused before the British conquest, passed the thatch-roofed cots of _habitants_ and, turning suddenly to the right, followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily. Here we had to slacken pace, our beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows like a modern snow-plow. Hamilton had spoken not a word. Clouds were massing on the north. Overhead a few stars glittered against the black, and the angry wind had the most mournful wail I have ever heard. How the weird undertones came like the cries of a tortured child, and the loud gusts with the shriek of demons! "Gillespie," called Eric's voice tremulous with anguish, "listen--Rufus--listen! Do you hear anything? Do you hear any one calling for help? Is that a child crying?" "No, Eric, old man," said I, shivering in my saddle. "I hear--I hear nothing at all but the wind." But my hesitancy belied the truth of that answer; for we both heard sounds, which no one can interpret but he whose well beloved is lost in the storm. And the wind burst upon us again, catching my empty denial and tossing the words to upper air with eldritch laughter. Then there was a lull, and I felt rather than heard the choking back of stifled moans and knew that the man by my side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving vent to grief in the blackness of night. At last a red light gleamed from the window of a low cot. That was the signal for us to turn abruptly to the left, entering the forest by a narrow bridle-path that twisted among the cedars. As if to look down in pity, the moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and all the snow-laden evergreens stood out stately, shadowy and spectral, like mourners for the dead. Again the road took to right-about at a sharp angle and the broad Chateau, with its noble portico and numerous windows all alight, suddenly loomed up in the center of a forest-clearing on the mountain side. Where the path to the garden crossed a frozen stream was a small open space. Here the Indians had been encamped. We hallooed for servants and by lantern light examined every square inch of the smoked snow and rubbish heaps. Bits of tin in profusion, stones for the fire, tent canvas, ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch. Snow was beginning to fall heavily in great flakes that obscured earth and air. Not a thing had we found to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until I caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal. Kicking the tin aside, I caught the ribbon up. When I saw on the lower end a child's finely beaded moccasin, I confess I had rather felt the point of Le Grand Diable's dagger at my own heart than have shown that simple thing to Hamilton. Then the snow-storm broke upon us in white billows blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. All night long Eric and I sat before the roaring grate fire of the hunting-room, he leaning forward with chin in his palms and saying few words, I offering futile suggestions and uttering mad threats, but both utterly at a loss what to do. We knew enough of Indian character to know what not to do. That was, raise an outcry, which might hasten the cruelty of Le Grand Diable. CHAPTER III. NOVICE AND EXPERT. Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant furies, rushed with the boom of a sea through the cedars and pines, and tore up the mountain slope till all the many voices of the forest were echoing back a thousand tumultuous discords. Again, I see Hamilton gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire, as if their frenzied motion reflected something of his own burning grief. Then, the agony of our utter helplessness, as long as the storm raged, would prove too great for his self-control. Rising, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room till his eye would be caught by some object with which the boy had played. He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. Afterwards, lanterns, which we had placed on the oak center table on coming in, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and each of us involuntarily walked across to a window and drew aside the curtains to see how daylight was coming on. The white glare of early morning flooded the room, but the snow-storm had changed to driving sleet and the panes were iced from corner to corner with frozen rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet and reflecting a white dazzle that made one's eyes blink. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines and snow was wreathed in fantastic forms among the cedars. We had laid our plans while we waited. After lifting the canvas from the camping-ground and seeking in vain for more trace of the fugitives, we despatched a dozen different search-parties that very morning, Eric leading those who were to go on the river-side of the Chateau, and I some well-trained bushrangers picked from the _habitants_ of the hillside, who could track the forest to every Indian haunt within a week's march of the city. After putting my men on a trail with instructions to send back an Indian courier to report each night, I hunted up an old _habitant_ guide, named Paul Larocque, who had often helped me to thread the woods of Quebec after big game. Now Paul was habitually as silent as a dumb animal, and sportsmen had nicknamed him The Mute; but what he lacked in speech he made up like other wild creatures in a wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. Indeed, it was commonly believed among trappers that Paul possessed some nameless sense by which he could actually _feel_ the presence of an enemy before ordinary men could either see, or hear. For my part, I would be willing to pit that "feel" of Paul's against the nose of any hound that dog-fanciers could back. "Paul," said I, as the _habitant_ stood before me licking the short stem of an inverted clay pipe, "there's an Indian, a bad Indian, an Iroquois, Paul,"--I was particular in describing the Indian as an Iroquois, for Paul's wife was a Huron from Lorette--"An Iroquois, who stole a white woman and a little boy from the Chateau three days ago, in the morning." There, I paused to let the facts soak in; for The Mute digested information in small morsels. Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure which fancy has painted of his class. Instead of the red toque, which artists place on the heads of _habitants_, he wore a cloth cap with ear flaps coming down to be tied under his chin. His jacket was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do man, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above brightly beaded moccasins. When I paused, Paul fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated. Then he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf, that held them to his waist, tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for me to go on. "That Iroquois, who belongs to the North-West trappers----" "_Pays d'En Haut?_" asks Paul, speaking for the first time. "Yes," I answered, "and they all disappeared with the woman and the child the day before the storm." The Mute's eyes were back on the snow. "Now," said I, "I'll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the place where he's hiding." Paul's eyes looked up with the question of how much. "Five pounds a day." This was four more than we paid for the cariboo hunts. Again he stood thinking, then darted off into the forest like a hare; but I knew his strange, silent ways, and confidently awaited his return. How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods; but he was back again all equipped for a long tramp, and as soon as I had laced on the racquets, we were skimming over the drift like a boat on billows. In the mazy confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Paul would have found and kept that tangled, forest path. Where great trunks had fallen across the way, Paul planted his pole and took the barrier at a bound. Then he raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot common to the _coureurs-des-bois_. The encased branches snapped like glass when we brushed past, and so heavily were snow and icicles frozen to the trees we might have been in some grotesque crystal-walled cavern. The _habitant_ spoke not a word, but on we pressed over the brushwood, now so packed with snow and crusted ice, our snow-shoes were not once tripped by loose branches, and we glided from drift to drift. In vain I tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, and I noticed that my guide was keeping his course by following the marks blazed on trees. At one place we came to a steep, clear slope, where the earth had fallen sheer away from the hillside and snow had filled the incline. First prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid, Paul promptly sat down on the rear end of his snow-shoes, and, quicker than I can tell it, tobogganed down to the valley. I came leaping clumsily from point to point with my pole, like a ski-jumping Norwegian, risking my neck at every bound. Then we coursed along the valley, the _habitant's_ eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were over a prospect of sugaring-off in the maple-woods, or at some foolish _habitant_ who had tapped the maple too early. How often had I known my guide to exhaust city athletes in these swift marches of his! But I had been schooled to his pace from boyhood and kept up with him at every step, though we were going so fast I lost all track of my bearings. "Where to, Paul?" I asked with a vague suspicion that we were heading for the Huron village at Lorette. "To Lorette, Paul?" But Paul condescended only a grunt and whisked suddenly round a headland up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the mountains and might have sheltered any number of fugitives. In the gorge we stopped to take a light meal of gingerbread horses--a cake that is the peculiar glory of the _habitant_--dried herrings and sea biscuits. By the sun, I knew it was long past noon and that we had been traveling northwest. I also vaguely guessed that Paul's object was to intercept the North-West trappers, if they had planned to slip away from the St. Lawrence through the bush to the Upper Ottawa, where they could meet north-bound boats. But not one syllable had my taciturn guide uttered. Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, we found ourselves in the upper reaches of a mountain, where the trees fell away in scraggy clumps and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the hill-crest. Paul grunted, licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to the hill-top. The dark peak of a solitary wigwam appeared above the snow. He pointed again to the fringe of woods below us. A dozen wigwams were visible among the trees and smoke curled up from a central camp-fire. "_Voilà, Monsieur?_" said the _habitant_, which made four words for that day. The Mute then fell to my rear and we first approached the general camp. The campers were evidently thieves as well as hunters; for frozen pork hung with venison from the branches of several trees. The sap trough might also have belonged to them, which would explain Paul's laugh, as the whole paraphernalia of a sugaring-off was on the outskirts of the encampment. "Not the Indians we're after," said I, noting the signs of permanency; but Paul Larocque shoved me forward with the end of his pole and a curious, almost intelligent, expression came on the dull, pock-pitted face. Strangely enough, as I looked over my shoulder to the guide, I caught sight of an Indian figure climbing up the bank in our very tracks. The significance of this incident was to reveal itself later. As usual, a pack of savage dogs flew out to announce our coming with furious barking. But I declare the _habitant_ was so much like any ragged Indian, the creatures recognized him and left off their vicious snarl. Only the shrill-voiced children, who rushed from the wigwams; evinced either surprise or interest in our arrival. Men and women were haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, lay in all variety of lazy attitudes on buffalo robes and caribou skins. I had known, as every one familiar with Quebec's family histories must know, that the sons of old seigneurs sometimes inherited the adventurous spirit, which led their ancestors of three centuries ago to exchange the gayeties of the French court for the wild life of the new world. I was aware this spirit frequently transformed seigneurs into bush-rangers and descendants of the royal blood into _coureurs-des-bois_. But it is one thing to know a fact, another to see that fact in living embodiment; and in this case, the living embodiment was Louis Laplante, a school-fellow of Laval, whom, to my amazement, I now saw, with a beard of some months' growth and clad in buckskin, lying at full length on his back among that villainous band of nondescript trappers. Something of the surprise I felt must have shown on my face, for as Louis recognized me he uttered a shout of laughter. "Hullo, Gillespie!" he called with the saucy nonchalance which made him both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the prophets?" and he sat up making room for me on his buffalo robe. "I'll wager, Louis," said I, shaking his hand heartily and accepting the proffered seat, "I'll wager it's prophets spelt with an 'f' brings you here." For the young rake had been one of the most notorious borrowers at the seminary. "Good boy!" laughed he, giving my shoulder a clap. "I see your time was not wasted with me. Now, what the devil," he asked as I surveyed the motley throng of fat, coarse-faced squaws and hard-looking men who surrounded him, "now, what the devil's brought you here?" "What's the same, to yourself, Louis lad?" said I. He laughed the merry, heedless laugh that had been the distraction of the class-room. "Do you need to ask with such a galaxy of nut-brown maidens?" and Louis looked with the assurance of privileged impudence straight across the fire into the hideous, angry face of a big squaw, who was glaring at me. The creature was one to command attention. She might have been a great, bronze statue, a type of some ancient goddess, a symbol of fury, or cruelty. Her eyes fastened themselves on mine and held me, whether I would or no, while her whole face darkened. "The lady evidently objects to having her place usurped, Louis," I remarked, for he was watching the silent duel between the native woman's questioning eyes and mine. "The gentleman wants to know if the lady objects to having her place usurped?" called Louis to the squaw. At that the woman flinched and looked to Laplante. Of course, she did not understand our words; but I think she was suspicious we were laughing at her. There was a vindictive flash across her face, then the usual impenetrable expression of the Indian came over her features. I noticed that her cheeks and forehead were scarred, and a cut had laid open her upper lip from nose to teeth. "You must know that the lady is the daughter of a chief and a fighter," whispered Louis in my ear. I might have known she was above common rank from the extraordinary number of trinkets she wore. Pendants hung from her ears like the pendulum of a clock. She had a double necklace of polished bear's claws and around her waist was a girdle of agates, which to me proclaimed that she was of a far-western tribe. In the girdle was an ivory-handled knife, which had doubtless given as many scars as its owner displayed. "What tribe, Louis?" I asked. "I'll be hanged, now, if I'm not jealous," he began. "You'll stare the lady out of countenance----" But at this moment the Indian who had come up the bank behind us came round and interrupted Laplante's merriment by tossing a piece of bethumbed paper between my comrade's knees. "The deuce!" exclaimed Louis, bulging his tongue into one cheek and glancing at me with a queer, quizzical look as he unfolded and read the paper. If he had not spoken I might not have turned; but having turned I could not but notice two things. Louis jerked back from me, as if I might try to read the soiled note in his hand, and in raising the paper displayed on the back the stamp of the commissariat department from Quebec Citadel. Neither Laplante's suppressed surprise, nor my observations of his movement, escaped the big squaw. She came quickly round the fire to us both. "Give me that," she commanded, holding out her hand to the French youth. "The deuce I will," he returned, twisting the paper up in his clenched fist. Half in jest, half in earnest, just as Louis used to be punished at the seminary, she gave him a prompt box on the ear. He took it in perfect good-nature. And the whole encampment laughed. The squaw went back to the other side of the fire. Laplante leaned forward and threw the paper towards the flames; but without his knowledge, he overshot the mark; and when the trader was looking elsewhere the big squaw stooped, picked up the coveted note and slipped it into her skirt pocket. "Now, Louis, nonsense aside," I began. "With all my soul, if I have one," said he, lying back languidly with a perceptible cooling of the cordiality he had first evinced. I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every wigwam for trace of the lost woman and child. He listened with shut eyes. "It isn't," I explained in a low voice, eager to arouse his interest, "it isn't in the least, Laplante, that we suspect these people; but you know the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to your people----" "Oh! Go ahead!" he interjected impatiently. "Don't beat round the bush! What do you want of me?" "To go through the tents with me and help me. By Jove! Laplante! I thought at least a spark of the man would suggest that without my speaking," I broke out hotly. He was on his feet with an alacrity that brought old Paul Larocque round to my side and the squaw to his. "Curse you," he cried out roughly, shoving the squaw back. For a moment I was uncertain whether he were addressing the woman or myself. "You mind your own business and go to your Indian! Here, Gillespie, I'll do the tents with you. Get off with you," he muttered at the squaw, rumbling out a lingo of persuasive expletives; and he led the way to the first wigwam. But the squaw was not to be dismissed; for when I followed the Frenchman, she closed in behind looking thunder, not at her abuser, but at me; and The Mute, fearing foul play and pole in hand, loyally brought up the rear of our strange procession. I shall not retail that search through robes and skins and blankets and boxes, in foul-smelling, vermin-infested wigwams. It was fruitless. I only recall the lowering face of the big squaw looking over my shoulder at every turn, with heavy brows contracted and gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious challenge. I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory handle in the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole. Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the squaw on the other. "And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill. The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching. Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether he would or no, just as she had mine. "Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting possession of me. "Why don't you answer?" The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile. "You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't lead you into it." "Well?" I demanded. "Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why we're all here. You must go. It is not safe." "Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand when I made to take leave. "Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of the valley. Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this century. The _habitant_ is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within a mile of the pest tent? It would be more like Indian character to reverse Samaritan practises and leave the victim to die. This man might, of course, be a French-Canadian trapper, but I would take no risks of a trick, so I ordered Paul to lead me back to that tepee. The Mute seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers. He skirted round the base of the hill till we were on the side remote from the tribe. Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he scrambled up the cliff to reconnoitre. I knew he received a surprise as soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank; for he curled himself up behind a snow-pile and gave a low whistle for me. I was beside him with one bound. We were not twenty pole-lengths from the wigwam. There was no appearance of life. The tent flaps had been laced up and a solitary watch-dog was tied to a stake before the entrance. Down the valley the setting sun shone through the naked trees like a wall of fire, and dyed all the glistening snow-drifts primrose and opal. At one place in the forest the red light burst through and struck against the tent on the hill-top, giving the skins a peculiar appearance of being streaked with blood. The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh of moving air-currents peculiar to snow-padded areas, came up from the woods with far-away echoes of the trappers' voices. Perhaps this was heard by the watch-dog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of my half-wild _habitant_ guide; for it sat back on its haunches and throwing up its head, let out the most doleful howlings imaginable. "Oh! _Monsieur_," shuddered out the superstitious habitant shivering like an aspen leaf, "sick man moan,--moan,--moan hard! He die, _Monsieur_, he die, he die now when dog cry lak dat," and full of fear he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent gestures for me to follow. For a time--but not long, I must acknowledge--I lay there alone, watching and listening. Paul's ears might hear the moans of a sick man, mine could not: nor would I return to the Chateau without ascertaining for a certainty what was in that wigwam. Slipping off the snow-shoes, I rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the dog with my pole; but I was suddenly arrested by the distinct sound of pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper, popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect English--"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!" "Who has smallpox?" I bawled back. "A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it on the snow and I'll come for it." As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions like those of my _habitant_ guide, which instinctively put out feelers with the caution of an insect's antennæ for the presence of vague, unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one missing factor--Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when he opened his lips to me. CHAPTER IV LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN "You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my experience with the campers; and was recounting how the man put his head out of the tent and warned me of smallpox. But my uncle was a gentleman of the old school and had a fine contempt for quarantine. "Knocked his head off, knocked his head off, Sir," he continued, explosively. "Make it a point to knock the head off anything that stands in your way, Sir----" "But you don't suppose," I expostulated, about to voice my own suspicions. "_Suppose!_" he roared out. "I make it a point never to _suppose_ anything. I act on facts, Sir! You wanted to go into that wigwam; didn't you? Well then, why the deuce didn't you go, and knock the head off anything that opposed you?" Being highly successful in all his own dealings, Mr. Jack MacKenzie could not tolerate failure in other people. A month of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Miriam and the child; and this fact ignited all the gunpowder of my uncle's fiery temperament. We had felt so sure Le Grand Diable's band of vagabonds would hang about till the brigades of the North-West Company's tripmen set out for the north, all our efforts were spent in a vain search for some trace of the rascals in the vicinity of Quebec. His gypsy nondescripts would hardly dare to keep the things taken from Miriam and the child. These would be traded to other tribes; so day and night, Mr. MacKenzie, Eric and I, with hired spies, dogged the footsteps of trappers, who were awaiting the breaking up of the ice; shadowed _voyageurs_, who passed idle days in the dram-shops of Lower Town, and scrutinized every native who crossed our path, ever on the alert for a glimpse of Diable, or his associates. Diligently we tracked all Indian trails through Charlesbourg forest and examined every wigwam within a week's march of the city. Le Grand Diable was not likely to be among his ancestral enemies at Lorette, but his half-breed followers might have traded with the Hurons; and the lodges at Lorette were also searched. Watches were set along the St. Lawrence, so no one could approach an opening before the ice broke up, or launch a canoe after the water had cleared, without our knowledge. But Le Grand Diable and his band had vanished as mysteriously as Miriam. It was as impossible to learn where the Iroquois had gone as to follow the wind. His disappearance was altogether as unaccountable as the lost woman's, and this, of itself, confirmed our suspicions. Had he sold, or slain his captives, he would not have remained in hiding; and the very fruitlessness of the search redoubled our zeal. The conviction that Louis Laplante had, somehow or other, played me false, stuck in my mind like the depression of a bad dream. Again and again, I related the circumstances to my uncle; but he "pished," and "tushed," and "pooh-poohed," the very idea of any kidnappers remaining so near the city and giving me free run of their wigwams. My reasonless persistence was beginning to irritate him. Indeed, on one occasion, he informed me that I had as many vagaries in my head as a "bed-ridden hag," and with great fervor he "wished to the Lord there was a law in this land for the ham-stringing of such fool idiots, as that _habitant_ Mute, who led me such a wild-goose chase." In spite of this and many other jeremiades, I once more donned snow-shoes and with Paul for guide paid a second visit to the campers of the gorge. And a second time, I was welcomed by Louis and taken through the wigwams. The smallpox tent was no longer on the crest of the hill; and when I asked after the patient, Louis without a word pointed solemnly to a snow-mound, where the man lay buried. But I did not see the big squaw, nor the face that had emerged from the tent flaps to wave me off; and when I also inquired after these, Louis' face darkened. He told me bluntly I was asking too many questions and began to swear in a mongrel jargon of French and English that my conduct was an insult he would take from no man. But Louis was ever short of temper. I remembered that of old. Presently his little flare-up died down, and he told me that the woman and her husband had gone north through the woods to join some crews on the Upper Ottawa. From the talk of the others, I gathered that, having disposed of their hunt to the commissariat department at the Citadel, they intended to follow the same trail within a few days. I tried without questioning to learn what crews they were to join; but whether with purpose, or by chance, the conversation drifted from my lead and I had to return to the city without satisfaction on that point. Meanwhile, Hamilton rested neither night nor day. In the morning with a few hurried words he would outline the plan for the day. At night he rode back to the Chateau with such eager questioning in his eyes when they met mine, I knew he had nothing better to report to me, than I to him. After a silent meal, he would ride through the dark forest on a fresh mount. How and where he passed those sleepless nights, I do not know. Thus had a month slipped away; and we had done everything and accomplished nothing. Baffled, I had gone to confer with Mr. Jack MacKenzie and had, as usual, exasperated him with the reiterated conviction that Adderly and the Citadel writing paper and Louis Laplante had some connection with the malign influence that was balking our efforts. "Fudge!" exclaims my uncle, stamping about his study and puffing with indignation. "You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off!" "You've said that several times already, Mr. MacKenzie," I put in, having a touch of his own peppery temper from my mother's side. "What about Adderly's rage?" "Adderly's been in Montreal since the night of the row. For the Lord's sake, boy, do you expect to find the woman by believing in that bloated bugaboo?" "But the Citadel paper?" I persisted. "Of course you've never been told, Rufus Gillespie," he began, choking down his impatience with the magnitude of my stupidity, "that the commissariat buys supplies from hunters?" "That doesn't explain the big squaw's suspicions and Louis' own conduct." "That Louis!" says my uncle. "Pah! That son of an inflated old seigneur! A fig for the buck! Not enough brains in his pate to fill a peanut!" "But there might be enough evil in his heart to wreck a life," and that was the first argument to pierce my uncle's scepticism. The keen eyes glanced out at me as if there might be some hope for my intelligence, and he took several turns about the room. "Hm! If you're of that mind, you'd better go out and excavate the smallpox," was his sententious conclusion. "And if it's a hoax, you'd better----" and he puckered his brows in thought. "What?" I asked eagerly. "Join the traders' crews and track the villains west," he answered with the promptitude of one who decides quickly and without vacillation. "O Lord! If I were only young! But to think of a man too stout and old to buckle on his own snow-shoes hankering for that life again!" And my uncle heaved a deep sigh. Now, no one, who has not lived the wild, free life of the northern trader, can understand the strange fascinations which for the moment eclipsed in this courteous and chivalrous old gentleman's mind all thought of the poor woman, with whom my own fate was interwoven. But I, who have lived in the lonely fastnesses of the splendid freedom, know full well what surging recollections of danger and daring, of success and defeat, of action in which one faces and laughs at death, and calm in which one sounds the unutterable depths of very infinity--thronged the old trader's soul. Indeed, when he spoke, it was as if the sentence of my own life had been pronounced; and my whole being rose up to salute destiny. I take it, there is in every one some secret and cherished desire for a chosen vocation to which each looks forward with hope up to the meridian of life, and to which many look back with regret after the meridian. Of prophetic instincts and intuitions and impressions and feelings and much more of the same kind going under a different name, I say nothing, I only set down as a fact, to be explained how it may, that all the way out to the gorge, with Paul, The Mute leading for a third time, I could have sworn there would be no corpse in that snow-covered grave. For was it not written in my inner consciousness that destiny had appointed me to the wild, free life of the north? So I was not surprised when Paul Larocque's spade struck sharply on a box. Indians sleep their last sleep in the skins of the chase. Nor was I in the least amazed when that same spade pried up the lid of cached provisions instead of a coffin. Then I had ocular proof of what I knew before, that Louis in word and conduct--but chiefly in conduct, which is the way of the expert had--lied outrageously to me. When the ice broke up at the end of April, hunters were off for their summer retreats and _voyageurs_ set out on the annual trip to the _Pays d'En Haut_. This year the Hudson's Bay Company had organized a strong fleet of canoemen under Mr. Colin Robertson, a former Nor'-Wester, to proceed to Red River settlement by way of the Ottawa and the Sault instead of entering the fur preserve by the usual route of Hudson Bay and York Factory. From Le Grand Diable's former association with the North-West Company it was probable he would be in Robertson's brigade. Among the _voyageurs_ of both companies there was not a more expert canoeman than this treacherous, thievish Iroquois. As steersman, he could take a crew safely through knife-edge rocks with the swift certainty of arrow flight. In spite of a reputation for embodying the vices of white man and red--which gave him his unsavory title--it seemed unlikely that the Hudson's Bay Company, now in the thick of an aggressive campaign against its great rival, and about to despatch an important flotilla from Montreal to Athabasca by way of the Nor'-Westers' route, would dispense with the services of this dexterous _voyageur_. On the other hand, the Nor'-Westers might bribe the Iroquois to stay with them. Acting on these alternative possibilities, Hamilton and I determined to track the fugitives north. We could leave hirelings to shadow the movements of Indian bands about Quebec. Eric could re-engage with the Hudson's Bay and get passage north with Colin Robertson's brigade, which was to leave Lachine in a few weeks. My uncle had been a famous _Bourgeois_ of the great North-West Company in his younger days, and could secure me an immediate commission in the North-West Company. Thus we could accompany the _voyageurs_ and runners of both companies. Hamilton's arrangements were easily made; and my uncle not only obtained the commission for me, but, with a hearty clap on my back and a "Bravo, boy! I knew the fur trader's fever would break out in you yet!" pinned to the breast of my inner waistcoat the showy gold medallion which the _Bourgeois_ wore on festive occasions. In very truth I oft had need of its inspiriting motto: _Fortitude in Distress_. Feudal lords of the middle ages never waged more ruthless war on each other than the two great fur trading companies of the north at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Pierre de Raddison and Grosselier, gentlemen adventurers of New France, first followed the waters of the Outawa (Ottawa) northward, and passed from Lake Superior (the _kelche gamme_ of Indian lore) to the great unknown fur preserve between Hudson Bay and the Pacific Ocean; but the fur monopolists of the French court in Quebec jealously obstructed the explorers' efforts to open up the vast territory. De Raddison was compelled to carry his project to the English court, and the English court, with a liberality not unusual in those days, promptly deeded over the whole domain, the extent, locality and wealth of which there was utter ignorance, to a fur trading organization,--the newly formed "Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay," incorporated in 1670 with Prince Rupert named as first governor. If monopolists of New France, through envy, sacrificed Quebec's first claim to the unknown land, Frontenac made haste to repair the loss. Father Albanel, a Jesuit, and other missionaries led the way westward to the _Pays d'En Haut_. De Raddison twice changed his allegiance, and when Quebec fell into the hands of the British nearly a century later, the French traders were as active in the northern fur preserve as their great rivals, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company; but the Englishmen kept near the bay and the Frenchmen with their _coureurs-des-bois_ pushed westward along the chain of water-ays leading from Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg to the Saskatchewan and Athabasca. Then came the Conquest, with the downfall of French trade in the north country. But there remained the _coureurs-des-bois_, or wood-rangers, the _Metis_, or French half-breeds, the _Bois-Brulés_, or plain runners--so called, it is supposed, from the trapper's custom of blazing his path through the forest. And on the ruins of French barter grew up a thriving English trade, organized for the most part by enterprising citizens of Quebec and Montreal, and absorbing within itself all the cast-off servants of the old French companies. Such was the origin of the X. Y. and North-West Companies towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of these the most energetic and powerful--and therefore the most to be feared by the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company--was the North-West Company, "_Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest_," as the partners designated themselves. From the time that the North-Westers gratuitously poured their secrets into the ears of Lord Selkirk, and Lord Selkirk shrewdly got control of the Hudson's Bay Company and began to infuse Nor'-Westers' zeal into the stagnant workings of the older company, there arose such a feud among these lords of the north as may be likened only to the pillaging of robber barons in the middle ages. And this feud was at its height when I cast in my lot with the North-West Fur Company, Nor'-Westers had reaped a harvest of profits by leaving the beaten track of trade and pushing boldly northward into the remote MacKenzie River region. This year the Hudson's Bay had determined to enter the same area and employed a former Nor'-Wester, Mr. Colin Robertson, to conduct a flotilla of canoes from Lachine, Montreal, by way of the Nor'-Westers' route up the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan and Athabasca. But while the Hudson's Bay Company could ship their peltries directly to England from the bay, the Nor'-Westers labored under the disadvantage of many delays and trans-shipments before their goods reached seaboard at Montreal. Indeed, I have heard my uncle tell of orders which he sent from the north to England in October. The things ordered in October would be sent from London in March to reach Montreal in mid-summer. There they would be re-packed in small quantities for portaging and despatched from Montreal with the Nor'-Western _voyageurs_ the following May, and if destined for the far north would not reach the end of their long trip until October--two years from the time of the order. Yet, under such conditions had the Nor'-Westers increased in prosperity, while the Hudson's Bay, with its annual ships at York Factory and Churchill, declined. When Lord Selkirk took hold of the Hudson's Bay there was a change. Once a feud has begun, I know very well it is impossible to apportion the blame each side deserves. Whether Selkirk timed his acts of aggression during the American war of 1812-1814, when the route of the Nor'-Westers was rendered unsafe--who can say? Whether he brought colonists into the very heart of the disputed territory for the sake of the colonists, or to be drilled into an army of defense for The Hudson's Bay Company--who can say? Whether he induced his company to grant him a vast area of land at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers--against which a minority of stockholders protested--for the sake of these same colonists, or to hold a strategical point past which North-Westers' cargoes must go--who can say? On these subjects, which have been so hotly discussed both inside and outside law courts, without any definite decision that I have ever heard, I refuse to pass judgment. I can but relate events as I saw them and leave to each the right of a personal decision. In 1815, Nor'-Westers' canoes were to leave Ste. Anne de Beaupré, twenty miles east of Quebec, instead of Ste. Anne on the Ottawa, the usual point of departure. We had not our full complement of men. Some of the Indians and half-breeds had gone northwest overland through the bush to a point on the Ottawa River north of Chaudière Falls, where they were awaiting us, and Hamilton, through the courtesy of my uncle, was able to come with us in our boats as far as Lachine. I was never a grasping trader, but I provided myself before setting out with every worthless gew-gaw and flashy trifle that could tempt the native to betray Indian secrets. Lest these should fail, I added to my stock a dozen as fine new flint-locks as could corrupt the soul of an Indian, and without consideration for the enemy's scalp also equipped myself with a box of wicked-looking hunting-knives. These things I placed in square cases and sat upon them when we were in barges, or pillowed my head upon them at night, never losing sight of them except on long portages where Indians conveyed our cargo on their backs. A man on a less venturesome quest than mine could hardly have set out with the brigades of canoemen for the north country and not have been thrilled like a lad on first escape from school's leading strings. There we were, twenty craft strong, with clerks, traders, one steersman and eight willowy, copper-skin paddlers in each long birch canoe. No oriental prince could be more gorgeously appareled than these gay _voyageurs_. Flaunting red handkerchiefs banded their foreheads and held back the lank, black hair. Buckskin smocks, fringed with leather down the sleeves and beaded lavishly in bright colors, were drawn tight at the waist by sashes of flaming crimson, green and blue. In addition to the fringe of leather down the trouser seams, some in our company had little bells fastened from knee to ankle. It was a strange sight to see each of these reckless denizens of forest and plain pause reverently before the chapel of _La Bonne Sainte Anne_, cross himself, invoke her protection on the voyage and drop some offering in the treasury box before hurrying to his place in the canoe. One Indian left the miniature of a carved boat in the hands of the priest at the porch. It was his votive gift to the saint and may be seen there to this day. As we were embarking I noticed Eric had not come down and the canoes were already gliding about the wharf awaiting the head steersman's signal. I had last seen him on the church steps and ran back from the river to learn the cause of his delay. Now Hamilton is not a Catholic; neither is he a Protestant; but I would not have good people ascribe his misfortunes to this lack of creed, for a trader in the far north loses denominational distinctions and a better man I have never known. What, then, was my surprise to meet him face to face coming out of the chapel with tears coursing down his cheeks and floor-dust thick upon his knees? Women know what to do and say in such a case. A man must be dumb, or blunder; so I could but link my arm through his and lead him silently down to my own canoe. A single wave of the chief steersman's hand, and out swept the paddles in a perfect harmony of motion. Then someone struck up a _voyageurs'_ ballad and the canoemen unconsciously kept time with the beat of the song. The valley seemed filled with the voices of those deep-chested, strong singers, and the chimes of Ste. Anne clashed out a last sweet farewell. "Cheer up, old man!" said I to Eric, who was sitting with face buried in his hands. "Cheer up! Do you hear the bells? It's a God-speed for you!" CHAPTER V CIVILIZATION'S VENEER RUBS OFF My uncle accompanied our flotilla as far as Lachine and occupied a place in my division of canoes. Many were the admonitions he launched out like thunderbolts whenever his craft and mine chanced to glide abreast. "If you lay hands on that skunk," he had said, the malodorous epithet being his designation for Louis Laplante, "If you lay hands on that skunk, don't be a simpleton. Skin him, Sir, by the Lord, skin him! Let him play the ostrich act! Keep your own counsel and work him for all you're worth! Let him play his deceitful game! By Jove! Give the villain rope enough to hang himself! Gain your end! Afterwards forget and forgive if you like; but, by the Lord, remember and don't ignore the fact, that repentance can't turn a skunk into an innocent, pussy cat!" And so Mr. Jack MacKenzie continued to warn me all the way from Quebec to Montreal, mixing his metaphors as topers mix drinks. But I had long since learned not to remonstrate against these outbursts of explosive eloquence--not though all the canons of Laval literati should be outraged. "What, Sir?" he had roared out when I, in full conceit of new knowledge, had audaciously ventured to pull him up, once in my student days. "What, Sir? Don't talk to me of your book-fangled balderdash! Is language for the use of man, or man for the use of language?" and he quoted from Hamlet's soliloquy in a way that set me packing my pedant lore in the unused lumber-room of brain lobes. And so, I say, Mr. Jack MacKenzie continued to pour instructions into my ear for the venturesome life on which I had entered. "The lad's a fool, only a fool," he said, still harping on Louis, "and mind you answer the fool according to his folly!" "Most men are fools first, and then knaves, knaves because they have been fools," I returned to my uncle, "and I fancy Laplante has graduated from the fool stage by this time, and is a full diploma knave!" "That's all true," he retorted, "but don't you forget there's always fool enough left in the knave to give you your opportunity, if you're not a fool. Joint in the armor, lad! Use your cutlass there." Apart from the peppery discourses of my kinsman, I remember very little of the trip up the St. Lawrence from Ste. Anne to Lachine with Eric sitting dazed and silent opposite me. We, of course, followed the river channel between the Island of Orleans and the north shore; and whenever our boats drew near the mainland, came whiffs of crisp, frosty air from the dank ravines, where snow patches yet lay in the shadow. Then the fleet would sidle towards the island and there would be the fresh, spring odor of damp, uncovered mold, with a vague suggestiveness of violets and May-flowers and ferns bursting with a rush through the black clods. The purple folds of the mountains, with their wavy outlines fading in the haze of distance, lay on the north as they lie to-day; and everywhere on the hills were the white cots of _habitant_ hamlets with chapel spires pointing above tree-tops. At the western end of the island, where boats sheer out into mid-current, came the dull, heavy roar of the cataract and above the north shore rose great, billowy clouds of foam. With a sweep of our paddles, we were opposite a cleft in the vertical rock and saw the shimmering, fleecy waters of Montmorency leap over the dizzy precipice churning up from their own whirling depths and bound out to the river like a panther after prey. Now the Isle of Orleans was vanishing on our rear and the bold heights of Point Levis had loomed up to the fore; and now we had poked our prows to the right and the sluggish, muddy tide of the St. Charles lapped our canoes, while a forest of masts and yard-arms and flapping sails arose from the harbor of Quebec City. The great walls of modern Quebec did not then exist; but the rude fortifications, that sloped down from the lofty Citadel on Cape Diamond and engirt the whole city on the hillside, seemed imposing enough to us in those days. It was late in the afternoon when we passed. The sunlight struck across the St. Charles, brightening the dull, gray stone of walls and cathedrals and convents, turning every window on the west to fire and transforming a multitude of towers and turrets and minarets to glittering gold. Small wonder, indeed, that all our rough tripmen stopped paddling and with eyes on the spire of Notre Dame des Victoires muttered prayers for a prosperous voyage. For some reason or other, I found my own hat off. So was Mr. Jack MacKenzie's, so was Eric Hamilton's. Then the _voyageurs_ fell to work again. The canoes spread out. We rounded Cape Diamond and the lengthening shadow of the high peak darkened the river before us. Always the broad St. Lawrence seemed to be winding from headland to headland among the purple hills, in sunlight a mirror between shadowy, forest banks, at night, molten silver in the moon-track. Afternoon slipped into night and night to morning, and each hour of daylight presented some new panorama of forests and hills and torrents. Here the river widened into a lake. There the lake narrowed to rapids; and so we came to Lachine--La Chine, named in ridicule of the gallant explorer, La Salle, who thought these vast waterways would surely lead him to China. At Lachine, Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with much brusque bluster to conceal his longings for the life he was too old to follow and many cynical injunctions about "skinning the skunk" and "knocking the head off anything that stood in my way" and "always profiting from the follies of other men"--"mind, have none yourself,"--parted from us. Here, too, Eric gripped my hand a tense, wordless farewell and left our party for the Hudson's Bay brigade under Colin Robertson. It has always been a mystery to me why our rivals sent that brigade to Athabasca by way of Lachine instead of Hudson Bay, which would have been two thousand miles nearer. We Nor'-Westers went all the way to and from Montreal, solely because that was our only point of access to the sea; but the Hudson's Bay people had their own Hudson Bay for a starting place. Why, in their slavish imitation of the methods, which brought us success, they also adopted our disadvantages, I could never understand. Birch canoes and good tripmen could, of course, as the Hudson's Bay men say, be most easily obtained in Quebec; but with a good organizer, the same could have been gathered up two thousand miles nearer York Factory, on Hudson Bay. Indeed, I have often thought the sole purpose of that expedition was to get Nor'-Westers' methods by employing discarded Nor'-Westers as trappers and _voyageurs_. Colin Robertson, the leader, had himself been a Nor'-Wester; and all the men with him except Eric Hamilton were renegades, "turn-coat traders," as we called them. But I must not be unjust; for neither company could possibly exceed the other in its zeal to entice away old trappers, who would reveal opponents' secrets. Acting on my uncle's advice, I made shift to pick up a few crumbs of valuable information. Had the Hudson's Bay known, I suppose they would have called me a spy. That was the name I gave any of them who might try such tricks with me. The General Assembly of the North-West partners was to meet at Fort William, at the head of Lake Superior. I learned that Robertson's brigade were anxious to slip past our headquarters at Fort William before the meeting and would set out that very day. I also heard they had sent forward a messenger to notify the Hudson's Bay governor at Fort Douglas of their brigade's coming. Almost before I realized it, we were speeding up the Ottawa, past a second and third and fourth Ste. Anne's; for she is the _voyageurs'_ patron saint and her name dots Canada's map like ink-blots on a boy's copybook. Wherever a Ste. Anne's is now found, there has the _voyageur_ of long ago passed and repassed. In places the surface of the river, gliding to meet us, became oily, almost glassy, as if the wave-current ran too fast to ripple out to the banks. Then little eddies began whirling in the corrugated water and our paddlers with labored breath bent hard to their task. By such signs I learned to know when we were stemming the tide of some raging waterfall, or swift rapid. There would follow quick disembarking, hurried portages over land through a tangle of forest, or up slippery, damp rocks, a noisy launching far above the torrent and swifter progress when the birch canoes touched water again. Such was the tireless pace, which made North-West _voyageurs_ famous. Such was the work the great _Bourgeois_ exacted of their men. A liberal supply of rum, when stoppages were made, and of bread and meat for each meal--better fare than was usually given by the trading companies--did much to encourage the tripmen. Each man was doing his utmost to out-distance the bold rivals following by our route. The _Bourgeois_ were to meet at Fort William early in June. At all hazards we were determined to notify our company of the enemy's invading flotilla; and without margin for accidents we had but a month to cross half a continent. At nightfall the fourth day from the shrine, after a tiresome nine-mile traverse past the Chaudière Falls of the Ottawa, glittering camp-fires on the river bank ahead showed where a fresh relay of canoemen awaited us. They were immediately taken into the different crews and night-shifts of paddlers put to work. It was quite dark, when the new hands joined us; but in the moonlight, as the chief steersman told off the men by name, I watched each tawny figure step quickly to his place in the canoes, with that gliding Indian motion, which scarcely rocked the light craft. There came to my crew Little Fellow, a short, thick-set man, with a grinning, good-natured face, who--despite his size--would solemnly assure people he was equal in force to the sun. With him was La Robe Noire, of grave aspect and few words, mighty in stature and shoulder power. There were five or six others, whose names in the clangor of voices I did not hear. Of these, one was a tall, lithe, swift-moving man, whose cunning eyes seemed to gleam with the malice of a serpent. This canoeman silently twisted into sleeping posture directly behind me. The signal was given, and we were in mid-stream again. Wrapping my blanket about me, half propped by a bale of stuff and breathing deep of the clear air with frequent resinous whiffs from the forest I drowsed off. The swish of waters rushing past and the roar of torrents, which I had seen and heard during the day, still sounded in my ears. The sigh of the night-wind through the forest came like the lonely moan of a far-distant sea, and I was sleepily half conscious that cedars, pines and cliffs were engaged in a mad race past the sides of the canoe. A bed in which one may not stretch at random is not comfortable. Certainly my cramped limbs must have caused bad dreams. A dozen times I could have sworn the Indian behind me had turned into a snake and was winding round my chest in tight, smothering coils. Starting up, I would shake the weight off. Once I suddenly opened my eyes to find blanket thrown aside and pistol belt unstrapped. Lying back eased, I was dozing again when I distinctly felt a hand crawl stealthily round the pack on which I was pillowed and steal towards the dagger handle in the loosened belt. I struck at it viciously only to bruise my fist on my dagger. Now wide awake, I turned angrily towards the Indian. Not a muscle of the still figure had changed from the attitude taken when he came into the canoe. The man was not asleep, but reclined in stolid oblivion of my existence. His head was thrown back and the steely, unflinching eyes were fixed on the stars. "It may not have been you, my scowling sachem," said I to myself, "but snakes have fangs. Henceforth I'll take good care you're not at my back." I slept no more that night. Next day I asked the fellow his name and he poured out such a jumbled mouthful of quick-spoken, Indian syllables, I was not a whit the wiser. I told him sharply he was to be Tom Jones on my boat, at which he gave an evil leer. Without stay we still pushed forward. The arrowy pace was merciless to red men and white; but that was the kind of service the great North-West Company always demanded. Some ten miles from the outlet of Lake Nipissangue (Nipissing) foul weather threatened delay. The _Bourgeois_ were for proceeding at any risk; but as the thunder-clouds grew blacker and the wind more violent, the head steersman lost his temper and grounded his canoe on the sands at _Point à la Croix_. Springing ashore he flung down his pole and refused to go on. "Sacredie!" he screamed, first pointing to the gathering storm and then to the crosses that marked the fate of other foolhardy _voyageurs_, "Allez si vous voulez! Pour moi je n'irai pas; ne voyez pas le danger!" A hurricane of wind, snapping the great oaks as a chopper breaks kindling wood, enforced his words. Canoes were at once beached and tarpaulins drawn over the bales of provisions. The men struggled to hoist a tent; but gusts of wind tossed the canvas above their heads, and before the pegs were driven a great wall of rain-drift drenched every one to the skin. By sundown the storm had gone southeast and we unrighteously consoled ourselves that it would probably disorganize the Hudson's Bay brigade as much as it had ours. Plainly, we were there for the night. _Point à la Croix_ is too dangerous a spot for navigation after dark. With much patience we kindled the soaked underbrush and finally got a pile of logs roaring in the woods and gathered round the fire. The glare in the sky attracted the lake tribes from their lodges. Indians, half-breeds and shaggy-haired whites--degenerate traders, who had lost all taste for civilization and retired with their native wives after the fashion of the north country--came from the Nipissangue encampments and joined our motley throng. Presently the natives drew off to a fire by themselves, where there would be no white-man's restraint. They had either begged or stolen traders' rum, and after the hard trip from Ste. Anne, were eager for one of their mad _boissons_--a drinking-bout interspersed with jigs and fights. Stretched before our camp, I watched the grotesque figures leaping and dancing between the firelight and the dusky woods like forest demons. With the leaves rustling overhead, the water laving the pebbles on the shore, and the washed pine air stimulating one's blood like an intoxicant, I began wondering how many years of solitary life it would take to wear through civilization's veneer and leave one content in the lodges of forest wilds. Gradually I became aware of my sulky canoeman's presence on the other side of the camp-fire. The man had not joined the revels of the other _voyageurs_ but sat on his feet, oriental style, gazing as intently at the flames as if spellbound by some fire-spirit. "What's wrong with that fellow, anyhow?" I asked a veteran trader, who was taking last pulls at a smoked-out pipe. "Sick--home-sick," was the laconic reply. "You'd think he was near enough nature here to feel at home! Where's his tribe?" "It ain't his tribe he wants," explained the trader. "What, then?" I inquired. "His wife, he's mad after her," and the trader took the pipe from his teeth. "Faugh!" I laughed. "The idea of an Indian sentimental and love-sick for some fat lump of a squaw! Come! Come! Am I to believe that?" "Don't matter whether you do, or not," returned the trader. "It's a fact. His wife's a Sioux chief's daughter. She went north with a gang of half-breeds and hunters last month; and he's been fractious crazy ever since." "What's his name?" I called, as my informant vanished behind the tent flaps. Again that mouthful of Indian syllables, unintelligible and unspeakable for me was tumbled forth. Then I turned to the fantastic figures carousing around the other camp fire. One form, in particular, I seemed to distinguish from the others. He was gathering the Indians in line for some native dance and had an easy, rakish sort of grace, quite different from the serpentine motions of the redskins. By a sudden turn, his profile was thrown against the fire and I saw that he wore a pointed beard. He was no Indian; and like a flash came one of those strange, reasonless intuitions, which precede, or proceed from, the slow motions of the mind. Was this the _avant-courier_ of the Hudson's Bay, delayed, like ourselves, by the storm? I had hardly spelled out my own suspicion, when to the measured beatings of the tom-tom, gradually becoming faster, and with a low, weird, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest, the Indians began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which my slow eyes could not follow, but which in a strange way brought up memories of snaky convolutions about the naked body of some Egyptian serpent-charmer. The drums beat faster. The suppressed voices were breaking in shrill, wild, exultant strains, and the measured tread had quickened from a walk to a run and from a swaying run to a swift, labyrinthine pace, which has no name in English, and which I can only liken to the wiggling of a green thing under leafy covert. The coiling and circling and winding of the dancers became bewildering, and in the centre, laughing, shouting, tossing up his arms and gesticulating like a maniac, was the white man with the pointed beard. Then the performers broke from their places and gave themselves with utter abandon to the wild impulses of wild natures in a wild world; and there was such a scene of uncurbed, animal hilarity as I never dreamed possible. Savage, furious, almost ferocious like the frisking of a pack of wolves, that at any time may fall upon and destroy a weaker one, the boisterous antics of these children of the forest fascinated me. Filled with the curiosity that lures many a trader to his undoing, I rose and went across to the thronging, shouting, shadowy figures. A man darted out of the woods full tilt against me. 'Twas he of the pointed beard, my _suspect_ of the Hudson's Bay Company. Quick as thought I thrust out my foot and tripped him full length on the ground. The light fell on his upturned face. It was Louis Laplante, that past-master in the art of diplomatic deception. He snarled out something angrily and came to himself in sitting posture. Then he recognized me. "_Mon Dieu!_" he muttered beneath his breath, momentarily surprised into a betrayal of astonishment. "You, Gillespie?" he called out, at once regaining himself and assuming his usual nonchalance. "Pardon, my solemncholy! I took you for a tree." "Granted, your impudence," said I, ignoring the slight but paying him back in kind. I was determined to follow my uncle's advice and play the rascal at his own game. "Help you up?" said I, as pleasantly as I could, extending my hand to give him a lift; and I felt his palm hot and his arm tremble. Then, I knew that Louis was drunk and this was the fool's joint in the knave's armor, on which Mr. Jack MacKenzie bade me use my weapons. "Tra-la!" he answered with mincing insult. "Tra-la, old tombstone! Good-by, my mausoleum! Au revoir, old death's-head! Adieu, grave skull!" With an absurdly elaborate bow, he reeled back among the dancers. "Get up, comrade," I urged, rushing into the tent, where the old trader I had questioned about my canoeman was now snoring. "Get up, man," and I shook him. "There's a Hudson's Bay spy!" "Spy," he shouted, throwing aside the moose-skin coverlet. "Spy! Who?" "It's Louis Laplante, of Quebec." "Louis Laplante!" reiterated the trader. "A Frenchman employed by the Hudson's Bay! Laplante, a trapper, with them! The scoundrel!" And he ground out oaths that boded ill for Louis. "Hold on!" I exclaimed, jerking him back. He was for dashing on Laplante with a cudgel. "He's playing the trapper game with the lake tribes." "I'll trapper him," vowed the trader. "How do you know he's a spy?" "I don't _know_, really know," I began, clumsily conscious that I had no proof for my suspicions, "but it strikes me we'd better not examine this sort of suspect at too long range. If we're wrong, we can let him go." "Bag him, eh?" queried the trader. "That's it," I assented. "He's a hard one to bag." "But he's drunk." "Drunk, Oh! Drunk is he?" laughed the man. "He'll be drunker," and the trader began rummaging through bales of stuff with a noise of bottles knocking together. He was humming in a low tone, like a grimalkin purring after a full meal of mice-- "Rum for Indians, when they come, Rum for the beggars, when they go, That's the trick my grizzled lads To catch the cash and snare the foe." "What's your plan?" I asked with a vague feeling the trader had some shady purpose in mind. "Squeamish? Eh? You'll get over that, boy. I'll trap your trapper and spy your spy, and Nor'-Wester your H. B. C.! You come down to the sand between the forest and the beach in about an hour and I'll have news for you," and he brushed past me with his arms full of something I could not see in the half-light. Then, as a trader, began my first compromise with conscience, and the enmity which I thereby aroused afterwards punished me for that night's work. I knew very well my comrade, with the rough-and-ready methods of traders, had gone out to do what was not right; and I hung back in the tent, balancing the end against the means, our deeds against Louis' perfidy, and Nor'-Westers' interests against those of the Hudson's Bay. It is not pleasant to recall what was done between the cedars and the shore. I do not attempt to justify our conduct. Does the physician justify medical experiments on the criminal, or the sacrificial priest the driving of the scape-goat into the wilderness? Suffice it to say, when I went down to the shore, Louis Laplante was sitting in the midst of empty drinking-flasks, and the wily, old Nor'-Wester was tempting the silly boy to take more by drinking his health with fresh bottles. But while Louis Laplante gulped down his rum, becoming drunker and more communicative, the tempter threw glass after glass over his shoulder and remained sober. The Nor'-Wester motioned me to keep behind the Frenchman and I heard his drunken lips mumbling my own name. "Rufush--prig--stuck-up prig--serve him tam right! Hamilton's--sh--sh--prig too--sho's his wife. Serve 'em all tam right!" "Ask him where she is," I whispered over his head. "Where's the gal?" demanded the trader, shoving more liquor over to Louis. "Shioux squaw--Devil's wife--how you say it in English? Lah Grawnd Deeahble," and he mouthed over our mispronunciation of his own tongue "Joke, isn't it?" he went on. "That wax-face prig--slave to Shioux Squaw. Rufush--a fool. Stuffed him to hish--neck. Made him believe shmall-pox was Hamilton's wife. I mean, Hamilton's wife was shmall-pox. Calf bellowed with fright--ran home--came back--'tamme,' I say, 'there he come again' 'shmall-pox in that grave,' say I. Joke--ain't it?" and he stopped to drain off another pint of rum. "Biggest joke out of jail," said the Nor'-Wester dryly, with meaning which Louis did not grasp. "Ask him where she is," I whispered, "quick! He's going to sleep." For Louis wiped his beard on his sleeve and lay back hopelessly drunk. "Here you, waken up," commanded the Nor'-Wester, kicking him and shaking him roughly. "Where's the gal?" "Shioux--_Pays d'En Haut_," drawled the youth. "Take off your boots! Don't wear boots. _Pays d'En Haut_--moccasins--softer," and he rolled over in a sodden sleep, which defied all our efforts to shake him into consciousness. "Is that true?" asked the Nor'-Wester, standing above the drunk man and speaking across to me. "Is that true about the Indian kidnapping a woman?" "True--too terribly true," I whispered back. "I'd like to boot him into the next world," said the trader, looking down at Louis in a manner that might have alarmed that youth for his safety. "I've bagged H. B. dispatches anyway," he added with satisfaction. "What'll we do with him?" I asked aimlessly. "If he had anything to do with the stealing of Hamilton's wife----" "He hadn't," interrupted the trader. "'Twas Diable did that, so Laplante says." "Then what shall we do with him?" "Do--with--him," slowly repeated the Nor'-Wester in a low, vibrating voice. "Do--with--him?" and again I felt a vague shudder of apprehension at this silent, uncompromising man's purpose. The camp fires were dead. Not a sound came from the men in the woods and there was a gray light on the water with a vague stirring of birds through the foliage overhead. Now I would not have any man judge us by the canons of civilization. Under the ancient rule of the fur companies over the wilds of the north, 'twas bullets and blades put the fear of the Lord in evil hearts. As we stooped to gather up the tell-tale flasks, the drunken knave, who had lightly allowed an innocent white woman to go into Indian captivity, lay with bared chest not a hand's length from a knife he had thrown down. Did the Nor'-Wester and I hesitate, and look from the man to the dagger, and from the dagger to the man; or is this an evil dream from a black past? Miriam, the guiltless, was suffering at his hands; should not he, the guilty, suffer at ours? Surely Sisera was not more unmistakably delivered into the power of his enemies by the Lord than this man; and Sisera was discomfited by Barak and Jael. Heber's wife--says the Book--drove a tent nail--through the temples--of the sleeping man--and slew him! Day was when I thought the Old Volume recorded too many deeds of bloodshed in the wilderness for the instruction of our refined generation; but I, too, have since lived in the wilderness and learned that soft speech is not the weapon of strong men overmastering savagery. I know the trader and I were thinking the same thoughts and reading each other's thoughts; for we stood silent above the drunk man, neither moving, neither uttering a word. "Well?" I finally questioned in a whisper. "Well," said he, and he knelt down and picked up the knife. "'Twould serve him right." He was speaking in the low, gentle, purring voice he had used in the tent. "'Twould serve him jolly right," and he knelt over Louis hesitating. My eyes followed his slow, deliberate motions with horror. Terror seemed to rob me of the power of speech. I felt my blood freeze with the fear of some impending crime. There was the faintest perceptible fluttering of leaves; and we both started up as if we had been assassins, glancing fearfully into the gloom of the forest. All the woods seemed alive with horrified eyes and whisperings. "Stop!" I gasped, "This is madness, the madness of the murderer. What would you do?" And I was trying to knock the knife out of his hand, when among the shadowy green of the foliage, an open space suddenly resolved itself into a human face and there looked out upon us gleaming eyes like those of a crouching panther. "Squeamish fool!" muttered the Nor'-Wester, raising his arm. "Stop!" I implored. "We are watched. See!" and I pointed to the face, that as suddenly vanished into blackness. We both leaped into the thicket, pistol in hand, to wreak punishment on the interloper. There was only an indistinct sound as of something receding into the darkness. "Don't fire," said I, "'twill alarm the camp." At imminent risk to our own lives, we poked sticks through the thicket and felt for our unseen enemy, but found nothing. "Let's go back and peg him out on the sand, where the Hudson's Bay will see him when they come this way," suggested the Nor'-Wester, referring to Laplante. "Yes, or hand-cuff him and take him along prisoner," I added, thinking Louis might have more information. But when we stepped back to the beach, there was no Louis Laplante. "He was too drunk to go himself," said I, aghast at the certainty, which now came home to me, that we had been watched. "I wash my hands of the whole affair," declared the trader, in a state of high indignation, and he strode off to his tent, I, following, with uncomfortable reflections trooping into my mind. Compunctions rankled in self-respect. How near we had been to a brutal murder, to crime which makes men shun the perpetrators. Civilization's veneer was rubbing off at an alarming rate. This thought stuck, but for obvious reasons was not pursued. Also I had learned that the worst and best of outlaws easily justify their acts at the time they commit them; but afterwards--afterwards is a different matter, for the thing is past undoing. I heard the trader snorting out inarticulate disgust as he tumbled into his tent; but I stood above the embers of the camp fire thinking. Again I felt with a creepiness, that set all my flesh quaking, felt, rather than saw, those maddening, tiger eyes of the dark foliage watching me. Looking up, I found my morose canoeman on the other side of the fire, leaning so close to a tree, he was barely visible in the shadows. Thinking himself unseen by me, he wore such an insolent, amused, malicious expression, I knew in an instant, who the interloper had been, and who had carried Louis off. Before I realized that such an act entails life-long enmity with an Indian, I had bounded over the fire and struck him with all my strength full in the face. At that, instead of knifing me as an Indian ordinarily would, he broke into hyena shrieks of laughter. He, who has heard that sound, need hear it only once to have the echo ring forever in his ears; and I have heard it oft and know it well. "Spy! Sneak!" I muttered, rushing upon him. But he sprang back into the forest and vanished. In dodging me, he let fall his fowling-piece, which went off with a bang into the fire. "Hulloo! What's wrong out there?" bawled the trader's voice from the tent. "Nothing--false alarm!" I called reassuringly. Then there caught my eyes what startled me out of all presence of mind. There, reflecting the glare of the firelight was the Indian's fowling-piece, richly mounted in burnished silver and chased in the rare design of Eric Hamilton's family crest. The morose canoeman was Le Grand Diable. * * * * * A few hours later, I was in the thick of a confused re-embarking. Le Grand Diable took a place in another boat; and a fresh hand was assigned to my canoe. Of that I was glad; I could sleep sounder and he, safer. The _Bourgeois_ complained that too much rum had been given out. "Keep a stiffer hand on your men, boy, or they'll ride over your head," one of the chief traders remarked to me. CHAPTER VI A GIRDLE OF AGATES RECALLED To unravel a ball of yarn, with which kittens have been making cobwebs, has always seemed to me a much easier task than to unknot the tangled skein of confused influences, that trip up our feet at every step in life's path. Here was I, who but a month ago had a supreme contempt for guile and a lofty confidence in uprightness and downrightness, transformed into a crafty trader with all the villainous tricks of the bargain-maker at my finger-tips. We had befooled Louis into a betrayal of his associates but how much reliance could be placed on that betrayal? Had he incriminated Diable to save himself? Then, why had Diable rescued his betrayer? Where was Louis in hiding? Was the Sioux wife with her white slave really in the north country, or was she near, and did that explain my morose Iroquois' all-night vigils? We had cheated Laplante; but had he in turn cheated us? Would I be justified in taking Diable prisoner, and would my company consent to the demoralization of their crews by such a step? Ah, if life were only made up of simple right and simple wrong, instead of half rights and half wrongs indistinguishably mingled, we could all be righteous! If the path to the goal of our chosen desire were only as straight as it is narrow, instead of being dark, mysterious and tortuous, how easily could we attain high ends! I was launched on the life for which I had longed, but strange, shadowy forms like the storm-fiends of sailors' lore, drunkenness, deceit and crime--on whose presence I had not counted--flitted about my ship's masthead. And there was not one guiding star, not one redeeming influence, except the utter freedom to be a man. I was learning, what I suppose everyone learns, that there are things which sap success of its sweets. Such were my thoughts, as our canoes sped across the northern end of Lake Huron, heading for the Sault. The Nor'-Westers had a wonderful way of arousing enthusiastic loyalty among their men. Danger fanned this fealty to white-heat. In the face of powerful opposition, the great company frequently accomplished the impossible. With half as large a staff in the service as its rivals boasted, it invaded the hunting-ground of the Hudson's Bay Company, and outrunning all competition, extended fur posts from the heart of the continent to the foot-hills to the Rockies, and from the international boundary to the Arctic Circle. I had thought no crews could make quicker progress than ours from Lachine to _Point à la Croix_; but the short delay during the storm occasioned faster work. More _voyageurs_ were engaged from the Nipissangue tribes. As soon as one lot fagged fresh shifts came to the relief. Paddles shot out at the rate of modern piston rods, and the waters whirled back like wave-wash in the wake of a clipper. Except for briefest stoppages, speed was not relaxed across the whole northern end of those inland seas called the Great Lakes. With ample space on the lakes, the brigades could spread out and the canoes separated, not halting long enough to come together again till we reached the Sault. Here, orders were issued for the maintenance of rigid discipline. We camped at a distance from the lodges of local tribes. No grog was given out. Camp-fire conviviality was forbidden, and each man kept with his own crew. We remained in camp but one night; and though I searched every tent, I could not find Le Grand Diable. This worried and puzzled me. All night, I lay awake, stretching conscience with doubtful plans to entrap the knave. Rising with first dawn-streak, I was surprised to find Little Fellow and La Robe Noire, two of my canoemen, setting off for the woods. They had laid a snare--so they explained--and were going to examine it. Of late I had grown distrustful of all natives. I suspected these two might be planning desertion; so I went with them. The way led through a dense thicket of ferns half the height of a man. Only dim light penetrated the maze of foliage; and I might easily have lost myself, or been decoyed--though these possibilities did not occur to me till we were at least a mile from the beach. Little Fellow was trotting ahead, La Robe Noire jogging behind, and both glided through the brake without disturbing a fern branch, while I--after the manner of my race--crunched flags underfoot and stamped down stalks enough to be tracked by keen-eyed Indians for a week afterwards. Twice I saw Little Fellow pull up abruptly and look warily through the cedars on one side. Once he stooped down and peered among the fern stems. Then he silently signaled back to La Robe Noire, pointed through the undergrowth and ran ahead again without explanation. At first I could see nothing, and regretted being led so far into the woods. I was about to order both Indians back to the tent, when Little Fellow, with face pricked forward and foot raised, as if he feared to set it down--for the fourth time came to a dead stand. Now, I, too, heard a rustle, and saw a vague sinuous movement distinctly running abreast of us among the ferns. For a moment, when we stopped, it ceased, then wiggled forward like beast, or serpent in the underbrush. Little Fellow placed his forefinger on his lips, and we stood noiseless till by the ripple of the green it seemed to scurry away. "What is it, Little Fellow, a cat?" I asked; but the Indian shook his head dubiously and turned to the open where the trap had been set. Bending over the snare he uttered an Indian word, that I did not understand, but have since heard traders use, so conclude it was one of those exclamations, alien races learn quickest from one another, but which, nevertheless, are not found in dictionaries. The trap had been rifled of game and completely smashed. "Wolverine!" muttered the Indian, making a sweep of his dagger blade at an imaginary foe. "No wolverine! Bad Indians!" Scarcely had he spoken when La Robe Noire leaped into the air like a wounded rabbit. An arrow whizzed past my face and glanced within a hair's-breadth of the Indian's head. Both men were dumb with amazement. Such treachery would have been surprising among the barbarous tribes of the Athabasca. The Sault was the dividing line between Canada and the Wilderness, between the east and the west, and there were no hostiles within a thousand miles of us. Little Fellow would have dragged me pell-mell back to the beach, but I needed no persuasion. La Robe Noire tore ahead with the springs of a hunted lynx. Little Fellow loyally kept between me and a possible pursuer, and we set off at a hard run. That creature, I fancied, was again coursing along beneath the undergrowth; for the foliage bent and rose as we ran. Whether it were man or beast, we were three against one, and could drive it out of hiding. "See here, Little Fellow!" I cried, "Let's hunt that thing out!" and I wheeled about so sharply the chunky little man crashed forward, knocking me off my feet and sending me a man's length farther on. That fall saved my life. A flat spear point hissed through the air above my head and stuck fast in the bark of an elm tree. Scrambling up, I promptly let go two or three shots into the fern brake. We scrutinized the underbrush, but there was no sign of human being, except the fern stems broken by my shots. I wrenched the stone spear-head from the tree. It was curiously ornamented with such a multitude of intricate carvings I could not decipher any design. Then I discovered that the medley of colors was produced by inlaying the flint with small bits of a bright stone; and the bright stones had been carved into a rude likeness of some birds. "What are these birds, Little Fellow?" I asked. He fingered them closely, and with bulging eyes muttered back, "L'Aigle! L'Aigle!" "Eagles, are they?" I returned, stupidly missing the possible meaning of his suppressed excitement. "And the stone?" "Agate, _Monsieur_." Agate! Agate! What picture did agate call back to my mind? A big squaw, with malicious eyes and gaping upper lip and girdle of agates, watching Louis Laplante and myself at the encampment in the gorge. "Little Fellow!" I shouted, not suppressing my excitement. "Who is Le Grand Diable's wife?" And the Indian answered in a low voice, with a face that showed me he had already penetrated my discovery, "The daughter of L'Aigle, chief of the Sioux." Then I knew for whom those missiles had been intended and from whom they had come. It was a clever piece of rascality. Had the assassin succeeded, punishment would have fallen on my Indians. CHAPTER VII THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL Beyond the Sault, the fascinations of the west beckoned like a siren. Vast waterways, where a dozen European kingdoms could be dropped into one lake without raising a sand-bar, seemed to sweep on forever and call with the voice of enchantress to the very ends of the earth. With the purple recesses of the shore on one side and the ocean-expanse of Lake Superior on the other, all the charms of clean, fresh freedom were unveiling themselves to me and my blood began to quicken with that fevered delight, which old lands are pleased to call western enthusiasm. Lake Huron, with its greenish-blue, shallow, placid waters and calm, sloping shores, seemed typical of the even, easy life I had left in the east. How those choppy, blustering, little waves resembled the jealousies and bickerings and bargainings of the east; but when one came to Lake Superior, with its great ocean billows and slumbering, giant rocks and cold, dark, fathomless depths, there was a new life in a hard, rugged, roomy, new world. We hugged close to the north coast; and the numerous rocky islands to our left stood guard like a wall of adamant between us and the heavy surf that flung against the barrier. We were rapidly approaching the headquarters of our company. When south-bound brigades, with prisoners in hand-cuffs, began to meet us, I judged we were near the habitation of man. "Bad men?" I asked Little Fellow, pointing to the prisoners, as our crews exchanged rousing cheers with the Nor'-Westers now bound for Montreal. "_Non, Monsieur!_ Not all bad men," and the Indian gave his shoulders an expressive shrug, "_Les traitres anglais_." To the French _voyageur_, English meant the Hudson's Bay people. The answer set me wondering to what pass things had come between the two great companies that they were shipping each other's traders gratuitously out of the country. I recalled the talk at the Quebec Club about Governor McDonell of the Hudson's Bay trying to expel Nor'-Westers and concluded our people could play their own game against the commander of Red River. We arrived in Fort William at sundown, and a flag was flying above the courtyard. "Is that in our honor?" I asked a clerk of the party. "Not much it is," he laughed. "We under-strappers aren't oppressed with honors! It warns the Indians there's no trade one day out of seven." "Is this Sunday?" I suddenly recollected as far as we were concerned the past month had been entirely composed of week-days. "Out of your reckoning already?" asked the clerk with surprise. "Wonder how you'll feel when you've had ten years of it." Situated on the river bank, near the site of an old French post, Fort William was a typical traders' stronghold. Wooden palisades twenty feet high ran round the whole fort and the inner court enclosed at least two hundred square yards. Heavily built block-houses with guns poking through window slits gave a military air to the trading post. The block-houses were apparently to repel attack from the rear and the face of the fort commanded the river. Stores, halls, warehouses and living apartments for an army of clerks, were banked against the walls, and the main building with its spacious assembly-room stood conspicuous in the centre of the enclosure. As we entered the courtyard, one of the chief traders was perched on a mortar in the gate. The little magnate condescended never a smile of welcome till the _Bourgeois_ came up. Then he fawned loudly over the chiefs and conducted them with noisy ostentation to the main hall. Indians and half-breed _voyageurs_ quickly dispersed among the wigwams outside the pickets, while clerks and traders hurried to the broad-raftered dining-hall. Fatigued from the trip, I took little notice of the vociferous interchange of news in passage-way and over door-steps. I remember, after supper I was strolling about the courtyard, surveying the buildings, when at the door of a sort of barracks where residents of the fort lived, I caught sight of the most grateful object my eye had lighted upon since leaving Quebec. It was a tin basin with a large bar of soap--actual soap. There must still have been some vestige of civilization in my nature, for after a delightful half-hour's intimate acquaintance with that soap, I came round to the groups of men rehabilitated in self-respect. "Athabasca, Rocky Mountain and Saskatchewan brigades here to-morrow," remarked a boyish looking Nor'-Wester, with a mannish beard on his face. Involuntarily I put my hand to my chin and found a bristling growth there. That was a land where young men could become suddenly very old; and many a trader has discovered other signs of age than a beard on his face when he first looked at a mirror after life in the _Pays d'En Haut_. "I say," blurted out another young clerk. "There's a man here from Red River, one of the Selkirk settlers. He's come with word if we'll supply the boats, lots of the colonists are ready to dig out. General Assembly's going to consider that to-morrow." "Oh! Hang the old Assembly if it ships that man out! He's got a pretty daughter, perfect beauty, and she's here with him!" exclaimed the lad with the mannish beard. "Go to, thou light-head!" declared the other youth, with the air of an elder in Israel. "Go to! You paraded beneath her window for an hour to-day and she never once laid eyes on you." All the men laughed. "Hang it!" said the first speaker. "We don't display our little amours----" "No," broke in the other, "we just display our little contours and get snubbed, eh?" The bearded youth flushed at the sally of laughter. "Hang it!" he answered, pulling fiercely at his moustache. "She is a bit of statuary, so she is, as cold as marble. But there is no law against looking at a pretty bit of statuary, when it frames itself in a window in this wilderness." To which, every man of the crowd said a hearty amen; and I walked off to stretch myself full length on a bench, resolving to have out a mirror from my packing case and get rid of those bristles that offended my chin. The men began to disperse to their quarters. The tardy twilight of the long summer evenings, peculiar to the far north, was gathering in the courtyard. As the night-wind sighed past, I felt the velvet caress of warm June air on my face and memory reverted to the innocent boyhood days of Laval. How far away those days seemed! Yet it was not so long ago. Surely it is knowledge, not time, that ages one, knowledge, that takes away the trusting innocence resulting from ignorance and gives in its place the distrustful innocence resulting from wisdom. I thought of the temptations that had come to me in the few short weeks I had been adrift, and how feebly I had resisted them. I asked myself if there were not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star, as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had missed before--a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of gold; for a wonderful mass of wavy hair clustered down from the blue-veined brow to the bit of white throat visible, where a gauzy piece of neck wear had been loosened. Evidently, this was the statuary described by the whiskered youth. But the statuary breathed. A bloom of living apple-blossoms was on the cheeks. The brows were black and arched. The very pose of the head was arch, and in the lips was a suggestion of archery, too,--Cupid's archery, though the upper lip was drawn almost too tight for the bow beneath to discharge the little god's shaft. Why did I do it? I do not know. Ask the young Nor'-Wester, who had worn a path beneath the selfsame window that very day, or the hosts of young men, who are still wearing paths beneath windows to this very day. I coughed and sat bolt upright on the bench with unnecessarily loud intimations of my presence. The fringe of black lashes did not even lift. I rose and with great show of indifference paraded solemnly five times past that window; but, in spite of my pompous indifference, by a sort of side-signalling, I learned that the owner of the heavy lashes was unaware of my existence. Thereupon, I sat down again. It _was_ a bit of statuary and a very pretty bit of statuary. As the youth said, there was no law against looking at a bit of statuary in this wilderness, and as the statuary did not know I was looking at it, I sat back to take my fill of that vision framed in the open window. The statuary, unknown to itself, had full meed of revenge; for it presently brought such a flood of longing to my heart, longings, not for this face, but for what this face represented--the innocence and love and purity of home, that I bowed dejectedly forward with moist eyes gazing at the ground. "Hullo!" whispered a deep voice in my ear. "Are you mooning after the Little Statue already?" When I looked up, the man had passed, but the head in the window was leaning out and a pair of swimming, lustrous, gray eyes were gazing forward in a way that made me dizzy. "Ah," they said in a language that needed no speaking, "there are two of us, very, very home-sick." "The guiding star for my moral compass," said I, under my breath. Then the statue in a live fashion suddenly drew back into the dark room. The window-shutter flung to, with a bang, and my vision was gone. I left the bench, made a shake-down on one of the store counters, and knew nothing more till the noise of brigades from the far north aroused the fort at an early hour Monday morning. The arrival of the Athabasca traders was the signal for tremendous activity. An army returning from victory could not have been received with greater acclaim. _Bourgeois_ and clerks tumbled promiscuously from every nook in the fort and rushing half-dressed towards the gates shouted welcome to the men, who had come from the outposts of the known world. They were a shaggy, ragged-looking rabble, those traders from mountain fastnesses and the Arctic circle. With long white hair, hatless some of them, with beards like oriental patriarchs, and dressed entirely in skins of the chase, from fringed coats to gorgeous moccasins, the unkempt monarchs of northern realms had the imperious bearing of princes. "Is it you, really you, looking as old as your great grandfather? By Gad! So it is," came from one quondam friend. "Powers above!" ejaculated another onlooker, "See that old Father Abraham! It's Tait! As you live, it's Tait! And he only went to the Athabasca ten years ago. He was thirty then, and now he's a hundred!" "That's Wilson," says another. "Looks thin, doesn't he? Slim fare! He's the only man from Great Slave Lake that escaped being a meal for the Crees,--year of the famine; and they hadn't time to pick his bones!" A running fire of such comments went along the spectators lining each side of the path. There was a sad side to the clamorous welcomes and handshakes and surprised recognitions. Had not these men gone north young and full of hope, as I was going? Now, news of the feud with the Hudson's Bay brought them out old before their time and more like the natives with whom they had traded than the white race they had left. Here and there, strong men would fall in each other's arms and embrace like school-girls, covering their emotion with rounded oaths instead of terms of endearment. All day the confusion of unloading boats continued. The dull tread of moccasined feet as Indians carried pack after pack from river bank to the fort, was ceaseless. Faster than the clerks could sort the furs great bundles were heaped on the floor. By noon, warehouses were crammed from basement to attic. Ermine taken in mid-winter, when the fur was spotlessly white, but for the jet tail-tip, otter cut so deftly scarcely a tuft of fur had been wasted along the opened seam, silver fox, which had made the fortune of some lucky hunter--these and other rare furs, that were to minister to the luxury of kings, passed from tawny carriers to sorters. Elsewhere, coarse furs, obtained at greater risk, but owing to the abundance of big game, less valuable for the hunter, were sorted and valued. With a reckless underestimate of the beaver-skin, their unit of currency, Indians hung over counters bartering away the season's hunt. I frankly acknowledge the Company's clerks on such occasions could do a rushing business selling tawdry stuff at fabulous prices. Meanwhile, in the main hall, the _Bourgeois_, or partners, of the great North-West Company were holding their annual General Assembly behind closed doors. Clerks lowered their voices when they passed that room, and well they might; for the rulers inside held despotic sway over a domain as large as Europe. And what were they decreeing? Who can tell? The archives of the great fur companies are as jealously guarded as diplomatic documents, and more remarkable for what they omit than what they state. Was the policy, that ended so tragically a year afterwards, adopted at this meeting? Great corporations have a fashion of keeping their mouths and their council doors tight shut and of leaving the public to infer that catastrophes come causeless. However that may be, I know that Duncan Cameron, a fiery Highlander and one of the keenest men in the North-West service, suddenly flung out of the Assembly room with a pleased, determined look on his ruddy face. "Are ye Rufus Gillespie?" he asked. "That's my name, Sir." "Then buckle on y'r armor, lad; for ye'll see the thick of the fight. You're appointed to my department at Red River." And he left us. "Lucky dog! I envy you! There'll be rare sport between Cameron and McDonell, when the two forts up in Red River begin to talk back to each other," exclaimed a Fort William man to me. "Are you Gillespie?" asked a low, mellow, musical voice by my side. I turned to face a tall, dark, wiry man, with the swarthy complexion and intensely black eyes of one having strains of native blood. Among the _voyageurs_, I had become accustomed to the soft-spoken, melodious speech that betrays Indian parentage; and I believe if I were to encounter a descendant of the red race in China, or among the Latin peoples of Southern Europe, I could recognize Indian blood by that rhythmic trick of the native tongue. "I'm Gillespie," I answered my keen-eyed questioner. "Who are you?" "Cuthbert Grant, warden of the plains and leader of the _Bois-Brulés_," was his terse response. "You're coming to our department at Fort Gibraltar, and I want you to give Father Holland a place in your canoes to come north with us. He's on his way to the Missouri." At that instant Duncan Cameron came up to Grant and muttered something. Both men at once went back to the council hall of the General Assembly. I heard the courtyard gossips vowing that the Hudson's Bay would cease its aggressions, now that Cameron and Cuthbert Grant were to lead the Nor'-Westers; but I made no inquiry. Next to keeping his own counsel and giving credence to no man, the fur trader learns to gain information only with ears and eyes, and to ask no questions. The scurrying turmoil in the fort lasted all day. At dusk, natives were expelled from the stockades and work stopped. Grand was the foregathering around the supper table of the great dining hall that night. _Bourgeois_, clerks and traders from afar, explorers, from the four corners of the earth--assembled four hundred strong, buoyant and unrestrained, enthusiastically loyal to the company, and tingling with hilarious fellowship over this, the first reunion for twenty years. Though their manner and clothing be uncouth, men who have passed a lifetime exploring northern wilds have that to say, which is worth hearing. So the feast was prolonged till candles sputtered low and pitch-pine fagots flared out. Indeed, before the gathering broke up, flagons as well as candles had to be renewed. Lanterns swung from the black rafters of the ceiling. Tallow candles stood in solemn rows down the centre of each table, showing that men, not women, had prepared the banquet. Stuck in iron brackets against the walls were pine torches, that had been dipped in some resinous mixture and now flamed brightly with a smell not unlike incense. Tables lined the four walls of the hall and ran in the form of a cross athwart the middle of the room. Backless benches were on both sides of every table. At the end, chairs were placed, the seats of honor for famous _Bourgeois_. British flags had been draped across windows and colored bunting hung from rafter to rafter. "Ah, mon! Is no this fine? This is worth living for! This is the company to serve!" Duncan Cameron exclaimed as he sank into one of the chairs at the head of the centre table. The Scotchman's heart softened before those platters of venison and wild fowl, and he almost broke into geniality. "Here, Gillespie, to my right," he called, motioning me to the edge of the bench at his elbow. "Here, Grant, opposite Gillespie! Aye! an' is that you, Father Holland?" he cried to the stout, jovial priest, with shining brow and cheeks wrinkling in laughter, who followed Grant. "There's a place o' honor for men like you, Sir. Here!" and he gave the priest a chair beside himself. The _Bourgeois_ seated, there was a scramble for the benches. Then the whole company with great zest and much noisy talk fell upon the viands with a will. "Why, Cameron," began a northern winterer a few places below me, "it's taken me three months fast travelling to come from McKenzie River to Fort William. By Jove! Sir, 'twas cold enough to freeze your words solid as you spoke them, when we left Great Slave Lake. I'll bet if you men were up there now, you'd hear my voice thawing out and yelling get-epp to my huskies, and my huskies yelping back! Used a dog train, whole of March. Tied myself up in bag of buffalo robes at night and made the huskies lie across it to keep me from freezing. Got so hot, every pore in my body was a spouting fountain, and in the morning that moisture would freeze my buckskin stiff. Couldn't stand that; so I tried sleeping with my head out of the bag and froze my nose six nights out of seven." The unfortunate nose corroborated his evidence. "Ice was sloppy on the Saskatchewan, and I had to use pack-horses and take the trail. I was trusting to get provisions at Souris. You can imagine, then, how we felt towards the Hudson's Bays when we found they'd plundered our fort. We were without a bite for two days. Why, we took half a dozen Hudson's Bays in our quarters up north last winter, and saved them from starvation; and here we were, starving, that they might plunder and rob. I'm with you, Sir! I'm with you to the hilt against the thieves! There's a time for peace and there's a time for war, and I say this is a very good time for war!" "Here's confusion to the old H. B. C's! Confusion, short life, no prosperity, and death to the Hudson's Bay!" yelled the young whiskered Nor'-Wester, springing to his feet on the bench and waving a drinking-cup round his head. Some of the youthful clerks were disposed to take their cue from this fire-eater and began strumming the table and applauding; but the _Bourgeois_ frowned on forward conduct. "Check him, Grant!" growled Cameron in disapproval. "Sit down, bumptious babe!" said the priest, tugging the lad's coat. "Here, you young show-off," whispered Grant, leaning across the priest, and he knocked the boy's feet from under him bringing him down to the bench with a thud. "He needs more outdoor life, that young one! It goes to his head mighty fast," remarked Cameron. "What were you saying about your hard luck?" and he turned to the northern winterer again. "Call that hard luck?" broke in a mountaineer, laughing as if he considered hardships a joke. "We lived a month last winter on two meals a day; soup, out of snow-shoe thongs, first course; fried skins, second go; teaspoonful shredded fish, by way of an entrée!" The man wore a beaded buckskin suit, and his mellow intonation of words in the manner of the Indian tongue showed that he had almost lost English speech along with English customs. His recital caused no surprise. "Been on short, rations myself," returned the northerner. "Don't like it! Isn't safe! Rips a man's nerves to the raw when Indians glare at him with hungry eyes eighteen hours out of the twenty-four." "What was the matter?" drawled the mountaineer. "Hudson's Bay been tampering with your Indians? Now if you had a good Indian wife as I have, you could defy the beggars to turn trade away----" "Aye, that's so," agreed the winterer, "I heard of a fellow on the Athabasca who had to marry a squaw before he could get a pair of racquets made; but that wasn't my trouble. Game was scarce." "Game scarce on MacKenzie River?" A chorus of voices vented their surprise. To the outside world game is always scarce, reported scarce on MacKenzie River and everywhere else by the jealous fur traders; but these deceptions are not kept up among hunters fraternizing at the same banquet board. "Mighty scarce. Some of the tribe died out from starvation. The Hudson's Bay in our district were in bad plight. We took six of them in--Hadn't heard of the Souris plunder, you may be sure." "More fools they to go into the Athabasca," declared the mountaineer. "Bigger fools to send another brigade there this year when they needn't expect help from us," interjected a third trader. "You don't say they're sending another lot of men to the Athabasca!" exclaimed the winterer. "Yes I do--under Colin Robertson," affirmed the third man. "Colin Robertson--the Nor'-Wester?" "Robertson who used to be a Nor'-Wester! It's Selkirk's work since he got control of the H. B." "Robertson should know better," said the northerner. "He had experience with us before he resigned. I'll wager he doesn't undertake that sort of venture! Surely it's a yarn!" "You lose your bet," cried the irrepressible Fort William lad. "A runner came in at six o'clock and reported that the Hudson's Bay brigade from Lachine would pass here before midnight. They're sooners, they are, are the H. B. C's.," and the clerk enjoyed the sensation of rolling a big oath from his boyish lips. "Eric Hamilton passing within a stone's throw of the fort!" In astonishment I leaned forward to catch every word the Fort William lad might say. "To Athabasca by our route--past this fort!" Such temerity amazed the winterer beyond coherent expression. "Good thing for them they're passing in the night," continued the clerk. "The half-breeds are hot about that Souris affair. There'll be a collision yet!" The young fellow's importance increased in proportion to the surprise of the elder men. "There'll be a collision anyway when Cameron and Grant reach Red River--eh, Cuthbert?" and the mountaineer turned to the dark, sharp-featured warden of the plains. Cuthbert Grant laughed pleasantly. "Oh, I hope not--for their sakes!" he said, and went on with the story of a buffalo hunt. The story I missed, for I was deep in my own thoughts. I must see Eric and let him know what I had learned; but how communicate with the Hudson's Bay brigade without bringing suspicion of double dealing on myself? I was turning things over in my mind in a stupid sort of way like one new at intrigue, when I heard a talker, vowing by all that was holy that he had seen the rarest of hunter's rarities--a pure white buffalo. The wonder had appeared in Qu'Appelle Valley. "I can cap that story, man," cried the portly Irish priest who was to go north in my boat. "I saw a white squaw less than two weeks ago!" He paused for his words to take effect, and I started from my chair as if I had been struck. "What's wrong, young man?" asked the winterer. "We lonely fellows up north see visions. We leap out of our moccasins at the sound of our own voices; but you young chaps, with all the world around you"--he waved towards the crowded hall as though it were the metropolis of the universe--"shouldn't see ghosts and go jumping mad." I sat down abashed. "Yes, a white squaw," repeated the jovial priest. "Sure now, white ladies aren't so many in these regions that I'd be likely to make a mistake." "There's a difference between squaws and white ladies," persisted the jolly father, all unconscious that he was emphasizing a difference which many of the traders were spelling out in hard years of experience. "I've seen papooses that were white for a day or two after they were born----" "Effect of the christening," interrupted the youth, whose head, between flattered vanity and the emptied contents of his drinking cup, was very light indeed. "Take that idiot out and put him to bed, somebody," commanded Cameron. "For a day or two after they were born," reiterated the priest; "but I never saw such a white-skinned squaw!" "Where did you see her?" I inquired in a voice which was not my own. "On Lake Winnipeg. Coming down two weeks ago we camped near a band of Sioux, and I declare, as I passed a tepee, I saw a woman's face that looked as white as snow. She was sleeping, and the curtain had blown up. Her child was in her arms, and I tell you her bare arms were as white as snow." "Must have been the effect of the moonlight," explained some one. "Moonlight didn't give the other Indians that complexion," insisted the priest. It was my turn to feel my head suddenly turn giddy, though liquor had not passed my lips. This information could have only one meaning. I was close on the track of Miriam, and Eric was near; yet the slightest blunder on my part might ruin all chance of meeting him and rescuing her. CHAPTER VIII THE LITTLE STATUE ANIMATE The men began arguing about the degrees of whiteness in a squaw's skin. Those, married to native women, averred that differences of complexion were purely matters of temperament and compared their dusky wives to Spanish belles. The priest was now talking across the table to Duncan Cameron, advocating a renewal of North-West trade with the Mandanes on the Missouri, whither he was bound on his missionary tour. To venture out of the fort through the Indian encampments, where natives and outlaws were holding high carnival, and my sleepless foe could have a free hand, would be to risk all chance of using the information that had come to me. I did not fear death--fear of death was left east of the Sault in those days. On my preservation depended Miriam's rescue. Besides, if either Le Grand Diable or myself had to die, I came to the conclusion of other men similarly situated--that my enemy was the one who should go. Violins, flutes and bag-pipes were striking up in different parts of the hall. Simple ballads, smacking of old delights in an older land, songs, with which home-sick white men comforted themselves in far-off lodges--were roared out in strident tones. Feet were beating time to the rasp of the fiddles. Men rose and danced wild jigs, or deftly executed some intricate Indian step; and uproarious applause greeted every performer. The hall throbbed with confused sounds and the din deadened my thinking faculties. Even now, Eric might be slipping past. In that deafening tumult I could decide nothing, and when I tried to leave the table, all the lights swam dizzily. "Excuse me, Sir!" I whispered, clutching the priest's elbow. "You're Father Holland and are to go north in my boats. Come out with me for a moment." Thinking me tipsy, he gave me a droll glance. "'Pon my soul! Strapping fellows like you shouldn't need last rites----" "Please say nothing! Come quickly!" and I gripped his arm. "Bless us! It's a touch of the head, or the heart!" and he rose and followed me from the hall. In the fresh air, dizziness left me. Sitting down on the bench, where I had lain the night before, I told him my perplexing mission. At first, I am sure he was convinced that I was drunk or raving, but my story had the directness of truth. He saw at once how easily he could leave the fort at that late hour without arousing suspicion, and finally offered to come with me to the river bank, where we might intercept Hamilton. "But we must have a boat, a light cockle-shell thing, so we can dart out whenever the brigade appears," declared the priest, casting about in his mind for means to forward our object. "The canoes are all locked up. Can't you borrow one from the Indians? Don't you know any of them?" I asked with a sudden sinking of heart. "And have the whole pack of them sneaking after us? No--no--that won't do. Where are your wits, boy! Arrah! Me hearty, but what was that?" We both heard the shutter above our heads suddenly thrown open, but darkness hid anyone who might have been listening. "Hm!" said the priest. "Overheard! Fine conspirators we are! Some eavesdropper!" "Hush!" and remembering whose window it was, I held him; for he would have stalked away. "Are you there?" came a clear, gentle voice, that fell from the window in the breaking ripples of a fountain plash. The bit of statuary had become suddenly animate and was not so marble-cold to mankind as it looked. Thinking we had been taken for an expected lover, I, too, was moving off, when the voice, that sounded like the dropping golden notes of a cremona, called out in tones of vibrating alarm: "Don't--don't go! Priest! Priest! Father! It's you I'm speaking to. I've heard every word!" Father Holland and I were too much amazed to do aught but gape from each other to the dark window. We could now see the outlines of a white face there. "If you'd please put one bench on top of another, and balance a bucket on that, I think I could get down," pleaded the low, thrilling voice. "An' in the name of the seven wonders of creation, what for would you be getting down?" asked the astonished priest. "Oh! Hurry! Are you getting the bench?" coaxed the voice. "Faith an' we're not! And we have no thought of doing such a thing!" began the good man with severity. "Then, I'll jump," threatened the voice. "And break your pretty neck," answered the ungallant father with indignation. There was a rustling of skirts being gathered across the window sill and outlines of a white face gave place to the figure of a frail girl preparing for a leap. "Don't!" I cried, genuinely alarmed, with a mental vision of shattered statuary on the ground. "Don't! I'm getting the benches," and I piled them up, with a rickety bucket on top. "Wait!" I implored, stepping up on the bottom bench. "Give me your hand," and as I caught her hands, she leaped from the window to the bucket, and the bucket to the ground, with a daintiness, which I thought savored of experience in such escapades. "What do you mean, young woman?" demanded Father Holland in anger. "I'll have none of your frisky nonsense! Do you know, you baggage, that you are delaying this young man in a matter that is of life-and-death importance? Tell me this instant, what do you want?" "I want to save that woman, Miriam! You're both so slow and stupid! Come, quick!" and she caught us by the arms. "There's a skiff down among the rushes in the flats. I can guide you to it. Cross the river in it! Oh! Quick! Quick! Some of the Hudson's Bay brigades have already passed!" "How do you know?" we both demanded as in one breath. "I'm Frances Sutherland. My father is one of the Selkirk settlers and he had word that they would pass to-night! Oh! Come! Come!" This girl, the daughter of a man who was playing double to both companies! And her service to me would compel me to be loyal to him! Truly, I was becoming involved in a way that complicated simple duty. But the girl had darted ahead of us, we following by the flutter of the white gown, and she led us out of the courtyard by a sally-port to the rear of a block-house. She paused in the shadow of some shrubbery. "Get fagots from the Indians to light us across the flats," she whispered to Father Holland. "They'll think nothing of your coming. You're always among them!" "Mistress Sutherland!" I began, as the priest hurried forward to the Indian camp-fires, "I hate to think of you risking yourself in this way for----" "Stop thinking, then," she interrupted abruptly in a voice that somehow reminded me of my first vision of statuary. "I beg your pardon," I blundered on. "Father Holland and I have both forgotten to apologize for our rudeness about helping you down." "Pray don't apologize," answered the marble voice. Then the girl laughed. "Really you're worse than I thought, when I heard you bungling over a boat. I didn't mind your rudeness. It was funny." "Oh!" said I, abashed. There are situations in which conversation is impossible. "I didn't mind your rudeness," she repeated, "and--and--you mustn't mind mine. Homesick people aren't--aren't--responsible, you know. Ah! Here are the torches! Give me one. I thank you--Father Holland--is it not? Please smother them down till we reach the river, or we'll be followed." She was off in a flash, leading us through a high growth of rushes across the flats. So I was both recognized and remembered from the previous night. The thought was not displeasing. The wind moaned dismally through the reeds. I did not know that I had been glancing nervously behind at every step, with uncomfortable recollections of arrows and spear-heads, till Father Holland exclaimed: "Why, boy! You're timid! What are you scared of?" "The devil!" and I spoke truthfully. "Faith! There's more than yourself runs from His Majesty; but resist the devil and he will flee from you." "Not the kind of devil that's my enemy," I explained. I told him of the arrow-shot and spear-head, and all mirth left his manner. "I know him, I know him well. There's no greater scoundrel between Quebec and Athabasca." "My devil, or yours?" "Yours, lad. Let your laughter be turned to mourning! Beware of him! I've known more than one murder of his doing. Eh! But he's cunning, so cunning! We can't trip him up with proofs; and his body's as slippery as an eel or we might----" But a loon flapped up from the rushes, brushing the priest's face with its wings. "Holy Mary save us!" he ejaculated panting to keep up with our guide. "Faith! I thought 'twas the devil himself!" "Do you really mean it? Would it be right to get hold of Le Grand Diable?" I asked. Frances Sutherland had slackened her pace and we were all three walking abreast. A dry cane crushed noisily under foot and my head ducked down as if more arrows had hissed past. "Mane it?" he cried, "mane it? If ye knew all the evil he's done ye'd know whether I mane it." It was his custom when in banter to drop from English to his native brogue like a merry-andrew. "But, Father Holland, I had him in my power. I struck him, but I didn't kill him, more's the pity!" "An' who's talking of killin', ye young cut-throat? I say get howld of his body and when ye've got howld of his body, I'd further advise gettin' howld of the butt end of a saplin'----" "But, Father, he was my canoeman. I had him in my power." Instantly he squared round throwing the torchlight on my face. "Had him in your power--knew what he'd done--and--and--didn't?" "And didn't," said I. "But you almost make me wish I had. What do you take traders for?" "You're young," said he, "and I take traders for what they are----" "But I'm a trader and I didn't----" Though a beginner, I wore the airs of a veteran. "Benedicite!" he cried. "The Lord shall be your avenger! He shall deliver that evil one into the power of the punisher!" "Benedicite!" he repeated. "May ye keep as clean a conscience in this land as you've brought to it." "Amen, Father!" said I. "Here we are," exclaimed Frances Sutherland as we emerged from the reeds to the brink of the river, where a skiff was moored. "Go, be quick! I'll stay here! 'Twill be better without me. The Hudson's Bay are keeping close to the far shore!" "You can't stay alone," objected Father Holland. "I shall stay alone, and I've had my way once already to-night." "But we don't wish to lose one woman in finding another," I protested. "Go," she commanded with a furious little stamp. "You lose time! Stupids! Do you think I stay here for nothing? We may have been followed and I shall stay here and watch! I'll hide in the rushes! Go!" And there was a second stamp. That stamp of a foot no larger than a boy's hand cowed two strong men and sent us rowing meekly across the river. "Did ye ever--did ever ye see such a little termagant, such a persuasive, commanding little queen of a termagant?" asked the priest almost breathless with surprise. "Queen of courage!" I answered back. "Queen of hearts, too, I'm thinking. Arrah! Me hearty, to be young!" She must have smothered her torch, for there was no light among the reeds when I looked back. We crossed the river slowly, listening between oar-strokes for the paddle-dips of approaching canoes. There was no sound but the lashing of water against the pebbled shore and we lay in a little bay ready to dash across the fleet's course, when the boats should come abreast. We had not long to wait. A canoe nose cautiously rounded the headland coming close to our boat. Instantly I shot our skiff straight across its path and Father Holland waved the torches overhead. "Hist! Hold back there--have a care!" I called. "Clear the way!" came an angry order from the dark. "Clear--or we fire!" "Fire if you dare, you fools!" I retorted, knowing well they would not alarm the fort, and we edged nearer the boat. "Where's Eric Hamilton?" I demanded. "A curse on you! None of your business! Get out of the way! Who are you?" growled the voice. "Answer--quick!" I urged Father Holland, thinking they would respect holy orders; and I succeeded in bumping my craft against their canoe. "Strike him with your paddle, man!" yelled the steersman, who was beyond reach. "Give 'im a bullet!" called another. "For shame, ye saucy divils!" shouted the priest, shaking his torch aloft and displaying his garb. "Shame to ye, threatenin' to shoot a missionary! Ye'd be much better showin' respect to the Church. Whur's Eric Hamilton?" he demanded in a fine show of indignation, and he caught the edge of their craft in his right hand. "Let go!" and the steersman threateningly raised a pole that shone steel-shod. "Let go--is ut ye're orderin' me?" thundered the holy man, now in a towering rage, and he flaunted the torch over the crew. "Howld y'r imp'dent tongues!" he shouted, shaking the canoe. "Be civil this minute, or I'll spill ye to the bottom, ye load of cursin' braggarts! Faith an' ut's a durty meal ye'd make for the fush! Foine answers ye give polite questions! How d'y' know we're not here to warn ye about the fort? For shame to ye. Whur's Eric Hamilton, I say?" Some of the canoemen recognized the priest. Conciliatory whispers passed from man to man. "Hamilton's far ahead--above the falls now," answered the steersman. "Then, as ye hope to save your soul," warned Father Holland not yet appeased, "deliver this young man's message!" "Tell Hamilton," I cried, "that she whom he seeks is held captive by a band of Sioux on Lake Winnipeg and to make haste. Tell him that and he'll reward you well!" "Vary by one word from the message," added the priest, "and my curses'll track your soul to the furnace." Father Holland relaxed his grasp, the paddles dipped down and the canoe was lost in the darkness. More than once I thought that a shadowy thing like an Indian's boat had hung on our rear and the craft seemed to be dogging us back to the flats. Father Holland raised his torch and could see nothing on the water but the glassy reflection of our own forms. He said it was a phantom boat I had seen; and, truly, visions of Le Grande Diable had haunted me so persistently of late, I could scarcely trust my senses. Frances Sutherland's torch suddenly appeared waving above the flats. I put muscle to the oar and before we had landed she called out-- "An Indian's canoe shot past a moment ago. Did you see it?" "No," returned Father Holland. "I think we did," said I. * * * * * "How can I thank you for what you have done?" I was saying to Frances Sutherland as we entered the fort by the same sally-port. "Do you really want to know how?" "Do I?" I was prepared to offer dramatic sacrifice. "Then never think of it again, nor speak of it again, nor know me any more than if it hadn't happened----" "The conditions are hard." "And----" "And what?" I asked eagerly. "And help me back the way I came down. For if my father--oh! if my father knew--he would kill me!" "Faith! So he ought!" ejaculated the priest. "Risking such precious treasure among vandals!" Again I piled up the benches. From the bench, she stepped to the bucket, and from the bucket to my shoulder, and as the light weight left my shoulder for the window sill, unknown to her, I caught the fluffy skirt, now bedraggled with the night dew, and kissed it gratefully. "Oh--ho--and oh-ho and oh-ho," hummed the priest. "Do _I_ scent matrimony?" "Not unless it's in your nose," I returned huffily. "Show me a man of all the hundreds inside, Father Holland, that wouldn't go on his marrow-bones to a woman who risks life and reputation, which is dearer than life, to save another woman!" "Bless you, me hearty, if he wouldn't, he'd be a villain," said the priest. CHAPTER IX DECORATING A BIT OF STATUARY I frequently passed that window above the stoop next day. Once I saw a face looking down on me with such withering scorn, I wondered if the disgraceful scene with Louis Laplante had become noised about, and I hastened to take my exercise in another part of the courtyard. Thereupon, others paid silent homage to the window, but they likewise soon tired of that parade ground. Eastern notions of propriety still clung to me. Of this I had immediate proof. When our rough crews were preparing to re-embark for the north, I was shocked beyond measure to see this frail girl come down with her father to travel in our company. Not counting her father, the priest, Duncan Cameron, Cuthbert Grant and myself, there were in our party three-score reckless, uncurbed adventurers, who feared neither God nor man. I thought it strange of a father to expose his daughter to the bold gaze, coarse remarks, and perhaps insults of such men. Before the end of that trip, I was to learn a lesson in western chivalry, which is not easily explained, or forgotten. As father and daughter were waiting to take their places in a boat, a shapeless, flat-footed woman, wearing moccasins--probably the half-breed wife of some trader in the fort--ran to the water's edge with a parcel of dainties, and kissing the girl on both cheeks, wished her a fervent God-speed. "Oh!" growled the young Nor'-Wester, who had been carried from the banquet hall, and now wore the sour expression that is the aftermath of banquets. "Look at that fat lump of a bumblebee distilling honey from the rose! There are others who would appreciate that sort of thing! This _is_ the wilderness of lost opportunities!" The girl seated herself in a canoe, where the only men were Duncan Cameron, her father and the native _voyageurs_; and I dare vouch a score of young traders groaned at the sight of this second lost opportunity. "Look, Gillespie! Look!" muttered my comrade of the banquet hall. "The Little Statue set up at the prow of yon canoe! I'll wager you do reverence to graven images all the way to Red River!" "I'll wager we all do," said I. And we did. To change the metaphor--after the style of Mr. Jack MacKenzie's eloquence--I warrant there was not a young man of the eight crews, who did not regard that marble-cold face at the prow of the leading canoe, as his own particular guiding star. And the white face beneath the broad-brimmed hat, tied down at each side in the fashion of those days, was as serenely unconscious of us as any star of the heavenly constellations. If she saw there were objects behind her canoe, and that the objects were living beings, and the living beings men, she gave no evidence of it. Nor was the Little Statue--as we had got in the habit of calling her--heartless. In spite of the fears which she entertained for her stern father, her filial affection was a thing to turn the lads of the crews quite mad. Scarcely were we ashore at the different encampments before father and daughter would stroll off arm in arm, leaving the whole brigade envious and disconsolate. Was it the influence of this slip of a girl, I wonder, that a curious change came over our crews? The men still swore; but they did it under their breath. Fewer yarns of a quality, which need not be specified, were told; and certain kinds of jokes were no longer greeted with a loud guffaw. Still we all thought ourselves mightily ill-used by that diminutive bundle of independence, and some took to turning the backs of their heads in her direction when she chanced to come their way. One young spark said something about the Little Statue being a prig, which we all invited him to repeat, but he declined. Had she played the coquette under the innocent mask of sympathy and all other guiles with which gentle slayers ambush strong hearts, I dare affirm there would have been trouble enough and to spare. Suicides, fights, insults and worse, I have witnessed when some fool woman with a fair face came among such men. "Fool" woman, I say, rather than "false"; for to my mind falsity in a woman may not be compared to folly for the utter be-deviling of men. With our guiding star at the prow of the fore canoe, we continued to wind among countless islands, through narrow, rocky channels and along those endless water-ways, that stretch like a tangled, silver chain with emerald jewels, all the way from the Great Lakes to the plains. Somewhere along Rainy River, where there is an oasis of rolling, wooded meadows in a desert of iron rock, we pitched our tents for the night. The evening air was fragrant with the odor of summer's early flowers. I could not but marvel at the almost magical growth in these far northern latitudes. Barely a month had passed since snow enveloped the earth in a winding sheet, and I have heard old residents say that the winter's frost penetrated the ground for a depth of four feet. Yet here we were in a very tropic of growth run riot and the frost, which still lay beneath the upper soil, was thawing and moistening the succulent roots of a wilderness of green. The meadow grass, swaying off to the forest margin in billowy ripples, was already knee-high. The woods were an impenetrable mass of foliage from the forest of ferns about the broad trunks to the high tree-tops, nodding and fanning in the night breeze like coquettish dames in an eastern ball-room. Everywhere--at the river bank, where our tents stood, above the long grass, and in the forest--clear, faint and delicate, like the bloom of a fair woman's cheek, or the pensive theme of some dream fugue, or the sweet notes of some far-off, floating harmonies, was an odor of hidden flowers. A trader's nature is, of necessity, rough in the grain, but it is not corrupt with the fevered joys of the gilded cities. Even we could feel the call of the wilds to come and seek. It was not surprising, therefore, that after supper father and daughter should stroll away from the encampment, arm in arm, as usual. As their figures passed into the woods, the girl broke away from her father's arm and stooped to the ground. "Pickin' flowers," was the laconic remark of the trader, who had helped me with Louis Laplante on the beach; and the man lay back full length against a rising knoll to drink in the delicious freshness of the night. Every man of us watched the vanishing forms. "Smell violets?" asked a heterogeneous combination of sun-brown and buckskin. "This ground's a perfect wheat-field of violets," exclaimed the whiskered youngster. "Lots o' Mayflowers and night-shades in the bush," declared a ragged man, who was one of the worst gamblers in camp, and was now aimlessly shuffling a greasy, bethumbed pack of cards. "Oh!" came simultaneously from half a dozen. Personally, it struck me one might pick flowers for a certain purpose in the bush without being observed. "Mayflowers in June!" scoffed the boy. "Aye, babe! Mayflowers in June! May is June in these here regions," asserted the man. "Ladies-and-gentlemen, too, many's you could pick in the bush!" "Ladies-and-gentlemen! Sounds funny in this desert, don't it?" asked the lad. "What _are_ ladies-and-gentlemen?" "Don't you know?" continued the gambler, unfolding a curious lore of flowers. "Those little potty, white things, split up the middle with a green head on top--grow under ferns. Come on. Cards are ready! Who's going to play?" "Durn it! Them's Dutchman's breeches!" exclaimed the sun-browned trapper. "O Goll! If that Little Stature finds any Dutchman's breeches, she that's so scared of us men! O Goll! Won't she blush? Say, babe, why don't y'r fill y'r hat with 'em and put 'em in her tent?" and the big trapper set up a hoarse guffaw which led a general chorus. Then the men gathered round, to play. "Faith, lads!" interrupted the voice of the Irish priest, who had come upon the group so quietly the gambler scarcely had time to tuck the tell-tale cards under his buckskin smock, "I'm thinking ye've all developed a mighty sudden interest in botany. Are there any bleeding hearts in the bush?" "There may be here," suggested the boy. "It all comes of the Little Statute!" declared the big trapper. "Oh! You and your Stature and Statute! Why can't you say Statue?" asked the lad with the pompous scorn of youthful knowledge. "Because, oh, babe with the chicken-down," answered the man, giving his corrector a thud with his broad palm and sticking heroically by his slip of the tongue, "I says the words I means and don't play no prig. She don't pay more attention to you than if you wuz a stump, that's why she's a statue, ain't it? And the fellows've got to stretch their necks to come up to her ideas of what's proper, that's why she's a stature, ain't it? And not a man of us, if His Reverence'll excuse me for saying so, dare let out a cuss afore her. That's why she's a statute, ain't it?" And when I walked off to the bush with as great a show of indifference as I could muster, I heard the priest crying "Bravo!" to the man's defence. How came it that I was in the woods slushing through damp mold up to my ankles in black ooze? I no longer had any fear of an ambushed enemy; for Le Grand Diable, the knave, had forfeited his wages and deserted at Fort William. He was not seen after the night of the meeting with the Hudson's Bay canoe off the flats. I drew Father Holland's attention to this, and the priest was no longer so sceptical about that phantom boat. But it was not of these things I thought, as I tore a great strip of bark from the trunk of a birch tree and twisted the piece into a huge cornucopia. Nor had I the slightest expectation of encountering father and daughter in the woods. That marble face was too much in earnest for the vainest of men to suppose its indifference assumed; and no matter how fair the eyes, no man likes to be looked at, by eyes that do not see him, or see him only as a blur on the landscape. Still that marble face stood for much that is dear to the roughest of hearts and about which men do not talk. So I went on packing damp moss into the bottom of the bark horn, arranging frail lilies and night shades about the rim and laying a solid pyramid of violets in the centre. The mold, through which I was floundering, seemed to merge into a bog; but the lower reaches were hidden by a thicket of alder bushes and scrub willows. I mounted a fallen tree and tried to get cautiously down to some tempting lily-pads. Evidently some one else on the other side of the brush was after those same bulbs; for I heard the sucking sound of steps plunging through the mire of water and mud. "Why, Gillespie," called a voice, "what in the world are you doing here?" and the boy emerged through the willows gaping at me in astonishment. "Just what I want to know of you," said I. He presented a comical figure. His socks and moccasins had been tied and slung round his neck. With trousers rolled to his knees, a hatful of water-lilies in one hand and a sheaf of ferns in the other, he was wading through the swamp. "You see," he began sheepishly. "I thought she couldn't--couldn't conveniently get these for herself, and it would be kind of nice--kind of nice--you know--to get some for her----" "Don't explain," I blurted out. "I was trying that same racket myself." "You know, Gillespie," he continued quite confidentially, "when a man's been away from his mother and sisters for years and years and years----" "Yes, I know, babe; you're an octogenarian," I interrupted. "And feels himself going utterly to the bow-wows without any stop-gear to keep him from bowling clean to the bottom, a person feels like doing something decent for a girl like the Little Statue," and the youth plucked half a dozen yellow flowers as well as the coveted white ones. "Have some for your basket," said he. His face was puckered into pathetic gravity. "It's so hanged easy to go to the bow-wows out here," he added. "Not so easy as in the towns," I interjected. "Ah! but I've been there, gone all through 'em in the towns," he explained. "That's why the pater packed me off to this wilderness." And that, thought I, is why the west gets all the credit for the wild oats gathered in old lands and sown in the new world. I pulled him up to the log on which I was balanced, and seating himself he dangled his feet down and began to souse the mud off his toes. "Say!" he exclaimed. "How are you going to get 'em to her?" "Take them to the tent." "Well, Gillespie, when you take yours up, take mine along, too, will you? There's a good fellow! Do!" He was drawing on his socks. "Not much I will. If there's any proxy, you can take mine," I returned. "Say! Do you think Father Holland would take 'em up?" He had tied his moccasins and was standing. "Can't say I think he would." "He'd let you hear about it to all eternity, too, wouldn't he?" reflected the lad. "Come on, then; but you go first." And he followed me up the log, both of us feeling like shame-faced schoolboys. We stole into the tent, the one tent of all others that had interest for us that night, and deposited our burden of flowers on the couch of buffalo robes. "Hurry," whispered my companion. "Stack these ferns round somewhere! Hurry! She'll be back." And leaving me to do the arranging he bolted for the tent flaps. "Oh! Open earth and swallow me!" he almost screamed, and I heard the sound of two persons coming in violent collision at the entrance. "The babe, as I live! The rascally young broth of a babe! Ye rogue, ye!" burred the deep bass tones of the trader whom I had met over Louis Laplante. "What are ye doin' here?" "Oh, is it only you? Thank fortune!" ejaculated the boy, dodging back. "What are you doing yourself? Great guns! You scared the wits out of me! Ho! Here's a lark! Gillespie, my pal, look here!" I turned to see the sheepish, guilty, smirking faces of the trader, the rough-tongued, sunburned trapper and the ragged gambler grouped at the entrance, and each man's arms were full of flowers. "Well, I'm durned!" began the rough man. "As she's jack-spotted us all," drawled the gentle, liquid tones of the gambler, "we'd better go ahead and----" "And decorate a bit of statuary," shouted the lad with a laugh. It was a long tent, like the booth of a fair, with supports at each end, and we were festooning it from pole to pole with moss and ferns when somebody rasped at the door. "Mon alive! What's goin' on here?" We started from our work with the guilty alacrity of burglars. There stood Frances Sutherland's father, much aghast at the proceedings, and by his side was a face with cheeks flaming poppy red and lips twitching in merriment. There was a sudden snow-storm of flowers being tossed down, and five men brushed past the two spectators and dashed into the hiding of gathering dusk. At the foot of the knoll I ran against the priest. "That," roared Father Holland, shaking with laughter. "That's what I call good stuff in the rough! Faith, but ye'll give me good stuff in the rough. I want none o' yer gilded chivalry from the tinsel towns!" There was a wreath of night-shades in the Little Statue's hat when the canoes set out next morning. Mayflowers were at her throat, violets in her girdle and I know not what in a basket at her feet. The face was unconscious of us as ever, but about the downcast eyelids played a tender gentleness which was not there before. Once I caught her glancing back among us as if she would pick out the culprits; and when her eyes for a moment rested on me, my heart set up a silly thumping. But she looked just as pointedly at the others, and I know every man's heart of them responded; for the boy began such a floundering I thought he would spill his canoe. A quick trip brought us to the mouth of Red River, where the Hudson's Bay _voyageurs_ under Colin Robertson were resting. Here I was surprised to learn that Eric Hamilton had not waited but had hastened up Red River to Fort Douglas. I could not but connect this southward move of his with the sudden flight of Le Grand Diable from Fort William. After brief pause at the foot of Lake Winnipeg, our brigade turned southward and made speed up the Red through the rush-grown sedgy swamps which over-flood the river bed. Farther south the banks towered high and smoke curled up from the huts of Lord Selkirk's settlers. Women with nets in their hands to scare off myriad blackbirds that clouded the air, and men from the cornfields ran to the river edge and cheered us as we passed. Here the Sutherlands landed. Some of the traders thought it a good omen, that Hudson's Bay settlers cheered Nor'-Wester brigades; but in one bend of the muddy Red, the bastions of Fort Douglas, where Governor McDonell of the rival company ruled, loomed up and the guns pointing across the river wore anything but a welcome look. We passed Fort Douglas unmolested, followed the Red a mile farther to its junction with the Assiniboine and here disembarked at Fort Gibraltar, the headquarters of the Nor'-Westers in Red River. CHAPTER X MORE STUDIES IN STATUARY "So he laughs at our warrant?" exclaimed Duncan Cameron. "Hut-tut! We'll teach him to respect warrants issued under authority of 43d King George III.," and the dictator of Fort Gibraltar fussed angrily among the papers of his desk and beat a threatening tattoo with knuckles and heels. The Assiniboine enters the Red at something like a right angle and in this angle was the Nor'-Westers' fort, named after an old-world stronghold, because we imagined our position gave us the same command of the two waterways by which the _voyageurs_ entered and left the north country as Gibraltar has of the Mediterranean. Governor McDonell had thought to outwit us by building the Hudson's Bay fort a mile further down the current of the Red. It was a sharp trick, for Fort Douglas could intercept Nor'-West brigades bound from Montreal to Fort Gibraltar, or from Fort Gibraltar to the Athabasca. Two days after our arrival, Cuthbert Grant, with a band of _Bois-Brulés_, had gone to Fort Douglas to arrest Captain Miles McDonell for plundering Nor'-West posts. The doughty governor took Grant's warrant as a joke and scornfully turned the whole North-West party out of Fort Douglas. On the stockades outside were proclamations commanding settlers to take up arms in defense of the Hudson's Bay traders and forbidding natives to sell furs to any but our rivals. These things added fuel to the hot anger of the chafing _Bois-Brulés_. A curious race were these mongrel plain-rangers, with all the savage instincts of the wild beast and few of the brutal impulses of the beastly man. The descendants of French fathers and Indian mothers, they inherited all the quick, fiery daring of the Frenchman, all the endurance, craft and courage of the Indian, and all the indolence of both white man and red. One might cut his enemy's throat and wash his hands in the life blood, or spend years in accomplishing revenge; but it is a question if there is a single instance on record of a _Bois-Brulé_ molesting an enemy's family. When the Frenchman married a native woman, he cast off civilization like an ill-fitting coat and virtually became an Indian. When the Scotch settler married a native woman, he educated her up to his own level and if she did not become entirely civilized, her children did. One was the wild man, the Ishmaelite of the desert, the other, the tiller of the soil, the Israelite of the plain. Such were the tameless men, of whom Cuthbert Grant was the leader, the leader solely from his fitness to lead. It was late in the afternoon when the warden returned from Fort Douglas. I was busy over my desk. Father Holland was still with us awaiting the departure of traders to the south, and Duncan Cameron was stamping about the room like a caged lion. There came a quick, angry tramp from the hall. "That's Grant back, and there's no one with him," muttered Cameron with suppressed anger; and in burst the warden himself, his heavy brows dark with fury and his eyes flashing like the fire at a pistol point. Involuntarily I stopped work and the priest glanced across at me with a look which bespoke expectation of an explosion. Grant did not storm. That was not his way. He took several turns about the room, mastered himself, and speaking through his teeth said quietly, "There be some fools that enjoy playing with gunpowder. I'm not one of them! There be some idiots that like teasing tigers. 'Tis not sport to my fancy! There be some pot-valiant braggarts that defy the law. Let them enjoy the breaking of the law!" "What--what--what?" sputtered the Highland governor, springing first on one side of Grant and then on the other, all the while rumbling out maledictions on Lord Selkirk, and Governor McDonell and Fort Douglas. "What do ye say, mon? Do I understand ye clearly, there's no prisoners with ye?" "Laughs at the _Bois-Brulés_. The fool laughs at the _Bois-Brulés_! I've seen gophers cock their eye at a wolf, before that same wolf made a breakfast of gophers! The fool laughs at your warrant, Sir! Scouted it, Sir! Bundled us out of Fort Douglas like cattle!" The warden went on in a bitter strain to tell of the effect of the posted proclamations on his followers. "So the lordly Captain Miles McDonell of the Queen's Rangers, generalissimo of all creation, defies us, does he?" demanded Cameron in great dudgeon, scarcely crediting his ears. "Aye!" answered Grant, "but he can ill afford to be so high and mighty. We went through the settlement and half the people are with us----" "That's good! That's good!" responded Cameron with keen relish. "They're heartily sick of the country," continued the warden, "and would leave to-morrow if we'd supply the boats. Last winter they nearly starved. The company's generous supply was rancid grease and wormy flour." "Fine way o' colonizing a country," stormed Cameron, "bring men out as settlers and arm them to fight! We'll spike his guns by shipping a score more away." "We've spiked his guns in a better way," said Grant dryly. "Some of the friendlies are so afraid he'll take their guns away and leave them defenceless unless they fight us, they've sent their arms here for safekeeping. We'll keep them safe, I'll warrant." Grant smiled, showing his white teeth in a way that was not pleasant to see, and somehow reminded me of a dog's snarl. "Good! Good! Excellent, Grant." Such strategy pleased Cameron. "See here, mon, Cuthbert, we've the law on our side--we've the warrants to back the law! We'd better give yon dour fool a lesson. He's broken the peace. We haven't. Come out, an' I'll talk it over with ye!" The two went out, Grant saying as they passed the window--"Let him tamper with the fur trade among the Indians and I'll not answer for it! That last order not to sell----" The rest of the remark I lost. "'Twould serve him well right if they did," returned Cameron, and both men walked beyond hearing. Father Holland and I were left alone. The fort became ominously still. There was a distant clatter of receding hoofs; but we were on the south side of the warehouse and could not see which way the horses were galloping. "I'm afraid--I'm afraid both sides will be rash," observed the priest. The sun-dial indicated six o'clock. I closed and locked the office desks. We had supper in the deserted dining-hall. Afterwards we strolled to the northeast gate, and looking in the direction of Fort Douglas, wondered what scheme could be afoot. Here my testimony need not be taken for, or against, either side. All I saw was Duncan Cameron with the other white men of the fort standing on a knoll some distance from Fort Gibraltar, evidently gazing towards Fort Douglas. Against the sky, above the settlement, there were clouds of rising smoke. "Burning hay-ricks?" I questioned. "Aye, and houses! 'Tis shameless work leaving the people exposed to the blasts of next winter! Shameless, shameless work! Y'r company'll gain nothing by it, Rufus!" Across the night came faint, short snappings like a fusillade of shots. "Looting the neutrals," said the priest. "God grant there be no blood on the plains this night! These fool traders don't realize what it means to rouse blood in an Indian! They'll get a lesson yet! Give the red devils a taste of blood and there won't be a white unscalped to the Rockies! I've seen y'r fine, clever rascals play the Indian against rivals, and the game always ends the same way. The Indian is a weapon that's quick to cut the hand of the user." Little did I realize my part in the terrible fulfilment of that prophecy. "Look alive, lad! Where are y'r wits? What's that?" he cried, suddenly pointing to the river bank. Up from the cliff sprang a form as if by magic. It came leaping straight to the fort gate. "Some frightened half-breed wench," surmised the priest. I saw it was a woman with a shawl over her head like a native. "_Bon soir!_" said I after the manner of traders with Indian women; but she rushed blindly on to the gate. The fort was deserted. Suspicion of treachery flashed on me. How many more half-breeds were beneath that cliff? "Stop, huzzie!" I ordered, springing forward and catching her so tightly by the wrist that she swung half-way round before she could check herself. She wrenched vigorously to get free. "Stop! Be still, you huzzie!" "Be still--you what?" asked a low, amazed voice that broke in ripples and froze my blood. A shawl fluttered to the ground, and there stood before us the apparition of a marble face. "The Little Statue!" I gasped in sheer horror at what I had done. "The little--what?" asked the rippling voice, that sounded like cold water flowing under ice, and a pair of eyes looked angrily down at the hand with which I was still unconsciously gripping her arm. "I'd thank you, Sir," she began, with a mock courtesy to the priest, "I'd thank you, Sir, to call off your mastiff." "Let her go, boy!" roared the priest with a hammering blow across my forearm that brought me to my senses and convinced me she was no wraith. Mastiff! That epithet stung to the quick. I flung her wrist from me as if it had been hot coals. Now, a woman may tread upon a man--also stamp upon him if she has a mind to--but she must trip it daintily. Otherwise even a worm may turn against its tormentor. To have idolized that marble creature by day and night, to have laid our votive offerings on its shrine, to have hungered for the sound of a woman's lips for weeks, and to hear those lips cuttingly call me a dog--were more than I could stand. "Ten thousand pardons, Mistress Sutherland!" I said with a pompous stiffness which I intended should be mighty crushing. "But when ladies deck themselves out as squaws and climb in and out of windows,"--that was brutal of me; she had done it for Miriam and me--"and announce themselves in unexpected ways, they need not hope to be recognized." And did she flare back at me? Not at all. "You waste time with your long speeches," she said, turning from me to Father Holland. Thereupon I strode off angrily to the river bank. "Oh, Father Holland," I heard her say as I walked away, "I must go to Pembina! I'm in such trouble! There's a Frenchman----" Trouble, thought I; she is in trouble and I have been thinking only of my own dignity. And I stood above the river, torn between desire to rush back and wounded pride, that bade me stick it out. Over the plains came the shout of returning plunderers. I could hear the throb, throb of galloping hoofs beating nearer and nearer over the turf, and reflected that I might make the danger from returning _Bois-Brulés_ the occasion of a reconciliation. "Come here, lad!" called Father Holland. I needed no urging. "Ye must rig up in tam-o'-shanter and tartan, like a Highland settler, and take Mistress Sutherland back to Fort Douglas. She's going to Pembina to meet her father, lad, when I go south to the Missouri. And, lad," the priest hesitated, glancing doubtfully from Miss Sutherland to me, "I'm thinking there's a service ye might do her." The Little Statue was looking straight at me now, and there were tear-marks about the heavy lashes. Now, I do not pretend to explain the power, or witchery, a gentle slip of a girl can wield with a pair of gray eyes; but when I met the furtive glance and saw the white, veined forehead, the arched brows, the tremulous lips, the rounded chin, and the whole face glorified by that wonderful mass of hair, I only know, without weapon or design, she dealt me a wound which I bear to this day. What a ruffian I had been! I was ashamed, and my eyes fell before hers. If a libation of blushes could appease an offended goddess, I was livid evidence of repentance. I felt myself flooded in a sudden heat of shame. She must have read my confusion, for she turned away her head to hide mantling forgiveness. "There's a crafty Frenchman in the fort has been troubling the lassie. I'm thinking, if ye worked off some o' your anger on him, it moight be for the young man's edification. Be quick! I hear the breeds returning!" "But I have a message," she said in choking tones. "From whom?" I asked aimlessly enough. "Eric Hamilton!" she answered. "Eric Hamilton!" both the priest and I shouted. "Yes--why? What--what--is it? He's wounded, and he wants a Rufus Gillespie, who's with the Nor'-Westers. The _Bois-Brulés_ fired on the fort. Where _is_ Rufus Gillespie?" "Bless you, lassie! Here--here--here he is!" The holy father thumped my back at every word. "Here he is, crazy as a March hare for news of Hamilton!" "You--Rufus--Gillespie!" So she did not even know my name. Evidently, if she troubled my thoughts, I did not trouble hers. "He's told me so much about you," she went on, with a little pant of astonishment. "How brave and good----" "Pshaw!" I interrupted roughly. "What's the message?" "Mr. Hamilton wishes to see you at once," she answered coldly. "Then kill two birds with one stone! Take her home and see Hamilton--and hurry!" urged the priest. The half-breeds were now very near. "Put it over your head!" and Father Holland clapped the shawl about Frances Sutherland after the fashion of the half-breed women. She stood demurely behind him while I ran up-stairs in the warehouse to disguise myself in tartan plaid. When I came out, Duncan Cameron was in the gateway welcoming Cuthbert Grant and the _Bois-Brulés_, as if pillaging defenceless settlers were heroic. Victors from war may be inspiring, but a half-breed rabble, red-handed from deeds of violence, is not a sight to edify any man. "What's this ye have, Father?" bawled one impudent fellow, and he pointed sneeringly at the figure in the folds of the shawl. "Let the wench be!" was the priest's reply, and the half-breed lounged past with a laugh. I was about to offer Frances Sutherland my arm to escort her from the mob, when I felt Father Holland's hard knuckles dig viciously into my ribs. "Ye fool ye! Ye blundering idiot!" he whispered, "she's a half-breed. Och! But's time y'r eastern greenness was tannin' a good western russet! Let her follow with bowed head, or you'll have the whole pack on y'r heels!" With that admonition I strode boldly out, she behind, humble, with downcast eyes like a half-breed girl. We ran down the river path through the willows and jumping into a canoe swiftly rounded the forks of the Assiniboine and Red. There we left the canoe and fled along a trail beneath the cliff till the shouting of the half-breeds could be no longer heard. At once I turned to offer her my arm. She must have bruised her feet through the thin moccasins, for the way was very rough. I saw that she was trembling from fatigue. "Permit me," I said, offering my arm as formally as if she had been some grand lady in an eastern drawing-room. "Thank you--I'm afraid I must," and she reluctantly placed a light hand on my sleeve. I did not like that condescending compulsion, and now out of danger, I became strangely embarrassed and angry in her presence. The "mastiff" epithet stuck like a barb in my boyish chivalry. Was it the wind, or a low sigh, or a silent weeping, that I heard? I longed to know, but would not turn my head, and my companion was lagging just a step behind. I slackened speed, so did she. Then a voice so low and soft and golden it might have melted a heart of stone--but what is a heart of stone compared to the wounded pride of a young man?--said, "Do you know, I think I rather like mastiffs?" "Indeed," said I icily, in no mood for raillery. "Like _them_ for friends, not enemies, to be protected by _them_, not--not bitten," the voice continued with a provoking emphasis of the plural "_them_." "Yes," said I, with equal emphasis of the obnoxious plural. "Ladies find _them_ useful at times." That fling silenced her and I felt a shiver run down the arm on my sleeve. "Why, you're shivering," I blundered out. "You must let me put this round you," and I pulled off the plaid and would have placed it on her shoulders, but she resisted. "I am not in the least cold," she answered frigidly--which is the only untruth I ever heard her tell--"and you shall not say '_must_' to me," and she took her hand from my arm. She spoke with a tremor that warned me not to insist. Then I knew why she had shivered. "Please forgive, Miss Sutherland," I begged. "I'm such a maladroit animal." "I quite agree with you, a maladroit mastiff with teeth!" Mastiff! That insult again! I did not reproffer my arm. We strode forward once more, she with her face turned sideways remote from me, I with my face sideways remote from her, and the plaid trailing from my hand by way of showing her she could have it if she wished. We must have paced along in this amiable, post-matrimonial fashion for quite a quarter of the mile we had to go, and I was awkwardly conscious of suppressed laughing from her side. It was the rippling voice, that always seemed to me like fountain splash in the sunshine, which broke silence again. "Really," said the low, thrilling, musical witchery by my side, "really, it's the most wonderful story I have ever heard!" "Story?" I queried, stopping stock still and gaping at her. "Perfectly wonderful! So intensely interesting and delightful." "Interesting and delightful?" I interrogated in sheer amazement. This girl utterly dumfounded me, and in the conceit of youth I thought it strange that any girl could dumfound me. "What an interesting life you have had, to be sure!" "I have had?" "Yes, don't you know you've been talking in torrents for the past ten minutes? No? Do you forget?" and she laughed tremulously either from embarrassment, or cold. "Well!" said I, befooled into good-humor and laughing back. "If you give me a day's warning, I'll try to keep up with you." "Ah! There! I've put you through the ice at last! It's been such hard work!" "And I come up badly doused!" "Stimulated too! You're doing well already!" "My thanks to my instructor," and catching the spirit of her mockery, I swept her a courtly bow. "There! There!" she cried, dropping raillery as soon as I took it up. "You were cross at the window. I was cross on the flats. You nearly wrenched my hand off----" "Can you blame me?" I asked. "And to pay me back you turned my head and stole my heart----" "Hush!" she interrupted. "Let's clean the slate and begin again." "With all my heart, if you'll wear this tartan and stop shivering." I was not ready to consent to an unconditional surrender. "I hate your 'ifs' and 'buts' and so-much-given-for-so-much-got," she exclaimed with an impatient, little stamp, "but--but--" she added inconsistently, "if--if--you'll keep one end of the plaid for yourself, I'll take the other." "Ho--ho! I like 'ifs' and 'buts.' Have you more of that kind?" I laughed, whisking the fold about us both. Drawing her hand into mine, I kept it there. "It isn't so cold as--as that, is it?" asked the voice under the plaid. "Quite," I returned valiantly, tightening my clasp. She laughed a low, mellow laugh that set my heart beating to the tune of a trip-hammer. I felt a great intoxication of strength that might have razed Fort Douglas to the ground and conquered the whole world, which, I dare say, other young men have felt when the same kind of weight hung upon their protection. "Oh! Little Statue! Why have you been so hard on us?" I began. "_Us?_" she asked. "Me--then," and I gulped down my embarrassment. "Because----" "Because what?" "No _what_. Just because!" She was astonished that her decisive reason did not satisfy. "Because! A woman's reason!" I scoffed. "Because! It's the best and wisest and most wholesome reason ever invented. Think what it avoids saying and what wisdom may be behind it!" "Only wisdom?" "You be careful! There'll be another cold plunge! Tell me about your friend's wife, Miriam," she answered, changing the subject. And when I related my strange mission and she murmured, "How noble," I became a very Samson of strength, ready to vanquish an army of Philistine admirers with the jawbone of my inflated self-confidence--provided, always, one queen of the combat were looking on. "Are you cold, now?" I asked, though the trembling had ceased. No, she was not cold. She was quite comfortable, and the answer came in vibrant tones which were as wine to a young man's heart. "Are you tired, Frances?" and the "No" was accompanied by a little laugh, which spurred more questioning for no other purpose than to hear the music of her voice. Now, what was there in those replies to cause happiness? Why have inane answers to inane, timorous questions transformed earth into paradise and mortals into angels? "Do you find the way very far--Frances?" The flavor of some names tempts repeated tasting. "Very far?" came the response in an amused voice, "find it very far? Yes I do, quite far--oh! No--I don't. Oh! I don't know!" She broke into a joyous laugh at her own confusion, gaining more self-possession as I lost mine; and out she slipped from the plaid. "I wish it were a thousand times farther," and I gazed ruefully at the folds that trailed empty. What other absurd things I might have said, I cannot tell; but we were at the fort and I had to wrap the tartan disguise about myself. Stooping, I picked a bunch of dog-roses growing by the path, then felt foolish, for I had not the courage to give them to her, and dropped them without her knowledge. She gave the password at the gate. I was taken for a Selkirk Highlander and we easily gained entrance. A man brushed past us in the gloom of the courtyard. He looked impudently down into her face. It was Laplante, and my whole frame filled with a furious resentment which I had not guessed could be possible with me. "That Frenchman," she whispered, but his figure vanished among the buildings. She showed me the council hall where Eric could be found. "And where do you go?" I asked stupidly. She indicated the quarters where the settlers had taken refuge. I led her to the door. "Are you sure you'll be safe?" "Oh! Yes, quite, as long as the settlers are here; and you, you will let me know when the priest sets out for Pembina?" I vowed more emphatically than the case required that she should know. "Are there no dark halls in there, unsafe for you?" I questioned. "None," and she went up the first step of the doorway. "Are you sure you're safe?" I also mounted a step. "Yes, quite, thank you," and she retreated farther, "and you, have you forgotten you came to see Mr. Hamilton?" "Why--so I did," I stammered out absently. She was on the top step, pulling the latch-string of the great door. "Stop! Frances--dear!" I cried. She stood motionless and I felt that this last rashness of an unruly tongue--too frank by far--had finished me. "What? Can I do anything to repay you for your trouble in bringing me here?" "I've been repaid," I answered, "but indeed, indeed, long live the Queen! May it please Her Majesty to grant a token to her leal and devoted knight----" "What is thy request?" she asked laughingly. "What token doth the knight covet?" "The token that goes with _good-nights_," and I ventured a pace up the stairs. "There, Sir Knight," she returned, hastily putting out her hand, which was not what I wanted, but to which I gratefully paid my devoir. "Art satisfied?" she asked. "Till the Queen deigns more," and I paused for a reply. She lingered on the threshold as if she meant to come down to me, then with a quick turn vanished behind the gloomy doors, taking all the light of my world with her; but I heard a voice, as of some happy bird in springtime, trilling from the hall where she had gone, and a new song made music in my own heart. CHAPTER XI A SHUFFLING OF ALLEGIANCE Time was when Fort Douglas rang as loudly with mirth of assembled traders as ever Fort William's council hall. Often have I heard veterans of the Hudson's Bay service relate how the master of revels used to fill an ample jar with corn and quaff a beaker of liquor for every grain in the drinker's hour-glass. "How stands the hour-glass?" the governor of the feast, who was frequently also the governor of the company, would roar out in stentorian tones, that made themselves heard above the drunken brawl. "High, Your Honor, high," some flunkey of the drinking bout would bawl back. Thereupon, another grain was picked from the jar, another flagon tossed down and the revel went on. This was a usual occurrence before and after the conflict with the Nor'-Westers. But the night that I climbed the stairs of the main warehouse and, mustering up assurance, stepped into the hall as if I belonged to the fort, or the fort belonged to me, there was a different scene. A wounded man lay on a litter at the end of the long, low room; and the traders sitting on the benches against the walls, or standing aimlessly about, were talking in suppressed tones. Scotchmen, driven from their farms by the _Bois-Brulés_, hung around in anxious groups. The lanterns, suspended on iron hooks from mid-rafter, gave but a dusky light, and I vainly scanned many faces for Eric Hamilton. That he was wounded, I knew. I was stealing stealthily towards the stretcher at the far end of the place, when a deep voice burred rough salutation in my ear. "Hoo are ye, gillie?" It was a shaggy-browed, bluff Scotchman, who evidently took me in my tartan disguise for a Highland lad. Whether he meant, "How are you," or "Who are you," I was not certain. Afraid my tongue might betray me, I muttered back an indistinct response. The Scot was either suspicious, or offended by my churlishness. I slipped off quickly to a dark corner, but I saw him eying me closely. A youth brushed past humming a ditty, which seemed strangely out of place in those surroundings. He stood an elbow's length from me and kicked moccasined heels against the floor in the way of light-headed lads. Both the air and figure of the young fellow vaguely recalled somebody, but his back was towards me. I was measuring my comrade, wondering if I might inquire where Hamilton could be found, when the lad turned, and I was face to face with the whiskered babe of Fort William. He gave a long, low whistle. "Gad!" he gasped. "Do my eyes tell lies? As I live, 'tis your very self! Hang it, now, I thought you were one of those solid bodies wouldn't do any turn-coating----" "Turn-coating!" I repeated in amazement. "One of those dray-horse, old reliables, wouldn't kick over the traces, not if the boss pumped his arms off licking you! Hang it! I'm not that sort! By gad, I'm not! I've got too many oats! I can't stand being jawed and gee-hawed by Dunc. Cameron; so when the old Gov. threatened to dock me for being full, I just kicked up my heels and came. But say! I didn't think you would, Gillespie!" "No?" said I, keeping my own counsel and waiting for the Nor'-West deserter to proceed. "What 'd y' do it for, Gillespie? You're as sober as cold water! Was it old Cameron?" "You're not talking straight, babe," said I. "You know Cameron doesn't nag his men. What did _you_ do it for?" "Eh?" and the lad gave a laugh over my challenge of his veracity. "See here, old pal, I'll tell you if you tell me." "Go ahead with your end of the contract!" "Well, then, look here. We're not in this wilderness for glory. I knock down to the highest bidder----" "Hudson's Bay is _not_ the highest bidder." "Not unless you happen to have information they want." "Oh! That's the way of it, is it?" So the boy was selling Nor'-Westers' secrets. "You can bet your last beaver-skin it is! Do you think I was old Cam's private secretary for nothin'? Not I! I say--get your wares as you may and sell 'em to the highest bidder. So here I am, snugly berthed, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, all through judicious--distribution--of--information." And the boy gurgled with pleasure over his own cleverness. "And say, Gillespie, I'm in regular clover! The Little Statue's here, all alone! Dad's gone to Pembina to the buffalo hunt. I've got ahead of all you fellows. I'm going to introduce a French-chap, a friend of mine." "You'd much better break his bones," was my advice. It needed no great speculation to guess who the Frenchman was; and in the hands of that crafty rake this prattling babe would be as putty. "Pah! You're jealous, Gillespie! We're right on the inside track!" "Lots of confidential talks with her, I suppose?" "Talks! Pah! You gross fatty! Why, Gillespie, what do you know of such things? Laplante can win a girl by just looking at her--French way, you know--he can pose better than a poem!" "Blockhead," I ground out between my teeth, a feeling taking possession of me, which is designated "indignation" in the first person but jealousy in the second and third. "You stupid simpleton, that Laplante is a villain who will turn your addled pate and work you as an old wife kneads dough." "What do you know about Laplante?" he demanded hotly. "I know he is an accomplished blackguard," I answered quietly, "and if you want to spoil your chances with the Little Statue, just prance round in his company." The lad was too much surprised to speak. "Where's Hamilton?" I asked. "Find him for yourself," said he, going off in a huff. I edged cautiously near enough the wounded man to see that he was not Hamilton. Near the litter was a group of clerks. "They're fools," one clerk was informing the others. "Cameron sent word he'd have McDonell dead or alive. If he doesn't give himself up, this fort'll go and the whole settlement be massacred." "Been altogether too high-handed anyway," answered another. "I'm loyal to my company; but Lord Selkirk can't set up a military despotism here. Been altogether better if we'd left the Nor'-Westers alone." "It's all the fault of that cocky little martinet," declared a third. "I say," exclaimed a man joining the group, "d' y' hear the news? All the chiefs in there--" jerking his thumb towards a side door--"are advising Captain McDonell to give himself up and save the fort." "Good thing. Who'll miss him? He'll only get a free trip to Montreal," remarked one of the aggressives in this group. "I tell you, men, both companies have gone a deal too far in this little slap-back game to be keen for legal investigation. Why, at Souris, everybody knows----" He lowered his voice and I unconsciously moved from my dark corner to hear the rest. "Hoo are ye, gillie?" said the burly Scot in my ear. Turning, I found the canny swain had followed me on an investigating tour. Again I gave him an inarticulate reply and lost myself among other coteries. Was the man spying on me? I reflected that if "the chiefs"--as the Hudson's Bay man had called them--were in the side room, Eric Hamilton would be among these conferring with the governor. As I approached the door, I noticed my Scotch friend had taken some one into his confidence and two men were now on my tracks. Lifting the latch, I gave a gentle, cautious push and the hinges swung so quietly I had slipped into the room before those inside or out could prevent me. I found myself in the middle of a long apartment with low, sloping ceiling, and deep window recesses. It had evidently been partitioned off from the main hall; for the wall, ceiling and floor made an exact triangle. At one end of the place was a table. Round this was a group of men deeply engrossed in some sort of conference. Sitting on the window sills and lounging round the box stove behind the table were others of our rival's service. I saw at once it would be difficult to have access to Hamilton. He was lying on a stretcher within talking range of the table and had one arm in a sling. Now, I hold it is harder for the unpractised man to play the spy with everything in his favor, than for the adept to act that rôle against the impossible. One is without the art that foils detection. The other can defy detection. So I stood inside with my hand on the door lest the click of the closing latch should rouse attention, but had no thought of prying into Hudson's Bay secrets. "Your Honor," began Hamilton in a lifeless manner, which told me his search had been bootless, and he turned languidly towards a puffy, crusty, military gentleman, whom, from the respect shown him, I judged to be Governor McDonell. "Duncan Cameron's warrant for the arrest is perfectly legal. If Your Honor should surrender yourself, you will save Fort Douglas for the Hudson's Bay Company. Besides, the whole arrest will prove a farce. The law in Lower Canada provides no machinery for the trial of cases occurring----" Here Hamilton came to a blank and unexpected stop, for his eyes suddenly alighted on me with a look that forbade recognition, and fled furtively back to the group it the table. I understood and kept silent. "For the trial of cases occurring?" asked the governor sharply. "Occurring--here," added Hamilton, shooting out the last word as if his arm had given him a sudden twinge. "And so I say, Your Honor will lose nothing by giving yourself up to the Nor'-Westers, and will save Fort Douglas for the Hudson's Bay." "The doctor tells me it's a compound fracture. You'll find it painful, Mr. Hamilton," said Governor McDonell sympathetically, and he turned to the papers over which the group were conferring. "I'm no great hand in winning victories by showing the white flag," began the gallant captain, "but if a free trip from here to Montreal satisfies those fools, I'll go." "Well said! Bravo! Your Honor," exclaimed a shaggy member of the council, bringing his fist down on the table with a thud. "I call that diplomacy, outmanoeuvring the enemy! Your Honor sets an example for abiding by the law; you obey the warrant. They must follow the example and leave Fort Douglas alone." "Besides, I can let His Lordship know from Montreal just what reinforcements are needed here," continued Captain McDonell, with a curious disregard for the law which he professed to be obeying, and a faithful zeal for Lord Selkirk. Hamilton was looking anxiously at me with an expression of warning which I could not fully read. Then I felt, what every one must have felt at some time, that a third person was watching us both. Following Eric's glance to a dark window recess directly opposite the door where I stood, I was horrified and riveted by the beady, glistening, insolent eyes of Louis Laplante, gazing out of the dusk with an expression of rakish amusement, the amusement of a spider when a fly walks into its web. Taken unawares I have ever been more or less of what Mr. Jack MacKenzie was wont to call "a stupid loon!" On discovering Laplante I promptly sustained my reputation by letting the door fly to with a sharp click that startled the whole room-full. Whereat Louis Laplante gave a low, soft laugh. "What do you want here, man?" demanded Governor McDonell's sharp voice. Jerking off my cap, I saluted. "My man, Your Honor," interjected Eric quietly. "Come here, Rufus," he commanded, motioning me to his side with the hauteur of a master towards a servant. And Louis Laplante rose and tip-toed after me with a tigerish malice that recalled the surly squaw. "Oh, Eric!" I cried out eagerly. "Are you hurt, and at such a time?" Unconsciously I was playing into Louis' hands, for he stood by the stove, laughing nonchalantly. Thereupon Eric ground out some imprecation at my stupidity. "There's been a shuffling of allegiance, I hear," he said with a queer misleading look straight at Laplante. "We've recruits from Fort Gibraltar." Eric's words, curiously enough, banished triumph from Laplante's face and the Frenchman's expression was one of puzzled suspicion. From Eric's impassive features, he could read nothing. What Hamilton was driving at, I should presently learn; but to find out I would no more take my eyes from Laplante's than from a tiger about to spring. At once, to get my attention, Hamilton brought a stick down on my toes with a sharpness that made me leap. By all the codes of nudges and kicks and such signaling, it is a principle that a blow at one end of human anatomy drives through the density of the other extremity. It dawned on me that Eric was trying to persuade Laplante I had deserted Nor'-Westers for the Hudson's Bay. The ethics of his attempt I do not defend. It was after the facile fashion of an intriguing era. A sharper weapon was presently given us against Louis Laplante; for when I grasped Eric's stick to stay the raps against my feet, I felt the handle rough with carving. "What are these carvings, may I inquire, Sir?" I asked, assuming the strangeness, which Eric's signals had directed, but never moving my eyes from Laplante. The villain who had befooled me in the gorge and eluded me in the forest, and now tormented Frances Sutherland, winced under my watchfulness. "The carvings!" answered Eric, annoyed that I did not return his plain signals and determined to get my eye. "Pray look for yourself! Where are your eyes?" "I can't see in this poor light, Sir; but I also have a strangely carved thing--a spear-head. Now if this head has no handle and this handle has no head--they might fit," I went on watching Laplante, whose saucy assurance was deserting him. "Spear-head!" exclaimed Hamilton, beginning to understand I too had my design. "Where did you find it?" "Trying to bury itself in my head." I returned. At this, Laplante, the knave, smiled graciously in my very face. "But it didn't succeed?" asked Hamilton. "No--it mistook me for a tree, missed the mark and went into the tree; just as another friend of mine mistook me for a tree, hit the mark and ran into me," and I smiled back at Laplante. His face clouded. That reference to the scene on the beach, where his Hudson's Bay despatches were stolen, was too much for his hot blood. "Here it is," I continued, pulling the spear-head out of my plaid. I had brought it to Hamilton, hoping to identify our enemy, and we did. "Please see if they fit, Sir? We might identify our--friends!" and I searched the furtive, guilty eyes of the Frenchman. "Dat frien'," muttered Louis with a threatening look at me, "dat frien' of Mister Hamilton he spike good English for Scot' youth." Now Louis, as I remembered from Laval days, never mixed his English and French, except when he was in passion furious beyond all control. "Fit!" cried Hamilton. "They're a perfect fit, and both carved the same, too." "With what?" "Eagles," answered Eric, puzzled at my drift, and Louis Laplante wore the last look of the tiger before it springs. "And eagles," said I, defying the spring, "signify that both the spear-head and the spear-handle belong to the Sioux chief whose daughter"--and I lowered my voice to a whisper which only Laplante and Hamilton could hear--"is married--to Le--Grand--Diable!" "What!" came Hamilton's low cry of agony. Forgetting the fractured arm, he sprang erect. And Louis Laplante staggered back in the dark as if we had struck him. "Laplante! Laplante! Where's that Frenchman? Bring him up here!" called Governor McDonell's fussy, angry tones. Coming when it did, this demand was to Louis a bolt of judgment; and he joined the conference with a face as gray as ashes. "Now about those stolen despatches! We want to know the truth! Were you drunk, or were you not? Who has them?" Captain McDonell arraigned the Frenchman with a fire of questions that would have confused any other culprit but Louis. "Eric," I whispered, taking advantage of the respite offered by Louis' examination. "We found Laplante at _Pointe a la Croix_. He was drunk. He confessed Miriam is held by Diable's squaw. Then we discovered someone was listening to the confession and pursued the eavesdropper into the bush. When we came back, Laplante had been carried off. I found one of my canoemen had your lost fowling-piece, and it was he who had listened and carried off the drunk sot and tried to send that spear-head into me at the Sault. 'Twas Diable, Eric! Father Holland, a priest in our company, told me of the white woman on Lake Winnipeg. Did you find this--" indicating the spear handle--"there?" Eric, cold, white and trembling, only whispered an affirmative. "Was that all?" "All," he answered, a strange, fierce look coming over his face, as the full import of my news forced home on him. "Was--was--Laplante--in that?" he asked, gripping my arm in his unwounded hand with foreboding force. "Not that we know of. Only Diable. But Louis is friendly with the Sioux, and if we only keep him in sight we may track them." "I'll--keep--him--in sight," muttered Hamilton in low, slow words. "Hush, Eric!" I whispered. "If we harm him, he may mislead us. Let us watch him and track him!" "He's asking leave to go trapping in the Sioux country. Can you go as trader for your people? To the buffalo hunt first, then, south? I'll watch here, if he stays; you, there, if he goes, and he shall tell us all he knows or--" "Hush, man," I urged. "Listen!" "Where," Governor McDonell was thundering at Laplante, "where are the parties that stole those despatches?" The question brought both Hamilton and myself to the table. We went forward where we could see Laplante's face without being seen by his questioners. "If I answer, Your Honor," began the Frenchman, taking the captain's bluster for what it was worth and holding out doggedly for his own rights, "I'll be given leave to trap with the Sioux?" "Certainly, man. Speak out." "The parties--that stole--those despatches," Laplante was answering slowly. At this stage he looked at his interlocutor as if to question the sincerity of the guarantee and he saw me standing screwing the spear-head on the tell-tale handle. I patted the spear-head, smiled blandly back, and with my eyes dared him to go on. He paused, bit his lip and flushed. "No lies, no roguery, or I'll have you at the whipping-post," roared the governor. "Speak up. Where are the parties?" "Near about here," stammered Louis, "and you may ask your new turn-coat." I was betrayed! Betrayed and trapped; but he should not go free! I would have shouted out, but Hamilton's hand silenced me. "Here!" exclaimed the astounded governor. "Go call that young Nor'-Wester! If _he_ backs up y'r story, _he_ was Cameron's secretary, you can go to the buffalo hunt." That response upset Louis' bearings. He had expected the governor would refer to me; but the command let him out of an awkward place and he darted from the room, as Hamilton and I supposed,--simpletons that we were with that rogue!--to find the young Nor'-Wester. This turn of affairs gave me my chance. If the young Nor'-Wester and Laplante came together, my disguise as Highlander and turn-coat would be stripped from me and I should be trapped indeed. "Good-by, old boy!" and I gripped Hamilton's hand. "If he stays, he's your game. When he goes, he's mine. Good luck to us both! You'll come south when you're better." Then I bolted through the main hall thinking to elude the canny Scots, but saw both men in the stairway waiting to intercept me. When I ran down a flight of side stairs, they dashed to trap me at the gate. At the doorway a man lounged against me. The lantern light fell on a pointed beard. It was Laplante, leaning against the wall for support and shaking with laughter. "You again, old tombstone! Whither away so fast?" and he made to hold me. "I'm in a hurry myself! My last night under a roof, ha! ha! Wait till I make my grand farewell! We both did well, did the grand, ho! ho! But I must leave a fair demoiselle!" "Let go," and I threw him off. "Take that, you ramping donkey, you Anglo-Saxon animal," and he aimed a kick in my direction. Though I could ill spare the time to do it, I turned. All the pent-up strength, from the walk with Frances Sutherland rushed into my clenched fist and Louis Laplante went down with a thud across the doorway. There was the sish-rip of a knife being thrust through my boot, but the blade broke and I rushed past the prostrate form. Certain of waylaying me, the Scots were dodging about the gate; but by running in the shadow of the warehouse to the rear of the court, I gave both the slip. I had no chance to reconnoitre, but dug my hunting-knife into the stockade, hoisted myself up the wooden wall, got a grip of the top and threw myself over, escaping with no greater loss than boots pulled off before climbing the palisade, and the Highland cap which stuck fast to a picket as I alighted below. At dawn, bootless and hatless, I came in sight of Fort Gibraltar and Father Holland, who was scanning the prairie for my return, came running to greet me. "The tip-top o' the mornin' to the renegade! I thought ye'd been scalped--and so ye have been--nearly--only they mistook y'r hat for the wool o' y'r crown. Boots gone too! Out wid your midnight pranks." A succession of welcoming thuds accompanied the tirade. As breath returned, I gasped out a brief account of the night. "And now," he exclaimed triumphantly, "I have news to translate ye to a sivinth hiven! Och! But it's clane cracked ye'll be when ye hear it. Now, who's appointed to trade with the buffalo hunters but y'r very self?" It was with difficulty I refrained from embracing the bearer of such good tidings. "Be easy," he commanded. "Ye'll need these demonstrations, I'm thinkin'--huntin' one lass and losin' y'r heart to another." We arranged he should go to Fort Douglas for Frances Sutherland and I was to set out later. They were to ride along the river-path south of the forks where I could join them. I, myself, picked out and paid for two extra horses, one a quiet little cayuse with ambling action, the other, a muscular broncho. I had the satisfaction of seeing Father Holland mounted on the latter setting out for Fort Douglas, while the Indian pony wearing an empty side-saddle trotted along in tow. The information I brought back from Fort Douglas delayed any more hostile demonstrations against the Hudson's Bay. That very morning, before I had finished breakfast, Governor McDonell rode over to Fort Gibraltar, and on condition that Fort Douglas be left unmolested gave himself up to the Nor'-Westers. At noon, when I was riding off to the buffalo hunt and the Missouri, I saw the captain, smiling and debonair, embarking--or rather being embarked--with North-West brigades, to be sent on a free trip two thousand five hundred miles to Montreal. "A safe voyage to ye," said Duncan Cameron, commander of Nor'-Westers, as the ex-governor of Red River settled himself in a canoe. "A safe voyage to ye, mon!" "And a prosperous return," was the ironical answer of the dauntless ruler over the Hudson's Bay. "Sure now, Rufus," said Father Holland to me a year afterwards, "'twas a prosperous return he had!" Fortunately, I had my choice of scouts, and, by dangling the prospects of a buffalo hunt before La Robe Noire and Little Fellow, tempted them to come with me. CHAPTER XII HOW A YOUTH BECAME A KING When the prima-donna of some vauntful city trills her bird-song above the foot-lights, or the cremona moans out the sigh of night-winds through the forest, artificial townsfolk applaud. Yet a nesting-tree, a thousand leagues from city discords, gives forth better music with deeper meaning and higher message--albeit the songster sings only from love of song. The fretted folk of the great cities cannot understand the witching fascinations of a wild life in a wild, free, tameless land, where God's own hand ministers to eye and ear. To fare sumptuously, to dress with the faultless distinction that marks wealth, to see and above all to be seen--these are the empty ends for which city men engage in a mad, feverish pursuit of wealth, trample one another down in a strife more ruthless than war and gamble away gifts of mind and soul. These are the things for which they barter all freedom but the name. Where one succeeds a thousand fail. Those with higher aims count themselves happy, indeed, to possess a few square feet of canvas, that truly represents the beauty dear to them, before weeds had undermined and overgrown and choked the temple of the soul. That any one should exchange gilded chains for freedom to give manhood shoulder swing, to be and to do--without infringing on the liberty of others to be and to do--is to such folk a matter of no small wonderment. For my part, I know I was counted mad by old associates of Quebec when I chose the wild life of the north country. But each to his taste, say I; and all this is only the opinion of an old trader, who loved the work of nature more than the work of man. Other voices may speak to other men and teach them what the waterways and forests, the plains and mountains, were teaching me. If "ologies" and "ics," the lore of school and market, comfort their souls--be it so. As for me, it was only when half a continent away from the jangle of learning and gain that I began to stir like a living thing and to know that I existed. The awakening began on the westward journey; but the new life hardly gained full possession before that cloudless summer day on the prairie, when I followed the winding river trail south of the forks. The Indian scouts were far to the fore. Rank grass, high as the saddle-bow, swished past the horse's sides and rippled away in an unbroken ocean of green to the encircling horizon. Of course allowance must be made for a man in love. Other men have discovered a worldful of beauty, when in love; but I do not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead--a mote in a sea of blue--or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought peace into the whole world. Father Holland evidently saw me, for he turned and waved. The other rider gave no sign of recognition. A touch of the spur to my horse and I was abreast of them, Frances Sutherland curveting her cayuse from the trail to give me middle place. "Arrah, me hearty, here ye are at last! Och, but ye're a skulkin' wight," called the priest as I saluted both. "What d'y' say for y'rself, ye belated rascal, comin' so tardy when ye're headed for Gretna Green--Och! 'Twas a _lapsus linguæ_! 'Tis Pembina--not Gretna Green--that I mean." Had it been half a century later, when a little place called Gretna sprang up on this very trail, Frances Sutherland and I need not have flinched at this reference to an old-world Mecca for run-away lovers. But there was no Gretna on the Pembina trail in those days and the Little Statue's cheeks were suddenly tinged deep red, while I completely lost my tongue. "Not a word for y'rself?" continued the priest, giving me full benefit of the mischievous spirit working in him. "He, who bearded the foe in his den, now meeker than a lambkin, mild as a turtle-dove, timid as a pigeon, pensive as a whimpering-robin that's lost his mate----" "There ought to be a law against the jokes of the clergy, Sir," I interrupted tartly. "The jokes aren't funny and one daren't hit back." "There ought to be a law against lovers, me hearty," laughed he. "They're always funny, and they can't stand a crack." "Against all men," ventured Frances Sutherland with that instinctive, womanly tact, which whips recalcitrant talkers into line like a deft driver reining up kicking colts. "All men should be warranted safe, not to go off." "Unless there's a fair target," and the priest looked us over significantly and laughed. If he felt a gentle pull on the rein, he yielded not a jot. Unluckily there are no curb-bits for hard-mouthed talkers. "Rufus, I don't see that ye wear a ticket warranting ye'll not go off," he added merrily. Red became redder on two faces, and hot, hotter with at least one temper. "And womankind?" I managed to blurt out, trying to second her efforts against our tormentor. "What guarantee against dangers from them? The pulpit silenced--though that's a big contract--mankind labeled, what for women?" "Libeled," she retorted. "Men say we don't hit straight enough to be dangerous." "The very reason ye are dangerous," the priest broke in. "Ye aim at a head and hit a heart! Then away ye go to Gretna Green--och! It's Pembina, I mean! Marry, my children----" and he paused. "Marry!--What?" I shouted. Thereupon Frances Sutherland broke into peals of laughter, in which I could see no reason, and Father Holland winked. "What's wrong with ye?" asked the priest solemnly. "Faith, 'tis no advice I'm giving; but as I was remarking, marry, my children, I'd sooner stand before a man not warranted safe than a woman, who might take to shying pretty charms at my head! Faith, me lambs, ye'll learn that I speak true." As Mr. Jack MacKenzie used to put it in his peppery reproof, I always did have a knack of tumbling head first the instant an opportunity offered. This time I had gone in heels and all, and now came up in as fine a confusion as any bashful bumpkin ever displayed before his lady. Frances Sutherland had regained her composure and came to my rescue with another attempt to take the lead from the loquacious churchman. "I'm so grateful to you for arranging this trip," and she turned directly to me. "Hm-m," blurted Father Holland with unutterable merriment, before I could get a word in, "he's grateful to himself for that same thing. Faith! He's been thankin' the stars, especially Venus, ever since he got marching orders!" "How did you reach Fort Gibraltar?" she persisted. "Sans boots and cap," I promptly replied, determined to be ahead of the interloper. "Sans heart, too," and the priest flicked my broncho with his whip and knocked the ready-made speech, with which I had hoped to silence him, clean out of my head. Frances Sutherland took to examining remote objects on the horizon. Hers was a nature not to be beaten. "Let us ride faster," she suddenly proposed with a glance that boded roguery for the priest's portly form. She was off like a shaft from a bow-string, causing a stampede of our horses. That was effective. A hard gallop against a stiff prairie wind will stop a stout man's eloquence. "Ho youngsters!" exclaimed the priest, coming abreast of us as we reined up behind the scouts. "If ye set me that gait--whew--I'll not be left for Gretna Green--Faith--it's Pembina, I mean," and he puffed like a cargo boat doing itself proud among the great liners. He was breathless, therefore safe. Frances Sutherland was not disposed to break the accumulating silence, and I, for the life of me, could not think of a single remark appropriate for a party of three. The ordinary commonplaces, that stop-gap conversation, refused to come forth. I rehearsed a multitude of impossible speeches; but they stuck behind sealed lips. "Silence is getting heavy, Rufus," he observed, enjoying our embarrassment. Thus we jogged forward for a mile or more. "Troth, me pet lambs," he remarked, as breath returned, "ye'll both bleat better without me!" Forthwith, away he rode fifty yards ahead, keeping that distance beyond us for the rest of the day and only calling over his shoulder occasionally. "Och! But y'r bronchos are slow! Don't be telling me y'r bronchos are not slow! Arrah, me hearties, be making good use o' the honeymoon,--I mean afternoon, not honeymoon. Marry, me children, but y'r bronchos are bog-spavined and spring-halted. Jiggle-joggle faster, with ye, ye rascals! Faith, I see ye out o' the tail o' my eye. Those bronchos are nosing a bit too close, I'm thinkin'! I'm going to turn! I warn ye fair--ready! One--shy-off there! Two--have a care! Three--I'm coming! Four--prepare!" And he would glance back with shouts of droll laughter. "Get epp! We mustn't disturb them! Get epp!" This to his own horse and off he would go, humming some ditty to the lazy hobble of his nag. "Old angel!" said I, under my breath, and I fell to wondering what earthly reason any man had for becoming a priest. He was right. Talk no longer lagged, whatever our bronchos did; but, indeed, all we said was better heard by two than three. Why that was, I cannot tell, for like beads of a rosary our words were strung together on things commonplace enough; and fond hearts, as well as mystics, have a key to unlock a world of meaning from meaningless words. Tufts of poplars, wood islands on the prairie, skulking coyotes, that prowled to the top of some earth mound and uttered their weird cries, mud-colored badgers, hulking clumsily away to their treacherous holes, gophers, sly fellows, propped on midget tails pointing fore-paws at us--these and other common things stole the hours away. The sun, dipping close to the sky-line, shone distorted through the warm haze like a huge blood shield. Far ahead our scouts were pitching tents on ground well back from the river to avoid the mosquitoes swarming above the water. It was time to encamp for the night. Those long June nights in the far north with fire glowing in the track of a vanished sun and stillness brooding over infinite space--have a glory, that is peculiarly their own. Only a sort of half-darkness lies between the lingering sunset and the early sun-dawn. At nine o'clock the sun-rim is still above the western prairie. At ten, one may read by daylight, and, if the sky is clear, forget for another hour that night has begun. After supper, Father Holland sat at a distance from the tents with his back carefully turned towards us, a precaution on his part for which I was not ungrateful. Frances Sutherland was throned on the boxes of our quondam table, and I was reclining against saddle-blankets at her feet. "Oh! To be so forever," she exclaimed, gazing at the globe of solid gold against the opal-green sky. "To have the light always clear, just ahead, nothing between us and the light, peace all about, no care, no weariness, just quiet and beauty like this forever." "Like this forever! I ask nothing better," said I with great heartiness; but neither her eyes nor her thoughts were for me. Would the eyes looking so intently at the sinking sun, I wondered, condescend to look at a spot against the sun. In desperation I meditated standing up. 'Tis all very well to talk of storming the citadel of a closed heart, but unless telepathic implements of war are perfected to the same extent as modern armaments, permitting attack at long range, one must first get within shooting distance. Apparently I was so far outside the defences, even my design was unknown. "I think," she began in low, hesitating words, so clear and thrilling, they set my heart beating wildly with a vague expectation, "I think heaven must be very, very near on nights like this, don't--you--Rufus?" I wasn't thinking of heaven at all, at least, not the heaven she had in mind; but if there is one thing to make a man swear white is black and black white and to bring him to instantaneous agreement with any statement whatsoever, it is to hear his Christian name so spoken for the first time. I sat up in an electrified way that brought the fringe of lashes down to hide those gray eyes. "Very near? Well rather! I've been in heaven all day," I vowed. "I've been getting glimpses of paradise all the way from Fort William----" "Don't," she interrupted with a flash of the imperious nature, which I knew. "Please don't, Mr. Gillespie." "Please don't Mister Gillespie me," said I, piqued by a return to the formal. "If you picked up Rufus by mistake from the priest, he sets a good example. Don't drop a good habit!" That was my first step inside the outworks. "Rufus," she answered so gently I felt she might disarm and slay me if she would, "Rufus Gillespie"--that was a return of the old spirit, a compromise between her will and mine--"please don't begin saying that sort of thing--there's a whole day before us----" "And you think I can't keep it up?" "You haven't given any sign of failing. You know, Rufus," she added consolingly, "you really must not say those things, or something will be hurt! You'll make me hurt it." "Something is hurt and needs mending, Miss Sutherland----" "Don't Miss Sutherland me," she broke in with a laugh, "call me Frances; and if something is hurt and needs mending, I'm not a tinker, though my father and the priest--yes and you, too--sometimes think so. But sisters do mending, don't they?" and she laughed my earnestness off as one would puff out a candle. "No--no--no--not sisters--not that," I protested. "I have no sisters, Little Statue. I wouldn't know how to act with a sister, unless she were somebody else's sister, you know. I can't stand the sisterly business, Frances----" "Have you suffered much from the sisterly?" she asked with a merry twinkle. "No," I hastened to explain, "I don't know how to play the sisterly touch-and-go at all, but the men tell me it doesn't work--dead failure, always ends the same. Sister proposes, or is proposed to----" "Oh!" cried the Little Statue with the faintest note of alarm, and she moved back from me on the boxes. "I think we'd better play at being very matter-of-fact friends for the rest of the trip." "No, thank you, Miss Sutherland--Frances, I mean," said I. "I'm not the fool to pretend that----" "Then pretend anything you like," and there was a sudden coldness in her voice, which showed me she regarded my refusal and the slip in her name as a rebuff. "Pretend anything you like, only don't say things." That was a throwing down of armor which I had not expected. "Then pretend that a pilgrim was lost in the dark, lost where men's souls slip down steep places to hell, and that one as radiant as an angel from heaven shone through the blackness and guided him back to safe ground," I cried, taking quick advantage of my fair antagonist's sudden abandon and casting aside all banter. "Children! children!" cried the priest. "Children! Sun's down! Time to go to your trundles, my babes!" "Yes, yes," I shouted. "Wait till I hear the rest of this story." At my words she had started up with a little gasp of fright. A look of awe came into her gray eyes, which I have seen on the faces of those who find themselves for the first time beside the abyss of a precipice. And I have climbed many lofty peaks, but never one without passing these places with the fearful possibilities of destruction. Always the novice has looked with the same unspeakable fear into the yawning depths, with the same unspeakable yearning towards the jewel-crowned heights beyond. This, or something of this, was in the startled attitude of the trembling figure, whose eyes met mine without flinching or favor. "Or pretend that a traveler had lost his compass, and though he was without merit, God gave him a star." "Is it a pretty story, Rufus?" called the priest. "Very," I cried out impatiently. "Don't interrupt." "Or pretend that a poor fool with no merit but his love of purity and truth and honor lost his way to paradise, and God gave him an angel for a guide." "Is it a long story, Rufus?" called the priest. "It's to be continued," I shouted, leaping to my feet and approaching her. "And pretend that the pilgrim and the traveler and the fool, asked no other privilege but to give each his heart's love, his life's devotion to her who had come between him and the darkness----" "Rufus!" roared the priest. "I declare I'll take a stick to you. Come away! D' y' hear? She's tired." "Good-night," she answered, in a broken whisper, so cold it stabbed me like steel; and she put out her hand in the mechanical way of the well-bred woman in every land. "Is that all?" I asked, holding the hand as if it had been a galvanic battery, though the priest was coming straight towards us. "All?" she returned, the lashes falling over the misty, gray eyes. "Ah, Rufus! Are we playing jest is earnest, or earnest is jest?" and she turned quickly and went to her tent. How long I stood in reverie, I do not know. The priest's broad hand presently came down on my shoulder with a savage thud. "Ye blunder-busticus, ye, what have ye been doing?" he asked. "The Little Statue was crying when she went to her tent." "Crying?" "Yes, ye idiot. I'll stay by her to-morrow." And he did. Nor could he have contrived severer punishment for the unfortunate effect of my words. Fool, that I was! I should keep myself in hand henceforth. How many men have made that vow regarding the woman they love? Those that have kept it, I trow, could be counted easily enough. But I had no opportunity to break my vow; for the priest rode with Frances Sutherland the whole of the second day, and not once did he let loose his scorpion wit. She had breakfast alone in her tent next morning, the priest carrying tea and toast to her; and when she came out, she leaped to her saddle so quickly I lost the expected favor of placing that imperious foot in the stirrup. We set out three abreast, and I had no courage to read my fate from the cold, marble face. The ground became rougher. We were forced to follow long detours round sloughs, and I gladly fell to the rear where I was unobserved. Clumps of willows alone broke the endless dip of the plain. Glassy creeks glittered silver through the green, and ever the trail, like a narrow ribbon of many loops, fled before us to the dim sky-line. When we halted for our nooning, Frances Sutherland had slipped from her saddle and gone off picking prairie roses before either the priest or I noticed her absence. "If you go off, you nuisance, you," said the priest rubbing his bald pate, and gazing after her in a puzzled way, when we had the meal ready, "I think she'll come back and eat." I promptly took myself off and had the glum pleasure of hearing her chat in high spirits over the dinner table of packing boxes; but she was on her cayuse and off with the scouts long before Father Holland and I had mounted. "Rufus," said the priest with a comical, quizzical look, as we set off together. "Rufus, I think y'r a fool." "I've thought that several hundred thousand times myself, this morning." "Have ye as much as got a glint of her eye to-day?" "No. I can't compete against the Church with women. Any fool knows that, even as big a fool as I." "Tush, youngster! Don't take to licking your raw tongue up and down the cynic's saw edge! Put a spur to your broncho there and ride ahead with her." "Having offended a goddess, I don't wish to be struck dead by inviting her wrath." "Pah! I've no patience with y'r ramrod independence! Bend a stiff neck, or you'll break a sore heart! Ride ahead, I tell you, you young mule!" and he brought a smart flick across my broncho. "Father Holland," I made answer with the dignity of a bishop and my nose mighty high in the air, "will you permit me to suggest that people know their own affairs best----" "Tush, no! I'll permit you to do nothing of the kind," said he, driving a fly from his horse's ear. "Don't you know, you young idiot, that between a man surrendering his love, and a woman surrendering hers, there's difference enough to account for tears? A man gives his and gets it back with compound interest in coin that's pure gold compared to his copper. A woman gives hers and gets back----" the priest stopped. "What?" I asked, interest getting the better of wounded pride. "Not much that's worth having from idiots like you," said he; by which the priest proved he could deal honestly by a friend, without any mincing palliatives. His answer set me thinking for the best part of the afternoon; and I warrant if any man sets out with the priest's premises and thinks hard for an afternoon he will come to the same conclusion that I did. "Let's both poke along a little faster," said I, after long silence. "Oho! With all my heart!" And we caught up with Frances Sutherland and for the first time that day I dared to look at her face. If there were tear marks about the wondrous eyes, they were the marks of the shower after a sun-burst, the laughing gladness of life in golden light, the joyous calm of washed air when a storm has cleared away turbulence. Why did she evade me and turn altogether to the priest at her right? Had I been of an analytical turn of mind, I might, perhaps, have made a very careful study of an emotion commonly called jealousy; but, when one's heart beats fast, one's thoughts throng too swiftly for introspection. Was I a part of the new happiness? I did not understand human nature then as I understand it now, else would I have known that fair eyes turn away to hide what they dare not reveal. I prided myself that I was now well in hand. I should take the first opportunity to undo my folly of the night before. * * * * * It was after supper. Father Holland had gone to his tent. Frances Sutherland was arranging a bunch of flowers in her lap; and I took my place directly behind her lest my face should tell truth while my tongue uttered lies. "Speaking of stars, you know Miss Sutherland," I began, remembering that I had said something about stars that must be unsaid. "Don't call me _Miss_ Sutherland, Rufus," she said, and that gentle answer knocked my grand resolution clean to the four winds. "I beg your pardon, Frances----" Chaos and I were one. Whatever was it I was to say about stars? "Well?" There was a waiting in the voice. "Yes--you know--Frances." I tried to call up something coherent; but somehow the thumping of my heart set up a rattling in my head. "No--Rufus. As a matter of fact, I don't know. You were going to tell me something." "Bother my stupidity, Miss--Miss--Frances, but the mastiff's forgotten what it was going to bow-wow about!" "Not the moon this time," she laughed. "Speaking of stars," and she gave me back my own words. "Oh! Yes! Speaking of stars! Do you know I think a lot of the men coming up from Fort William got to regarding the star above the leading canoe as their own particular star." I thought that speech a masterpiece. It would convince her she was the star of all the men, not mine particularly. That was true enough to appease conscience, a half-truth like Louis Laplante's words. So I would rob my foolish avowal of its personal element. A flush suffused the snowy white below her hair. "Oh! I didn't notice any particular star above the leading canoe. There were so very, very many splendid stars, I used to watch them half the night!" That answer threw me as far down as her manner had elated me. "Well! What of the stars?" asked the silvery voice. I was dumb. She flung the flowers aside as though she would leave; but Father Holland suddenly emerged from the tent fanning himself with his hat. "Babes!" said he. "You're a pair of fools! Oh! To be young and throw our opportunities helter-skelter like flowers of which we're tired," and he looked at the upset lapful. "Children! children! _Carpe Diem! Carpe Diem!_ Pluck the flowers; for the days are swifter than arrows," and he walked away from us engrossed in his own thoughts, muttering over and over the advice of the Latin poet, "_Carpe Diem! Carpe Diem!_" "What is _Carpe Diem_?" asked Frances Sutherland, gazing after the priest in sheer wonder. "I wasn't strong on classics at Laval and I haven't my crib." "Go on!" she commanded. "You're only apologizing for my ignorance. You know very well." "It means just what he says--as if each day were a flower, you know, had its joys to be plucked, that can never come again." "Flowers! Oh! I know! The kind you all picked for me coming up from Fort William. And do you know, Rufus, I never could thank you all? Were those _Carpe Diem_ flowers?" "No--not exactly the kind Father Holland means we should pick." "What then?" and she turned suddenly to find her face not a hand's length from mine. "This kind," I whispered, bending in terrified joy over her shoulder; and I plucked a blossom straight from her lips and another and yet another, till there came into the deep, gray eyes what I cannot transcribe, but what sent me away the king of all men--for had I not found my Queen? And that was the way I carried out my grand resolution and kept myself in hand. CHAPTER XIII THE BUFFALO HUNT I question if Norse heroes of the sea could boast more thrilling adventure than the wild buffalo hunts of American plain-rangers. A cavalcade of six hundred men mounted on mettlesome horses eager for the furious dash through a forest of tossing buffalo-horns was quite as imposing as any clash between warring Vikings. Squaws, children and a horde of ragged camp-followers straggled in long lines far to the hunters' rear. Altogether, the host behind the flag numbered not less than two thousand souls. Like any martial column, our squad had captain, color-bearer and chaplain. Luckily, all three were known to me, as I discovered when I reached Pembina. The truce, patched up between Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Westers after Governor McDonell's surrender, left Cuthbert Grant free to join the buffalo hunt. Pursuing big game across the prairie was more to his taste than leading the half-breeds during peace. The warden of the plains came hot-foot after us, and was promptly elected captain of the chase. Father Holland was with us too. Our course lay directly on his way to the Missouri and a jolly chaplain he made. In Grant's company came Pierre, the rhymster, bubbling over with jingling minstrelsy, that was the delight of every half-breed camp on the plains. Bareheaded, with a red handkerchief banding back his lank hair, and clad in fringed buckskin from the bright neck-cloth to the beaded moccasins, he was as wild a figure as any one of the savage rabble. Yet this was the poet of the plain-rangers, who caught the song of bird, the burr of cataract through the rocks, the throb of stampeding buffalo, the moan of the wind across the prairie, and tuned his rude minstrelsy to wild nature's fugitive music. Viking heroes, I know, chanted their deeds in songs that have come down to us; but with the exception of the Eskimo, descendants of North American races have never been credited with a taste for harmony. Once I asked Pierre how he acquired his art of verse-making. With a laugh of scorn, he demanded if the wind and the waterfalls and the birds learned music from beardless boys and draggle-coated dominies with armfuls of books. However, it may have been with his Pegasus, his mount for the hunt was no laggard. He rode a knob-jointed, muscular brute, that carried him like poetic inspiration wherever it pleased. Though Pierre's right hand was busied upholding the hunters' flag, and he had but one arm to bow-string the broncho's arching neck, the half-breed poet kept his seat with the easy grace of the plainsman born and bred in the saddle. "Faith, man, 'tis the fate of genius to ride a fractious steed," said Father Holland, when the bronchos of priest and poet had come into violent collision with angry squeals for the third time in ten minutes. "And what are the capers of this, my beast, compared to the antics of fate, Sir Priest?" asked Pierre with grave dignity. The wind caught his long hair and blew it about his face till he became an equestrian personification of the frenzied muse. I had become acquainted with his trick of setting words to the music of quaint rhymes; but Father Holland was taken aback. "By the saints," he exclaimed, "I've no mind to run amuck of Pegasus! I'll get out of your way. Faith, 'tis the first time I've seen poetry in buckskin of this particular binding," and he wheeled his broncho out, leaving me abreast of the rhymster. Pierre's lips began to frame some answer to the churchman. "Have a care, Father," I warned. "You've escaped the broncho; but look out for the poet." "Save us! What's coming now?" gasped the priest. "Ha! I have it!" and Pierre turned triumphantly to Father Holland. "The Lord be praised that poetry's free, Or you'd bottle it up like a saint's thumb-bone, That beauty's beauty for eyes that see Without regard to a priestly gown----" "Hold on," interrupted Father Holland. "Hold on, Pierre!" "'Your double-quick Peg Has a limp of one leg!' "'Bone' and 'gown' don't fit, Mr. Rhymster." "Upon my honor! You turned poet, too, Father Holland!" said I. "We might be on a pilgrimage to Helicon." "To where?" says Grant, whose knowledge of classics was less than my own, which was precious little indeed. "Helicon." At that Father Holland burst in such roars of laughter, the rhymster took personal offense, dug his moccasins against the horse's sides and rode ahead. His fringed leggings were braced straight out in the stirrups as if he anticipated his broncho transforming the concave into the convex,--known in the vernacular as "bucking." "Mad as a hatter," said Grant, inferring the joke was on Pierre. "Let him be! Let him be! He'll get over it! He's working up his rhymes for the feast after the buffalo hunt." And we afterwards got the benefit of those rhymes. The tenth day west from Pembina our scouts found some herd's footprints on soggy ground. At once word was sent back to pitch camp on rolling land. A cordon of carts with shafts turned outward encircled the camping ground. At one end the animals were tethered, at the other the hunter's tents were huddled together. All night mongrel curs, tearing about the enclosure in packs, kept noisy watch. Twice Grant and I went out to reconnoitre. We saw only a whitish wolf scurrying through the long grass. Grant thought this had disturbed the dogs; but I was not so sure. Indeed, I felt prepared to trace features of Le Grand Diable under every elk-hide, or wolf-skin in which a cunning Indian could be disguised. I deemed it wise to have a stronger guard and engaged two runners, Ringing Thunder and Burnt Earth, giving them horses and ordering them to keep within call during the thick of the hunt. At daybreak all tents were a beehive of activity. The horses, with almost human intelligence, were wild to be off. Riders could scarcely gain saddles, and before feet were well in the stirrups, the bronchos had reared and bolted away, only to be reined sharply in and brought back to the ranks. The dogs, too, were mad, tearing after make-believe enemies and worrying one another till there were several curs less for the hunt. Inside the cart circle, men were shouting last orders to women, squaws scolding half-naked urchins, that scampered in the way, and the whole encampment setting up a din that might have scared any buffalo herd into endless flight. Grant gave the word. Pierre hoisted the flag, and the camp turmoil was left behind. The _Bois-Brulés_ kept well within the lines and observed good order; but the Indian rabble lashed their half-broken horses into a fury of excitement, that threatened confusion to all discipline. The camp was strongly guarded. Father Holland remained with the campers, but in spite of his holy calling, I am sure he longed to be among the hunters. Scouts ahead, we followed the course of a half-dried slough where buffalo tracks were visible. Some two miles from camp, the out-runners returned with word that the herds were browsing a short distance ahead, and that the marsh-bed widened to a banked ravine. The buffalo could not have been found in a better place; for there was a fine slope from the upper land to our game. We at once ascended the embankment and coursed cautiously along the cliff's summit. Suddenly we rounded an abrupt headland and gained full view of the buffalo. The flag was lowered, stopping the march, and up rose our captain in his stirrups to survey the herd. A light mist screened us and a deep growth of the leathery grass, common to marsh lands, half hid a multitude of broad, humped, furry backs, moving aimlessly in the valley. Coal-black noses poked through the green stalks sniffing the air suspiciously and the curved horns tossed broken stems off in savage contempt. From the headland beneath us to the rolling prairie at the mouth of the valley, the earth swayed with giant forms. The great creatures were restless as caged tigers and already on the rove for the day's march. I suppose the vast flocks of wild geese, that used to darken the sky and fill the air with their shrill "hunk, hunk," when I first went to the north, numbered as many living beings in one mass as that herd; but men no more attempted to count the creatures in flock or herd, than to estimate the pebbles of a shore. Protruding eyes glared savagely sideways. Great, thick necks hulked forward in impatient jerks; and those dagger-pointed horns, sharper than a pruning hook, promised no boy's sport for our company. The buffalo sees best laterally on the level, and as long as we were quiet we remained undiscovered. At the prospect, some of the hunters grew excitedly profane. Others were timorous, fearing a stampede in our direction. Being above, we could come down on the rear of the buffaloes and they would be driven to the open. Grant scouted the counseled caution. The hunters loaded guns, filled their mouths with balls to reload on the gallop and awaited the captain's order. Wheeling his horse to the fore, the warden gave one quick signal. With a storm-burst of galloping hoofs, we charged down the slope. At sound of our whirlwind advance, the bulls tossed up their heads and began pawing the ground angrily. From the hunters there was no shouting till close on the herd, then a wild halloo with unearthly screams from the Indians broke from our company. The buffaloes started up, turned panic-stricken, and with bellowings, that roared down the valley, tore for the open prairie. The ravine rocked with the plunging monsters, and reëchoed to the crash of six-hundred guns and a thunderous tread. Firing was at close range. In a moment there was a battle royal between dexterous savages, swift as tigers, and these leviathans of the prairie with their brute strength. A quick fearless horse was now invaluable; for the swiftest riders darted towards the large buffaloes and rode within a few yards before taking aim. Instantly, the ravine was ablaze with shots. Showers of arrows from the Indian hunters sung through the air overhead. Men unhorsed, ponies thrown from their feet, buffaloes wounded--or dead--were scattered everywhere. One angry bull gored furiously at his assailant, ripping his horse from shoulder to flank, then, maddened by the creature's blood, and before a shot from a second hunter brought him down, caught the rider on its upturned horns and tossed him high. By keeping deftly to the fore, where the buffalo could not see, and swerving alternately from side to side as the enraged animals struck forward, trained horses avoided side thrusts. The saddle-girths of one hunter, heading a buffalo from the herd, gave way as he was leaning over to send a final ball into the brute's head. Down he went, shoulders foremost under its nose, while the horse, with a deft leap cleared the vicious drive of horns. Strange to say, the buffalo did not see where he fell and galloped onward. Carcasses were mowed down like felled trees; but still we plunged on and on, pursuing the racing herd; while the ground shook in an earthquake under stampeding hoofs. I had forgotten time, place, danger--everything in the mad chase and was hard after a savage old warrior that outraced my horse. Gradually I rounded him closer to the embankment. My broncho was blowing, almost wind-spent, but still I dug the spurs into him, and was only a few lengths behind the buffalo, when the wily beast turned. With head down, eyes on fire and nostrils blood-red, he bore straight upon me. My broncho reared, then sprang aside. Leaning over to take sure aim, I fired, but a side jerk unbalanced me. I lost my stirrup and sprawled in the dust. When I got to my feet, the buffalo lay dead and my broncho was trotting back. Hunters were still tearing after the disappearing herd. Riderless horses, mad with the smell of blood and snorting at every flash of powder, kept up with the wild race. Little Fellow, La Robe Noire, Burnt Earth, and Ringing Thunder, had evidently been left in the rear; for look where I might I could not see one of my four Indians. Near me two half-breeds were righting their saddles. I also was tightening the girths, which was not an easy matter with my excited broncho prancing round in a circle. Suddenly there was the whistle of something through the air overhead, like a catapult stone, or recoiling whip-lash. The same instant one of the half-breeds gave an upward toss of both arms and, with a piercing shriek, fell to the ground. The fellow caught at his throat and from his bared chest protruded an arrow shaft. I heard his terrified comrade shout, "The Sioux! the Sioux!" Then he fled in a panic of fear, not knowing where he was going and staggering as he ran; and I saw him pitch forward face downwards. I had barely realized what had happened and what it all meant, before an exultant shout broke from the high grass above the embankment. At that my horse gave a plunge and, wrenching the rein from my grasp, galloped off leaving me to face the hostiles. Half a score of Indians scrambled down the cliff and ran to secure the scalps of the dead. Evidently I had not been seen; but if I ran I should certainly be discovered and a Sioux's arrow can overtake the swiftest runner. I was looking hopelessly about for some place of concealment, when like a demon from the earth a horseman, scarlet in war-paint appeared not a hundred yards away. Brandishing his battle-axe, he came towards me at furious speed. With weapons in hand I crouched as his horse approached; and the fool mistook my action for fear. White teeth glistened and he shrieked with derisive laughter. I knew that sound. Back came memory of Le Grand Diable standing among the shadows of a forest camp-fire, laughing as I struck him. The Indian swung his club aloft. I dodged abreast of his horse to avoid the blow. With a jerk he pulled the animal back on its haunches. Quick, when it rose, I sent a bullet to its heart. It lurched sideways, reared straight up and fell backwards with Le Grand Diable under. The fall knocked battle-axe and club from his grasp; and when his horse rolled over in a final spasm, two men were instantly locked in a death clutch. The evil eyes of the Indian glared with a fixed look of uncowed hatred and the hands of the other tightened on the redman's throat. Diable was snatching at a knife in his belt, when the cries of my Indians rang out close at hand. Their coming seemed to renew his strength; for with the full weight of an antagonist hanging from his neck, the willowy form squirmed first on his knees, then to his feet. But my men dashed up, knocked his feet from under him and pinioned him to the ground. La Robe Noire, with the blood-lust of his race, had a knife unsheathed and would have finished Diable's career for good and all; but Little Fellow struck the blade from his hand. That murderous attempt cost poor La Robe Noire dearly enough in the end. Hare-skin thongs of triple ply were wound about Diable's crossed arms from wrists to elbows. Burnt Earth gagged the knave with his own moccasin, while Ringing Thunder and Little Fellow quickly roped him neck and ankles to the fore and hind shanks of the dead buffalo. This time my wily foe should remain in my power till I had rescued Miriam. "_Monsieur! Monsieur!_" gasped Little Fellow as he rose from putting a last knot to our prisoner's cords. "The Sioux!" and he pointed in alarm to the cliff. True, in my sudden conflict, I had forgotten about the marauding Sioux; but the fellows had disappeared from the field of the buffalo hunt and it was to the embankment that my Indians were anxiously looking. Three thin smoke lines were rising from the prairie. I knew enough of Indian lore to recognize this tribal signal as a warning to the Sioux band of some misfortune. Was Miriam within range of those smoke signals? Now was my opportunity. I could offer Diable in exchange for the Sioux captives. Meanwhile, we had him secure. He would not be found till the hunt was over and the carts came for the skins. Mounting the broncho, which Little Fellow had caught and brought back, I ordered the Indians to get their horses and follow; and I rode up to the level prairie. Against the southern horizon shone the yellow birch of a wigwam. Vague movements were apparent through the long grass, from which we conjectured the raiders were hastening back with news of Diable's capture. We must reach the Sioux camp before these messengers caused another mysterious disappearing of this fugitive tribe. We whipped our horses to a gallop. Again thin smoke lines arose from the prairie and simultaneously the wigwam began to vanish. I had almost concluded the tepee was one of those delusive mirages which lead prairie riders on fools' errands, when I descried figures mounting ponies where the peaked camp had stood. At this we lashed our horses to faster pace. The Sioux galloped off and more smoke lines were rising. "What do those mean, Little Fellow?" I asked; for there was smoke in a dozen places ahead. "The prairie's on fire, _Monsieur_! The Sioux have put burnt stick in dry grass! The wind--it blow--it come hard--fast--fast this way!" and all four Indians reined up their horses as if they would turn. "Coward Indians," I cried. "Go on! Who's put off the trail by the fire of a fool Sioux? Get through the fire before it grows big, or it will catch you all and burn you to a crisp." The gathering smoke was obscuring the fugitives and my Indians still hung back. Where the Indian refuses to be coerced, he may be won by reward, or spurred by praise of bravery. "Ten horses to the brave who catches a Sioux!" I shouted. "Come on, Indians! Who follows? Is the Indian less brave than the pale face?" and we all dashed forward, spurring our hard-ridden horses without mercy. Each Indian gave his horse the bit. Beating them over the head, they craned flat over the horses' necks to lessen resistance to the air. A boisterous wind was fanning the burning grass to a great tide of fire that rolled forward in forked tongues; but beyond the flames were figures of receding riders; and we pressed on. Cinders rained on us like liquid fire, scorching and maddening our horses; but we never paused. The billowy clouds of smoke that rolled to meet us were blinding, and the very atmosphere, livid and quivering with heat, seemed to become a fiery fluid that enveloped and tortured us. Involuntarily, as we drew nearer and nearer the angry fire-tide, my hand was across my mouth to shut out the hot burning air; but a man must breathe, and the next intake of breath blistered one's chest like live coals on raw flesh. Little wonder our poor beasts uttered that pitiful scream against pain, which is the horse's one protest of suffering. Presently, they became wildly unmanageable; and when we dismounted to blindfold them and muffle their heads in our jackets, they crowded and trembled against us in a frenzy of terror. Then we tied strips torn from our clothing across our own mouths and, remounting, beat the frantic creatures forward. I have often marveled at the courage of those four Indians. For me, there was incentive enough to dare everything to the death. For them, what motive but to vindicate their bravery? But even bravery in its perfection has the limitation of physical endurance; and we had now reached the limit of what we could endure and live. The fire wave was crackling and licking up everything within a few paces of us. Live brands fell thick as a rain of fire. The flames were not crawling in the insidious line of the prairie fire when there is no wind, but the very heat of the air seemed to generate a hurricane and the red wave came forward in leaps and bounds, reaching out cloven fangs that hissed at us like an army of serpents. I remember wondering in a half delirium whether parts of Dante's hell could be worse. With the instinctive cry to heaven for help, of human-kind world over, I looked above; but there was only a great pitchy dome with glowing clouds rolling and heaving and tossing and blackening the firmament. Then I knew we must choose one of three things, a long detour round the fire-wave, one dash through the flames--or death. I shouted to the men to save themselves; but Burnt Earth and Ringing Thunder had already gone off to skirt the near end of the fire-line. Little Fellow and La Robe Noire stuck staunchly by me. We all three paused, facing death; and the Indians' horses trembled close to my broncho till I felt the burn of hot stirrups against both ankles. Our buckskin was smoking in a dozen places. There was a lull of the wind, and I said to myself, "The calm before the end; the next hurricane burst and those red demon claws will have us." But in the momentary lull, a place appeared through the trough of smoke billows, where the grass was green and the fire-barrier breached. With a shout and heads down, we dashed towards this and vaulted across the flaming wall, our horses snorting and screaming with pain as we landed on the smoking turf of the other side. I gulped a great breath of the fresh air into my suffocating lungs, tore the buckskin covering from my broncho's head and we raced on in a swirl of smoke, always following the dust which revealed the tracks of the retreating Sioux. There was a whiff of singed hair, as if one of the horses had been burnt, and Little Fellow gave a shout. Looking back I saw his horse sinking on the blackened patch; but La Robe Noire and I rode on. The fugitives were ascending rising ground to the south. They were beating their horses in a rage of cruelty; but we gained at every pace. I counted twenty riders. A woman seemed to be strapped to one horse. Was this Miriam? We were on moist grass and I urged La Robe Noire to ride faster and drove spurs in my own beast, though I felt him weakening under me. The Sioux had now reached the crest of the hill. Our horses were nigh done, and to jade the fagged creatures up rising ground was useless. When we finally reached the height, the Sioux were far down in the valley. It was utterly hopeless to try to overtake them. Ah! It is easy to face death and to struggle and to fight and to triumph! But the hardest of all hard things is to surrender, to yield to the inevitable, to turn back just when the goal looms through obscurity! I still had Diable in my power. We headed about and crawled slowly back by unburnt land towards the buffalo hunters. Little Fellow, we overtook limping homeward afoot. Burnt Earth and Ringing Thunder awaited us near the ravine. The carts were already out gathering hides, tallow, flesh and tongues. We made what poor speed we could among the buffalo carcasses to the spot where we had left Le Grand Diable. It was Little Fellow, who was hobbling ahead, and the Indian suddenly turned with such a cry of baffled rage, I knew it boded misfortune. Running forward, I could hardly believe my eyes. Fools that we were to leave the captive unguarded! The great buffalo lay unmolested; but there was no Le Grand Diable. A third time had he vanished as if in league with the powers of the air. Closer examination explained his disappearance. A wet, tattered moccasin, with the appearance of having been chewed, lay on the turf. He had evidently bitten through his gag, raised his arms to his mouth, eaten away the hare thongs, and so, without the help of the Sioux raiders, freed his hands, untied himself and escaped. Dumfounded and baffled, I returned to the encampment and took counsel with Father Holland. We arranged to set out for the Mandanes on the Missouri. Diable's tribe had certainly gone south to Sioux territory. The Sioux and the Mandanes were friendly enough neighbors this year. Living with the Mandanes south of the Sioux country, we might keep track of the enemy without exposing ourselves to Sioux vengeance. Forebodings of terrible suffering for Miriam haunted me. I could not close my eyes without seeing her subjected to Indian torture; and I had no heart to take part in the jubilation of the hunters over their great success. The savory smell of roasting meat whiffed into my tent and I heard the shrill laughter of the squaws preparing the hunters' feast. With hard-wood axles squeaking loudly under the unusual burden, the last cart rumbled into the camp enclosure with its load of meat and skins. The clamor of the people subsided; and I knew every one was busily gorging to repletion, too intent on the satisfaction of animal greed to indulge in the Saxon habit of talking over a meal. Well might they gorge; for this was the one great annual feast. There would follow a winter of stint and hardship and hunger; and every soul in the camp was laying up store against famine. Even the dogs were happy, for they were either roving over the field of the hunt, or lying disabled from gluttony at their masters' tents. Father Holland remained in the tepee with me talking over our plans and plastering Indian ointment on my numerous burns. By and by, the voices of the feasters began again and we heard Pierre, the rhymester, chanting the song of the buffalo hunt: Now list to the song of the buffalo hunt, Which I, Pierre, the rhymester, chant of the brave! We are _Bois-Brulés_, Freemen of the plains, We choose our chief! We are no man's slave! Up, riders, up, ere the early mist Ascends to salute the rising sun! Up, rangers, up, ere the buffalo herds Sniff morning air for the hunter's gun! They lie in their lairs of dank spear-grass, Down in the gorge, where the prairie dips. We've followed their tracks through the sucking ooze, Where our bronchos sank to their steaming hips. We've followed their tracks from the rolling plain Through slime-green sloughs to a sedgy ravine, Where the cat-tail spikes of the marsh-grown flags Stand half as high as the billowy green. The spear-grass touched our saddle-bows, The blade-points pricked to the broncho's neck; But we followed the tracks like hounds on scent Till our horses reared with a sudden check. The scouts dart back with a shout, "They are found!" Great fur-maned heads are thrust through reeds, A forest of horns, a crunching of stems, Reined sheer on their haunches are terrified steeds! Get you gone to the squaws at the tents, old men, The cart-lines safely encircle the camp! Now, braves of the plain, brace your saddle-girths! Quick! Load guns, for our horses champ! A tossing of horns, a pawing of hoofs, But the hunters utter never a word, As the stealthy panther creeps on his prey, So move we in silence against the herd. With arrows ready and triggers cocked, We round them nearer the valley bank; They pause in defiance, then start with alarm At the ominous sound of a gun-barrel's clank. A wave from our captain, out bursts a wild shout, A crash of shots from our breaking ranks, And the herd stampedes with a thunderous boom While we drive our spurs into quivering flanks. The arrows hiss like a shower of snakes, The bullets puff in a smoky gust, Out fly loose reins from the bronchos' bits And hunters ride on in a whirl of dust. The bellowing bulls rush blind with fear Through river and marsh, while the trampled dead Soon bridge safe ford for the plunging herd; Earth rocks like a sea 'neath the mighty tread. A rip of the sharp-curved sickle-horns, A hunter falls to the blood-soaked ground! He is gored and tossed and trampled down, On dashes the furious beast with a bound, When over sky-line hulks the last great form And the rumbling thunder of their hoofs' beat, beat, Dies like an echo in distant hills, Back ride the hunters chanting their feat. Now, old men and squaws, come you out with the carts! There's meat against hunger and fur against cold! Gather full store for the pemmican bags, Garner the booty of warriors bold. So list ye the song of the _Bois-Brulés_, Of their glorious deeds in the days of old, And this is the tale of the buffalo hunt Which I, Pierre, the rhymester, have proudly told. CHAPTER XIV IN SLIPPERY PLACES A more desolate existence than the life of a fur-trading winterer in the far north can scarcely be imagined. Penned in some miserable lodge a thousand miles from human companionship, only the wild orgies of the savages varied the monotony of dull days and long nights. The winter I spent with the Mandanes was my first in the north. I had not yet learned to take events as the rock takes wave-blows, and was still at that mawkish age when a man is easily filled with profound pity for himself. A month after our arrival, Father Holland left the Mandane village. Eric Hamilton had not yet come; so I felt much like the man whom a gloomy poet describes as earth's last habitant. I had accompanied the priest half-way to the river forks. Here, he was to get passage in an Indian canoe to the tribes of the upper Missouri. After an affectionate farewell, I stood on a knoll of treeless land and watched the broad-brimmed hat and black robe receding from me. "Good-by, boy! God bless you!" he had said in broken voice. "Don't fall to brooding when you're alone, or you'll lose your wits. Now mind yourself! Don't mope!" For my part, I could not answer a word, but keeping hold of his hand walked on with him a pace. "Get away with you! Go home, youngster!" he ordered, roughly shaking me off and flourishing his staff. Then he strode swiftly forward without once looking back, while I would have given all I possessed for one last wave. As he plunged into the sombre forest, where the early autumn frost of that north land had already tinged the maple woods with the hectic flush of coming death, so poignant was this last wresting from human fellowship, I could scarcely resist the impulse to desert my station and follow him. Poorer than the poorest of the tribes to whom he ministered, alone and armed only with his faith, this man was ready to conquer the world for his Master. "Would that I had half the courage for my quest," I mused, and walked slowly back to the solitary lodge. Black Cat, Chief of the Mandane village, in a noisy harangue, adopted me as his son and his brother and his father and his mother and I know not what; but apart from trade with his people, I responded coldly to these warm overtures. From Father Holland's leave-taking to Hamilton's coming, was a desolately lonesome interval. Daily I went to the north hill and strained my eyes for figures against the horizon. Sometimes horsemen would gradually loom into view, head first, then arms and horse, like the peak of a ship preceding appearance of full canvas and hull over sea. Thereupon I would hurriedly saddle my own horse and ride furiously forward, feeling confident that Hamilton had at last come, only to find the horsemen some company of Indian riders. What could be keeping him? I conjectured a thousand possibilities; but in truth there was no need for any conjectures. 'Twas I, who felt the days drag like years. Hamilton was not behind his appointed time. He came at last, walking in on me one night when I least expected him and was sitting moodily before my untouched supper. He had nothing to tell except that he had wasted many weeks following false clues, till our buffalo hunters returned with news of the Sioux attack, Diable's escape and our bootless pursuit. At once he had left Fort Douglas for the Missouri, pausing often to send scouts scouring the country for news of Diable's band; but not a trace of the rascals had been found; and his search seemed on the whole more barren of results than mine. Laplante, he reported, had never been seen the night after he left the council hall to find the young Nor'-Wester. In my own mind, I had no doubt the villain had been in that company we pursued through the prairie fire. Altogether, I think Hamilton's coming made matters worse rather than better. That I had failed after so nearly effecting a rescue seemed to embitter him unspeakably. Out of deference to the rival companies employing us, we occupied different lodges. Indeed, I fear poor Eric did but a sorry business for the Hudson's Bay that winter. I verily believe he would have forgotten to eat, let alone barter for furs, had I not been there to lug him forcibly across to my lodge, where meals were prepared for us both. Often when I saw the Indian trappers gathering before his door with piles of peltries, I would go across and help him to value the furs. At first the Indian rogues were inclined to take advantage of his abstraction and palm off one miserable beaver skin, where they should have given five for a new hatchet; and I began to understand why they crowded to his lodge, though he did nothing to attract them, while they avoided mine. Then I took a hand in Hudson's Bay trade and equalized values. First, I would pick over the whole pile, which the Indians had thrown on the floor, putting spoiled skins to one side, and peltries of the same kind in classified heaps. "Lynx, buffalo, musk-ox, marten, beaver, silver fox, black bear, raccoon! Want them all, Eric?" I would ask, while the Indians eyed me with suspicious resentment. "Certainly, certainly, take everything," Eric would answer, without knowing a word of what I had said, and at once throwing away his opportunity to drive a good bargain. Picking over the goods of Hamilton's packet, the Mandanes would choose what they wanted. Then began a strange, silent haggling over prices. Unlike Oriental races, the Indian maintains stolid silence, compelling the white man to do the talking. "Eric, Running Deer wants a gun," I would begin. "For goodness' sake, give it to him, and don't bother me," Eric would urge, and the faintest gleam of amused triumph would shoot from the beady eyes of Running Deer. Running Deer's peltries would be spread out, and after a half hour of silent consideration on his part and trader's talk on mine, furs to the value of so many beaver skins would be passed across for the coveted gun. I remember it was a wretched old squaw with a toothless, leathery, much-bewrinkled face and a reputation for knowledge of Indian medicines, who first opened my eyes to the sort of trade the Indians had been driving with Hamilton. The old creature was bent almost double over her stout oak staff and came hobbling in with a bag of roots, which she flung on the floor. After thawing out her frozen moccasins before the lodge fire and taking off bandages of skins about her ankles, she turned to us for trade. We were ready to make concessions that might induce the old body to hurry away; but she demanded red flannel, tea and tobacco enough to supply a whole family of grandchildren, and sat down on the bag of roots prepared to out-siege us. "What's this, Eric?" I asked, knowing no more of roots than the old woman did of values. "Seneca for drugs. For goodness' sake, buy it quick and don't haggle." "But she wants your whole kit, man," I objected. "She'll have the whole kit and the shanty, too, if you don't get her out," said Hamilton, opening the lodge door; and the old squaw presently limped off with an armful of flannel, one tea packet and a parcel of tobacco, already torn open. Such was the character of Hamilton's bartering up to the time I elected myself his first lieutenant; but as his abstractions became almost trance-like, I think the superstition of the Indians was touched. To them, a maniac is a messenger of the Great Spirit; and Hamilton's strange ways must have impressed them, for they no longer put exorbitant values on their peltries. After the day's trading Eric would come to my hut. Pacing the cramped place for hours, wild-eyed and silent, he would abruptly dash into the darkness of the night like one on the verge of madness. Thereupon, the taciturn, grave-faced La Robe Noire, tapping his forehead significantly, would look with meaning towards Little Fellow; and I would slip out some distance behind to see that Hamilton did himself no harm while the paroxysm lasted. So absorbed was he in his own gloom, for days he would not utter a syllable. The storm that had gathered would then discharge its strength in an outburst of incoherent ravings, which usually ended in Hamilton's illness and my watching over him night and day, keeping firearms out of reach. I have never seen--and hope I never may--any other being age so swiftly and perceptibly. I had attributed his worn appearance in Fort Douglas to the cannon accident and trusted the natural robustness of his constitution would throw off the apparent languor; but as autumn wore into winter, there were more gray hairs on his temple, deeper lines furrowed his face and the erect shoulders began to bow. When days slipped into weeks and weeks into months without the slightest inkling of Miriam's whereabouts to set at rest the fear that my rash pursuit had caused her death, I myself grew utterly despondent. Like all who embark on daring ventures, I had not counted on continuous frustration. The idea that I might waste a lifetime in the wilderness without accomplishing anything had never entered my mind. Week after week, the scouts dispatched in every direction came back without one word of the fugitives, and I began to imagine my association with Hamilton had been unfortunate for us both. This added to despair the bitterness of regret. The winter was unusually mild, and less game came to the Missouri from the mountains and bad lands than in severe seasons. By February, we were on short rations. Two meals a day, with cat-fish for meat and dried skins in soup by way of variety, made up our regular fare for mid-winter. The frequent absence of my two Indians, scouring the region for the Sioux, left me to do my own fishing; and fishing with bare hands in frosty weather is not pleasant employment for a youth of soft up-bringing. Protracted bachelordom was also losing its charms; but that may have resulted from a new influence, which came into my life and seemed ever present. At Christmas, Hamilton was threatened with violent insanity. As the Mandanes' provisions dwindled, the Indians grew surlier toward us; and I was as deep in despondency as a man could sink. Frequently, I wondered whether Father Holland would find us alive in the spring, and I sometimes feared ours would be the fate of Athabasca traders whose bodies satisfied the hunger of famishing Crees. How often in those darkest hours did a presence, which defied time and space, come silently to me, breathing inspiration that may not be spoken, healing the madness of despair and leaving to me in the midst of anxiety a peace which was wholly unaccountable! In the lambent flame of the rough stone fireplace, in the darkness between Hamilton's hut and mine, through which I often stole, dreading what I might find--everywhere, I felt and saw, or seemed to see, those gray eyes with the look of a startled soul opening its virgin beauty and revealing its inmost secrets. A bleak, howling wind, with great piles of storm-scud overhead, raved all the day before Christmas. It was one of those afternoons when the sombre atmosphere seems weighted with gloom and weariness. On Christmas eve Hamilton's brooding brought on acute delirium. He had been more depressed than usual, and at night when we sat down to a cheerless supper of hare-skin soup and pemmican, he began to talk very fast and quite irrationally. "See here, old boy," said I, "you'd better bunk here to-night. You're not well." "Bunk!" said he icily, in the grand manner he sometimes assumed at the Quebec Club for the benefit of a too familiar member. "And pray, Sir, what might 'bunk' mean?" "Go to bed, Eric," I coaxed, getting tight hold of his hands. "You're not well, old man; come to bed!" "Bed!" he exclaimed with indignation. "Bed! You're a madman, Sir! I'm to meet Miriam on the St. Foye road." (It was here that Miriam lived in Quebec, before they were married.) "On the St. Foye road! See the lights glitter, dearest, in Lower Town," and he laughed aloud. Then followed such an outpouring of wild ravings I wept from very pity and helplessness. "Rufus! Rufus, lad!" he cried, staring at me and clutching at his forehead as lucid intervals broke the current of his madness. "Gillespie, man, what's wrong? I don't seem able to think. Who--are--you? Who--in the world--are you? Gillespie! O Gillespie! I'm going mad! Am I going mad? Help me, Rufus! Why can't you help me? It's coming after me! See it! The hideous thing!" Tears started from his burning eyes and his brow was knotted hard as whipcord. "Look! It's there!" he screamed, pointing to the fire, and he darted to the door, where I caught him. He fought off my grasp with maniacal strength, and succeeded in flinging open the door. Then I forgot this man was more than brother to me, and threw myself upon him as against an enemy, determined to have the mastery. The bleak wind roared through the open blackness of the doorway, and on the ground outside were shadows of two struggling, furious men. I saw the terrified faces of Little Fellow and La Robe Noire peering through the dark, and felt wet beads start from every pore in my body. Both of us were panting like fagged racers. One of us was fighting blindly, raining down aimless blows, I know not which, but I think it must have been Hamilton, for he presently sank in my arms, limp and helpless as a sick child. Somehow I got him between the robes of my floor mattress. Drawing a box to the bedside I again took his hands between mine and prepared for a night's watch. He raved in a low, indistinct tone, muttering Miriam's name again and again, and tossing his head restlessly from side to side. Then he fell into a troubled sleep. The supper lay untouched. Torches had burned black out. One tallow candle, that I had extravagantly put among some evergreens--our poor decorations for Christmas Eve--sputtered low and threw ghostly, branching shadows across the lodge. I slipped from the sick man's side, heaped more logs on the fire and stretched out between robes before the hearth. In the play of the flame Hamilton's face seemed suddenly and strangely calm. Was it the dim light, I wonder. The furrowed lines of sorrow seemed to fade, leaving the peaceful, transparent purity of the dead. I could not but associate the branched shadows on the wall with legends of death keeping guard over the dying. The shadow by his pillow gradually assumed vague, awesome shape. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Was this an illusion, or was I, too, going mad? The filmy thing distinctly wavered and receded a little into the dark. An unspeakable fear chilled my veins. Then I could have laughed defiance and challenged death. Death! Curse death! What had we to fear from dying? Had we not more to fear from living? At that came thought of my love and the tumult against life was quieted. I, too, like other mortals, had reason, the best of reason, to fear death. What matter if a lonely one like myself went out alone to the great dark? But when thought of my love came, a desolating sense of separation--separation not to be bridged by love or reason--overwhelmed me, and I, too, shrank back. Again I peered forward. The shadow fluttered, moved, and came out of the gloom, a tender presence with massy, golden hair, white-veined brow, and gray eyes, speaking unutterable things. "My beloved!" I cried. "Oh, my beloved!" and I sprang towards her; but she had glided back among the spectral branches. The candle tumbled to the floor, extinguishing all light, and I was alone with the sick man breathing heavily in the darkness. A log broke over the fire. The flames burst up again; but I was still alone. Had I, too, lost grip of reality; or was she in distress calling for me? Neither suggestion satisfied; for the mean lodge was suddenly filled with a great calm, and my whole being was flooded and thrilled with the trancing ecstasy of an ethereal presence. If I remember rightly--and to be perfectly frank, I do--though I was in as desperate straits as a man could be, I lay before the hearth that Christmas Eve filled with gratitude to heaven--God knows such a gift must have come from heaven!--for the love with which I had been dowered. How it might have been with other men I know not. For myself, I could not have come through that dreary winter unscathed without the influence of her, who would have been the first to disclaim such power. Among the velvet cushions of the east one may criticise the lapse of white man to barbarity; but in the wilderness human voice is as grateful to the ear as rain patter in a drouth. There, men deal with facts, not arguments. Natives break the loneliness of an isolated life by not unwelcomed visits. Comes a time when they tarry over long in the white man's lodge. Other men, who have scouted the possibility of sinking to savagery, have forsaken the ways of their youth. Who can say that I might not have departed from the path called rectitude? Religion may keep a holy man upright in slippery places; but for common mortals, devotion to a being, whom, in one period of their worship men rank with angels, does much to steady wavering feet. Hers was the influence that aroused loathing for the drunken debauches, the cheating, the depraved living of the Indian lodges: hers, the influence that kept the loathing from slipping into indifference, the indifference from becoming participation. Indeed, I could wish a young man no better talisman against the world, the flesh and the devil, than love for a pure woman. How we dragged through the hours of that night, of Christmas and the days that followed, I do not attempt to set down here. Hamilton's illness lasted a month. What with trading and keeping our scouts on the search for Miriam and waiting on the sick man, I had enough to busy me without brooding over my own woes. Hard as my life was, it was fortunate I had no time for thoughts of self and so escaped the melancholy apathy that so often benumbs the lonely man's activities. And when Eric became convalescent, I had enough to do finding diversion for his mind. Keeping record of our doings on birch-bark sheets, playing quoits with the Mandanes and polo with a few fearless riders, helped to pass the long weary days. So the dismal winter wore away and spring was drizzling into summer. Within a few weeks we should be turning our faces northward for the forks of the Red and Assiniboine. The prospect of movement after long stagnation cheered Hamilton and fanned what neither of us would acknowledge--a faint hope that Miriam might yet be alive in the north. I verily believe Eric would have started northward with restored courage had not our plans been thwarted by the sinister handiwork of Le Grand Diable. CHAPTER XV THE GOOD WHITE FATHER For a week Hamilton and I had been busy in our respective lodges getting peltries and personal belongings into shape for return to Red River. On Saturday night, at least I counted it Saturday from the notches on my doorpost, though Eric, grown morose and contradictory, maintained that it was Sunday--we sat talking before the fire of my lodge. A dreary raindrip pattered through the leaky roof and the soaked parchment tacked across the window opening flapped monotonously against the pine logs. Unfastening the moon-shaped medallion, which my uncle had given me, I slowly spelled out the Nor'-Westers' motto--"Fortitude in Distress." "For-ti-tude in Dis-tress," I repeated idly. "By Jove, Hamilton, we need it, don't we?" Eric's lips curled in scorn. Without answering, he impatiently kicked a fallen brand back to the live coals. I know old saws are poor comfort to people in distress, being chiefly applicable when they are not needed. "What in the world can be keeping Father Holland?" I asked, leading off on another tack. "Here we are almost into the summer, and never a sight of him." "Did you really expect him back alive from the Bloods?" sneered Hamilton. He had unconsciously acquired a habit of expecting the worst. "Certainly," I returned. "He's been among them before." "Then all I have to say is, you're a fool!" Poor Eric! He had informed me I was a fool so often in his ravings I had grown quite used to the insult. He glared savagely at the fire, and if I had not understood this bitterness towards the missionary, the next remark was of a nature to enlighten me. "I don't see why any man in his senses wants to save the soul of an Indian," he broke out. "Let them go where they belong! Souls! They haven't any souls, or if they have, it's the soul of a fiend----" "By the bye, Eric," I interrupted, for this petulant ill-humor, that saw naught but evil in everything, was becoming too frequent and always ended in the same way--a night of semi-delirium, "by the bye, did you see those fellows turning up soil for corn with a buffalo shoulder-blade as a hoe?" "I wish every damn Red a thousand feet under the soil, deeper than that, if the temperature increases." It was impossible to talk to Hamilton without provoking a quarrel. Leaning back with hands clasped behind my head, I watched through half-closed eyes his sad face darkling under stormy moods. At last the rain succeeded in soaking through the parchment across the window and the wind drove through a great split in chilling gusts that added to the cabin's discomfort. I got up and jammed an old hat into the hole. At the window I heard the shouting of Indians having a hilarious night among the lodges and was amazed at the sound of discharging firearms above the huzzas, for ammunition was scarce among the Mandanes. The hubbub seemed to be coming towards our hut. I could see nothing through the window slit, and lighting a pine fagot, shot back the latch-bolt and threw open the door. A multitude of tawny, joyous, upturned faces thronged to the steps. The crowd was surging about some newcomer, and Chief Black Cat was prancing around in an ecstasy of delight, firing away all his gunpowder in joyous demonstration. I lifted my torch. The Indians fell back and forth strode Father Holland, his face shining wet and abeam with pleasure. The Indians had been welcoming "their good white father." As he dismissed his Mandane children we drew him in and placed his soaked over-garments before the fire. Then we proffered him all the delicacies of bachelors' quarters, and filled and refilled his bowl with soup, and did not stop pouring out our lye-black tea till he had drained the dregs of it. Having satisfied his inner-man, we gave him the best stump-tree seat in the cabin and sat back to listen. There was the awkward pause of reunion, when friends have not had time to gather up the loose threads of a parted past and weave them anew into stronger bands of comradeship. Hamilton and the priest were strangers; but if the latter were as overcome by the meeting after half a year's isolation as I was, the silence was not surprising. To me it seemed the genial face was unusually grave, and I noticed a long, horizontal scar across his forehead. "What's that, Father?" I asked, indicating the mark on his brow. "Tush, youngster! Nothing! Nothing at all! Sampled scalping-knife on me; thought better of it, kept me out of the martyr's crown." "And left you your own!" cried Hamilton astonished at the priest's careless stoicism. "Left me my own," responded Father Holland. "Do you mean to say the murderous----" I began. "Tush, youngster! Be quiet!" said he. "Haven't many brethren come from the same tribe more like warped branches than men? What am I, that I should escape? Never speak of it again," and he continued his silent study of the flames' play. "Where are your Indians?" he asked abruptly. "In the lodges. Shall I whistle for them?" He did not answer, but leaned forward with elbows on his knees, rubbing his chin vigorously first with one hand, then the other, still studying the fire. "How strong are the Mandanes?" he asked. "Weak, weak," I answered. "Few hundred. It hasn't been worth while for traders to come here for years." "Was it worth while this year?" "Not for trade." "For anything else?" and he looked at Eric's dejected face. "Nothing else," I put in hastily, fearing one of Hamilton's outbreaks. "We've been completely off the track, might better have stayed in the north----" "No, you mightn't, not by any means," was his sharp retort. "I've been in the Sioux lodges for three weeks." With an inarticulate cry, Hamilton sprang to his feet. He was trembling from head to foot and caught Father Holland roughly by the shoulder. "Speak out, Sir! What of Miriam?" he demanded in dry, hard, rasping tones. "Well, well, safe and inviolate. So's the boy, a big boy now! May ye have them both in y'r arms soon--soon--soon!" and again he fell to studying the fire with an unhurried deliberation, that was torture to Hamilton. "Are they with you? Are they with you?" shouted Hamilton, hope bounding up elastically to the wildest heights after his long depression. "Don't keep me in suspense! I cannot bear it. Tell me where they are," he pleaded. "Are they with you?" and his eyes burned into the priest's like live coals. "Are--they--with--you?" "No--Lord--no!" roared Father Holland, alarmed at Hamilton's violent condition. "But," he added, seeing Eric reel dizzily, "but they're all right! Now you keep quiet and don't scare the wits out of a body! They're all right, I tell you, and I've come straight from them for the ransom price." "Get it, Rufus, get it!" shouted Hamilton to me, throwing his hands distractedly to his head, a habit too common with him of late. "Get it! Get it!" he kept calling, utterly beside himself. "Sit down, will you?" thundered the priest, as if Eric's sitting down would calm all agitation. "Sit down! Behave! Keep quiet, both of you, or my tongue'll forget holy orders and give ye some good Irish eloquence! What d' y' mane, scarin' the breath out of a body and blowing his ideas to limbo? Keep quiet, now, and listen!" "And did they," I cried, in spite of the injunction, "did they do that to you?" pointing to the scar on his brow. "Yes, they did." "Because they saw you with me?" "No, that's a brand for the faith, you conceited whelp, you--they stopped their tortures because they saw you with me. Now, swell out, Rufus, and gloat over your importance! I tell you it was the devil, himself, snatched my martyr's crown." "Le Grand Diable?" "Le Grand Diable's own minion. I saw his devilish eyes leering from the back o' the crowd, when I was tied to a stake. 'Bring that Indian to me,' sez I, transfixing him with my gaze; for--you understand--I couldn't point, my hands being tied. Troth! But ye should 'a' seen their looks of amazement at me boldness! There was I, roped to that tree, like a pig for the boiling pot, and sez I, 'Bring--that Indian--to me!' just as though I was managing the execution," and the priest paused to enjoy the recollection of the effects of his boldness. "A squaw up with an old clout," he continued, "and slashed it across my face, saying, 'Take that, pale face! Take that, man with a woman's skirts on!' and 'Take that!' howled a young buck, fetching the flat of his dagger across me forehead, close-cropped hair giving no grip for scalping, not to mention a pate as bald as mine," and the priest roared at his own joke, patting his bare crown affectionately. "Though the blood was boilin' in me enraged veins and dribblin' down my face like the rain to-night, by the help o' the Lord, I felt no pain. Never flinchin' nor takin' heed o' that bold baste of a squaw, I bawled like a bull of Bashan, 'Bring--that Indian--to me, coward-hearted Sioux--d' y' fear an Iroquois? Bring him to me and I'll make him enrich your tribe!' "Faith! Their eyes grew big as a harvest moon and they brought Le Grand Diable to me. Knowing his covetous heart, I told him if he still had the woman and the child, I'd get him a big ransom. At that they all jangled a bit, the old squaw clouting me with her filthy rag as if she wanted to slap me to a peak. At length they let Le Grand Diable unfasten the bands. With my hands tied behind my back, I was taken to his lodge. Miriam and the boy were kept in a place behind the Sioux squaw's hut. Once when the skin tied between blew up, I caught a glimpse of her poor white face. The boy was playing round her feet. I was in a corner of the lodge but was so grimed with grease and dirt, if she saw me she thought I was some Indian captive and turned away her head. I told Le Grand Diable in _habitant_ French--which the rascal understands--that I could obtain a good ransom for his prisoners. He left me alone in the lodge for some hours, I think to spy upon me and learn if I tried to speak to Miriam; but I lay still as a log and pretended to sleep. When he came back, he began bartering for the price; but I could make him no promises as to the amount or time of payment, for I was not sure you were here, and would not have him know where you are. "He kept me hanging on for his answer during the whole week, and many a time Miriam brushed past so close her skirts touched me; but that she-male devil of his--may the Lord give them both a warm, front seat!--was always watching and I could not speak. Miriam's face was hidden under her shawl and she looked neither to the right, nor to the left. I don't think she ever saw me. On condition you stay in your camp and don't go to meet her, but send your two Indians alone for her with your offer, he let me go. Here I am! Now, Rufus, where are your men? Off with them bearing more gifts than the Queen of Sheba carried to Solomon!" * * * * * From the hour that La Robe Noire and Little Fellow, laden with gaudy trinkets and hunting outfits, departed for the Sioux lodges, Hamilton was positively a madman. In the first place, he had been determined to disguise himself as an Indian and go instead of La Robe Noire, whose figure he resembled. To this, we would not listen. Le Grand Diable was not the man to be tricked and there was no sense in ransoming Miriam for a captive husband. Then, he persisted in riding part of the way with our messengers, which necessitated my doing likewise. I had to snatch his horse's bridle, wheel both our horses round and head homeward at a gallop, before he would listen to reason and come back. Round the lodges he was a ramping tiger. Twenty times a day he went from our hut to the height of land commanding the north country, keeping me on the run at his heels; and all night he beat around the cramped shack as if it had been a cage. On the fourth day from the messengers' departure, chains could not bind him. If all went well, they should be with us at night. In defiance of Le Grand Diable's conditions, which an arrow from an unseen marksman might enforce, Eric saddled his mare and rode out to meet the men. Of course Father Holland and I peltered after him; but it was only because gathering darkness prevented travel that we prevailed on him to dismount and await the Indians' coming at the edge of the village. At last came the clank, clank of shod hoofs in the valley. The natives used only unshod animals, so we recognized our men. Hamilton darted away like a hare racing for cover. "The Lord have mercy upon us!" groaned Father Holland. "Listen, lad! There's only one horse!" I threw myself to the earth and laying my ear to the turf strained for every sound. The thud, thud of a single horse, fore and hind feet striking the beaten trail in quick gallop, came distinctly up from the valley. "It may not be our men," said I, with sickening forebodings tugging at throat and heart. "I mistrusted them! I mistrusted the villains!" repeated the priest. "If only you had enough Mandanes to ride down on them, but you're too weak. There are at least two thousand Sioux." Hamilton and Little Fellow, talking loudly and gesticulating, rode crashing through the furze. "I knew it! I knew it!" shouted Hamilton fiercely, "One of us should have gone." "What's wrong?" came from Father Holland in a voice so low and unnaturally calm, I knew he feared the worst. "Wrong!" yelled Hamilton, "They hold La Robe Noire as hostage and demand five hundred pounds of ammunition, twenty guns and ten horses. Of course, I should have gone----" "And would it have mended matters if you'd been held hostage too?" I demanded, utterly out of patience and at that stage when a little strain makes a man strike his best friends. "You know very well, the men were only sent to make an offer. You'd no right to expect everything on one trip without any bargaining----" "Shut up, boy!" exclaimed Father Holland. "Just when ye both need all y'r wits, y'r scattering them to the four winds. Now, mind yourselves! I don't like these terms! 'Tis the devil's own doing! Let's talk this over!" With a vast deal of the wordy eloquence that characterizes Indian diplomacy, the tenor of Le Grand Diable's message was "His shot pouch was light and his pipe cold; he hung down his head and the pipe of peace had not been in the council; the Sioux were strangers and the whites were their enemies; the pale-faces had been in their power and they had always conveyed them on their journey with glad hearts and something to eat." Finally, the Master of Life, likewise Earth, Air, Water, and Fire were called on to witness that if the white men delivered five hundred rounds of ammunition, twenty guns and ten horses, the white woman and her child, likewise the two messengers, would be sent safely back to the Mandane lodge; none but these two messengers would be permitted in the Sioux camp; also, the Sioux would not answer for the lives of the white men if they left the Mandane lodges. Let the white men, therefore, send back the full ransom by the hands of the same messenger. CHAPTER XVI LE GRAND DIABLE SENDS BACK OUR MESSENGER Father Holland advised caution and consideration before acting. A policy of bargaining was his counsel. "I don't like those terms, at all," he said, "too much like giving your weapons to the enemy. I don't like all this." He would temporize and rely on Le Grand Diable's covetous disposition bringing him to our terms; but Hamilton would hear of neither caution nor delay. The ransom price was at once collected. Next morning, Little Fellow, on a fresh mount with a string of laden horses on each side, went post haste back to the Sioux. In all conscience, Hamilton had been wild enough during the first parley. His excitement now exceeded all bounds. The first two days, when there was no possibility of Miriam's coming and Little Fellow could not yet have reached the Sioux, I tore after Eric so often I lost count of the races between our lodge and the north hill. The performance began again on the third day, and I broke out with a piece of my mind, which surprised him mightily. "Look you here, Hamilton!" I exclaimed, rounding him back from the hill, "Can't you stop this nonsense and sit still for only two days more, or must I tie you up? You've tried to put me crazy all winter and, by Jove, if you don't stop this, you'll finish the job----" He gazed at me with the dumb look of a wounded animal and was too amazed for words. Leaving me in mid-road, feeling myself a brute, he went straight to his own hut. After that incident, he gave us no further anxiety and kept an iron grip on his impatience. With me, anger had given place to contrition. He remained much by himself until the night, when our messengers were expected. Then he came across to my quarters, where Father Holland and I were keyed up to the highest pitch. Putting out his hand he said-- "Is it all right with us again, Rufus, old man?" That speech nigh snapped the strained cords. "Of course," said I, gripping the extended hand, and I immediately coughed hard, to explain away the undue moisture welling into my eyes. We all three sat as still and silent as a death-watch, Father Holland fumbling and pretending to pore over some holy volume, Eric with fingers tightly interlaced and upper teeth biting through lower lip, and I with clenched fists dug into jacket pockets and a thousand imaginary sounds singing wild tunes in my ears. How the seconds crawled, and the minutes barely moved, and the hours seemed to heap up in a blockade and crush us with their leaden weight! Twice I sought relief for pent emotion by piling wood on the fire, though the night was mild, and by breaking the glowing embers into a shower of sparks. The soft, moccasined tread of Mandanes past our door startled Father Holland so that his book fell to the floor, while I shook like a leaf. Strange to say, Hamilton would not allow himself the luxury of a single movement, though the lowered brows tightened and teeth cut deeper into the under lip. Dogs set up a barking at the other end of the village--a common enough occurrence where half-starved curs roved in packs--but I could not refrain from lounging with a show of indifference to the doorway, where I peered through the moon-silvered dusk. As usual, the Indians with shrill cry flew at the dogs to silence them. The noise seemed to be annoying my companions and was certainly unnerving me, so I shut the door and walked back to the fire. The howl of dogs and squaws increased. I heard the angry undertone of men's voices. A hoarse roar broke from the Mandane lodges and rolled through the village like the sweep of coming hurricane. There was a fleet rush, a swift pattering of something pursued running round the rear of our lodge, with a shrieking mob of men and squaws after it. The dogs were barking furiously and snapping at the heels of the thing, whatever it was. "A hostile!" exclaimed Hamilton, leaping up. Hardly knowing what I did, I bounded towards the door and shot forward the bolt, with a vague fear that blood might be spilled on our threshold. "For shame, man!" cried Father Holland, making to undo the latch. But the words had not passed his lips when the parchment flap of the window lifted. A voice screamed through the opening and in hurtled a round, nameless, blood-soaked horror, rolling over and over in a red trail, till it stopped with upturned, dead, glaring eyes and hideous, gaping mouth, at the very feet of Hamilton. It was the scalpless head of La Robe Noire. Our Indian had paid the price of his own blood-lust and Diable's enmity. Before the full enormity of the treachery--messengers murdered and mutilated, ransom stolen and captives kept--had dawned on me, Father Holland had broken open the door. He was rushing through the night screaming for the Mandanes to catch the miscreant Sioux. When I turned back, not daring to look at that awful object, Hamilton had fallen to the hut floor in a dead faint. * * * * * And now may I be spared recalling what occurred on that terrible night! Women luxuriate and men traffic in the wealth of the great west, but how many give one languid thought to the years of bloody deeds by which the west was won? * * * * * Before restoring Hamilton, it was necessary to remove that which was unseemly; also to wash out certain stains on the hearth-stones; and those things would have tried the courage of more iron-nerved men than myself. I should not have been surprised if Eric had come out of that faint, a gibbering maniac; but I toiled over him with the courage of blank hopelessness, pumping his arms up and down, forcing liquor between the clenched teeth, splashing the cold, clammy face with water, and laving his forehead. At last he opened his eyes wearily. Like a man ill at ease with life, moaning, he turned his face to the wall. Outside, it was as if the unleashed furies of hell fought to quench their thirst in human blood. The clamor of those red demons was in my ears and I was still working over Hamilton, loosening his jacket collar, under-pillowing his chest, fanning him, and doing everything else I could think of, to ease his labored breathing, when Father Holland burst into the lodge, utterly unmanned and sobbing like a child. "For the Lord's sake, Rufus," he cried, "for the Lord's sake, come and help! They're murdering him! They're murdering him! 'Twas I who set them on him, and I can't stop them! I can't stop them!" "Let them murder him!" I returned, unconsciously demonstrating that the civilized heart differs only in degree from the barbarian. "Come, Rufus," he pleaded, "come, for the love of Frances, or your hands will not be clean. There'll be blood on your hands when you go back to her. Come, come!" Out we rushed through the thronging Mandanes, now riotous with the lust of blood. A ring of young bucks had been formed round the Sioux to keep the crowd off. Naked, with arms pinioned, the victim stood motionless and without fear. "Good white father, he no understand," said the Mandanes, jostling the weeping priest back from the circle of the young men. "Good white father, he go home!" In spite of protest by word and act they roughly shoved us to our lodge, the doomed man's death chant ringing in our ears as they pushed us inside and clashed our door. In vain we had argued they would incur the vengeance of the Sioux nation. Our voices were drowned in the shout for blood--for blood! The sigh of the wind brought mournful strains of the victim's dirge to our lodge. I fastened the door, with robes against it to keep the sound out. Then a smell of burning drifted through the window, and I stop-gapped that, too, with more robes. * * * * * That the Sioux would wreak swift vengeance could not be doubted. As soon as the murderous work was over, guides were with difficulty engaged. Having fitted up a sort of prop in which I could tie Hamilton to the saddle, I saw both Father Holland and Eric set out for Red River before daybreak. It was best they should go and I remain. If Miriam were still in the country, stay I would, till she were safe; but I had no mind to see Eric go mad or die before the rescue could be accomplished. As they were leaving I took a piece of birch bark. On it I wrote with a charred stick:-- "Greetings to my own dear love from her ever loyal and devoted knight." This, Father Holland bore to Frances Sutherland from me. CHAPTER XVII THE PRICE OF BLOOD How many shapeless terrors can spring from the mind of man I never knew till Eric and the priest left me alone in the Mandane village. Ever, on closing my eyes, there rolled and rolled past, endlessly, without going one pace beyond my sight, something too horrible to be contemplated. When I looked about to assure myself the thing was not there--could not possibly be there--memory flashed back the whole dreadful scene. Up started glazed eyes from the hearth, the floor, and every dim nook in the lodge. Thereupon I would rush into the village road, where the shamefaced greetings of guilty Indians recalled another horror. If I ventured into Le Grand Diable's power a fate worse than La Robe Noire's awaited me. That there would be a hostile demonstration over the Sioux messenger's death I was certain. Nothing that I offered could induce any of the Indians to act as scouts or to reconnoiter the enemy's encampment. I had, of my own will, chosen to remain, and now I found myself with tied hands, fuming and gnashing against fate, conjuring up all sorts of projects for the rescue of Miriam, and butting my head against the impossible at every turn. Thus three weary days dragged past. Having reflected on the consequences of their outrage, the Mandanes exhibited repentance of a characteristically human form--resentment against the cause of their trouble. Unfortunately, I was the cause. From the black looks of the young men I half suspected, if the Sioux chief would accept me in lieu of material gifts, I might be presented as a peace-offering. This would certainly not forward my quest, and prudence, or cowardice--two things easily confused when one is in peril--counseled discretion, and discretion seemed to counsel flight. "Discretion! Discretion to perdition!" I cried, springing up from a midnight reverie in my hut. Every selfish argument for my own safety had passed in review before my mind, and something so akin to judicious caution, which we trappers in plain language called "cowardice," was insidiously assailing my better self, I cast logic's sophistries to the winds, and dared death or torture to drive me from my post. Whence comes this sublime, reasonless _abandon_ of imperiled human beings, which casts off fear and caution and prudence and forethought and all that goes to make success in the common walks of life, and at one blind leap mounts the Sinai of duty? To me, the impulse upwards is as mysterious as the impulse downwards, and I do not wonder that pagans ascribe one to Ormuzd, the other to Ahriman. 'Tis ours to yield or resist, and I yielded with the vehemence of a passionate nature, vowing in the darkness of the hut--"Here, before God, I stay!" Swift came test of my oath. While the words were yet on my lips, stealthy steps suddenly glided round the lodge. A shuffling stopped at the door, while a chilling fear took possession of me lest the mutilated form of my other Indian should next be hurled through the window. I had not time to shoot the door-bolt to its catch before a sharp click told of lifted latch. The hinge creaked, and there, distinct in the starlight, that smote through the open, stood Little Fellow, himself, haggard and almost naked. "Little Fellow! Good boy!" I shouted, pulling him in. "Where did you come from? How did you get away? Is it you or your ghost?" Down he squatted with a grunt on one of the robes, answering never a word. The gaunt look of the man declared his needs, so I prepared to feed him back to speech. This task kept me busy till daybreak, for the filling capacity of a famishing Indian may not be likened to any other hungry thing on earth without doing the red man grave injustice. "Hoohoo! Hoohoo! But I be sick man to-morrow!" and he rubbed himself down with a satisfied air of distension, declining to have his plate reloaded for the tenth time. I noticed the poor wretch's skin was cut to the bone round wrists and ankles. Chafed bandage marks encircled the flesh of his neck. "What did this, Little Fellow?" and I pointed to the scars. A grim look of Indian gratitude for my interest came into the stolid face. "Bad Indians," was the terse response. "Did they torture you?" He grunted a ferocious negative. "You got away too quick for them?" An affirmative grunt. "Le Grand Diable--did you see him?" At that name, his white teeth snapped shut, and from the depths of the Indian's throat came the vicious snarl of an enraged wolf. "Come," I coaxed, "tell me. How long since you left the Sioux?" "Walkee--walkee--walkee--one sleep," and rising, he enacted a hobbling gait across the cabin in unison with the rhythmic utterance of his words. "Walkee--walkee--walkee--one." "Traveled at night!" I interrupted. "Two nights! You couldn't do it in two nights!" "Walkee--walkee--walkee--one sleep," he repeated. "Three nights!" Four times he hobbled across the floor, which meant he had come afoot the whole distance, traveling only at night. Sitting down, he began in a low monotone relating how he had returned to La Robe Noire with the additional ransom demanded by Le Grand Diable. The "pig Sioux, more gluttonous than the wolverine, more treacherous than the mountain cat," had come out to receive them with hootings. The plunder was taken, "as a dead enemy is picked by carrion buzzards." He, himself, was dragged from his horse and bound like a slave squaw. La Robe Noire had been stripped naked, and young men began piercing his chest with lances, shouting, "Take that, man who would scalp the Iroquois! Take that, enemy to the Sioux! Take that, dog that's friend to the white man!" Then had La Robe Noire, whose hands were bound, sprung upon his torturers and as the trapped badger snaps the hand of the hunter so had he buried his teeth in the face of a boasting Sioux. Here, Little Fellow's teeth clenched shut in savage imitation. Then was Le Grand Diable's knife unsheathed. More, my messenger could not see; for a Sioux bandaged his eyes. Another tied a rope round his neck. Thus, like a dead stag, was he pulled over the ground to a wigwam. Here he lay for many "sleeps," knowing not when the great sun rose and when he sank. Once, the lodges became very still, like many waters, when the wind slumbers and only the little waves lap. Then came one with the soft, small fingers of a white woman and gently, scarcely touching him, as the spirits rustle through the forest of a dark night, had these hands cut the rope around his neck, and unbound him. A whisper in the English tongue, "Go--run--for your life! Hide by day! Run at night!" The skin of the tent wall was lifted by the same hands. He rolled out. He tore the blind from his eyes. It was dark. The spirits had quenched their star torches. No souls of dead warriors danced on the fire plain of the northern sky! The father of winds let loose a blast to drown all sound and help good Indian against the pig Sioux! He ran like a hare. He leaped like a deer. He came as the arrows from the bow of the great hunter. Thus had he escaped from the Sioux! Little Fellow ceased speaking, wrapped himself in robes and fell asleep. I could not doubt whose were the liberator's hands, and I marveled that she had not come with him. Had she known of our efforts at all? It seemed unlikely. Else, with the liberty she had, to come to Little Fellow, surely she would have tried to escape. On the other hand, her immunity from torture might depend on never attempting to regain freedom. Now I knew what to expect if I were captured by the Sioux. Yet, given another stormy night, if Little Fellow and I were near the Sioux with fleet horses, could not Miriam be rescued in the same way he had escaped? Until Little Fellow had eaten and slept back to his normal condition of courage, it would be useless to propose such a hazardous plan. Indeed, I decided to send him to some point on the northern trail, where I could join him and go alone to the Sioux camp. This would be better than sitting still to be given as a hostage to the Sioux. If the worst happened and I were captured, had I the courage to endure Indian tortures? A man endures what he must endure, whether he will, or not; and I certainly had not courage to leave the country without one blow for Miriam's freedom. With these thoughts, I gathered my belongings in preparation for secret departure from the Mandanes that night. Then I prepared breakfast, saw Little Fellow lie back in a dead sleep, and strolled out among the lodges. Four days had passed without the coming of the avengers. The villagers were disposed to forget their guilt and treat me less sulkily. As I sauntered towards the north hill, pleasant words greeted me from the lodges. "Be not afraid, my son," exhorted Chief Black Cat. "Lend a deaf ear to bad talk! No harm shall befall the white man! Be not afraid!" "Afraid!" I flouted back. "Who's afraid, Black Cat? Only white-livered cowards fear the Sioux! Surely no Mandane brave fears the Sioux--ugh! The cowardly Sioux!" My vaunting pleased the old chief mightily; for the Indian is nothing if not a boaster. At once Black Cat would have broken out in loud tirade on his friendship for me and contempt for the Sioux, but I cut him short and moved towards the hill, that overlooked the enemy's territory. A great cloud of dust whirled up from the northern horizon. "A tornado the next thing!" I exclaimed with disgust. "The fates are against me! A fig for my plans!" I stooped. With ear to the ground I could hear a rumbling clatter as of a buffalo stampede. "What is it, my son?" asked the voice of the chief, and I saw that Black Cat had followed me to the hill. "Are those buffalo, Black Cat?" and I pointed to the north. As he peered forward, distinguishing clearly what my civilized eyes could not see, his face darkened. "The Sioux!" he muttered with a black look at me. Turning, he would have hurried away without further protests of friendship, but I kept pace with him. "Pooh!" said I, with a lofty contempt, which I was far from feeling. "Pooh! Black Cat! Who's afraid of the Sioux? Let the women run from the Sioux!" He gave me a sidelong glance to penetrate my sincerity and slackened his flight to the proud gait of a fearless Indian. All the same, alarm was spread among the lodges, and every woman and child of the Mandanes were hidden behind barricaded doors. The men mounted quickly and rode out to gain the vantage ground of the north hill before the enemy's arrival. Another cross current to my purposes! Fool that I was, to have dilly-dallied three whole days away like a helpless old squaw wringing her hands, when I should have dared everything and ridden to Miriam's rescue! Now, if I had been near the Sioux encampment, when all the warriors were away, how easily could I have liberated Miriam and her child! * * * * * Always, it is the course we have not followed, which would have led on to the success we have failed to grasp in our chosen path. So we salve wounded mistrust of self and still, in spite of manifest proof to the contrary, retain a magnificent conceit. I cursed my blunders with a vehemence usually reserved for other men's errors, and at once decided to make the best of the present, letting past and future each take care of itself, a course which will save a man gray hairs over to-morrow and give him a well-provisioned to-day. Arming myself, I resolved to be among the bargain-makers of the Mandanes rather than be bargained by the Sioux. Wakening Little Fellow, I told him my plan and ordered him to slip away north while the two tribes were parleying and to await me a day's march from the Sioux camp. He told me of a wooded valley, where he could rest with his horses concealed, and after seeing him off, I rode straight for the band of assembled Mandanes and surprised them beyond all measure by taking a place in the forefront of Black Cat's special guard. The Sioux warriors swept towards us in a tornado. Ascending the slope at a gallop, whooping and beating their drums, they charged past us, and down at full speed through the village, displaying a thousand dexterities of horsemanship and prowess to strike terror to the Mandanes. Then they dashed back and reined up on the hillside beneath our forces. The men were naked to the waist and their faces were blackened. Porcupine quills, beavers' claws, hooked bones, and bears' claws stained red hung round their necks in ringlets, or adorned gorgeous belts. Feathered crests and broad-shielded mats of willow switches, on the left arm, completed their war dress. The leaders had their buckskin leggings strung from hip to ankle with small bells, and carried firearms, as well as arrows and stone lances; but the majority had only Indian weapons. In that respect--though we were not one third their number--we had the advantage. All the Mandanes carried firearms; but I do not believe there was enough ammunition to average five rounds a man. Luckily, this was unknown to the Sioux. I scanned every face. Diable was not there. Scarcely were the ranks in position, when both Sioux and Mandane chiefs rode forward, and there opened such a harangue as I have never heard since, and hope I never may. "Our young man has been killed," lamented the Sioux. "He was a good warrior. His friends sorrow. Our hearts are no longer glad. Till now our hands have been white, and our hearts clean. But the young man has been slain and we are grieved. Of the scalps of the enemy, he brought many. We hang our heads. The pipe of peace has not been in our council. The whites are our enemies. Now, the young man is dead. Tell us if we are to be friends or enemies. We have no fear. We are many and strong. Our bows are good. Our arrows are pointed with flint and our lances with stone. Our shot-pouches are not light. But we love peace. Tell us, what doth the Mandane offer for the blood of the young man? Is it to be peace or war? Shall we be friends or enemies? Do you raise the tomahawk, or pipe of peace? Say, great chief of the Mandanes, what is thy answer?" This and more did the Sioux chief vauntingly declaim, brandishing his war club and addressing the four points of the compass, also the sun, as he shouted out his defiance. To which Black Cat, in louder voice, made reply. "Say, great chief of the Sioux, our dead was brought into the camp. The body was yet warm. It was thrown at our feet. Never before did it enter the heart of a Missouri to seek the blood of a Sioux! Our messengers went to your camp smoking the sacred calumet of peace. They were sons of the Mandanes. They were friends of the white men. The white man is like magic. He comes from afar. He knows much. He has given guns to our warriors. His shot bags are full and his guns many. But his men, ye slew. We are for peace, but if ye are for war, we warn you to leave our camp before the warriors hidden where ye see them not, break forth. We cannot answer for the white man's magic," and I heard my power over darkness and light, life and death, magnified in a way to terrify my own dreams; but Black Cat cunningly wound up his bold declamation by asking what the Sioux chief would have of the white man for the death of the messenger. A clamor of voices arose from the warriors, each claiming some relationship and attributing extravagant virtues to the dead Sioux. "I am the afflicted father of the youth ye killed," called an old warrior, putting in prior claim for any forthcoming compensation and enhancing its value by adding, "and he had many feathers in his cap." "He, who was killed, I desired for a nephew," shouted another, "and an ivory wand he carried in his hand." "He who was killed was my brother," cried a third, "and he had a new gun and much powder." "He was braver than the buffalo," declared another. "He had three wounds!" "He had scars!" "He wore many scalps!" came the voices of others. "Many bells and beads were on his leggings!" "He had garnished moccasins!" "He slew a bear with his own hands!" "His knife had a handle of ivory!" "His arrows had barbs of beavers' claws!" If the noisy claimants kept on, they would presently make the dead man a god. I begged Black Cat to cut the parley short and demand exactly what gift would compensate the Sioux for the loss of so great a warrior. After another half-hour's jangling, in which I took an animated part, beating down their exorbitant request for two hundred guns with beads and bells enough to outfit the whole Sioux tribe, we came to terms. Indeed, the grasping rascals well-nigh cleared out all that was left of my trading stock; but when I saw they had no intention of fighting, I held back at the last and demanded the surrender of Le Grand Diable, Miriam and the child in compensation for La Robe Noire. Then, they swore by everything, from the sun and the moon to the cow in the meadow, that they were not responsible for the doings of Le Grand Diable, who was an Iroquois. Moreover, they vowed he had hurriedly taken his departure for the north four days before, carrying with him the Sioux wife, the strange woman and the white child. As I had no object in arousing their resentment, I heard their words without voicing my own suspicions and giving over the booty, whiffed pipes with them. But I had no intention of being tricked by the rascally Sioux, and while they and the Mandanes celebrated the peace treaty, I saddled my horse and spurred off for their encampment, glad to see the last of a region where I had suffered much and gained nothing. CHAPTER XVIII LAPLANTE AND I RENEW ACQUAINTANCE The warriors had spoken truth to the Mandanes. Le Grand Diable was not in the Sioux lodges. I had been at the encampment for almost a week, daily expecting the warriors' return, before I could persuade the people to grant me the right of search through the wigwams. In the end, I succeeded only through artifice. Indeed, I was becoming too proficient in craft for the maintenance of self-respect. A child--I explained to the surly old men who barred my way--had been confused with the Sioux slaves. If it were among their lodges, I was willing to pay well for its redemption. The old squaws, eying me distrustfully, averred I had come to steal one of their naked brats, who swarmed on my tracks with as tantalizing persistence as the vicious dogs. The jealous mothers would not hear of my searching the tents. Then I was compelled to make friends with the bevies of young squaws, who ogle newcomers to the Indian camps. Presently, I gained the run of all the lodges. Indeed, I needed not a little diplomacy to keep from being adopted as son-in-law by one pertinacious old fellow--a kind of embarrassment not wholly confined to trappers in the wilds. But not a trace of Diable and his captives did I find. I had hobbled my horses--a string of six--in a valley some distance from the camp and directly on the trail, where Little Fellow was awaiting me. Returning from a look at their condition one evening, I heard a band of hunters had come from the Upper Missouri. I was sitting with a group of men squatted before my fatherly Indian's lodge, when somebody walked up behind us and gave a long, low whistle. "Mon Dieu! Mine frien', the enemy! Sacredie! 'Tis he! Thou cock-brained idiot! Ho--ho! Alone among the Sioux!" came the astonished, half-breathless exclamation of Louis Laplante, mixing his English and French as he was wont, when off guard. Need I say the voice brought me to my feet at one leap? Well I remembered how I had left him lying with a snarl between his teeth in the doorway of Fort Douglas! Now was his chance to score off that grudge! I should not have been surprised if he had paid me with a stab in the back. "What for--come you--here?" he slowly demanded, facing me with a revengeful gleam in his eyes. His English was still mixed. There was none of the usual light and airy impudence of his manner. "You know very well, Louis," I returned without quailing. "Who should know better than you? For the sake of the old days, Louis, help to undo the wrong you allowed? Help me and before Heaven you shall command your own price. Set her free! Afterwards torture me to the death and take your full pleasure!" "I'll have it, anyway," retorted Louis with a hard, dry, mirthless laugh. "Know they--what for--you come?" He pointed to the Indians, who understood not a word of our talk; and we walked a pace off from the lodges. "No! I'm not always a fool, Louis," said I, "though you cheated me in the gorge!" "See those stones?" There was a pile of rock on the edge of the ravine. "I do. What of them?" "All of your Indian--left after the dogs--it lie there!" His eye questioned mine; but there was not a vestige of fear in me towards that boaster. This, I set down not vauntingly, but fully realizing what I owe to Heaven. "Poor fellow," said I. "That was cruel work." "Your other man--he fool them----" "All the better," I interrupted. "They not be cheated once more again! No--no--mine frien'! To come here, alone! Ha--ha! Stupid Anglo-Saxon ox!" "Don't waste your breath, Louis," I quietly remarked. "Your names have no more terror for me now than at Laval! However big a knave you are, Louis, you're not a fool. Why don't you make something out of this? I can reward you. Hold _me_, if you like! Scalp me and skin me and put me under a stone-pile for revenge! Will it make your revenge any sweeter to torture a helpless, white woman?" Louis winced. 'Twas the first sign of goodness I had seen in the knave, and I credited it wholly to his French ancestors. "I never torture white woman," he vehemently declared, with a sudden flare-up of his proud temper. "The son of a seigneur----" "The son of a seigneur," I broke in, "let an innocent woman go into captivity by lying to me!" "Don't harp on that!" said Louis with a scornful laugh--a laugh that is ever the refuge of the cornered liar. "You pay me back by stealing despatches." "Don't harp on that, Louis!" and I returned his insolence in full measure. "I didn't steal your despatches, though I know the thief. And you paid me back by almost trapping me at Fort Douglas." "But I didn't succeed," exclaimed Laplante. "Mon Dieu! If I had only known you were a spy!" "I wasn't. I came to see Hamilton." "And you pay me back as if I had succeed," continued Louis, "by kicking me--me--the son of a seigneur--kicking me in the stomach like a pig, which is no fit treatment for a gentleman!" "And you paid me back by sticking your knife in my boot----" "And didn't succeed," broke in Louis regretfully. At that, we both laughed in spite of ourselves, laughed as comrades. And the laugh brought back memories of old Laval days, when we used to thrash each other in the schoolyard, but always united in defensive league, when we were disciplined inside the class-room. "See here, old crony," I cried, taking quick advantage of his sudden softening and again playing suppliant to my adversary. "I own up! You owe me two scores, one for the despatches I saw taken from you, one for knocking you down in Fort Douglas; for your knife broke and did not cut me a whit. Pay those scores with compound interest, if you like, the way you used to pummel me black and blue at Laval; but help me now as we used to help each other out of scrapes at school! Afterwards, do as you wish! I give you full leave. As the son of a seigneur, as a gentleman, Louis, help me to free the woman!" "Pah!" cried Louis with mingled contempt and surrender. "I not punish you here with two thousand against one! Louis Laplante is a gentleman--even to his enemy!" "Bravo, comrade!" I shouted out, full of gratitude, and I thrust forward my hand. "No--no--thanks much," and Laplante drew himself up proudly, "not till I pay you well, richly,--generous always to mine enemy!" "Very good! Pay when and where you will." "Pay how I like," snapped Louis. With that strange contract, his embarrassment seemed to vanish and his English came back fluently. "You'd better leave before the warriors return," he said. "They come home to-morrow!" "Is Diable among them?" "No." "Is Diable here?" "No." His face clouded as I questioned. "Do you know where he is?" "No." "Will he be back?" "Dammie! How do I know? He will if he wants to! I don't tell tales on a man who saved my life." His answer set me to wondering if Diable had seen me hold back the trader's murderous hand, when Louis lay drunk, and if the Frenchman's knowledge of that incident explained his strange generosity now. "I'll stay here in spite of all the Sioux warriors on earth, till I find out about that knave of an Indian and his captives," I vowed. Louis looked at me queerly and gave another whistle. "You always were a pig-head," said he. "I can keep them from harming you; but remember, I pay you back in your own coin. And look out for the daughter of L'Aigle, curse her! She is the only thing I ever fear! Keep you in my tent! If Le Grand Diable see you----" and Louis touched his knife-handle significantly. "Then Diable _is_ here!" "I not say so," but he flushed at the slip of his tongue and moved quickly towards what appeared to be his quarters. "He is coming?" I questioned, suspicious of Louis' veracity. "Dolt!" said Louis. "Why else do I hide you in my tent? But remember I pay you back in your own coin afterwards! Ha! There they come!" A shout of returning hunters arose from the ravine, at which Louis bounded for the tent on a run, dashing inside breathlessly, I following close behind. "Stay you here, inside, mind! Mon Dieu! If you but show your face; 'tis two white men under one stone-pile! Louis Laplante is a fool--dammie--a fool--to help you, his enemy, or any other man at his own risk." With these enigmatical words, the Frenchman hurried out, fastening the tent flap after him and leaving me to reflect on the wild impulses of his wayward nature. Was his strange, unwilling generosity the result of animosity to the big squaw, who seemed to exercise some subtle and commanding influence over him; or of gratitude to me? Was the noble blood that coursed in his veins, directing him in spite of his degenerate tendencies; or had the man's heart been touched by the sight of a white woman's suffering? If his alarm at the sound of returning hunters had not been so palpably genuine--for he turned pale to the lips--I might have suspected treachery. But there was no mistaking the motive of fear that hurried him to the tent; and with Le Grand Diable among the hunters, Louis might well fear to be seen in my company. There was a hubbub of trappers returning to the lodges. I heard horses turned free and tent-poles clattering to the ground; but Laplante did not come back till it was late and the Indians had separated for the night. "I can take you to her!" he whispered, his voice thrilling with suppressed emotion. "Le Grand Diable and the squaw have gone to the valley to set snares! And when I whistle, come out quickly! Mon Dieu! If you're caught, both our scalps go! Dammie! Louis is a fool. I take you to her; but I pay you back all the same!" "To whom?" The question throbbed with a rush to my lips. "Stupid dolt!" snarled Louis. "Follow me! Keep your ears open for my whistle--one--they return--two--come you out of the tent--three, we are caught, save yourself!" I followed the Frenchman in silence. It was a hazy summer night with just enough light from the sickle moon for us to pick our way past the lodges to a large newly-erected wigwam with a small white tent behind. "This way," whispered Louis, leading through the first to an opening hidden by a hanging robe. Raising the skin, he shoved me forward and hastened out to keep guard. The figure of a woman with a child in her arms was silhouetted against the white tent wall. She was sitting on some robes, crooning in a low voice to the child, and was unaware of my presence. "And was my little Eric at the hunt, and did he shoot an arrow all by himself?" she asked, fondling the face that snuggled against her shoulder. The boy gurgled back a low, happy laugh and lisped some childish reply, which only a mother could translate. "And he will grow big, big and be a great warrior and fight--fight for his poor mother," she whispered, lowering her voice and caressing the child's curls. The little fellow sat up of a sudden facing his mother and struck out squarely with both fists, not uttering a word. "My brave, brave little Eric! My only one, all that God has left to me!" she sobbed hiding her weeping face on the child's neck. "O my God, let me but keep my little one! Thou hast given him to me and I have treasured him as a jewel from Thine own crown! O my God, let me but keep my darling, keep him as Thy gift--and--and--O my God!--Thy--Thy--Thy will be done!" The words broke in a moan and the child began to cry. "Hush, dearie! The birds never cry, nor the beavers, nor the great, bold eagle! My own little warrior must never cry! All the birds and the beasts and the warriors are asleep! What does Eric say before he goes to sleep?" A pair of chubby arms were flung about her neck and passionate, childish kisses pressed her forehead and her cheeks and her lips. Then he slipped to his knees and put his face in her lap. "God bless my papa--and keep my mamma--and make little Eric brave and good--for Jesus' sake----" the child hesitated. "Amen," prompted the gentle voice of the mother. "And keep little Eric for my mamma so she won't cry," added the child, "for Jesus' sake--Amen," and he scrambled to his feet. A low, piercing whistle cut the night air like the flight of an arrow-shaft. It was Louis Laplante's signal that Diable and the squaw were coming back. At the sound, mother and child started up in alarm. Then they saw me standing in the open way. A gasp of fright came from the white woman's lips. I could tell from her voice that she was all a-tremble, and the little one began to whimper in a smothered, suppressed way. I whispered one word--"Miriam!" With a faint cry of anguish, she leaped forward. "Is it you, Eric? O Eric! is it you?" she asked. "No--no, Miriam, not Eric, but Eric's friend, Rufus Gillespie." She tottered as if I had struck her. I caught her in my arms and helped her to the couch of robes. Then I took up my station facing the tent entrance; for I realized the significance of Laplante's warning. "We have hunted for more than a year for you," I whispered, bending over her, "but the Sioux murdered our messenger and the other you yourself let out of the tent!" "That--your messenger for me?" she asked in sheer amazement, proving what I had suspected, that she was kept in ignorance of our efforts. "I have been here for a week, searching the lodges. My horses are in the valley, and we must dare all in one attempt." "I have given my word I will not try," she hastily interrupted, beginning to pluck at her red shawl in the frenzied way of delirious fever patients. "If we are caught, they will torture us, torture the child before my eyes. They treat him well now and leave me alone as long as I do not try to break away. What can you, one man, do against two thousand Sioux?" and she began to weep, choking back the anguished sobs, that shook her slender frame, and picking feverishly at the red shawl fringe. To look at that agonized face would have been sacrilege, and in a helpless, nonplussed way, I kept gazing at the painful workings of the thin, frail fingers. That plucking of the wasted, trembling hands haunts me to this day; and never do I see the fingers of a nervous, sensitive woman working in that delirious, aimless fashion but it sets me wondering to what painful treatment from a brutalized nature she has been subjected, that her hands take on the tricks of one in the last stages of disease. It may be only the fancy of an old trader; but I dare avow, if any sympathetic observer takes note of this simple trick of nervous fingers, it will raise the veil on more domestic tragedies and heart-burnings than any father-confessor hears in a year. "Miriam," said I, in answer to her timid protest, "Eric has risked his life seeking you. Won't you try all for Eric's sake? There'll be little risk! We'll wait for a dark, boisterous, stormy night, and you will roll out of your tent the way you thrust my Indian out. I'll have my horses ready. I'll creep up behind and whisper through the tent." "Where _is_ Eric?" she asked, beginning to waver. Two shrill, sharp whistles came from Louis Laplante, commanding me to come out of the tent. "That's my signal! I must go. Quick, Miriam, will you try?" "I will do what you wish," she answered, so low, I had to kneel to catch the words. "A stormy night our signal, then," I cried. Three, sharp, terrified whistles, signifying, "We are caught, save yourself," came from Laplante, and I flung myself on the ground behind Miriam. "Spread out your arms, Miriam! Quick!" I urged. "Talk to the boy, or we're trapped." With her shawl spread out full and her elbows sticking akimbo, she caught the lad in her arms and began dandling him to right, and left, humming some nursery ditty. At the same moment there loomed in the tent entrance the great, statuesque figure of the Sioux squaw, whom I had seen in the gorge. I kicked my feet under the canvas wall, while Miriam's swaying shawl completely concealed me from the Sioux woman and thus I crawled out backwards. Then I lay outside the tent and listened, listened with my hand on my pistol, for what might not that monster of fury attempt with the tender, white woman? "There were words in the tepee," declared the angry tones of the Indian woman. "The pale face was talking! Where is the messenger from the Mandanes?" At that, the little child set up a bitter crying. "Cry not, my little warrior! Hush, dearie! 'Twas only a hunter whistling, or the night hawk, or the raccoon! Hush, little Eric! Warriors never cry! Hush! Hush! Or the great bear will laugh at you and tell his cubs he's found a coward!" crooned Miriam, making as though she neither heard, nor saw the squaw; but Eric opened his mouth and roared lustily. And the little lad unconsciously foiled the squaw; for she presently took herself off, evidently thinking the voices had been those of mother and son. I skirted cautiously around the rear of the lodges to avoid encountering Diable, or his squaw. The form of a man hulked against me in the dark. 'Twas Louis. "Mon Dieu, Gillespie, I thought one scalp was gone," he gasped. "What are you here for? You don't want to be seen with me," I protested, grateful and alarmed for his foolhardiness in coming to meet me. "Sacredie! The dogs! They make pretty music at your shins without me," and Louis struck boldly across the open for his tent. "Fool to stay so long!" he muttered. "I no more ever help you once again! Mon Dieu! No! I no promise my scalp too! They found your horses in the valley! They--how you say it?--think for some Mandane is here and fear. They rode back fast on your horses. 'Twas why I whistle for, twice so quick! They ride north in the morning. I go too, with the devil and his wife! I be gone to the devil this many a while! But I must go, or they suspect and knife me. That vampire! Ha! she would drink my gore! I no more have nothing to do with you. Before morning, you must do your own do alone! Sacredie! Do not forget, I pay you back yet!" So he rattled on, ever keeping between me and the lodges. By his confused words, I knew he was in great trepidation. "Why, there are my horses!" I exclaimed, seeing all six standing before Diable's lodge. "You do your do before morning! Take one of my saddles!" said Louis. Sure enough, all my saddles were piled before the Iroquois' wigwam; and there stood my enemy and the Sioux squaw, talking loudly, pointing to the horses and gesticulating with violence. "Mon Dieu! Prenez garde! Get you in!" muttered Louis. We were at his tent door, and I was looking back at my horses. "If they see you, all is lost," he warned. And the warning came just in time. With that animal instinct of nearness, which is neither sight, nor smell, my favorite broncho put forward his ears and whinnied sharply. Both Diable and the squaw noted the act and turned; but Louis had knocked me forward face down into the tent. With an oath, he threw himself on his couch. "Take my saddle," he said. "I steal another. Do your do before morning. I no more have nothing to do with you, till I pay you back all the same!" And he was presently fast asleep, or pretending to be. CHAPTER XIX WHEREIN LOUIS INTRIGUES Next morning Le Grand Diable would set out for the north. This night, then, was my last chance to rescue Miriam. "Do your do before morning!" How Laplante's words echoed in my ears! I had told Miriam a stormy night was to be the signal for our attempt; and now the rising moon was dispelling any vague haziness that might have helped to conceal us. In an hour, the whole camp would be bright as day in clear, silver light. Presently, the clatter of the lodges ceased. Only an occasional snarl from the dogs, or the angry squeals of my bronchos kicking the Indian ponies, broke the utter stillness. There was not even a wind to drown foot-treads, and every lodge of the camp was reflected across the ground in elongated shadows as distinct as a crayon figure on white paper. What if some watchful Indian should discover our moving shadows? La Robe Noire's fate flashed back and I shuddered. Flinging up impatiently from the robes, I looked from the tent way. Some dog of the pack gave the short, sharp bark of a fox. Then, but for the crunching of my horses over the turf some yards away, there was silence. I could hear the heavy breathing of people in near-by lodges. Up from the wooded valley came the far-off purr of a stream over stony bottom and the low washing sound only accentuated the stillness. The shrill cry of some lonely night-bird stabbed the atmosphere with a throb of pain. Again the dog snapped out a bark and again there was utter quiet. "One chance in a thousand," said I to myself, "only one in a thousand; but I'll take it!" And I stepped from the tent. This time the wakeful dog let out a mouthful of quick barkings. Jerking off my boots--I had not yet taken to the native custom of moccasins--I dodged across the roadway into the exaggerated shadow of some Indian camp truckery. Here I fell flat to the ground so that no reflection should betray my movements. Then I remembered I had forgotten Louis Laplante's saddle. Rising, I dived back to the tepee for it and waited for the dogs to quiet before coming out again. That alert canine had set up a duet with a neighboring brute of like restless instincts and the two seemed to promise an endless chorus. As I live, I could have sworn that Louis Laplante laughed in his sleep at my dilemma; but Louis was of the sort to laugh in the face of death itself. A man flew from a lodge and dealing out stout blows quickly silenced the vicious curs; but I had to let time lapse for the man to go to sleep before I could venture out. Once more, chirp of cricket, croak of frog and the rush of waters through the valley were the only sounds, and I darted across to the camp shadow. Lying flat, I began to crawl cautiously and laboriously towards my horses. One gave a startled snort as I approached and this set the dogs going again. I lay motionless in the grass till all was quiet and then crept gently round to the far side of my favorite horse and caught his halter strap lest he should whinny, or start away. I drew erect directly opposite his shoulders, so that I could not be seen from the lodges and unhobbling his feet, led him into the concealment of a group of ponies and had the saddle on in a trice. To get the horse to the rear of Miriam's tent was no easy matter. I paced my steps so deftly with the broncho's and let him munch grass so often, the most watchful Indian could not have detected a man on the far side of the horse, directing every move. Behind the Sioux lodge, the earth sloped abruptly away, bare and precipitous; and I left the horse below and clambered up the steep to the white wall of Miriam's tent. Once the dogs threatened to create a disturbance, but a man quieted them, and with gratitude I recognized the voice of Laplante. Three times I tapped on the canvas but there was no response. I put my arm under the tent and rapped on the ground. Why did she not signal? Was the Sioux squaw from the other lodge listening? I could hear nothing but the tossings of the child. "Miriam," I called, shoving my arm forward and feeling out blindly. Thereupon, a woman's hand grasped mine and thrust it out, while a voice so low it might have been the night breeze, came to my ear--"We are watched." Watched? What did it matter if we were? Had I not dared all? Must not she do the same? This was the last chance. We must not be foiled. My horse, I knew, could outrace any cayuse of the Sioux band. "Miriam," I whispered back, lifting the canvas, "they will take you away to-morrow--my horse is here! Come! We must risk all!" And I shoved myself bodily in under the tent wall. She was not a hand's length away, sitting with her face to the entrance of Diable's lodge, her figure rigid and tense with fear. In the half light I could discern the great, powerful, angular form of a giantess in the opening. 'Twas the Sioux squaw. Miriam leaned forward to cover the child with a motion intended to conceal me, and I drew quickly out. I thought I had not been detected; but the situation was perilous enough, in all conscience, to inspire caution, and I was backing away, when suddenly the shadows of two men coming from opposite sides appeared on the white tent, and something sprang upon me with tigerish fury. There was the swish of an unsheathing blade, and I felt rather than saw Le Grand Diable and Louis Laplante contesting over me. "Never! He's mine, my captive! He stole my saddle! He's mine, I tell you," ground out the Frenchman, throwing off my assailant. "Keep him for the warriors and let him be tortured," urged Louis, snatching at the Indian's arm. I sprang up. It was Louis, who tripped my feet from under me, and we two tumbled to the bottom of the cliff, while the Indian stood above snarling out something in the Sioux tongue. "Idiot! Anglo-Saxon ox!" muttered Louis, grappling with me as we fell. "Do but act it out, or two scalps go! I no promise mine when I say I help you, bah----" That was the last I recall; for I went down head backwards, and the blow knocked me senseless. When I came to, with an aching neck and a humming in my ears, there was the gray light of a waning moon, and I found myself lying bound in Miriam's tent. Her child was whimpering timidly and she was hurriedly gathering her belongings into a small bundle. "Miriam, what has happened?" I asked. Then the whole struggle and failure came back to me with an overwhelming realization that torture and death would be our portion. "Try no more," she whispered, brushing past me and making as though she were gathering things where I lay. "Never try, for my sake, never try! They will torture you. I shall die soon. Only save the child! For myself, I am past caring. Good-by forever!" and she dashed to the other side of the tent. At that, with a deal of noisy mirth, in burst Laplante and the Sioux squaw. "Ho-ho! My knight-errant has opened his eyes! Great sport for the braves, say I! Fine mouse-play for the cat, ho-ho!" and Louis looked down at me with laughing insolence, that sent a chill through my veins. 'Twas to save his own scalp the rascal was acting and would have me act too; but I had no wish to betray him. Striking at her captives and rudely ordering them out, the Sioux led the way and left Louis to bring up the rear. "Leave this, lady," said Louis with an air that might have been impudence or gallantry; and he grabbed the bundle from Miriam's hand and threw it over his shoulder at me. This was greeted with a roar of laughter from the Sioux woman and one look of unspeakable reproach from Miriam. Whistling gaily and turning back to wink at me, the Frenchman disappeared in Diable's lodge. For my part, I was puzzled. Did Louis act from the love of acting and trickery and intrigue? Was he befooling the daughter of L'Aigle, or me? They tore down Diable's tepee, stringing the poles on the bronchos stolen from me and leaving Miriam's white tent with the Sioux. I saw them mount with my horses to the fore, and they set out at a sharp trot. From the hoof-beats, I should judge they had not gone many paces, when one rider seemed to turn back, and Louis ran into the tent where I lay. I did not utter one word of pleading; but as he stooped for Miriam's bundle, he whisked out a jack-knife and my heart bounded with a great hope. I suppose, involuntarily, I must have lifted my arms to have the bonds severed; for Laplante shook his head. "No--mine frien'--not now--I not scalp Louis Laplante for your sake,--no, never. Use your teeth--so!" said he, laying the blade of the knife in his own teeth to show me how; and he slipped the thing into hiding under my armpits. "The warriors--they come back to-day," he warned. "You wait till we are far, then cut quick, or they do worse to you than to La Robe Noire! I leave one horse for you in the valley beyond the beaver-dam. Tra-la, comrade, but not forget you. I pay you back yet all the same," and with a whistle, he had vanished. I hung upon the Frenchman's words as a drowning sailor to a life-line, and heard the hoof-beats grow fainter and fainter in the distance, hardly daring to realize the fearful peril in which I lay. By the light at the tent opening, I knew it was daybreak. Already the Sioux were stirring in their lodges and naked urchins came to the entrance to hoot and pelt mud. Somehow, I got into sitting posture, with my head bowed forward on my arms, so I could use the knife without being seen. At that, the impertinent brats became bolder and swarming into the tent began poking sticks. I held my arm closer to my side, and felt the hard steel's pressure with a pleasure not to be marred by that tantalizing horde. There seemed to be a gathering hubbub outside. Indians, squaws and children were rushing in the direction of the trail to the Mandanes. The children in my tent forgot me and dashed out with the rest. I could not doubt the cause of the clamor. This was the morning of the warriors' return; and getting the knife in my teeth, I began filing furiously at the ropes about my wrists. Man is not a rodent; but under stress of necessity and with instruments of his own designing, he can do something to remedy his human helplessness. To the din of clamoring voices outside were added the shouts of approaching warriors, the galloping of a multitude of horses and the whining yells of countless dogs. While all the Sioux were on the outskirts of the encampment, I might yet escape unobserved, but the returning braves were very near. Putting all my strength in my wrists, I burst the half-cut bonds; and the rest was easy. A slash of the knife and my feet were free and I had rolled down the cliff and was running with breathless haste over fallen logs, under leafy coverts, across noisy creeks, through the wooded valley to the beaver dam. How long, or how far, I ran in this desperate, heedless fashion, I do not know. The branches, that reached out like the bands of pursuers, caught and ripped my clothing to shreds. I had been bootless, when I started; but my feet were now bare and bleeding. A gleam of water flashed through the green foliage. This must be the river, with the beaver-dam, and to my eager eyes, the stream already appeared muddy and sluggish as if obstructed. My heart was beating with a sensation of painful, bursting blows. There was a roaring in my ears, and at every step I took, the landscape swam black before me and the trees racing into the back ground staggered on each side like drunken men. Then I knew that I had reached the limit of my strength and with the domed mud-tops of the beaver-dam in sight half a mile to the fore, I sank down to rest. The river was marshy, weed-grown and brown; but I gulped down a drink and felt breath returning and the labored pulse easing. Not daring to pause long, I went forward at a slackened rate, knowing I must husband my strength to swim or wade across the river. Was it the apprehension of fear, or the buzzing in my ears, that suggested the faint, far-away echo of a clamoring multitude? I stopped and listened. There was no sound but the lapping of water, or rush of wind through the leaves. I went on again at hastened pace, and distinctly down the valley came echo of the Sioux war-whoop. I was pursued. There was no mistaking that fact, and with a thrill, which I have no hesitancy in confessing was the most intense fear I have ever experienced in my life, I broke into a terrified, panic-stricken run. The river grew dark, sluggish and treacherous-looking. By the blood flowing from my feet, Indian scouts could track me for leagues. I looked to the river with the vague hope of running along the water bed to throw my pursuers off the trail; but the water was deep and I had not strength to swim. The beaver-dam was huddled close to the clay bank of the far side and on the side, where I ran, the current spread out in a flaggy marsh. Hoping to elude the Sioux, I plunged in and floundered blindly forward. But blood trails marked the pond behind and the soft ooze snared my feet. I was now opposite the beaver-dam and saw with horror there were branches enough floating in mid-stream to entangle the strongest swimmer. The shouts of my pursuers sounded nearer. They could not have known how close they were upon me, else had they ambushed me in silence after Indian custom, shouting only when they sighted their quarry. The river was not tempting for a fagged, breathless swimmer, whose dive must be short and sorry. I had nigh counted my earthly course run, when I caught sight of a hollow, punky tree-trunk standing high above the bank. I could hear the swiftest runners behind splashing through the marsh bed. Now the thick willow-bush screened me, but in a few moments they would be on my very heels. With the supernatural strength of a last desperate effort, I bounded to the empty trunk and like some hounded, treed creature, clambered up inside, digging my wounded feet into the soft, wet wood-rot and burrowing naked fingers through the punk of the rounded sides till I was twice the height of a man above the blackened opening at the base. Then a piece of wood crumbled in my right hand. Daylight broke through the trunk and I found that I had grasped the edge of a rotted knot-hole. Bracing my feet across beneath me like tie beams of raftered scaffolding, I craned up till my eye was on a level with the knot-hole and peered down through my lofty lookout. Either the shouting of the Sioux warriors had ceased, which indicated they had found my tracks and knew they were close upon me, or my shelter shut out the sound of approaching foes. I broke more bark from the hole and gained full view of the scene below. A crested savage ran out from the tangled foliage of the river bank, saw the turgid settlings of the rippling marsh, where I had been floundering, and darted past my hiding-place with a shrill yell of triumph. Instantaneously the woods were ringing, echoing and re-echoing with the hoarse, wild war-cries of the Sioux. Band after band burst from the leafy covert of forest and marsh willows, and dashed in full pursuit after the leading Indian. Some of the braves still wore the buckskin toggery of their visit to the Mandanes; but the swiftest runners had cast off all clothing and tore forward unimpeded. The last coppery form disappeared among the trees of the river bank and the shoutings were growing fainter, when, suddenly, there was such an ominous calm, I knew they were foiled. Would they return to the last marks of my trail? That thought sent the blood from my head with a rush that left me dizzy, weak and shivering. I looked to the river. The floating branches turned lazily over and over to the lapping of the sluggish current, and the green slime oozing from the clustered beaver lodges of the far side might hide either a miry bottom, or a treacherous hole. A naked Indian came pattering back through the brush, looking into every hollow log, under fallen trees, through clumps of shrub growth, where a man might hide, and into the swampy river bed. It was only a matter of time when he would reach my hiding-place. Should I wait to be smoked out of my hole, like a badger, or a raccoon? Again I looked hopelessly to the river. A choice of deaths seemed my only fate. Torture, burning, or the cool wash of a black wave gurgling over one's head? A broad-girthed log lay in the swamp and stretched out over mid-stream in a way that would give a quick diver at least a good, clean, clear leap. A score more savages had emerged from the woods and were eagerly searching, from the limbs of trees above, where I might be perched, to the black river-bed below. However much I may vacillate between two courses, once my decision is taken, I have ever been swift to act; and I slipped down the tree-trunk with the bound of a bullet through a gun-barrel, took one last look from the opening, which revealed pursuers not fifty yards away, plunged through the marsh, dashed to the fallen log and made a rush to the end. A score of brazen throats screeched out their baffled rage. There was a twanging of bow-strings. The humming of arrow flight sung about my head. I heard the crash of some savage blazing away with his old flintlock. A deep-drawn breath, and I was cleaving the air. Then the murky, greenish waters splashed in my face, opened wide and closed over me. A tangle of green was at the soft, muddy bottom. Something living, slippery, silky and furry, that was neither fish, nor water snake, got between my feet; but countless arrows, I knew, were aimed and ready for me, when I came to the surface. So I held down for what seemed an interminable time, though it was only a few seconds, struck for the far shore, and presently felt the green slime of the upper water matting in my hair. Every swimmer knows that rich, sweet, full intake of life-giving air after a long dive. I drew in deep, fresh breaths and tried to blink the slime from my eyes and get my bearings. There were the howlings of baffled wolves from what was now the far side of the river bank; but domed clay mounds, mossy, floating branches and a world of willows shrubs were about my head. Then I knew what the furry thing among the tangle at the river bottom was, and realized that I had come up among the beaver lodges. The dam must have been an old one; for the clay houses were all overgrown with moss and water-weeds. A perfect network of willow growth interlaced the different lodges. I heard the splash as of a diver from the opposite side. Was it a beaver, or my Indian pursuers? Then I could distinctly make out the strokes of some one swimming and splashing about. My foes were determined to have me, dead, or alive. I ducked under, found shallow, soft bottom, half paddled, half waded, a pace more shoreward, and came up with my head in utter darkness. Where was I? I drew breath. Yes, assuredly, I was above water; but the air was fetid with heavy, animal breath and teeth snarled shut in my very face. Somehow, I had come up through the broken bottom of an old beaver lodge and was now in the lair of the living creatures. What was inside, I cannot record; for to my eyes the blackness was positively thick. I felt blindly out through the palpable darkness and caught tight hold of a pole, that seemed to reach from side to side. This gave me leverage and I hoisted myself upon it, bringing my crown a mighty sharp crack as I mounted the perch; for the beaver lodge sloped down like an egg shell. I must have seemed some water monster to the poor beaver; for there was a scurrying, scampering and gurgling off into the river. Then my own breathing and the drip of my clothes were all that disturbed the lodge. Time, say certain philosophers, is the measure of a man's ideas marching along in uniform procession. But I hold they are wrong. Time is nothing of the sort; else had time stopped as I hung panting over the pole in the beaver lodge; for one idea and one only, beat and beat and beat to the pulsing of the blood that throbbed through my brain--"I am safe--I am safe--I am safe!" How can I tell how long I hung there? To me it seemed a century. I do not even know whether I lost consciousness. I am sure I repeatedly awakened with a jerk back from some hazy, far-off, oblivious realm, shut off even in memory from the things of this life. I am sure I tried to burrow my hand through the clammy moss-wall of the beaver lodge to let in fresh air; but my spirit would be suddenly rapt away to that other region. I am sure I felt the waters washing over my head and sweeping me away from this world to another life. Then I would lose grip of the pole and come to myself clutching at it with wild terror; and again the drowse of life's borderland would overpower me. And all the time I was saying over and over, "I am safe! I am safe!" How many of the things called hours slipped past, I do not know. As I said before, it seemed to me a century. Whether it was mid-day, or twilight, when I let myself down from the pole and crawled like a bedraggled water-rat to the shore, I do not know. Whether it was morning, or night, when I dragged myself under the fern-brake and fell into a death-like sleep, I do not know. When I awakened, the forest was a labyrinth of shafted moonlight and sombre shadows. All that had happened in the past twenty-four hours came back to me with vivid reality. I remembered Laplante's promise to leave a horse for me in the valley beyond the beaver dam. With this hope in my heart I crawled cautiously down through the silent shadows of the night. At daybreak I found Louis had made good his promise, and I was speeding on horseback towards the trail, where Little Fellow awaited me. CHAPTER XX PLOTS AND COUNTER-PLOTS He who would hear that paradox of impossibilities--silence become vocal--must traverse the vast wastes of the prairie by night. As a mother quiets a fretful child, so the illimitable calm lulls tumultuous thoughts. The wind moving through empty solitudes comes with a sigh of unutterable loneliness. Unconsciously, men listen for some faint rustling from the gauzy, wavering streamers that fire northern skies. The dullest ear can almost fancy sounds from the noiseless wheeling of planets through the overspanning vaulted blue; and human speech seems sacrilege. Though the language of the prairie be not in words, some message is surely uttered; for the people of the plains wear the far-away look of communion with the unseen and the unheard. The fine sensibility of the white woman, perhaps, shows the impress of the vast solitudes most readily, and the gravely repressed nature of the Indian least; but all plain-dwellers have learned to catch the voice of the prairie. I, myself, know the message well, though I may no more put it into words than the song love sings in one's heart. Love, says the poet, is infinite. So is the space of the prairie. That, I suppose, is why both are too boundless for the limitation of speech. Night after night, with only a grassy swish and deadened tread over the turf breaking stillness, we journeyed northward. Occasionally, like the chirp of cricket in a dry well, life sounded through emptiness. Skulking coyotes, seeking prey among earth mounds, or night hawks, lilting solitarily in vaulted mid-heaven, uttered cries that pierced the vast blue. Owls flapped stupidly up from our horses' feet. Hungry kites wheeled above lonely Indian graves, or perched on the scaffolding, where the dead lay swathed in skins. Reflecting on my experiences with the Mandanes and the Sioux, I was disposed to upbraid fate as a senseless thing with no thread of purpose through life's hopeless jumble. Now, something in the calm of the plains, or the certainty of our unerring star-guides, quieted my unrest. Besides, was I not returning to one who was peerless? That hope speedily eclipsed all interests. That was purpose enough for my life. Forthwith, I began comparing lustrous gray eyes to the stars, and tracing a woman's figure in the diaphanous northern lights. One face ever gleamed through the dusk at my horse's head and beckoned northward. I do not think her presence left me for an instant on that homeward journey. But, indeed, I should not set down these extravagances, which each may recall in his own case, only I would have others judge whether she influenced me, or I, her. Thus we traveled northward, journeying by night as long as we were in the Sioux territory. Once in the land of the Assiniboines, we rode day and night to the limit of our horses' endurance. Remembering the Hudson's Bay outrage at the Souris, and having also heard from Mandane runners of a raid planned by our rivals against the North-West fort at Pembina, I steered wide of both places, following the old Missouri trail midway between the Red and Souris rivers. It may have been because we traveled at night, but I did not encounter a single person, native or white, till we came close to the Red and were less than a day's journey from Fort Gibraltar. On the river trail, we overtook some Hudson's Bay trappers. The fellows would not answer a single question about events during the year and scampered away from us as if we carried smallpox, which had thinned the population a few years before. "That's bad!" said I aloud, as the men fled down the river bank, where we could not follow. Little Fellow looked as solemn as a grave-stone. He shook his head with ominous wisdom that foresees all evil but refuses to prophesy. "Bother to you, Little Fellow!" I exclaimed. "What do you mean? What's up?" Again the Indian shook his head with dark mutterings, looking mighty solemn, but he would not share his foreknowledge. We met more Hudson's Bay men, and their conduct was unmistakably suspicious. On a sudden seeing us, they reined up their horses, wheeled and galloped off without a word. "I don't like that! I emphatically don't!" I piloted my broncho to a slight roll of the prairie, where we could reconnoitre. Distinctly there was the spot where the two rivers met. Intervening shrubbery confused my bearings. I rose in my stirrups, while Little Fellow stood erect on his horse's back. "Little Fellow!" I cried, exasperated with myself, "Where's Fort Gibraltar? I see where it ought to be, where the towers ought to be higher than that brush, but where's the fort?" The Indian screened his eyes and gazed forward. Then he came down with a thud, abruptly re-straddling his horse, and uttered one explosive word--"Smoke." "Smoke? I don't see smoke! Where's the fort?" "No fort," said he. "You're daft!" I informed him, with the engaging frankness of a master for a servant. "There--is--a fort, and you know it--we're both lost--that's more! A fine Indian you are, to get lost!" Little Fellow scrambled with alacrity to the ground. Picking up two small switches, he propped them against each other. "Fort!" he said, laconically, pointing to the switches. "L'anglais!" he cried, thrusting out his foot, which signified Hudson's Bay. "No fort!" he shouted, kicking the switches into the air. "No fort!" and he looked with speechless disgust at the vacancy. Now I knew what he meant. Fort Gibraltar had been destroyed by Hudson's Bay men. We had no alternative but to strike west along the Assiniboine, on the chance of meeting some Nor'-Westers before reaching the company's quarters at the Portage. That post, too, might be destroyed; but where were Hamilton and Father Holland? Danger, or no danger, I must learn more of the doings in Red River. Also, there were reasons why I wished to visit the settlers of Fort Douglas. We camped on the south side of the Assiniboine a few miles from the Red, and Little Fellow went to some neighboring half-breeds for a canoe. And a strange story he brought back! A great man, second only to the king--so the half-breeds said--had come from England to rule over Assiniboia. He boasted the shock of his power would be felt from Montreal to Athabasca. He would drive out all Nor'-Westers. This personage, I afterwards learned, was the amiable Governor Semple, who succeeded Captain Miles McDonell. Already, as a hunter chases a deer, had the great governor chased Nor'-Westers from Red River. Did Little Fellow doubt their word? Where was Fort Gibraltar? Let Little Fellow look and see for himself if aught but masonry and charred walls stood where Fort Gibraltar had been! Let him seek the rafters of the Nor-Westers' fort in the new walls of Fort Douglas! Pembina, too, had fallen before the Hudson's Bay men. Since the coming of the great governor, nothing could stand before the English. But wait! It was not all over! The war drum was beating in the tents of all the _Bois-Brulés_! The great governor should be taught that even the king's arms could not prevail against the _Bois-Brulés_! Was there smoke of battle? The _Bois-Brulés_ would be there! The _Bois-Brulés_ had wrongs to avenge. They would not be turned out of their forts for nothing! Knives would be unsheathed. There were full powder-bags! There was a grand gathering of _Bois-Brulés_ at the Portage. They, themselves, were on the way there. Let Little Fellow and the white trader join them! Let them be wary; for the English were watchful! Great things were to be done by the _Bois-Brulés_ before another moon--and Little Fellow's eyes snapped fire as he related their vauntings. I was inclined to regard the report as a fairy tale. If the half-breeds were arming and the English watchful, the distrust of the Hudson's Bay men was explained. A nomad, himself, the Indian may be willing enough to share running rights over the land of his fathers; but when the newcomer not only usurps possession, but imposes the yoke of laws on the native, the resentment of the dusky race is easily fanned to that point which civilized men call rebellion. I could readily understand how the Hudson's Bay proclamations forbidding the sale of furs to rivals, when these rivals were friends by marriage and treaty with the natives, roused all the bloodthirsty fury of the Indian nature. Nor'-Westers' forts were being plundered. Why should the _Bois-Brulés_ not pillage Hudson's Bay posts? Each company was stealing the cargo of its rival, as boats passed and repassed the different forts. Why should the half-breed not have his share of the booty? The most peace-loving dog can be set a-fighting; and the fight-loving Indian finds it very difficult indeed, to keep the peace. This, the great fur companies had not yet realized; and the lesson was to be driven home to them with irresistible force. The half-breeds also had news of a priest bringing a delirious man to Fort Douglas. The description seemed to fit Hamilton and Father Holland. Whatever truth might be in the rumors of an uprising, I must ascertain whether or not Frances Sutherland would be safe. Leaving Little Fellow to guard our horses, at sundown I pushed my canoe into the Assiniboine just east of the rapids. Paddling swiftly with the current, I kept close to the south bank, where overhanging willows concealed one side of the river. As I swung out into the Red, true to the _Bois-Brulés'_ report, I saw only blackened chimneys and ruined walls on the site of Fort Gibraltar. Heading towards the right bank, I hugged the naked cliff on the side opposite Fort Douglas, and trusted the rising mist to conceal me. Thus, I slipped past cannon, pointing threateningly from the Hudson's Bay post, recrossed to the wooded west bank again, and paddled on till I caught a glimpse of a little, square, whitewashed house in a grove of fine old trees. This I knew, from Frances Sutherland's description, was her father's place. Mooring among the shrubbery I had no patience to hunt for beaten path; but digging my feet into soft clay and catching branches with both hands, I clambered up the cliff and found myself in a thicket not a stone's throw from the door. The house was in darkness. My heart sank at a possibility which hardly framed itself to a thought. Was the apparition in the Mandane lodge some portent? Had I not read, or heard, of departed spirits hovering near loved ones? I had no courage to think more. Suddenly the door flung open. Involuntarily, I slipped behind the bushes, but dusk hid the approaching figure. Whoever it was made no noise. I felt, rather than heard, her coming, and knew no man could walk so silently. It must be a woman. Then my chest stifled and I heard my own heart-beats. Garments fluttered past the branches of my hiding-place. She of whom I had dreamed by night and thought by day and hoped whether sleeping, or waking, paused, not an arm's length away. Toying with the tip of the branch, which I was gripping for dear life, she looked languorously through the foliage towards the river. At first I thought myself the victim of another hallucination, but would not stir lest the vision should vanish. She sighed audibly, and I knew this was no spectre. Then I trembled all the more, for my sudden appearance might alarm her. I should wait until she went back to the house--another of my brave vows to keep myself in hand!--then walk up noisily, giving due warning, and knock at the door. The keeping of that resolution demanded all my strength of will; for she was so near I could have clasped her in my arms without an effort. Indeed, it took a very great effort to refrain from doing so. "Heigh-ho," said a low voice with the ripple of a sunny brook tinkling over pebbles, "but it's a long day--and a long, long week--and a long, long, long month--and oh!--a century of years since----" and the voice broke in a sigh. I think--though I would not set this down as a fact--that a certain small foot, which once stamped two strong men into obedience, now vented its impatience at a twig on the grass. By the code of eastern proprieties, I may not say that the dainty toe-tip first kicked the offensive little branch and then crunched it deep in the turf. "I hate this lonely country," said the voice, with the vim of water-fret against an obstinate stone. "Wonder what it's like in the Mandane land! I'm sure it's nicer there." Now I affirm there is not a youth living who would not at some time give his right hand to know a woman's exact interpretation of that word "nicer." For my part, it set me clutching the branch with such ferocity, off snapped the thing with the sharp splintering of a breaking stick. The voice gave a gasp and she jumped aside with nervous trepidation. "Whatever--was that? I am--not frightened." No one was accusing her. "I won't go in! I won't let myself be frightened! There! The very idea!" And three or four sharp stamps followed in quick succession; but she was shivering. "I declare the house is so lonely, a ghost would be live company." And she looked doubtfully from the dark house to the quivering poplars. "I'd rather be out here with the tree-toads and owls and bats than in there alone, even if they do frighten me! Anyway, I'm not frightened! It's just some stupid hop-and-go-spring thing at the base of our brains that makes us jump at mice and rats." But the hands interlocking at her back twitched and clasped and unclasped in a way that showed the automatic brain-spring was still active. "It's getting worse every day. I can't stand it much longer, looking and looking till I'm half blind and no one but Indian riders all day long. Why doesn't he come? Oh! I know something is wrong." "Afraid of the Metis," thought I, "and expecting her father. A fine father to leave his daughter alone in the house with the half-breeds threatening a raid. She needs some one else to take care of her." This, on after thought, I know was unjust to her father; for pioneers obey necessity first and chivalry second. "If he would only come!" she repeated in a half whisper. "Hope he doesn't," thought I. "For a week I've been dreaming such fearful things! I see him sinking in green water, stretching his hands to me and I can't reach out to save him. On Sunday he seemed to be running along a black, awful precipice. I caught him in my arms to hold him back, but he dragged me over and I screamed myself awake. Sometimes, he is in a black cave and I can't find any door to let him out. Or he lies bound in some dungeon, and when I stoop to cut the cords, he begins to sink down, down, down through the dark, where I can't follow. I leap after him and always waken with such a dizzy start. Oh! I know he has been in trouble. Something is wrong! His thoughts are reaching out to me and I am so gross and stupid I can't hear what his spirit says. If I could only get away from things, the clatter of everyday things that dull one's inner hearing, perhaps I might know! I feel as if he spoke in a foreign language, but the words he uses I can't make out. All to-day, he has seemed so near! Why does he not come home to me?" "Mighty fond daughter," thought I, with a jealous pang. She was fumbling among the intricate draperies, where women conceal pockets, and presently brought out something in the palm of her hand. "I wouldn't have him know how foolish I am," and she laid the thing gently against her cheek. Now I had never given Frances Sutherland a gift of any sort whatever; and my heart was pierced with anguish that cannot be described. I was, indeed, falling over a precipice and her arms were not holding me back but dragging me over. Would that I, like the dreamer, could awaken with a start. In all conscience, I was dizzy enough; and every pressure of that hateful object to her face bound me faster in a dungeon of utter hopelessness. My sweet day-dreams and midnight rhapsodies trooped back to mock at me. I felt that I must bow broken under anguish or else steel myself and shout back cynical derision to the whole wan troop of torturing regrets. And all the time, she was caressing that thing in her hand and looking down at it with a fondness, which I--poor fool--thought that I alone could inspire. I suppose if I could have crept away unobserved, I would have gone from her presence hardened and embittered; but I must play out the hateful part of eavesdropper to the end. She opened the hand to feast her eyes on the treasure, and I craned forward, playing the sneak without a pang of shame, but the dusk foiled me. Then the low, mellow, vibrant tones, whose very music would have intoxicated duller fools than I--'tis ever a comfort to know there are greater fools--broke in melody: "To my own dear love from her ever loyal and devoted knight," and she held her opened hand high. 'Twas my birch-bark message which Father Holland had carried north. I suddenly went insane with a great overcharge of joy, that paralyzed all motion. "Dear love--wherever are you?" asked a voice that throbbed with longing. Can any man blame me for breaking through the thicket and my resolution and discretion and all? "Here--beloved!" I sprang from the bush. She gave a cry of affright and would have fallen, but my arms were about her and my lips giving silent proof that I was no wraith. What next we said I do not remember. With her head on my shoulder and I doing the only thing a man could do to stem her tears, I completely lost track of the order of things. I do not believe either of us was calm enough for words for some time after the meeting. It was she who regained mental poise first. "Rufus!" she exclaimed, breaking away from me, "You're not a sensible man at all." "Never said I was," I returned. "If you do _that_," she answered, ignoring my remark and receding farther, "I'll never stop crying." "Then cry on forever!" With womanly ingratitude, she promptly called me "a goose" and other irrelevant names. The rest of our talk that evening I do not intend to set down. In the first place, it was best understood by only two. In the second, it could not be transcribed; and in the third, it was all a deal too sacred. We did, however, become impersonal for short intervals. "I feel as if there were some storm in the air," said Frances Sutherland. "The half-breeds are excited. They are riding past the settlement in scores every day. O, Rufus, I know something is wrong." "So do I," was my rejoinder. I was thinking of the strange gossip of the Assiniboine encampment. "Do you think the _Bois-Brulés_ would plunder your boats?" she asked innocently, ignorant that the malcontents were Nor'-Westers. "No," said I. "What boats?" "Why, Nor'-West boats, of course, coming up Red River from Fort William to go up the Assiniboine for the winter's supplies. They're coming in a few days. My father told me so." "Is Mr. Sutherland an H. B. C. or Nor'-Wester?" I asked in the slang of the company talk. "I don't know," she answered. "I don't think he knows himself. He says there are numbers of men like that, and they all know there is to be a raid. Why, Rufus, there are men down the river every day watching for the Nor'-Westers' Fort William express." "Where do the men come from?" I questioned, vainly trying to patch some connection between plots for a raid on North-West boats and plots for a fight by Nor'-West followers. "From Fort Douglas, of course." "H. B. C.'s, my dear. You must go to Fort Douglas at once. There will be a fight. You must go to-morrow with your father, or with me to-night," I urged, thinking I should take myself off and notify my company of the intended pillaging. "With you?" she laughed. "Father will be home in an hour. Are you sure about a fight!" "Quite," said I, trembling for her safety. This certainty of mine has been quoted to prove premeditation on the Nor'-Westers' part; but I meant nothing of the sort. I only felt there was unrest on both sides, and that she must be out of harm's way. Truly, I have seldom had a harder duty to perform than to leave Frances alone in that dark house to go and inform my company of the plot. Many times I said good-by before going to the canoe and times unnumbered ran back from the river to repeat some warning and necessitate another farewell. "Rufus, dear," she said, "this is about the twentieth time. You mustn't come back again." "Then good-by for the twenty-first," said I, and came away feeling like a young priest anointed for some holy purpose. * * * * * I declare now, as I declared before the courts of the land, that in hastening to the Portage with news of the Hudson's Bay's intention to intercept the Nor'-Westers' express from Fort William, I had no other thought but the faithful serving of my company. I knew what suffering the destruction of Souris had entailed in Athabasca, and was determined our brave fellows should not starve in the coming winter through my negligence. Could I foresee that simple act of mine was to let loose all the punishment the Hudson's Bay had been heaping up against the day of judgment? CHAPTER XXI LOUIS PAYS ME BACK What tempted me to moor opposite the ruins of Fort Gibraltar? What tempts the fly into the spider's web and the fish with a wide ocean for play-ground into one small net? I know there is a consoling fashion of ascribing our blunders to the inscrutable wisdom of a long-suffering Providence; but common-sense forbids I should call evil good, deify my errors, and give thanks for what befalls me solely through my own fault. Bare posts hacked to the ground were all that remained of Fort Gibraltar's old wall. I had not gone many paces across the former courtyard, when voices sounded from the gravel-pit that had once done duty as a cellar. The next thing I noticed was the shaggy face of Louis Laplante bobbing above the ground. With other vagabond wanderers, the Frenchman had evidently been rummaging old Nor'-West vaults. "Tra-la, comrade," he shouted, leaping out of the cellar as soon as he saw me. "I, Louis Laplante, son of a seigneur, am resurrecting. I was a Plante! Now I'm a _Louis d'or_, fresh coined from the golden vein of dazzling wit. Once we were men, but they drowned us in a wine-barrel like your lucky dog of an English prince. Now we're earth-goblins re-incarnate! Behold gnomes of the mine! Knaves of the nethermost depths, tra-la! Vampires that suck the blood of whisky-cellars and float to the skies with dusky wings and dizzy heads! Laugh with us, old solemncholy! See the ground spin! Laugh, I say, or be a hitching-post, and we'll dance the May-pole round you! We're vampires, comrade, and you're our cousin, for you're a bat," and Louis applauded his joke with loud, tipsy laughter and staggered up to me drunk as a lord. His heavy breath and bloodshot eyes testified what he had found under the rubbish heaps of Fort Gibraltar's cellar. Embracing me with the affection of a long-lost brother, he rattled on with a befuddled, meaningless jargon. "So the knife cut well, did it? And the Sioux did not eat you by inches, beginning with your thumbs? Ha! Très bien! Very good taste! You were not meant for feasts, my solemncholy? Some men are monuments. That's you, mine frien'! Some are champagne bottles that uncork, zip, fizz, froth, stars dancing round your head! That's me! 'Tis I, Louis Laplante, son of a seigneur, am that champagne bottle!" Pausing for breath, he drew himself erect with ridiculous pomposity. Now there are times when the bravest and wisest thing a brave and wise man can do is take to his heels. I have heard my Uncle Jack MacKenzie say that vice and liquor and folly are best frustrated by flight; and all three seemed to be embodied in Louis Laplante that night. A stupid sort of curiosity made me dally with the mischief brewing in him, just as the fly plays with the spider-web, or the fish with a baited hook. "There's a fountain-spout in Nor'-West vaults for those who know where to tap the spigot, eh, Louis?" I asked. "I'm a Hudson's Bay man and to the conqueror comes the tribute," returned Louis, sweeping me a courtly bow. "I hope such a generous conqueror draws all the tribute he deserves. Do you remember how you saved my life twice from the Sioux, Louis?" "Generous," shouted the Frenchman, drawing himself up proudly, "generous to mine enemy, always magnificent, grand, superb, as becomes the son of a seigneur! Now I pay you back, rich, well, generous." "Nonsense, Louis," I expostulated. "'Tis I who am in your debt. I owe you my life twice over. How shall I pay you?" and I made to go down to my canoe. "Pay me?" demanded Louis, thrusting himself across my path in a menacing attitude. "Stand and pay me like a man!" "I am standing," I laughed. "Now, how shall I pay you?" "Strike!" ordered Louis, launching out a blow which I barely missed. "Strike, I say, for kicking me, the son of a seigneur, like a pig!" At that, half a dozen more drunken vagabonds of the Hudson's Bay service reeled up from the cellar pit; and I began to understand I was in for as much mischief as a young man could desire. The fellows were about us in a circle, and now, that it was too late, I was quite prepared like the fly and the fish to seek safety in flight. "Sink his canoe," suggested one; and I saw that borrowed craft swamped. "Strike! _Sacredie!_ I pay you back generous," roared Louis. "How can I, Louis Laplante, son of a seigneur, strike a man who won't hit back?" "And how can I strike a man who saved my life?" I urged, trying to mollify him. "See here, Louis, I'm on a message for my company to-night. I can't wait. Some other day you can pay me all you like--not to-night, some-other-time----" "Some-oder-time! No--never! Some-oder-time--'tis the way I pay my own debts, always some-oder-time, and I never not pay at all. You no some-oder-time me, comrade! Louis knows some-oder-time too well! He quit his cups some-oder-time and he never quit, not at all! He quit wild Indian some-oder-time, and he never quit, not at all! And he go home and say his confess to the curé some-oder-time, and he never go, not at all! And he settle down with a wife and become a grand seigneur some-oder-time, and he never settle down at all!" "Good night, Laplante! I have business for the company. I must go," I interrupted, trying to brush through the group that surrounded us. "So have we business for the company, the Hudson's Bay Company, and you can't go," chimed in one of the least intoxicated of the rival trappers; and they closed about me so that I had not striking room. "Are you men looking for trouble?" I asked, involuntarily fingering my pistol belt. "No--we're looking for the Nor'-West brigade billed to pass from Fort William to Athabasca," jeered the boldest of the crowd, a red-faced, middle-aged man with blear eyes. "We're looking for the Nor'-Westers' express," and he laughed insolently. "You don't expect to find our brigades in Fort Gibraltar's cellar," said I, backing away from them and piecing this latest information to what I had already heard of plots and conspiracies. Forthwith I felt strong hands gripping both my arms like a vise and the coils of a rope were about me with the swiftness of a lasso. My first impulse was to struggle against the outrage; but I was beginning to learn the service of open ears and a closed mouth was often more valuable than a fighter's blows. Already I had ascertained from their own lips that the Hudson's Bay intended to molest our north-bound brigade. "Well," said I, with a laugh, which surprised the rascals mightily, "now you've captured your elephant, what do you propose to do with him?" Without answering, the men shambled down to the landing place of the fort, jostling me along between the red-faced man and Louis Laplante. "I consider this a scurvy trick, Louis," said I. "You've let me into a pretty scrape with your idiotic heroics about paying back a fancied grudge. To save a mouse from the tigers, Louis, and then feed him to your cats! Fie, man! I like your son-of-a-seigneur ideas of honor!" "Ingrate! Low-born ingrate," snapped the Frenchman, preparing to strike one of his dramatic attitudes, "if I were not the son of a seigneur, and you a man with bound arms, you should swallow those words," and he squared up to me for a second time. "If you won't fight, you shan't run away----" "Off with your French brag," ordered the soberest of the Hudson's Bay men, catching Louis by the scruff of his coat and spinning him out of the way. "There'll be neither fighting nor running away. It is to Fort Douglas we'll take our fine spy." The words stung, but I muffled my indignation. "I'll go with pleasure," I returned, thinking that Frances Sutherland and Hamilton and Father Holland were good enough company to compensate for any captivity. "With pleasure, and 'tis not the first time I'll have found friends in the Hudson's Bay fort." At that speech, the red-faced man, who seemed to be the ringleader, eyed me narrowly. We all embarked on a rickety raft, that would, I declare, have drowned any six sober men who risked their lives on it; but drunk men and children seem to do what sober, grown folk may not are. How Louis Laplante was for fighting a duel _en route_ with the man, who spoke of "French brag" and was only dissuaded from his purpose by the raft suddenly teetering at an angle of forty-five degrees with the water, which threatened to toboggan us all into mid-river; how I was then stationed in the centre and the other men distributed equally on each side of the raft to maintain balance; how we swung out into the Red, rocking with each shifting of the crew and were treated to a volley of objurgations from the red-faced man--I do not intend to relate. This sort of melodrama may be seen wherever there are drunken men, a raft and a river. The men poled only fitfully, and we were driven solely by the current. It was dark long before we had neared Fort Douglas and the waters swished past with an inky, glassy sheen that vividly recalled the murky pool about the beaver-dam. And yet I had no fear, but drifted along utterly indifferent to the termination of the freakish escapade in which I had become involved. Nature mercifully sets a limit to human capacity for suffering; and I felt I had reached that limit. Nothing worse could happen than had happened, at least, so I told myself, and I awaited with cynical curiosity what might take place inside the Hudson's Bay fort. Then a shaft of lantern light pierced the dark, striking aslant the river, and the men began poling hard for Fort Douglas wharf. We struck the landing with a bump, disembarked, passed the sentinel at the gate and were at the entrance to the main building. "You kick me here," said Louis. "I pay you back here!" "What are you going to do with him?" asked the soberest man of the red-faced leader. "Hand him over to Governor Semple for a spy." "The governor's abed. Besides, they don't want him about to hear H. B. secrets when the Nor'-West brigade's a-coming! You'd better get sobered up, yez hed! That's my advice to yez, before going to Governor Semple," and the prudent trapper led the way inside. To the fore was the main stairway, on the right the closed store, and on the left a small apartment which the governor had fitted up as a private office. For some unaccountable reason--the same reason, I suppose, that mischief is always awaiting the mischief-maker--the door to this office had been left ajar and a light burned inside. 'Twas Louis, ever alert, when mischief was abroad, who tip-toed over to the open door, poked his head in and motioned his drunken companions across the sacred precincts of Governor Semple's private room. I was loath to be a party to this mad nonsense, but the fly and the fish should have thought of results before venturing too near strange coils. The red-faced fellow gave me a push. The sober man muttered, "Better come, or they'll raise a row," and we were all within the forbidden place, the door shut and bolted. To city folk, used to the luxuries of the east, I dare say that office would have seemed mean enough. But the men had been so long away from leather chairs, hair-cloth sofa, wall mirror, wine decanter and other odds and ends which furnish a gentleman's living apartments that the very memory of such things had faded, and that small room, with its old-country air, seemed the vestibule to another world. "Sump--too--uss--ain't it?" asked the sober man with bated breath and obvious distrust of his tongue. "Mag--nee--feque! M. Louis Laplante, look you there," cried the Frenchman, catching sight of his full figure in the mirror and instantly striking a pose of admiration. Then he twirled fiercely at both ends of his mustache till it stood out with the wire finish of a Parisian dandy. The red-faced fellow had permitted me, with arms still tied, to walk across the room and sit on the hair-cloth sofa. He was lolling back in the governor's armchair, playing the lord and puffing one of Mr. Semple's fine pipes. "We are gentlemen adventurers of the ancient and honorable Hudson's Bay Company, gentlemen adventurers," he roared, bringing his fist down with a thud on the desk. "We hereby decree that the Fort William brigade be captured, that the whisky be freely given to every dry-throated lad in the Hudson's Bay Company, that the Nor'-Westers be sent down the Red on a raft, that this meeting raftify this dissolution, afterwards moving--seconding--and unanimously amending----" "Adjourning--you mean," interrupted one of the orator's audience. "I say," called one, who had been dazed by the splendor, "how do you tell which is the lookin' glass and which is the window?" And he looked from the window on one side to its exact reflection, length and width, directly opposite. The puzzle was left unsolved; for just then Louis Laplante found a flask of liquor and speedily divided its contents among the crowd--which was not calculated to clear up mysteries of windows and mirrors among those addle-pates. Dull wit may be sport for drunken men, but it is mighty flat to an onlooker, and I was out of patience with their carousal. "The governor will be back here presently, Louis," said I. "Tired of being a tombstone, ha--ha! Better be a champagne bottle!" he laughed with slightly thickened articulation and increased unsteadiness in his gait. "If you don't hide that bottle in your hand, there'll be a big head and a sore head for you men to-morrow morning." I rose to try and get them out of the office; but a sober man with tied arms among a drunken crew is at a disadvantage. "Ha--old--wise--sh--head! To--be--sh--shure! Whur--d'--y'--hide--it?" "Throw it out of the window," said I, without the slightest idea of leading him into mischief. "Whish--whish--ish--the window, Rufush?" asked Louis imploringly. The last potion had done its work and Louis was passing from the jovial to the pensive stage. He would presently reach a mood which might be ugly enough for a companion in bonds. Was it this prospect, I wonder, or the mischievous spirit pervading the very air from the time I reached the ruins that suggested a way out of my dilemma? "Throw it out of the window," said I, ignoring his question and shoving him off. "Whish--ish--the window--dammie?" he asked, holding the bottle irresolutely and looking in befuddled distraction from side to side of the room. "Thur--both--windows--fur as I see," said the man, who had been sober, but was no longer so. "Throw it through the back window! Folks comin' in at the door won't see it." The red-faced man got up to investigate, and all faith in my plan died within me; but the lantern light was dusky and the red-faced man could no longer navigate a course from window to mirror. "There's a winder there," said he, scratching his head and looking at the window reflected in perfect proportion on the mirrored surface. "And there's a winder there," he declared, pointing at the real window. "They're both winders and they're both lookin'-glasses, for I see us all in both of them. This place is haunted. Lem-me out!" "Take thish, then," cried Louis, shoving the bottle towards him and floundering across to the door to bar the way. "Take thish, or tell me whish--ish--the window." "Both winders, I tell you, and both lookin'-glasses," vowed the man. The other four fellows declined to express an opinion for the very good reason that two were asleep and two befuddled beyond questioning. "See here, Louis," I exclaimed, "there's only one way to tell where to throw that bottle." "Yesh, Rufush," and he came to me as if I were his only friend on earth. "The bottle will go through the window and it won't go through the mirror," I began. "Dammie--I knew that," he snapped out, ready to weep. "Well--you undo these things," nodding to the ropes about my arms, "and I'll find out which opens, and the one that opens is the window, and you can throw out the bottle." "The very thing, Rufush, wise--sh--head--old--old--ol' solemncholy," and he ripped the ropes off me. Now I offer no excuse for what I did. I could have opened that window and let myself out some distance ahead of the bottle, without involving Louis and his gang in greater mischief. What I did was not out of spite to the governor of a rival company; but mischief, as I said, was in the very air. Besides, the knaves had delayed me far into midnight, and I had no scruples about giving each twenty-four hours in the fort guardroom. I took a precautionary inspection of the window-sash. Yes, I was sure I could leap through, carrying out sash and all. "Hurry--ol' tombshtone--governor--sh-comin'," urged Louis. I made towards the window and fumbled at the sash. "This doesn't open," said I, which was quite true, for I did not try to budge it. Then I went across to the mirror. "Neither does this," said I. "Wha'--wha'--'ll--we do--Rufush?" "I'll tell you. You can jump through a window but not through a glass. Now you count--one two--three,"--this to the red-faced man--"and when you say 'three' I'll give a run and jump. If I fall back, you'll know it's the mirror, and fling the bottle quick through the other. Ready, count!" "One," said the red-faced man. Louis raised his arm and I prepared for a dash. "Two!" Louis brought back his arm to gain stronger sweep. "Three!" I gave a leap and made as though I had fallen back. There was the pistol-shot splintering of bottle and mirror crashing down to the floor. The window frame gave with a burst, and I was outside rushing past the sleepy sentinel, who poured out a volley of curses after me. CHAPTER XXII A DAY OF RECKONING As well play pussy-wants-a-corner with a tiger as make-believe war with an Indian. In both cases the fun may become ghastly earnest with no time for cry-quits. So it was with the great fur-trading companies at the beginning of this century. Each held the Indian in subjection and thought to use him with daring impunity against its rival. And each was caught in the meshes of its own merry game. I, as a Nor'-Wester, of course, consider that the lawless acts of the Hudson's Bay had been for three years educating the natives up to the tragedy of June 19, 1816. But this is wholly a partisan, opinion. Certainly both companies have lied outrageously about the results of their quarrels. The truth is Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Westers were playing war with the Indian. Consequences having exceeded all calculation, both companies would fain free themselves of blame. For instance, it has been said the Hudson's Bay people had no intention of intercepting the North-West brigade bound up the Red and Assiniboine for the interior--this assertion despite the fact our rivals had pillaged every North-West fort that could be attacked. Now I acknowledge the Nor'-Westers disclaim hostile purpose in the rally of three hundred _Bois-Brulés_ to the Portage; but this sits not well with the warlike appearance of these armed plain rangers, who sallied forth to protect the Fort William express. Nor does it agree with the expectations of the Indian rabble, who flocked on our rear like carrion birds keen for the spoils of battle. Both companies had--as it were--leveled and cocked their weapon. To send it off needed but a spark, and a slight misunderstanding ignited that spark. My arrival at the Portage had the instantaneous effect of sending two strong battalions of _Bois-Brulés_ hot-foot across country to meet the Fort William express before it could reach Fort Douglas. They were to convoy it overland to a point on the Assiniboine where it could be reshipped. To the second of these parties, I attached myself. I was anxious to attempt a visit to Hamilton. There was some one else whom I hoped to find at Fort Douglas; so I refused to rest at the Portage, though I had been in my saddle almost constantly for twenty days. When we set out, I confess I did not like the look of things. Those Indians smeared with paint and decked out with the feathered war-cap kept increasing to our rear. There were the eagles! Where was the carcass? The presence of these sinister fellows, hot with the lust of blood, had ominous significance. Among the half-breeds there was unconcealed excitement. Shortly before we struck off the Assiniboine trail northward for the Red, in order to meet the expected brigade beyond Fort Douglas, some of our people slipped back to the Indian rabble. When they reappeared, they were togged out in native war-gear with too many tomahawks and pistols for the good of those who might interfere with our mission. There was no misunderstanding the ugly temper of the men. Here, I wish to testify that explicit orders were given for the forces to avoid passing near Fort Douglas, or in any way provoking conflict. There was placed in charge of our division the most powerful plain-ranger in the service of the company, the one person of all others, who might control the natives in case of an outbreak--and that man was Cuthbert Grant. Pierre, the minstrel, and six clerks were also in the party; but what could a handful of moderate men do with a horde of Indians and Metis wrought up to a fury of revenge? "Now, deuce take those rascals! What are they doing?" exclaimed Grant angrily, as we left the river trail and skirted round a slough of Frog Plains on the side remote from Fort Douglas. Our forces were following in straggling disorder. The first battalions of the _Bois-Brulés_, which had already rounded the marsh, were now in the settlement on Red River bank. It was to them that Grant referred. Commanding a halt and raising his spy-glass, he took an anxious survey of the foreground. "There's something seriously wrong," he said. "Strikes me we're near a powder mine! Here, Gillespie, you look!" He handed the field-glass to me. A great commotion was visible among the settlers. Ox-carts packed with people were jolting in hurried confusion towards Fort Douglas. Behind, tore a motley throng of men, women and children, running like a frightened flock of sheep. Whatever the cause of alarm, our men were not molesting them; for I watched the horsemen proceeding leisurely to the appointed rendezvous, till the last rider disappeared among the woods of the river path. "Scared! Badly scared! That's all, Grant," said I. "You've no idea what wild stories are going the rounds of the settlement about the _Bois-Brulés_!" "And you've no idea, young man, what wild stories are going the rounds of the _Bois-Brulés_ about the settlement," was Grant's moody reply. My chance acquaintance with the Assiniboine encampment had given me some idea, but I did not tell Grant so. "Perhaps they've taken a few old fellows prisoners to ensure the fort's good behavior, while we save our bacon," I suggested. "If they have, those Highlanders will go to Fort Douglas shining bald as a red ball," answered the plain-ranger. In this, Grant did his people injustice; for of those prisoners taken by the advance guard, not a hair of their heads was injured. The warden was nervously apprehensive. This was unusual with him; and I have since wondered if his dark forebodings arose from better knowledge of the _Bois-Brulés_ than I possessed, or from some premonition. "There'd be some reason for uneasiness, if you weren't here to control them, Grant," said I, nodding towards the Indians and Metis. "One man against a host! What can I do?" he asked gloomily. "Good gracious, man! Do! Why, do what you came to do! Whatever's the matter with you?" The swarthy face had turned a ghastly, yellowish tint and he did not answer. "'Pon my honor," I exclaimed. "Are you ill, man?" "'Tisn't that! When I went to sleep, last night, there were--corpses all round me. I thought I was in a charnel house and----" "Good gracious, Grant!" I shuddered out. "Don't you go off your head next! Leave that for us green chaps! Besides, the Indians were raising stench enough with a dog-stew to fill any brain with fumes. For goodness' sake, let's go on, meet those fellows with the brigade, secure that express and get off this 'powder mine'--as you call it." "By all means!" Grant responded, giving the order, and we moved forward but only at snail pace; for I think he wanted to give the settlers plenty of time to reach the fort. By five o'clock in the afternoon we had almost rounded the slough and were gradually closing towards the wooded ground of the river bank. We were within ear-shot of the settlers. They were flying past with terrified cries of "The half-breeds! The half-breeds!" when I heard Grant groan from sheer alarm and mutter-- "Look! Look! The lambs coming to meet the wolves!" To this day I cannot account for the madness of the thing. There, some twenty, or thirty Hudson's Bay men--mere youths most of them--were coming with all speed to head us off from the river path, at a wooded point called Seven Oaks. What this pigmy band thought it could do against our armed men, I do not know. The blunder on their part was so unexpected and inexcusable, it never dawned on us the panic-stricken settlers had spread a report of raid, and these poor valiant defenders had come out to protect the colony. If that be the true explanation of their rash conduct in tempting conflict, what were they thinking about to leave the walls of their fort during danger? My own opinion is that with Lord Selkirk's presumptuous claims to exclusive possession in Red River and the recent high-handed success of the Hudson's Bay, the men of Fort Douglas were so flushed with pride they did not realize the risk of a brush with the _Bois-Brulés_. Much, too, may be attributed to Governor Semple's inexperience; but it was very evident the purpose of the force deliberately blocking our path was not peaceable. If the Hudson's Bay blundered in coming out to challenge us, so did we, I frankly admit; for we regarded the advance as an audacious trick to hold us back till the Fort William express could be captured. Now that the thing he feared had come, all hesitancy vanished from Grant's manner. Steeled and cool like the leader he was, he sternly commanded the surging Metis to keep back. Straggling Indians and half-breeds dashed to our fore-ranks with the rush of a tempest and chafed hotly against the warden. At a word from Grant, the men swung across the enemy's course sickle-shape; but they were furious at this disciplined restraint. From horn to horn of the crescent, rode the plain-ranger, lashing horses back to the circle and shaking his fist in the quailing face of many a bold rebel. Both sides advanced within a short distance of each other. We could see that Governor Semple, himself, was leading the Hudson's Bay men. Immediately, Boucher, a North-West clerk, was sent forward to parley. Now, I hold the Nor'-Westers would not have done that if their purpose had been hostile; but Boucher rode out waving his hand and calling-- "What do you want? What do you want?" "What do you want, yourself?" came Governor Semple's reply with some heat and not a little insolence. "We want our fort," demanded Boucher, slightly taken aback, but thoroughly angered. His horse was prancing restively within pistol range of the governor. "Go to your fort, then! Go to your fort!" returned Semple with stinging contempt in manner and voice. He might as well have told us to go to Gehenna; for the fort was scattered to the four winds. "The fool!" muttered Grant. "The fool! Let him answer for the consequences. Their blood be on their own heads." Whether the _Bois-Brulés_, who had lashed their horses into a lather of foam and were cursing out threats in the ominous undertone that precedes a storm-burst, now encroached upon the neutral ground in spite of Grant, or were led gradually forward by the warden as the Hudson's Bay governor's hostility increased, I did not in the excitement of the moment observe. One thing is certain, while the quarrel between the Hudson's Bay governor and the North-West clerk was becoming more furious, our surging cohorts were closing in on the little band like an irresistible tidal wave. I could make out several Hudson's Bay faces, that seemed to remind me of my Fort Douglas visit; but of the rabble of Nor'-Westers and _Bois-Brulés_ disguised in hideous war-gear, I dare avow not twenty of us were recognizable. "Miserable rogue!" Boucher was shouting, utterly beside himself with rage and flourishing his gun directly over the governor's head, "Miserable rogue! Why have you destroyed our fort?" "Call him off, Grant! Call him off, or it's all up!" I begged, seeing the parley go from bad to worse; but Grant was busy with the _Bois-Brulés_ and did not hear. "Wretch!" Governor Semple exclaimed in a loud voice. "Dare you to speak so to me!" and he caught Boucher's bridle, throwing the horse back on its haunches. Boucher, agile as a cat, slipped to the ground. "Arrest him, men!" commanded the governor. "Arrest him at once!" But the clerk was around the other side of the horse, with his gun leveled across its back. Whether, when Boucher jumped down, our bloodthirsty knaves thought him shot and broke from Grant's control to be avenged, or whether Lieutenant Holt of the Hudson's Bay at that unfortunate juncture discharged his weapon by accident, will never be known. Instantaneously, as if by signal, our men with a yell burst from the ranks, leaped from their saddles and using horses as breast-work, fired volley after volley into the governor's party. The neighing and plunging of the frenzied horses added to the tumult. The Hudson's Bay men were shouting out incoherent protest; but what they said was drowned in the shrill war-cry of the Indians. Just for an instant, I thought I recognized one particular voice in that shrieking babel, which flashed back memory of loud, derisive laughter over a camp fire and at the buffalo hunt; but all else was forgotten in the terrible consciousness that our men's murderous onslaught was deluging the prairie with innocent blood. Throwing himself between the _Bois-Brulés_ and the retreating band, the warden implored his followers to grant truce. As well plead with wild beasts. The half-breeds were deaf to commands, and in vain their leader argued with blows. The shooting had been of a blind sort, and few shots did more than wound; but the natives were venting the pent-up hate of three years and would give no quarter. From musketry volleys the fight had become hand-to-hand butchery. I had dismounted and was beating the scoundrels back with the butt end of my gun, begging, commanding, abjuring them to desist, when a Hudson's Bay youth swayed forward and fell wounded at my feet. There was the baffled, anguished scream of some poor wounded fellow driven to bay, and I saw Laplante across the field, covered with blood, reeling and staggering back from a dozen red-skin furies, who pressed upon their fagged victim, snatching at his throat like hounds at the neck of a beaten stag. With a bound across the prostrate form of the youth, I ran to the Frenchman's aid. Louis saw me coming and struck out so valiantly, the wretched cowards darted back just as I have seen a miserable pack of open-mouthed curs dodge the last desperate sweep of antlered head. That gave me my chance, and I fell on their rear with all the might I could put in my muscle, bringing the flat of my gun down with a crash on crested head-toggery, and striking right and left at Louis' assailants. "Ah--_mon Dieu_--comrade," sobbed Louis, falling in my arms from sheer exhaustion, while the tears trickled down in a white furrow over his blood-splashed cheeks, "_mon Dieu_--comrade, but you pay me back generous!" "Tutts, man, this is no time for settling old scores and playing the grand! Run for your life. Run to the woods and swim the river!" With that, I flung him from me; for I heard the main body of our force approaching. "Run," I urged, giving the Frenchman a push. "The run--ha--ha--my old spark," laughed Louis with a tearful, lack-life sort of mirth, "the run--it has all run out," and with a pitiful reel down he fell in a heap. I caught him under the armpits, hoisted him to my shoulders, and made with all speed for the wooded river bank. My pace was a tumble more than a run down the river cliff, but I left the man at the very water's edge, where he could presently strike out for the far side and regain Fort Douglas by swimming across again. Then I hurried to the battle-field in search of the wounded youth whom I had left. As I bent above him, the poor lad rolled over, gazing up piteously with the death-look on his face; and I recognized the young Nor'-Wester who had picked flowers with me for Frances Sutherland and afterwards deserted to the Hudson's Bay. The boy moaned and moved his lips as if speaking, but I heard no sound. Stooping on one knee, I took his head on the other and bent to listen; but he swooned away. Afraid to leave him--for the savages were wreaking indescribable barbarities on the fallen--I picked him up. His arms and head fell back limply as if he were dead, and holding him thus, I again dashed for the fringe of woods. Rogers of the Hudson's Bay staggered against me wounded, with both hands thrown up ready to surrender. He was pleading in broken French for mercy; but two half-breeds, one with cocked pistol, the other with knife, rushed upon him. I turned away that I might not see; but the man's unavailing entreaties yet ring in my ears. Farther on, Governor Semple lay, with lacerated arm and broken thigh. He was calling to Grant, "I'm not mortally wounded! If you could get me conveyed to the fort I think I would live!" Then I got away from the field and laid my charge in the woods. Poor lad! The pallor of death was on every feature. Tearing open his coat and taking letters from an inner pocket to send to relatives, I saw a knife-stab in his chest, which no mortal could survive. Battle is pitiless. I hurriedly left the dying boy and went back to the living, ordering a French half-breed to guard him. "See that no one mutilates this body," said I, "and I'll reward you." My shout seemed to recall the lad's consciousness. Whether he fully understood the terrible significance of my words, I could not tell; but he opened his eyes with a reproachful glazed stare; and that was the last I saw of him. Knowing Grant would have difficulty in obtaining carriers for Governor Semple, and only too anxious to gain access to Fort Douglas, I ran with haste towards the recumbent form of the fallen leader. Grant was at some distance scouring the field for reliable men, and while I was yet twenty or thirty yards away an Indian glided up. "Dog!" he hissed in the prostrate man's face. "You have caused all this! You shall not live! Dog that you are!" Then something caught my feet. I stumbled and fell. There was the flare of a pistol shot in Governor Semple's face and a slight cry. The next moment I was by his side. The shot had taken effect in the breast. The body was yet hot with life; but there was neither breath, nor heart beat. A few of the Hudson's Bay band gained hiding in the shrubbery and escaped by swimming across to the east bank of the Red, but the remnant tried to reach the fort across the plain. Calling me, Grant, now utterly distracted, directed his efforts to this quarter. I with difficulty captured my horse and galloped off to join the warden. Our riders were circling round something not far from the fort walls and Grant was tearing over the prairie, commanding them to retire. It seems, when Governor Semple discovered the strength of our forces, he sent some of his men back to Fort Douglas for a field-piece. Poor Semple with his European ideas of Indian warfare! The _Bois-Brulés_ did not wait for that field-piece. The messengers had trundled it out only a short distance from the gateway, when they met the fugitives flying back with news of the massacre. Under protection of the cannon, the men made a plucky retreat to the fort, though the _Bois-Brulés_ harassed them to the very walls. This disappearance--or rather extermination--of the enemy, as well as the presence of the field-gun, which was a new terror to the Indians, gave Grant his opportunity. He at once rounded the men up and led them off to Frog Plains, on the other side of the swamp. Here we encamped for the night, and were subsequently joined by the first division of _Bois-Brulés_. CHAPTER XXIII THE IROQUOIS PLAYS HIS LAST CARD The _Bois-Brulés_ and Indian marauders, who gathered to our camp, were drunk with the most intoxicating of all stimulants--human blood. This flush of victory excited the redskins' vanity to a boastful frenzy. There was wild talk of wiping the pale-face out of existence; and if a weaker man than Grant had been at the head of the forces, not a white in the settlement would have escaped massacre. In spite of the bitterness to which the slaughter at Seven Oaks gave rise, I think all fair-minded people have acknowledged that the settlers owed their lives to the warden's efforts. That night pandemonium itself could not have presented a more hideous scene than our encampment. The lust of blood is abhorrent enough in civilized races, but in Indian tribes, whose unrestrained, hard life abnormally develops the instincts of the tiger, it is a thing that may not be portrayed. Let us not, with the depreciatory hypocrisy, characteristic of our age, befool ourselves into any belief that barbaric practices were more humane than customs which are the flower of civilized centuries. Let us be truthful. Scientific cruelty may do its worst with intricate armaments; but the blood-thirst of the Indian assumed the ghastly earnest of victors drinking the warm life-blood of dying enemies and of torturers laving hands in a stream yet hot from pulsing hearts. Decked out in red-stained trophies with scalps dangling from their waists, the natives darted about like blood-whetted beasts; and the half-breeds were little better, except that they thirsted more for booty than life. There was loud vaunting over the triumph, the ignorant rabble imagining their warriors heroes of a great battle, instead of the murderous plunderers they were. Pierre, the rhymester, according to his wont, broke out in jubilant celebration of the half-breeds' feat:[A] Ho-ho! List you now to a tale of truth Which I, Pierre, the rhymester, proudly sing, Of the _Bois-Brulés_, whose deeds dismay The hearts of the soldiers serving the king! Swift o'er the plain rode our warriors brave To meet the gay voyageurs come from the sea. Out came the bold band that had pillaged our land, And we taught them the plain is the home of the free. We were passing along to the landing-place, Three hostile whites we bound on the trail. The enemy came with a shout of acclaim, We flung back their taunts with the shriek of a gale. "They have come to attack us," our people cry. Our cohorts spread out in a crescent horn, Their path we bar in a steel scimitar, And their empty threats we flout with scorn. They halt in the face of a dauntless foe, They spit out their venom of baffled rage! Honor, our breath to the very death! So we proffer them peace, or a battle-gage. The governor shouts to his soldiers, "Draw!" 'Tis the enemy strikes the first, fateful blow! Our men break from line, for the battle-wine Of a fighting race has a fiery glow. The governor thought himself mighty in power. The shock of his strength--Ha-ha!--should be known From the land of the sea to the prairie free And all free men should be overthrown![B] But naked and dead on the plain lies he, Where the carrion hawk, and the sly coyote Greedily feast on the great and the least, Without respect for a lord of note. The governor thought himself mighty in power. He thought to enslave the _Bois-Brulés_, "Ha-ha," laughed the hawk. Ho-ho! Let him mock. "Plain rangers ride forth to slay, to slay." Whose cry outpierces the night-bird's note? Whose voice mourns sadly through sighing trees? What spirits wail to the prairie gale? Who tells his woes to the evening breeze? Ha-ha! We know, though we tell it not. We fought with them till none remained. The coyote knew, and his hungry crew Licked clean the grass where the turf was stained. Ho-ho! List you all to my tale of truth. 'Tis I, Pierre, the rhymester, this glory tell Of freedom saved and brave hands laved In the blood of tyrants who fought and fell! The whole scene was repugnant beyond endurance. My ears were so filled with the death cries heard in the afternoon, I had no relish for Pierre's crude recital of what seemed to him a glorious conquest. I could not rid my mind of that dying boy's sad face. Many half-breeds were preparing to pillage the settlement. Intending to protect the Sutherland home and seek the dead lad's body, I borrowed a fresh horse and left the tumult of the camp. I made a detour of the battle-field in order to reach the Sutherland homestead before night. I might have saved myself the trouble; for every movable object--to the doors and window sashes--had been taken from the little house, whether by father and daughter before going to the fort, or by the marauders, I did not know. It was unsafe to return by the wooded river trail after dark and I struck directly to the clearing and followed the path parallel to the bush. When I reached Seven Oaks, I was first apprised of my whereabouts by my horse pricking forward his ears and sniffing the air uncannily. I tightened rein and touched him with the spur, but he snorted and jumped sideways with a suddenness that almost unseated me, then came to a stand, shaking as if with chill. Something skulked across the trail and gained cover in the woods. With a reassuring pat, I urged my horse back towards the road, for the prairie was pitted with badger and gopher holes; but the beast reared, baulked and absolutely refused to be either driven, or coaxed. "Wise when men are fools!" said I, dismounting. Bringing the reins over his head, I tried to pull him forward; but he planted all fours and jerked back, almost dragging me off my feet. "Are you possessed?" I exclaimed, for if ever horror were plainly expressed by an animal, it was by that horse. Legs rigid, head bent down, eyes starting forward and nostrils blowing in and out, he was a picture of terror. Something wriggled in the thicket. The horse rose on his hind legs, wrenched the rein from my hand and scampered across the plain. I sent a shot into the bush. There was a snarl and a scurrying through the underbrush. "Pretty bold wolf! Never saw a broncho act that way over a coyote before!" I might as well find the body of the English lad before trying to catch my horse, so I walked on. Suddenly, in the silver-white of a starry sky, I saw what had terrified the animal. Close to the shrubbery lay the stark form of a white man, knees drawn upwards and arms spread out like the bars of a cross. Was that the lad I had known? I rushed towards the corpse--but as quickly turned away. From downright lack of courage, I could not look at it; for the body was mutilated beyond semblance to humanity. Would that I had strength and skill to paint that dead figure as it was! Then would those, who glory in the shedding of blood, glory to their shame; and the pageant of war be stripped of all its false toggery revealing carnage and slaughter in their revolting nakedness. I could not look back to know if that were the lad, but ran aimlessly towards the scene of the Seven Oaks fray. As I approached, there was a great flapping of wings. Up rose buzzards, scolding in angry discord at my interruption. A pack of wolves skulked a few feet off and eyed me impatiently, boldly waiting to return when I left. The impudence of the brutes enraged me and I let go half a dozen charges, which sent them to a more respectful distance. Here were more bodies like the first. I counted eight within a stone's throw, and there were twice as many between Seven Oaks and the fort. Where they lay, I could tell very well; for hawks wheeled with harsh cries overhead and there was a vague movement of wolfish shapes along the ground. What possessed me to hover about that dreadful scene, I cannot imagine, unless the fear of those creatures returning; but I did not carry a thing with which I could bury the dead. Involuntarily, I sought out Rogers and Governor Semple; for I had seen the death of each. It was when seeking these, that I thought I distinguished the faintest motion of one figure still clothed and lying apart from the others. The sight riveted me to the spot. Surely it was a mistake! The form could not have moved! It must have been some error of vision, or trick of the shadowy starlight; but I could not take my eyes from the prostrate form. Again the body moved--distinctly moved--beyond possibility of fancy, the chest heaving up and sinking like a man struggling but unable to rise. With the ghastly dead and the ravening wolves all about, the movement of that wounded man was strangely terrifying and my knees knocked with fear, as I ran to his aid. The man was an Indian, but his face I could not see; for one hand staunched a wound in his head and the other gripped a knife with which he had been defending himself. My first thought was that he must be a Nor'-Wester, or his body would not have escaped the common fate; but if a Nor'-Wester, why had he been left on the field? So I concluded he was one of the camp-followers, who had joined our forces for plunder and come to a merited end. Still he was a man; and I stooped to examine him with a view to getting him on my horse and taking him back to the camp. At first he was unconscious of my presence. Gently I tried to remove the left hand from his forehead, but at the touch, out struck the right hand in vicious thrusts of the hunting-knife, one blind cut barely missing my arm. "Hold, man!" I cried, "I'm no foe, but a friend!" and I caught the right arm tightly. At the sound of my voice, the left hand swung out revealing a frightful gash; and the next thing I knew, his left arm had encircled my neck like the coil of a strangler, five fingers were digging into the flesh of my throat and Le Grand Diable was making frantic efforts to free his right hand and plunge that dagger into me. The shock of the discovery threw me off guard, and for a moment there was a struggle, but only for a moment. Then the wounded man fell back, writhing in pain, his face contorted with agony and hate. I do not think he could see me. He must have been blind from that wound. I stood back, but his knife still cut the air. "Le Grand Diable! Fool!" I said, "I will not harm you! I give you the white man's word, I will not hurt you!" The right arm fell limp and still. Had I, by some strange irony, been led to this spot that I might witness the death of my foe? Was this the end of that long career of evil? "Le Grand Diable!" I cried, going a pace nearer, which seemed to bring back the ebbing life. "Le Grand Diable! You cannot stay here among the wolves. Tell me whereto find Miriam and I'll take you back to the camp! Tell me and no one shall harm you! I will save you!" The thin lips moved. He was saying, or trying to say, something. "Speak louder!" and I bent over him. "Speak the truth and I take you to the camp!" The lips were still moving, but I could not hear a sound. "Speak louder!" I shouted. "Where is Miriam? Where is the white woman?" I put my ear to his lips, fearful that life might slip away before I could hear. There was a snarl through the glistening set teeth. The prostrate body gave an upward lurch. With one swift, treacherous thrust, he drove his knife into my coat-sleeve, grazing my forearm. The effort cost him his life. He sank down with a groan. The sightless, bloodshot eyes opened. Le Grand Diable would never more feign death. I jerked the knife from my coat, hurled it from me, sprang up and fled from the field as if it had been infected with a pest, or I pursued by gends. Never looking back and with superstitious dread of the dead Indian's evil spirit, I tore on and on till, breath-spent and exhausted, I threw myself down with the North-West camp-fires in sight. FOOTNOTES: [A] It should scarcely be necessary for the author to state that these are the sentiments of the Indian poet expressing the views of the savage towards the white man, and not the white man towards the savage. The poem is as close a translation of the original ballad sung by Pierre in Metis dialect the night of the massacre, as could be given. The Indian nature is more in harmony with the hawk and the coyote than with the white man; hence the references. Other thoughts embodied in this crude lay are taken directly from the refrains of the trappers chanted at that time. [B] Governor Semple unadvisedly boasted that the shock of his power would be felt from Montreal to Athabasca. CHAPTER XXIV FORT DOUGLAS CHANGES MASTERS I suppose there are times in the life of every one, even the strongest--and I am not that--when a feather's weight added to a burden may snap power of endurance. I had reached that stage before encountering Le Grand Diable on the field of massacre at Seven Oaks. With the events in the Mandane country, the long, hard ride northward and this latest terrible culmination of strife between Nor'-Westers and Hudson's Bay, the past month had been altogether too hard packed for my well-being. The madness of northern traders no longer amazed me. An old nurse of my young days, whom I remember chiefly by her ramrod back and sharp tongue, used to say, "Nerves! nerves! nothing but nerves!" She thanked God she was born before the doctors had discovered nerves. Though neurotic theories had not been sufficiently elaborated for me to ascribe my state to the most refined of modern ills--nervous prostration--I was aware, as I dragged over the prairie with the horse at the end of a trailing bridle rein, that something was seriously out of tune. It was daylight before I caught the frightened broncho and no knock-kneed coward ever shook more, as I vainly tried to vault into the saddle, and after a dozen false plunges at the stirrup, gave up the attempt and footed it back to camp. There was a daze between my eyes, which the over-weary know well, and in the brain-whirl, I could distinguish only two thoughts, Where was Miriam--and Father Holland's prediction--"Benedicite! The Lord shall be your avenger! He shall deliver that evil one into the power of the punisher." Thus, I reached the camp, picketed the horse, threw myself down in the tent and slept without a break from the morning of the 20th till mid-day of the 21st. I was awakened by the _Bois-Brulés_ returning from a demonstration before the gateway of Fort Douglas. Going to the tent door, I saw that Pritchard, one of the captive Hudson's Bay men, had been brought back from a conference with the enemy. From his account, the Hudson's Bay people seemed to be holding out against us; but the settlers, realizing the danger of Indian warfare, to a man favored surrender. Had it not been for Grant, there would have been no farther parley; but on news that settlers were pressing for capitulation, the warden again despatched Pritchard to the Hudson's Bay post. In the hope of gaining access to Frances Sutherland and Eric Hamilton I accompanied him. Such was the terror prevailing within the walls, in spite of Pritchard's assurance regarding my friendly purpose, admission was flatly denied me. I contented myself with verbal messages that Hamilton and Father Holland must remain. I could guarantee their safety. The same offer I made to Frances, but told her to do what was best for herself and her father. When Pritchard came out, I knew from his face that Fort Douglas was ours. Hamilton and Father Holland would stay, he reported; but Mistress Sutherland bade him say that after Seven Oaks her father had no friendly feeling for Nor'-Westers, and she could not let him go forth alone. Terms were stipulated between the two companies with due advantage to our side from the recent victory and the formal surrender of Fort Douglas took place the following day. "What are you going to do with the settlers, Cuthbert?" I asked of the warden before the capitulation. "Aye! That's a question," was the grim response. "Why not leave them in the fort till things quiet down?" "With all the Indians of Red River in possession of that fort?" asked Grant, sarcastically. "Were a few Nor'-Westers so successful in holding back the Metis at Seven Oaks, you'd like to see that experiment repeated?" "'Twill be worse, Grant, if you let them go back to their farms." "They'll not do that, if I'm warden of the plains," he declared with great determination. "We'll have to send them down the Red to the lake till that fool of a Scotch nobleman decides what to do with his fine colonists." "But, Grant, you don't mean to send them up north in this cold country. They may not reach Hudson's Bay in time to catch the company ship to Scotland! Why, man, it's sheer murder to expose those people to a winter up there without a thing to shelter them!" "To my mind, freezing is not quite so bad as a massacre. If they won't take our boats to the States, or Canada, what else can Nor'-Westers do?" And what else, indeed? I could not answer Grant's question, though I know every effort we made to induce those people to go south instead of north has been misrepresented as an infamous attempt to expel Selkirk settlers from Red River. Truly, I hope I may never see a sadder sight than the going forth of those colonists to the shelterless plain. It was disastrous enough for them to be driven from their native heath; but to be lured away to this far country for the purpose of becoming buffers between rival fur-traders, who would stop at nothing, and to be sacrificed as victims for their company's criminal policy--I speak as a Nor'-Wester--was immeasurably cruel. Grant was, of course, on hand for the surrender, and he wisely kept the plain-rangers at a safe distance. Clerks lined each side of the path to the gate, and I pressed forward for a glimpse of Frances Sutherland. There was the jar of a heavy bolt shot back. Confused noises sounded from the courtyard. The gates swung open, and out marched the sheriff of Assiniboia, bearing in one hand a pole with a white sheet tacked to the end for a flag of truce, and in the other the fort keys. Behind, sullen and dejected, followed a band of Hudson's Bay men. Grant stepped up to meet the sheriff. The terms of capitulation were again stated, and there was some signing of paper. Of those things my recollection is indistinct; for I was straining my eyes towards the groups of settlers inside the walls. When I looked back to the conferring leaders the silence was so intense a pinfall could have been heard. The keys of the fort were being handed to the Nor'-Westers and the Hudson's Bay men had turned away their faces that they might not see. The vanquished then passed quickly to the barges at the river. Each of the six drunken fellows, whom I had last seen in the late Governor Semple's office, the Highlanders who had spied upon me when I visited Fort Douglas but a year before, the clerks whom I had heard talking that night in the great hall, and many others with whom I had but a chance acquaintance, filed down to the river. Seeing all ready, with a North-West clerk at the prow of each boat to warn away marauders, the men came back for settlers and wounded comrades. I would have proffered my assistance to some of the burdened people on the chance of a word with Frances Sutherland, but the colonists proudly resented any kind offices from a Nor'-Wester. I saw Louis Laplante come limping out, leaning on the arm of the red-faced man, whose eye quailed when it met mine. Poor Louis looked sadly battered, with his head in a white bandage, one arm in a sling, and a dejected stoop to his shoulders that was unusual with him. "This is too bad, Louis," said I, hurrying forward. "I forgot to send word about you. You might as well have stayed in the fort till your wounds healed. Won't you come back?" Louis stole a furtive, sheepish glance at me, hung his head and looked away with a suspicion of moisture about his eyes. "You always were a brute to fight at Laval! I might trick you at first, but you always ended by giving me the throw," he answered disconsolately. "Nonsense, Louis." I was astounded at the note of reproach in his voice. "We're even now--let by-gones be by-gones! You helped me, I helped you. You trapped me into the fort, I tricked you into breaking a mirror and laying up a peck of trouble for yourself. Surely you don't treasure any grudge yet?" He shook his head without looking at me. "I don't understand. Let us begin over again. Come, forget old scores, come back to the fort till you're well." "Pah!" said Louis with a sudden, strange impatience which I could not fathom. "You understand some day and turn upon me and strike and give me more throw." "All right, comrade, treasure your wrath! Only I thought two men, who had saved each other's lives, might be friends and bury old quarrels." "You not know," he blurted out in a broken voice. "Not know what?" I asked impatiently. "I tell you I forgive all and I had thought you might do as much----" "Do as much!" he interrupted fiercely. "_O mon Dieu!_" he cried, with a sob that shook his frame. "Take me away! Take me away!" he begged the man on whose arm he was leaning; and with those enigmatical words he passed to the nearest boat. While I was yet gazing in mute amazement after Louis Laplante, wondering whether his strange emotion were revenge, or remorse, the women and children marched forth with the men protecting each side. The empty threats of half-breeds to butcher every settler in Red River had evidently reached the ears of the women. Some trembled so they could scarcely walk and others stared at us with the reproach of murder in their eyes, gazing in horror at our guilty hands. At last I caught sight of Frances Sutherland. She was well to the rear of the sad procession, leaning on the arm of a tall, sturdy, erect man whom I recognized as her father. I would have forced my way to her side at once, but a swift glance forbade me. A gleam of love flashed to the gray eyes for an instant, then father and daughter had passed. "Little did I think," the harsh, rasping voice of the father was saying, "that daughter of mine would give her heart to a murderer. Which of these cut-throats may I claim for a son?" "Hush, father," she whispered. "Remember he warned us to the fort and took me to Pembina." She was as pale as death. "Aye! Aye! We're under obligations to strange benefactors when times go awry!" he returned bitterly. "O father! Don't! You'll think differently when you know----" but a hulking lout stumbled between us, and I missed the rest. They were at the boats and an old Highlander was causing a blockade by his inability to lift a great bale into the barge. "Let me give you a lift," said I, stepping forward and taking hold of the thing. "Friend, or foe?" asked the Scot, before he would accept my aid. "Friend, of course," and I braced myself to give the package a hoist. "Hudson's Bay, or Nor'-Wester?" pursued the settler, determined to take no help from the hated enemy. "Nor'-Wester, but what does that matter? A friend all the same! Yo heave! Up with it!" "Neffer!" roared the man in a towering passion, and he gave me a push that sent me knocking into the crowd on the landing. Involuntarily, I threw out my arm to save a fall and caught a woman's outstretched hand. It was Frances Sutherland's and I thrilled with the message she could not speak. "I beg your pardon, Mistress Sutherland," said I, as soon as I could find speech, and I stepped back tingling with embarrassment and delight. "A civil-tongued young man, indeed," remarked the father, sarcastically, with a severe scrutiny of my retreating person. "A civil-tongued young man to know your name so readily, Frances! Pray, who is he?" "Oh! Some Nor'-Wester," answered Frances, the white cheeks blushing red, and she stepped quickly forward to the gang-plank. "Some Nor'-Wester, I suppose!" she repeated unconcernedly, but the flush had suffused her neck and was not unnoticed by the father's keen eyes. Then they seated themselves at the prow beside the Nor'-Wester appointed to accompany the boat; and I saw that Louis Laplante was sitting directly opposite Frances Sutherland, with his eyes fixed on her face in a bold gaze, that instantly quenched any kindness I may have felt towards him. How I regretted my thoughtlessness in not having forestalled myself in the Sutherlands' barge. The next best thing was to go along with Grant, who was preparing to ride on the river bank and escort the company beyond all danger. "You coming too?" asked Grant sharply, as I joined him. "If you don't mind." "Think two are necessary?" "Not when one of the two is Grant," I answered, which pleased him, "but as my heart goes down the lake with those barges----" "Hut-tutt--man," interrupted Grant. "War's bad enough without love; but come if you like." As the boats sheered off from the wharf, Grant and I rode along the river trail. I saw Frances looking after me with surprise, and I think she must have known my purpose, though she did not respond when I signalled to her. "Stop that!" commanded Grant peremptorily. "You did that very slyly, Rufus, but if they see you, there'll be all sorts of suspicion about collusion." The river path ran into the bush, winding in and out of woods, so we caught only occasional glimpses of the boats; but I fancied her eyes were ever towards the bank where we rode, and I could distinctly see that the Frenchman's face was buried in his arms above one of the squarish packets opposite the Sutherlands. "Is it the same lass," asked Grant, after we had been riding for more than an hour, "is it the same lass that was disguised as an Indian girl at Fort Gibraltar?" His question astonished me. I thought her disguise too complete even for his sharp penetration; but I was learning that nothing escaped the warden's notice. Indeed, I have found it not unusual for young people at a certain stage of their careers to imagine all the rest of the world blind. "The same," I answered, wondering much. "You took her back to Fort Douglas. Did you hear anything special in the fort that night?" "Nothing but that McDonell was likely to surrender. How did you know I was there?" "Spies," he answered laconically. "The old _voyageurs_ don't change masters often for nothing. If you hadn't been stuck off in the Mandane country, you'd have learned a bit of our methods. Her father used to favor the Nor'-Westers. What has changed him?" "Seven Oaks changed him," I returned tersely. "Aye! Aye! That was terrible," and his face darkened. "Terrible! Terrible! It will change many," and the rest of his talk was full of gloomy portents and forebodings of blame likely to fall upon him for the massacre; but I think history has cleared and justified Grant's part in that awful work. Suddenly he turned to me. "There's pleasure in this ride for you. There's none for me. Will ye follow the boats alone and see that no harm comes to them?" "Certainly," said I, and the warden wheeled his horse and galloped back towards Fort Douglas. For an hour after he left, the trail was among the woods, and when I finally reached a clearing and could see the boats, there was cause enough for regret that the warden had gone. A great outcry came from the Sutherlands' boat and Louis Laplante was on his feet gesticulating excitedly and talking in loud tones to the rowers. "Hullo, there!" I shouted, riding to the very water's edge and flourishing my pistol. "Stop your nonsense, there! What's wrong?" "There's a French papist demands to have speech wi' ye," called Mr. Sutherland. "Bring him ashore," I returned. The boat headed about and approached the bank. Then the rowers ceased pulling; for the water was shallow, and we were within speaking distance. "Now, Louis, what do you mean by this nonsense?" I began. In answer, the Frenchman leaped out of the boat and waded ashore. "Let them go on," he said, scrambling up the cliff in a staggering, faint fashion. "If you meant to stay at the fort, why didn't you decide sooner?" I demanded roughly. "I didn't." This doggedly and with downcast eyes. "Then you go down the lake with the rest and no skulking!" "Gillespie," answered Louis in a low tone, "there's strength of an ox in you, but not the wit. Let them go on! Simpleton, I tell you of Miriam." His words recalled the real reason of my presence in the north country; for my quest had indeed been eclipsed by the fearful events of the past week. I signalled the rowers to go without him, waved a last farewell to Frances Sutherland, and turned to see Louis Laplante throw himself on the grass and cry like a schoolboy. Dismounting I knelt beside him. "Cheer up, old boy," said I, with the usual vacuity of thought and stupidity of expression at such times. "Cheer up! Seven Oaks has knocked you out. I knew you shouldn't make this trip till you were strong again. Why, man, you have enough cuts to undo the pluck of a giant-killer!" Louis was not paying the slightest attention to me. He was mumbling to himself and I wondered if he were in a fever. "The priest, the Irish priest in the fort, he say to me: 'Wicked fellow, you be tortured forever and ever in the furnace, if you not undo what you did in the gorge!' What care Louis Laplante for the fire? Pah! What care Louis for wounds and cuts and threats? Pah! The fire not half so hot as the hell inside! The cuts not half so sharp as the thinks that prick and sting and lash from morn'g to night, night to morn'g! Pah! Something inside say: 'Louis Laplante, son of a seigneur, a dog! A cur! Toad! Reptile!' Then I try stand up straight and give the lie, but it say: 'Pah! Louis Laplante!' The Irish priest, he say, 'You repent!' What care Louis for repents? Pah! But her eyes, they look and look and look like two steel-gray stars! Sometime they caress and he want to pray! Sometime they stab and he shiver; but they always shine like stars of heaven and the priest, he say, 'You be shut out of heaven!' If the angel all have stars, steel glittering stars, for eyes, heaven worth for trying! The priest, he say, 'You go to abode of torture!' Torture! Pah! More torture than 'nough here. Angels with stars in their heads, more better. But the stars stab through--through--through----" "Bother the stars," said I to myself. "What of Miriam?" I asked, interrupting his penitential confidences. His references to steel-gray eyes and stars and angels somehow put me in no good mood, for a reason with which most men, but few women, will sympathize. "Stupid ox!" He spat out the words with unspeakable impatience at my obtuseness. "What of Miriam! Why the priest and the starry eyes and the something inside, they all say, 'Go and get Miriam! Where's the white woman? You lied! You let her go! Get her--get her--get her!' What of Miriam? Pah!" After that angry outburst, the fountains of his sorrow seemed to dry up and he became more the old, nonchalant Louis whom I knew. "Where is Miriam?" I asked. He ignored my question and went on reasoning with himself. "No more peace--no more quiet--no more sing and rollick till he get Miriam!" Was the fellow really delirious? The boats were disappearing from view. I could wait no longer. "Louis," said I, "if you have anything to say, say it quick! I can't wait longer." "You know I lie to you in the gorge?" and he looked straight at me. "Certainly," I answered, "and I punished you pretty well for it twice." "You know what that lie mean"--and he hesitated--"mean to her--to Miriam?" "Yes, Louis, I know." "And you forgive all? Call all even?" "As far as I'm concerned--yes--Louis! God Almighty alone can forgive the suffering you have caused her." Then Louis Laplante leaped up and, catching my hand, looked long and steadily into my eyes. "I go and find her," he muttered in a low, tense voice. "I follow their trail--I keep her from suffer--I bring them all back--back here in the bush on this river--I bring her back, or I kill Louis Laplante!" "Old comrade--you were always generous," I began; but the words choked in my throat. "I know not where they are, but I find them! I know not how soon--perhaps a year--but I bring them back! Go on with the boats," and he dropped my hand. "I can't leave you here," I protested. "You come back this way," he said. "May be you find me." Poor Louis! His tongue tripped in its old evasive ways even at the moment of his penitence, which goes to prove--I suppose--that we are all the sum total of the thing called habit, that even spontaneous acts are evidences of the summed result of past years. I did not expect to find him when I came back, and I did not. He had vanished into the woods like the wild creature that he was; but I was placing a strange, reasonless reliance on his promise to find Miriam. When I caught up with the boats, the river was widening so that attack would be impossible, and I did not ride far. Heading my horse about, I spurred back to Fort Douglas. Passing Seven Oaks, I saw some of the Hudson's Bay men, who had remained burying the dead--not removing them. That was impossible after the wolves and three days of a blistering sun. I told Hamilton of neither Le Grand Diable's death, nor Louis Laplante's promise. He had suffered disappointments enough and could ill stand any sort of excitement. I found him walking about in the up-stairs hall, but his own grief had deadened him to the fortunes of the warring companies. "Confound you, boy! Tell me the truth!" said Father Holland to me afterwards in the courtyard. Le Grand Diable's death and Louis Laplante's promise seemed to make a great impression on the priest. "I tell you the Lord delivered that evil one into the hands of the punisher; and of the innocent, the Lord, Himself, is the defender. Await His purpose! Await His time!" "Mighty long time," said I, with the bitter impatience of youth. "Quiet, youngster! I tell you she shall be delivered!" * * * * * At last the Nor-Westers' Fort William brigade with its sixty men and numerous well-loaded canoes--whose cargoes had been the bone of contention between Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Westers at Seven Oaks--arrived at Fort Douglas. The newcomers were surprised to find us in possession of the enemy's fort. The last news they had heard was of wanton and successful aggression on the part of Lord Selkirk's Company; and I think the extra crews sent north were quite as much for purposes of defence as swift travel. But the gravity of affairs startled the men from Fort William; for they, themselves, had astounding news. Lord Selkirk was on his way north with munitions of war and an army of mercenaries formerly of the De Meurons' regiment, numbering two hundred, some said three or four hundred men; but this was an exaggeration. For what was he coming to Red River in this warlike fashion? His purpose would probably show itself. Also, if his intent were hostile, would not Seven Oaks massacre afford him the very pretence he wanted for chastising Nor'-Westers out of the country? The canoemen had met the ejected settlers bound up the lake; and with them, whom did they see but the bellicose Captain Miles McDonell, given free passage but a year before to Montreal and now on "the prosperous return," which he, himself, had prophesied? The settlers' news of Seven Oaks sent the brave captain hurrying southward to inform Lord Selkirk of the massacre. We had had a victory; but how long would it last? Truly the sky was darkening and few of us felt hopeful about the bursting of the storm. CHAPTER XXV HIS LORDSHIP TO THE RESCUE Even at the hour of our triumph, we Nor'-Westers knew that we had yet to reckon with Lord Selkirk; and a speedy reckoning the indomitable nobleman brought about. The massacre at Seven Oaks afforded our rivals the very pretext they desired. Clothed with the authority of an officer of the law, Lord Selkirk hurried northward; and a personage of his importance could not venture into the wilderness without a strong body-guard. At least, that was the excuse given for the retinue of two or three hundred mercenaries decked out in all the regimentals of war, whom Lord Selkirk brought with him to the north. A more rascally, daring crew of ragamuffins could not have been found to defend Selkirk's side of the gentlemen adventurers' feud. The men were the offscourings of European armies engaged in the Napoleonic wars, and came directly from the old De Meurons' regiment. The information which the Fort William brigade brought of Selkirk's approach, also explained why that same brigade hastened back to the defence of Nor'-West quarters on Lake Superior; and their help was needed. News of events at Fort William came to us in the Red River department tardily. First, there was a vague rumor among the Indian _voyageurs_, who were ever gliding back and forward on the labyrinthine waters of that north land like the birds of passage overhead. Then came definite reports from freemen who had been expelled from Fort William; and we could no longer doubt that Nor'-West headquarters, with all the wealth of furs and provisions therein had fallen into the hands of the Hudson's Bay forces. Afterwards came warning from our _Bourgeois_, driven out of Fort William, for Fort Douglas to be prepared. Lord Selkirk would only rest long enough at Fort William to take possession of everything worth possessing, in the name of the law--for was he not a justice of the peace?--and in the name of the law would he move with like intent against Fort Douglas. To the earl's credit, be it said, that his victories were bloodless; but they were bloodless because the Nor'-Westers had no mind to unleash those redskin bloodhounds a second time, preferring to suffer loss rather than resort to violence. Nevertheless, we called in every available hand of the Nor'-West staff to man Fort Douglas against attack. But summer dragged into autumn and autumn into winter, and no Lord Selkirk. Then we began to think ourselves secure; for the streams were frozen to a depth of four feet like adamant, and unless Selkirk were a madman, he would not attempt to bring his soldiers north by dog-train during the bitter cold of mid-winter. But 'tis ever the policy of the astute madman to discount the enemy's calculations; and Selkirk utterly discounted ours by sending his hardy, dare-devil De Meurons across country under the leadership of that prince of braggarts, Captain D'Orsonnens. Indeed, we had only heard the rumor of their coming, when we awakened one morning after an obscure, stormy night to find them encamped at St. James, westward on the Assiniboine River. Day after day the menacing force remained quiet and inoffensive, and we began to look upon these notorious ruffians as harmless. For our part, vigilance was not lacking. Sentinels were posted in the towers day and night. Nor'-West spies shadowed every movement of the enemy; and it was seriously considered whether we should not open communication with D'Orsonnens to ascertain what he wanted; but, truth to say, we knew very well what he wanted, and had had such a surfeit of blood, we were not anxious to re-open hostilities. As for Hamilton, I can hardly call his life at Fort Douglas anything more than a mere existence. A blow stuns, but one may recover. Repeated failure gradually benumbs hope and willpower and effort, like some ghoulish vampire sucking away a man's life-blood till he faint and die from very inanition. The blow, poor Eric had suffered, when he lost Miriam; the repeated failure, when we could not restore her; and I saw this strong, athletic man slowly succumb as to some insidious, paralyzing disease. The thought of effort seemed to burden him. He would silently mope by the hour in some dark corner of Fort Douglas, or wander aimlessly about the courtyard, muttering and talking to himself. He was weary and fatigued without a stroke of work; and what little sleep he snatched from wakeful vigils seemed to give him no rest. His food, he thrust from him with the petulance of a child; and at every suggestion I could make, he sneered with a quiet, gentle insistence that was utterly discomfiting. To be sure, I had Father Holland's boisterous good cheer as a counter-irritant; for the priest had remained at Fort Douglas, and was ministering to the tribes of the Red and Assiniboine. But it was on her, who had been my guiding star and hope and inspiration from the first, that I mainly depended. As hard, merciless winter closed in, I could not think of those shelterless colonists driven to the lake, without shuddering at the distress I knew they must suffer; and I despatched a runner, urging them to return to Red River, and giving personal guarantee for their safety. Among those, who came back, were the Sutherlands; and if my quest had entailed far greater hardship than it did, that quiet interval with leisure to spend much time at the Selkirk settlement would have repaid all suffering. After sundown, I was free from fort duties. Tying on snow-shoes after the manner of the natives, I would speed over the whitened drifts of billowy snow. The surface, melted by the sun-glare of mid-day and encrusted with brittle, glistening ice, never gave under my weight; and, oddly enough, my way always led to the Sutherland homestead. After the coming of the De Meurons, Frances used to expostulate against what she called my foolhardiness in making these evening visits; but their presence made no difference to me. "I don't believe those drones intend doing anything very dreadful, after all, sir," I remarked one night to Frances Sutherland's father, referring to the soldiers. Following his daughter's directions I had been coming very early, also very often, with the object of accustoming the dour Scotchman to my staying late; and he had softened enough towards me to take part in occasional argument. "Don't believe they intend doing a thing, sir," I reiterated. Pushing his spectacles up on his forehead, he closed the book of sermons, which he had been reading, and puckered his brows as if he were compromising a hard point with conscience, which, indeed, I afterwards knew, was exactly what he had been doing. "Aye," said he, "aye, aye, young man. But I'm thinking ye'll no do y'r company ony harm by speerin' after the designs o' fightin' men who make ladders." "Oh!" I cried, all alert for information. "Have they been making ladders?" He pulled the spectacles down on his nose and deliberately reopened the book of sermons. "Of that, I canna say," he replied. Only once again did he emerge from his readings. I had risen to go. Frances usually accompanied me to the outer door, where I tied my snow-shoes and took a farewell unobserved by the father; but when I opened the door, such a blast of wind and snow drove in, I instantly clapped it shut again and began tying the racquets on inside. "O Rufus!" exclaimed Frances, "you can't go back to Fort Douglas in that storm!" Then we both noticed for the first time that a hurricane of wind was rocking the little house to its foundations. "Did that spring up all of a sudden?" I cried. "I never saw a blizzard do that before." "I'm afraid, Rufus, we were not noticing." "No, we were otherwise interested," said I, innocently enough; but she laughed. "You can't go," she declared. "The wind will be on my back," I assured her. "I'll be all right," and I went on lacing the snow-shoe thongs about my ankle. The book of sermons shut with a snap and the father turned towards us. "Let no one say any man left the Sutherland hearth on such a night! Put by those senseless things," and he pointed to the snow-shoes. "But those ladders," I interposed. "Let no one say when the enemy came Rufus Gillespie was absent from his citadel!" The wind roared round the house corners like a storm at sea; and the father looked down at me with a strange, quizzical expression. "Ye're a headstrong young man, Rufus Gillespie," said the hard-set mouth. "Ye maun knock a hole in the head, or the wall! Will ye go?" "Knock the hole in the wall," I laughed back. "Of course I go." "Then, tak' the dogs," said he, with a sparkle of kindliness in the cold eyes. So it came that I set out in the Sutherlands' dog-sled with a supply of robes to defy biting frost. And I needed them every one. Old settlers, describing winter storms, have been accused of an imagination as expansive as the prairie; but I affirm no man could exaggerate the fury of a blizzard on the unbroken prairie. To one thing only may it be likened--a hurricane at sea. People in lands boxed off at short compass by mountain ridges forget with what violence a wind sweeping half a continent can disport itself. In the boisterous roar of the gale, my shouts to the dogs were a feeble whisper caught from my lips and lost in the shrieking wind. The fine snowy particles were a powdered ice that drove through seams of clothing and cut one's skin like a whip lash. Without the fringe of woods along the river bank to guide me, it would have been madness to set out by day, and worse than madness by night; but I kept the dogs close to the woods. The trees broke the wind and prevented me losing all sense of direction in the tornado whirl of open prairie. Not enough snow had fallen on the hard-crusted drifts to impede the dogs. They scarcely sank and with the wind on their backs dashed ahead till the woods were passed and we were on the bare plains. No light could be seen through the storm, but I knew I was within a short distance of the fort gate and wheeled the dogs toward the river flats of the left. The creatures seemed to scent human presence. They leaped forward and brought the sleigh against the wall with a knock that rolled me out. "Good fellows;" I cried, springing up, uncertain where I was. The huskies crouched around my feet almost tripping me and I felt through the snowy darkness against the stockades, stake by stake. Ah! There was a post! Here were close-fitted boards--here, iron-lining--this must be the gate; but where was the lantern that hung behind? A gust of wind might have extinguished the light; so I drubbed loudly on the gate and shouted to the sentry, who should have been inside. The wind lulled for a moment and up burst wild shouting from the courtyard intermingled with the jeers of Frenchmen and cries of terror from our people. Then I knew judgment had come for the deeds at Seven Oaks. The gale broke again with a hissing of serpents, or red irons, and the howling wind rose in shrill, angry bursts. Hugging the wall, while the dogs whined behind, I ran towards the rear. Men jostled through the snowy dark, and I was among the De Meurons. They were too busy scaling the stockade on the ladders of which I had heard to notice an intruder. Taking advantage of the storm, I mounted a ladder, vaulted over the pickets and alighted in the courtyard. Here all was noise, flight, pursuit and confusion. I made for the main hall, where valuable papers were kept, and at the door, cannoned against one of our men, who shrieked with fright and begged for mercy. "Coward!" said I, giving him a cuff. "What has happened?" A flare fell on us both, and he recognized me. "The De Meurons!" he gasped. "The De Meurons!" I left him bawling out his fear and rushed inside. "What has happened?" I asked, tripping up a clerk who was flying through the hallway. "The De Meurons!" he gasped. "The De Meurons!" "Stop!" I commanded, grasping the lap of his coat. "What--_has_--happened?" "The De Meurons!" This was fairly screamed. I shook him till he sputtered something more. "They've captured the fort--our people didn't want to shed blood----" "And threw down their guns," I interjected, disgusted beyond word. "Threw down their guns," he repeated, as though that were a praiseworthy action. "The s-s-sentinels--saw the court--full--full--full of s-soldiers!" "Full of soldiers!" I thundered. "There are not a hundred in the gang." Thereupon I gave the caitiff a toss that sent him reeling against the wall, and dashed up-stairs for the papers. All was darkness, and I nigh broke my neck over a coffin-shaped rough box made for one of the trappers, who had died in the fort. Why was the thing lying there, anyway? The man should have been put into it and buried at once without any drinking bout and dead wake, I reflected with some sharpness, as I rubbed my bruised shins and shoved the box aside. Shouts rang up from the courtyard. Heavy feet trampled in the hall below. Hamilton, as a Hudson's Bay man, and Father Holland, I knew, were perfectly safe. But I was far from safe. Why were they not there to help me, I wondered, with the sort of rage we all vent on our friends when we are cornered and they at ease. I fumbled across the apartment, found the right desk, pried the drawer open with my knife, and was in the very act of seizing the documents when I saw my own shadow on the floor. Lantern light burst with a glare through the gloom of the doorway. CHAPTER XXVI FATHER HOLLAND AND I IN THE TOILS Behind the lantern was a face with terrified eyes and gaping mouth. It was the priest, his genial countenance a very picture of fear. "What's wrong, Father?" I asked. "You needn't be alarmed; you're all right." "But I am alarmed, for you're all wrong! Lord, boy, why didn't ye stay with that peppery Scotchman? What did Frances mane by lettin' you out to-night?" and he shaded the light of the lantern with his hand. "I wanted these things," I explained. "Ye want a broad thumpin', I'm thinkin', ye rattle-pate, to risk y'r precious noodle here to-night," he whispered, coming forward and fussing about me with all the maternal anxiety of a hen over her only chicken. "Listen," said I. "The whole mob's coming in." "Go!" he urged, pushing me from the desk over which I still fumbled. "Run for those dogs of mercenaries!" I protested. "Ye swash-buckler! Ye stiff-necked braggart!" bawled the priest. "Out wid y'r nonsense, and what good are y' thinkin' ye'll do--? Stir your stumps, y' stoopid spalpeen!" "Listen," I urged, undisturbed by the tongue-thrashing that stormed about my ears. In the babel of voices I thought I had heard some one call my name. "Run, Rufus! Run for y'r life, boy!" urged Father Holland, apparently thinking the ruffians had come solely for me. "Run yourself, Father; run yourself, and see how you like it," and I tucked the documents inside my coat. "Divil a bit I'll run," returned the priest. "Hark!" The De Meurons' leaders were shouting orders to their men. Above the screams of people fleeing in terror through passage-ways, came a shrill bugle-call. "Go--go--go--Rufus!" begged Father Holland in a paroxysm of fear. "Go!" he pleaded, pushing me towards the door. "I won't!" and I jerked away from him. "There, now." I caught up a club and loaded pistol. The Nor'-Westers had no time to defend themselves. Almost before my stubborn defiance was uttered, the building was filled with a mob of intoxicated De Meurons. Rushing everywhere with fixed bayonets and cursing at the top of their voices, they threatened death to all Nor'-Westers. There was a loud scuffling of men forcing their way through the defended hall downstairs. "Go, Rufus, go! Think of Frances! Save yourself," urged the priest. It was too late. I could not escape by the hall. Noisy feet were already trampling up the stairs and the clank of armed men filled every passage. "Jee-les-pee! Jee-les-pee! Seven Oaks!" bawled a French voice from the half-way landing, and a multitude of men with torches dashed up the stairs. I took a stand to defend myself; for I thought I might be charged with implication in the massacre. "Jee-les-pee," roared the voices. "Where is Gillespie?" thundered a leader. "That's you, Rufus, lad! Down with you!" muttered the priest. Before I knew his purpose, he had tripped my feet from under me and knocked me flat on the floor. Overturning the empty coffin-box, he clapped it above my whole length, imprisoning me with the snap and celerity of a mouse-trap. Then I heard the thud of two hundred avoirdupois seating itself on top of the case. The man above my person had whisked out a book of prayers, and with lantern on the desk was conning over devotions, which, I am sure, must have been read with the manual upside down; for bits of the _pater noster_, service of the mass, and vesper psalms were uttered in a disconnected jumble, though I could not but apply the words to my own case. "_Libera nos a malo--ora pro nobis, peccatoribus--ab hoste maligno defende me--ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me--peccator videbit et irascetur--desiderium peccatorum peribit_----" came from the priest with torrent speed. "Jee-les-pee! Jee-les-pee!" roared a dozen throats above the half-way landing. Then came the stamp of many feet to the door. "Wait, men!" Hamilton's voice commanded. "I'll see if he's here!" "_Simulacra gentium argentum et aurum, opera manuum hominum_," like hailstones rattled the Latin words down on my prison. "One moment, men," came Eric's voice; but he could not hold them back. In burst the door with a rush, and immediately the room was crowded with vociferating French soldiers. "_Manus habent, et non palpabunt; pedes_----" "Is Gillespie here?" interrupted Hamilton, without the slightest recognition of the priest in his tones. "_Pedes habent et non ambulabunt; non clamabunt in gutture suo_," muttered the priest, finishing his verse; then to the men with a stiffness which I did not think Father Holland could ever assume-- "How often must I be disturbed by men seeking that young scoundrel? Look at this place, fairly topsy-turvy with their hunt! Faith! The room is before you. Look and see!" and with a great indifference he went on with his devotions. "_Similes illis fiant qui faciunt ea_----" "Some one here before us?" interrupted an Englishman with some suspicion. "Two parties here before ye," answered the priest, icily, as if these repeated questions rumpled ecclesiastical dignity, and he gabbled on with the psalm, "_similes illis fiant qui faciunt ea, et omnes_----" "If we lifted that box," interrupted the persistent Englishman, "what might there be?" "If ye lift that box," answered Father Holland with massive solemnity--and I confess every hair on my body bristled as he rose--"If ye lift that box there might be a powr--dead--body," which was very true; for I still held the cocked pistol in hand and would have shot the first man daring to molest me. But the priest's indifference was not so great as it appeared. I could tell from a tremor in his voice that he was greatly disturbed; and he certainly lost his place altogether in the vesper psalm. "_Requiescat in pace_," were his next words, uttered in funereal gravity. Singularly enough, they seemed to fit the situation. Father Holland's prompt offer to have the rough box examined satisfied the searchers, and there were no further demands. "Oh," said the Englishman, taken aback, "I beg your pardon, sir! No offence meant." "No offence," replied the priest, reseating himself. "_Benedicite_----" "Sittin' on the coffin!" blurted out the voice of an English youth as the weight of the priest again came down heavily on my prison; and again I breathed easily. "Come on, men!" shouted Hamilton, apprehensive of more curiosity. "We're wasting time! He may be escaping by the basement window!" "_Jam hiems transiit, imber abiit et recessit; surge, amica mea, et veni!_" droned the priest, and the whole company clattered downstairs. "Quick!--Out with you!" commanded Father Holland. "Speed to y'r heels, and blessing on the last o' ye!" I dashed down the stairs and was bolting through the doorway when some one shouted, "There he is!" "Run, Gillespie!" cried some one else--one of our men, I suppose--and I had plunged into the storm and raced for the ladders at the rear stockades with a pack of pursuers at my heels. The snow drifts were in my favor, for with my moccasins, I leaped lightly forward, while the booted soldiers floundered deep. I eluded my pursuers and was half-way up a ladder when a soldier's head suddenly appeared above the wall on the other side. Then a bayonet prodded me in the chest and I fell heavily backwards to the ground. * * * * * I was captured. That is all there is to say. No man dilates with pleasure over that part of his life when he was vanquished. It is not pleasant to have weapons of defence wrested from one's hands, to feel soldiers standing upon one's wrists and rifling pockets. It is hard to feel every inch the man on the horizontal. In truth, when the soldiers picked me up without ceremony, or gentleness, and bundling me up the stairs of the main hall, flung me into a miserable pen, with windows iron-barred to mid-sash, I was but a sorry hero. My tormentors did not shackle me; I was spared that humiliation. "There!" exclaimed a Hudson's Bay man, throwing lantern-light across the dismal low roof as I fell sprawling into the room. "That'll cool the young hot-head," and all the French soldiers laughed at my discomfiture. They chained and locked the door on the outside. I heard the soldiers' steps reverberating through the empty passages, and was alone in a sort of prison-room, used during the régime of the petty tyrant McDonell. It was cold enough to cool any hot-head, and mine was very hot indeed. I knew the apartment well. Nor'-Westers had used it as a fur storeroom. The wind came through the crevices of the board walls and piled miniature drifts on the floor-cracks, all the while rattling loose timbers like a saw-mill. The roof was but a few feet high, and I crept to the window, finding all the small panes coated with two inches of hoar-frost. Whether the iron bars outside ran across, or up and down, I could not remember; but the fact would make a difference to a man trying to escape. Much as I disliked to break the glass letting in more cold, there was only one way of finding out about those bars. I raised my foot for an outward kick, but remembering I wore only the moccasins with which I had been snowshoeing, I struck my fist through instead, and shattered the whole upper half of the window. I broke away cross-pieces that might obstruct outward passage, and leaning down put my hand on the sharp points of upright spikes. So intense was the frost, the skin of my finger tips stuck to the iron, and I drew my hand in, with the sting of a fresh burn. It was unfortunate about those bars. I could not possibly get past them down to the ground without making a ladder from my great-coat. I groped round the room hoping that some of the canvas in which we tied the peltries, might be lying about. There was nothing of the sort, or I missed it in the dark. Quickly tearing my coat into strips, I knotted triple plies together and fastened the upper end to the crosspiece of the lower window. Feet first, I poked myself out, caught the strands with both hands, and like a flash struck ground below with badly skinned palms. That reminded me I had left my mits in the prison room. The storm had driven the soldiers inside. I did not encounter a soul in the courtyard, and had no difficulty in letting myself out by the main gate. I whistled for the dogs. They came huddling from the ladders where I had left them, the sleigh still trailing at their heels. One poor animal was so benumbed I cut him from the traces and left him to die. Gathering up the robes, I shook them free of snow, replaced them in the sleigh and led the string of dogs down to the river. It would be bitterly cold facing that sweep of unbroken wind in mid-river; but the trail over ice would permit greater speed, and with the high banks on each side the dogs could not go astray. To an overruling Providence, and to the instincts of the dogs, I owe my life. The creatures had not gone ten sleigh-lengths when I felt the loss of my coat, and giving one final shout to them, I lay back on the sleigh and covered myself, head and all, under the robes, trusting the huskies to find their way home. I do not like to recall that return to the Sutherlands. The man, who is frozen to death, knows nothing of the cruelties of northern cold. The icy hand, that takes his life, does not torture, but deadens the victim into an everlasting, easy, painless sleep. This I know, for I felt the deadly frost-slumber, and fought against it. Aching hands and feet stopped paining and became utterly feelingless; and the deadening thing began creeping inch by inch up the stiffening limbs the life centres, till a great drowsiness began to overpower body and mind. Realizing what this meant, I sprang from the sleigh and stopped the dogs. I tried to grip the empty traces of the dead one, but my hands were too feeble; so I twisted the rope round my arm, gave the word, and raced off abreast the dog train. The creatures went faster with lightened sleigh, but every step I took was a knife-thrust through half-frozen awakening limbs. Not the man who is frozen to death, but the man who is half-frozen and thawed back to life, knows the cruelties of northern cold. In a stupefied way, I was aware the dogs had taken a sudden turn to the left and were scrambling up the bank. Here my strength failed or I tripped; for I only remember being dragged through the snow, rolling over and over, to a doorway, where the huskies stopped and set up a great whining. Somehow, I floundered to my feet. With a blaze of light that blinded me, the door flew open and I fell across the threshold unconscious. * * * * * Need I say what door opened, what hands drew me in and chafed life into the benumbed being? "What was the matter, Rufus Gillespie?" asked a bluff voice the next morning. I had awakened from what seemed a long, troubled sleep and vaguely wondered where I was. "What happened to ye, Rufus Gillespie?" and the man's hand took hold of my wrist to feel my pulse. "Don't, father! you'll hurt him!" said a voice that was music to my ears, and a woman's hand, whose touch was healing, began bathing my blistered palms. At once I knew where I was and forgot pain. In few and confused words I tried to relate what had happened. "The country's yours, Mr. Sutherland," said I, too weak, thick-tongued and deliriously happy for speech. "Much to be thankful for," was the Scotchman's comment. "Seven Oaks is avenged. It would ill 'a' become a Sutherland to give his daughter's hand to a conqueror, but I would na' say I'd refuse a wife to a man beaten as you were, Rufus Gillespie," and he strode off to attend to outdoor work. And what next took place, I refrain from relating; for lovers' eloquence is only eloquent to lovers. CHAPTER XXVII UNDER ONE ROOF Nature is not unlike a bank. When drafts exceed deposits comes a protest, and not infrequently, after the protest, bankruptcy. From the buffalo hunt to the recapture of Fort Douglas by the Hudson's Bay soldiers, drafts on that essential part of a human being called stamina had been very heavy with me. Now came the casting-up of accounts, and my bill was minus reserve strength, with a balance of debt on the wrong side. The morning after the escape from Fort Douglas, when Mr. Sutherland strode off, leaving his daughter alone with me, I remember very well that Frances abruptly began putting my pillow to rights. Instead of keeping wide awake, as I should by all the codes of romance and common sense, I--poor fool--at once swooned, with a vague, glimmering consciousness that I was dying and this, perhaps, was the first blissful glimpse into paradise. When I came to my senses, Mr. Sutherland was again standing by the bedside with a half-shamed look of compassion under his shaggy brows. "How far," I began, with a curious inability to use my wits and tongue, "how far--I mean how long have I been asleep, sir?" "Hoots, mon! Dinna claver in that feckless fashion! It's months, lad, sin' ye opened y'r mouth wi' onything but daft gab." "Months!" I gasped out. "Have I been here for months?" "Aye, months. The plain was snaw-white when ye began y'r bit nappie. Noo, d'ye no hear the clack o' the geese through yon open window?" I tried to turn to that side of the little room, where a great wave of fresh, clear air blew from the prairie. For some reason my head refused to revolve. Stooping, the elder man gently raised the sheet and rolled me over so that I faced the sweet freshness of an open, sunny view. "Did I rive ye sore, lad?" asked the voice with a gruffness in strange contradiction to the gentleness of the touch. Now I hold that however rasping a man's words may be, if he handle the sick with gentleness, there is much goodness under the rough surface. Thoughtlessness and stupidity, I know, are patent excuses for half the unkindness and sorrow of life. But thoughtlessness and stupidity are also responsible for most of life's brutality and crime. Not spiteful intentions alone, but the dulled, brutalized, deadened sensibilities--that go under the names of thoughtlessness and stupidity--make a man treat something weaker than himself with roughness, or in an excessive degree, qualify for murder. When the harsh voice asked, "Do I rive ye sore?" I began to understand how surface roughness is as often caused by life's asperities as by the inner dullness akin to the brute. Indeed, if my thoughts had not been so intent on the daughter, I could have found Mr. Sutherland's character a wonderfully interesting study. The infinite capacity of a canny Scot for keeping his mouth shut I never realized till I knew Mr. Sutherland. For instance, now that consciousness had returned, I noticed that the father himself, and not the daughter, did all the waiting on me even to the carrying of my meals. "How is your daughter, Mr. Sutherland?" I asked, surely a natural enough question to merit a civil reply. "Aye--is it Frances y'r speerin' after?" he answered, meeting my question with a question; and he deigned not another word. But I lay in wait for him at the next meal. "I haven't seen your daughter yet, Mr. Sutherland," I stuttered out with a deal of blushing. "I haven't even heard her about the house." "No?" he asked with a show of surprise. "Have ye no seen Frances?" And that was all the satisfaction I got. Between the dinner hour and supper time I conjured up various plots to hoodwink paternal caution. "Mr. Sutherland," I began, "I have a message for your daughter." "Aye," said he. "I wish her to hear it personally." "Aye." "When may I see her?" "Ye maun bide patient, lad!" "But the message is urgent." That was true; for had not forty-eight hours passed since I had regained consciousness and I had heard neither her footsteps nor her voice? "Aye," said the imperturbable father. "Very urgent, Mr. Sutherland," I added. "Aye." "When may I see her, Sir?" "All in guid time. Ye maun bide quiet, lad." "The message cannot wait," I declared. "It must be given at once." "Then deleever it word for word to me, young mon, and I'll trudge off to Frances." "Your daughter is not at home?" "What words wu'l ye have me bear to her, lad?" he asked. That was too much for a youth in a peevish state of convalescence. What lover could send his heart's eloquence by word of mouth with a peppery, prosaic father? "Tell Mistress Sutherland I must see her at once," I quickly responded with a flash of temper that was ever wont to flare up when put to the test. "Aye," he answered, with an amused look in the cold, steel eyes. "I'll deleever y'r message when--when"--and he hesitated in a way suggestive of eternity--"I'll deleever y'r message when I see her." At that I turned my face to the wall in the bitterness of spirit which only the invalid, with all the strength of a man in his whims and the weakness of an infant in his body, knows. I spent a feverish, restless night, with the hard-faced Scotchman watching from his armchair at my bedside. Once, when I suddenly awakened from sleep, or delirium, his eyes were fastened on my face with a gleam of grave kindliness. "Mr. Sutherland," I cried, with all the impatience of a child, "please tell me, where is your daughter?" "I sent her to a neighbor, sin' ye came to y'r senses, lad," said he. "Ye hae kept her about ye night and day sin' ye gaed daft, and losh, mon, ye hae gabbled wild talk enough to turn the head o' ony lassie clean daft. An' ye claver sic' nonsense when ye're daft, what would ye say when ye're sane? Hoots, mon, ye maun learn to haud y'r tongue----" "Mr. Sutherland," I interrupted in a great heat, quite forgetful of his hospitality, "I'm sorry to be the means of driving your daughter from her home. I beg you to send me back to Fort Douglas----" "Haud quiet," he ordered with a wave of his hand. "An' wa'd ye have me expose the head of a mitherless bairn to a' the clack o' the auld geese in the settlement? Temper y'r ardor wi' discretion, lad! 'Twas but the day before yesterday she left and she was sair done wi' nursing you and losing of sleep! Till ye're fair y'rsel' again and up, and she's weel and rosy wi' full sleep, bide patient!" That speech sent my face to the wall again; but this time not in anger. And that dogged fashion Mr. Sutherland had of taking his own way did me many a good turn. Often have I heard those bragging captains of the Hudson's Bay mercenaries swagger into the little cottage sitting-room, while I lay in bed on the other side of the thin board partition, and relate to Mr. Sutherland all the incidents of their day's search for me. "So many pounds sterling for the man who captures the rascal," declares D'Orsonnens. "Aye, 'tis a goodly price for one poor rattle-pate," says Mr. Sutherland. Whereupon, D'Orsonnens swears the price is more than my poor empty head is worth, and proceeds to describe me in terms which Mr. Sutherland will only tolerate when thundered from an orthodox pulpit. "I'd have ye understand, Sir," he would declare with great dignity, "I'll have no papistical profanity under my roof." Forthwith, he would show D'Orsonnens the door, lecturing the astonished soldier on the errors of Romanism; for whatever Mr. Sutherland deemed evil, from oaths to theological errors, he attributed directly to the pope. "The ne'er-do-weel can hawk naething frae me," said he when relating the incident. Once I heard a Fort Douglas man observe that, as the search had proved futile, I must have fallen into one of the air-holes of the ice. "Nae doot the headstrong young mon is' gettin' what he deserves. I warrant he's warm in his present abode," answered Mr. Sutherland. On another occasion D'Orsonnens asked who the man was that Mr. Sutherland's daughter had been nursing all winter. "A puir body driven from Fort Douglas by those bloodthirsty villains," answered Mr. Sutherland, giving his visitor a strong toddy; and he at once improved the occasion by taking down a volume and reading the French officer a series of selections against Romanism. After that D'Orsonnens came no more. "I hope I did not tell Nor'-West secrets in a Hudson's Bay house when I was delirious, Mr. Sutherland," I remarked. The Scotchman had lugged me from bed in a gentle, lumbering, well-meant fashion, and I was sitting up for the first time. "Ye're no the mon wi' a leak t' y'r mouth. I dinna say, though, ye're aye as discreet wi' the thoughts o' y'r heart as y'r head! Ye need na fash y'r noodle wi' remorse aboot company secrets. I canna say ye'll no fret aboot some other things ye hae told. A' the winter lang, 'twas Frances and stars and spooks and speerits and bogies and statues and graven images--wha' are forbidden by the Holy Scriptures--till the lassie thought ye gane clean daft! 'Twas a bonnie e'e, like silver stars; or a bit blush, like the pippin; or laughter, like a wimplin' brook; or lips, like posies; or hair, like links o' gold; and mair o' the like till the lassie came rinnin' oot o' y'r room, fair red wi' shame! Losh, mon, ye maun keep a still tongue in y'r head and not blab oot y'r thoughts o' a wife till she believes na mon can hae peace wi'out her. I wad na hae ye abate one jot o' all ye think, for her price is far above rubies; but hae a care wi' y'r grand talk! After ye gang to the kirk, lad, na mon can keep that up." His warning I laughed to the winds, as youth the world over has ever laughed sage counsels of chilling age. I can compare my recovery only to the swift transition of seasons in those northern latitudes. Without any lingering spring, the cold grayness of long, tense winter gives place to a radiant sun-burst of warm, yellow light. The uplands have long since been blown bare of snow by the March winds, and through the tangle of matted turf shoot myriad purple cups of the prairie anemone, while the russet grass takes on emerald tints. One day the last blizzard may be sweeping a white trail of stormy majesty across the prairie; the next a fragrance of flowers rises from the steaming earth and the snow-filled ravines have become miniature lakes reflecting the dazzle of a sunny sky and fleece clouds. My convalescence was similar to the coming of summer. Without any weary fluctuation from well to ill, and ill to well--which sickens the heart with a deferred hope--all my old-time strength came back with the glow of that year's June sun. "There's nae accountin' for some wilful folk, lad," was Mr. Sutherland's remark, one evening after I was able to leave my room. "Ye hae risen frae y'r bed like the crocus frae snaw. An' Frances were hangin' aboot y'r pillow, lad, I'm nae sure y'd be up sae dapper and smart." "I thought my nurse was to return when I was able to be up," I answered, strolling to the cottage door. "Come back frae the door, lad. Dinna show y'rsel' tae the enemy. There be more speerin' for ye than hae love for y'r health. Have y'r wits aboot ye! Dinna be frettin' y'rsel' for Frances! The lassies aye rin fast enow tae the mon wi' sense to hold his ain!" With that advice he motioned me to the only armchair in the room, and sitting down on the outer step to keep watch, began reading some theological disputation aloud. "Odds, lad, ye should see the papist so'diers rin when I hae Calvin by me," he remarked. "It's a pity you can't lay the theological thunderers on the doorstep to drive stray De Meurons off. Then you could come in and take this chair yourself," I answered, sitting back where no visitor could see me. But Mr. Sutherland did not hear. He was deep in polemics, rolling out stout threats, that used Scriptural texts as a cudgel, with a zest that testified enjoyment. "The wicked bend their bow," began the rasping voice; but when he cleared his throat, preparatory to the main argument, my thoughts went wandering far from the reader on the steps. As one whose dream is jarred by outward sound, I heard his tones quaver. "Aye, Frances, 'tis you," he said, and away he went, pounding at the sophistries of some straw enemy. A shadow was on the threshold, and before I had recalled my listless fancy, in tripped Frances Sutherland, herself, feigning not to see me. The gray eyes were veiled in the misty fashion of those fluffy things women wear, which let through all beauty, but bar out intrusion. I do not mean she wore a veil: veils and frills were not seen among the colonists in those days. But the heavy lashes hung low in the slumbrous, dreamy way that sees all and reveals nothing. Instinctively I started up, with wild thoughts thronging to my lips. At the same moment Mr. Sutherland did the most chivalrous thing I have seen in homespun or broadcloth. "Hoots wi' y'r giddy claver," said he, before I had spoken a word; and walking off, he sat down at some distance. Thereupon his daughter laughed merrily with a whole quiver of dangerous archery about her lips. "That is the nearest to an untruth I have ever heard him tell," she said, which mightily relieved my embarrassment. "Why did he say that?" I asked, with my usual stupidity. "I am sure I cannot say," and looking straight at me, she let go the barbed shaft, that lies hidden in fair eyes for unwary mortals. "Sit down," she commanded, sinking into the chair I had vacated. "Sit down, Rufus, please!" This with an after-shot of alarm from the heavy lashes; for if a woman's eyes may speak, so may a man's, and their language is sometimes bolder. "Thanks," and I sat down on the arm of that same chair. For once in my life I had sense to keep my tongue still; for, if I had spoken, I must have let bolt some impetuous thing better left unsaid. "Rufus," she began, in the low, thrilling tones that had enthralled me from the first, "do you know I was your sole nurse all the time you were delirious?" "No wonder I was delirious! Dolt, that I was, to have been delirious!" thought I to myself; but I choked down the foolish rejoinder and endeavored to look as wise as if my head had been ballasted with the weight of a patriarch's wisdom instead of ballooning about like a kite run wild. "I think I know all your secrets." "Oh!" A man usually has some secrets he would rather not share; and though I had not swung the full tether of wild west freedom--thanks solely to her, not to me--I trembled at recollection of the passes that come to every man's life when he has been near enough the precipice to know the sensation of falling without going over. "You talked incessantly of Miriam and Mr. Hamilton and Father Holland." "And what did I say about Frances?" "You said things about Frances that made her tremble." "Tremble? What a brute, and you waiting on me day and----" "Hush," she broke in. "Tremble because I am just a woman and not an angel, just a woman and not a star. We women are mortals just as you men are. Sometimes we're fools as well as mortals, just as you men are; but I don't think we're knaves quite so often, because we're denied the opportunity and hedged about and not tempted." As she gently stripped away the pretty hypocrisies with which lovers delude themselves and lay up store for disappointment, I began to discount that old belief about truth and knowledge rendering a woman mannish and arrogant and assertive. "You men marry women, expecting them to be angels, and very often the angel's highest ambition is to be considered a doll. Then your hope goes out and your faith----" "But, Frances," I cried, "if any sensible man had his choice of an angel and a fair, good woman----" "Be sure to say fair, or he'd grumble because he hadn't a doll," she laughed. "No levity! If he had choice of angels and stars and a good woman, he'd choose the woman. The star is mighty far away and cold and steely. The angel's a deal too perfect to know sympathy with faults and blunders. I tell you, Little Statue, life is only moil and toil, unless love transmutes the base metal of hard duty into the pure gold of unalloyed delight." "That's why I tremble. I must do more than angel or star! Oh, Rufus, if I can only live up to what you think I am--and you can live up to what I think you are, life will be worth living." "That's love's leverage," said I. Then there was silence; for the sun had set and the father was no longer reading. Shadows deepened into twilight, and twilight into gloaming. And it was the hour when the brooding spirit of the vast prairie solitudes fills the stillness of night with voiceless eloquence. Why should I attempt to transcribe the silent music of the prairie at twilight, which every plain-dweller knows and none but a plain-dweller may understand? What wonder that the race native to this boundless land hears the rustling of spirits in the night wind, the sigh of those who have lost their way to the happy hunting-ground, and the wail of little ones whose feet are bruised on the shadow trail? What wonder the gauzy northern lights are bands of marshaling warriors and the stars torches lighting those who ride the plains of heaven? Indeed, I defy a white man with all the discipline of science and reason to restrain the wanderings of mystic fancy during the hours of sunset on the prairie. There is, I affirm, no such thing as time for lovers. If they have watches and clocks, the wretched things run too fast; and if the sun himself stood still in sympathy, time would not be long. So I confess I have no record of time that night Frances Sutherland returned to her home and Mr. Sutherland kept guard at the door. When he had passed the threshold impatiently twice, I recollected with regret that it was impossible to read theology in the dark. The third time he thrust his head in. "Mind y'rselves," he called. "I hear men coming frae the river, a pretty hour, indeed, for visitin'. Frances, go ben and see yon back window's open!" "The soldiers from the fort," cried Frances with a little gasp. "Don't move," said I. "They can't see me here. It's dark. I want to hear what they say and the window is open. Indeed, Frances, I'm an expert at window-jumping," and I had begun to tell her of my scrape with Louis' drunken comrades in Fort Douglas, when I heard Mr. Sutherland's grating tones according the newcomers a curious welcome. "Ye swearin', blasphemin', rampag'us, carousin' infidel, ye'll no darken my doorway this night. Y'r French gab may be foul wi' oaths for all I ken; but ye'll no come into my hoose! An' you, Sir, a blind leader o' the blind, a disciple o' Beelzebub, wi' y'r Babylonish idolatries, wi' y'r incense that fair stinks in the nostrils o' decent folk, wi' y'r images and mummery and crossin' o' y'rsel', wi' y'r pagan, popish practises, wi' y'r skirts and petticoats, I'll no hae ye on my premises, no, not an' ye leave y'r religion outside! An' you, Meester Hamilton, a respectable Protestant, I'm fair surprised to see ye in sic' company." "'Tis Eric and Father Holland and Laplante," I shouted, springing to my feet and rushing to the doorway, but Frances put herself before me. "Keep back," she whispered. "The priest and Mr. Hamilton have been here before; but father would not let them in. The other man may be a De Meuron. Be careful, Rufus! There's a price on your head." "Ho--ho--my _Ursus Major_, prime guardian of _Ursa Major_, first of the heavenly constellations in the north," insolently laughed Louis Laplante through the dusk. "Let me pass, Frances," I begged, thrusting her gently aside, but her trembling hands still clung to my arm. "Impertinent rascal," rasped the irate Scotchman. "I'd have ye understand my name's Sutherland, not _Major Ursus_. I'll no bide wi' y'r impudence! Leave this place----" "The Bruin growls," interrupted Louis with a laugh, and I heard Mr. Sutherland's gasp of amazed rage at the lengths of the Frenchman's insolence. "I must, dearest," I whispered, disengaging the slender hands from my arm; and I flung out into the dusk. In the gloom, my approach was unnoticed; and when I came upon the group, Father Holland had laid his hand upon Mr. Sutherland's shoulder and in a low, tense voice was uttering words, which--thank an all-bountiful Providence!--have no sectarian limits. "And the King shall answer and say unto them, 'I was a stranger and ye took me not in: naked and ye clothed me not: sick and in prison and ye visited me not. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me'----" "Dinna con Holy Writ to me, Sir," interrupted Mr. Sutherland, throwing the priest's hand off and jerking back. Then Louis Laplante saw me. There was a long, low whistle. "Ye daft gommerel," gasped Mr. Sutherland, facing me with unutterable disgust. "Ye daft gommerel! A' my care and fret, waste--gane clean to waste. I wash m' hands o' ye----" But Louis had knocked the Scotchman aside and tumbled into my arms, half laughing, half crying and altogether as hysterical as was his wont. "I pay you back at las', my comrade! Ha--old solemncholy! You thought the bird of passage, he come not back at all! But the birds return! So does Louis! He decoy-duck the whole covey! You generous? No more not generous than the son of a seigneur, mine enemy! You give life? He give life! You give liberty! So does Louis! You help one able help himself? Louis help one not able help himself! Ha! _Très bien! Noblesse oblige! La Gloire!_ She--near! She here! She where I, Louis Laplante, son of a seigneur, snare that she-devil, trap that fox, trick the tigress! Ha--ol' tombstone! _Noblesse oblige_--I say! She near--she here," and he flung up both arms like a frenzied maniac. "Man! Are you mad?" I demanded, uncertain whether he were apostrophizing Diable's squaw, or abstract glory. "Speak out!" I shouted, shaking him by the shoulder. "These--are they all friends?" asked Louis, suddenly cooled and looking suspiciously at the group. "All," said I, still holding him by the shoulder. "That--that thing--that bear--that bruin--he a friend?" and Louis pointed to Mr. Sutherland. "Friend to the core," said I, laying both hands upon his shoulders. "Core with prickles outside," gibed Louis. "Louis," I commanded, utterly out of patience, "what of Miriam? Speak plain, man! Have you brought the tribe as you promised?" It must have been mention of Miriam's name, for the white, drawn face of Eric Hamilton bent over my shoulder and fiery, glowing eyes burned into the very soul of the Frenchman. Louis staggered back as if red irons had been thrust in his face. "_Sacredie_," said he, backing against Father Holland, "I am no murderer." It was then I observed that Frances Sutherland had followed me. Her slender white fingers were about the bronzed hand of the French adventurer. "Monsieur Laplante will tell us what he knows," she said softly, and she waited for his answer. "The daughter of _L'Aigle_," he replied slowly and collectedly, all the while feasting upon that fair face, "comes down the Red with her tribe and captives, many captive women. They pass here to-night. They camp south the rapids, this side of the rapids. Last night I leave them. I run forward, I find Le Petit Garçon--how you call him?--Leetle Fellow? He take me to the priest. He bring canoe here. He wait now for carry us down. We must go to the rapids--to the camp! There my contract! My bargain, it is finished," and he shrugged his shoulders, for Frances had removed her hand from his. Whether Louis Laplante's excitable nature were momentarily unbalanced by the success of his feat, I leave to psychologists. Whether some premonition of his impending fate had wrought upon him strangely, let psychical speculators decide. Or whether Louis, the sly rogue, worked up the whole situation for the purpose of drawing Frances Sutherland into the scene--which is what I myself suspect--I refer to private judgment, and merely set down the incidents as they occurred. That was how Louis Laplante told us of bringing Diable's squaw and her captives back to Red River. And that was how Father Holland and Eric and Louis and Mr. Sutherland and myself came to be embarking with a camping outfit for a canoe-trip down the river. "Have the Indians passed, or are they to come?" I asked Louis as Mr. Sutherland and Eric settled themselves in a swift, light canoe, leaving the rest of us to take our places in a larger craft, where Little Fellow, gurgling pleased recognition of me, acted as steersman. "They come later. The fast canoe go forward and camp. We watch behind," ordered Louis, winking at me significantly. I saw Frances step to her father's canoe. "You're no coming, Frances," he protested, querulously. "Don't say that, father. I never disobeyed you in my life, and I _am_ coming! Don't tell me not to! Push out, Mr. Hamilton," and she picked up a paddle and I saw the canoe dart swiftly forward into mid-current, where the darkness enveloped it; and we followed fast in its wake. "Louis," said I, trying to fathom the meaning of his wink, "are those Indians to come yet?" "No. Simpleton--you think Louis a fool?" he asked. "Why did you lie to them?" "Get them out of the way." "Why?" "Because, stupid, some ones they be killed to-night! The Englishman, he have a wife--he not be killed! Mademoiselle--she love a poor fool--or break her pretty heart! The father--he needed to stick-pin you both--so you never want for to fight each other," and Louis laughed low like the purr of water on his paddle-blade. "Faith, lad," cried the priest, who had been unnaturally silent, because, I suppose, he was among aliens to his faith, "faith, lad, 'tis a good heart ye have, if ye'd but cut loose from the binding past. May this night put an end to your devil pranks!" * * * * * And that night did! CHAPTER XXVIII THE LAST OF LOUIS' ADVENTURES I think, perhaps, the reason good enterprises fail so often where evil ventures succeed, is that the good man blunders forward, trusting to the merits of his cause, where the evil manipulator proceeds warily as a cat over broken glass. And so, altogether apart from his services as guide, I felt Louis Laplante's presence on the river a distinct advantage. "The Lord is with us, lad. She shall be delivered! The Lord is with us; but don't you bungle His plans!" ejaculated Father Holland for the twentieth time; and each time the French trapper looked waggishly over his shoulder at me and winked. "Bungle! Pah!" Louis clapped his paddle athwart the canoe and laughed a low, sly, defiant laugh. "Bungle! Pah! Catch Louis bungle his cards, ha, ha! Trumps! He play trumps--he hold his hand low--careless--nodings in it--he keep quiet--nodings worth play in his hand--but his sleeve--ha, ha!" and Louis laughed softly and winked at the full moon. "The daughter of L'Aigle, she cuff Louis, she slap his cheek, she call him lump--lout--slouch! Ha, ha!--Louis no fool--he pare the claws of L'Aigle to-night!" At that, Little Fellow's stolid face took on a vindictive gleam, and he snapped out something in Indian tongue which set Louis to laughing. Suddenly the Indian's paddle was suspended in mid-air, and Little Fellow bent over the prow, gazing at the moon-tracked water. "_Sacredie!_" cried Louis, catching up water that trickled through his fingers, "'tis dried rabbit thong! They are ahead of us! They have passed while that Scotch mule was balk! We must catch the Englishman," and he began hitting out with his paddle at a great rate. We had overtaken Mr. Sutherland's canoe within half an hour of Louis' discovery, and Eric wheeled about with a querulous demand. "What's wrong? Are they ahead? I thought you said they were behind," and he turned suspiciously to Laplante. "You thought wrong," said Louis, ever facile with subterfuges. "You thought wrong, Mister High-and-Mighty! Camp here and watch; they come before morning!" "No lies to me," shouted Eric, becoming uncontrollably excited. "If you mislead us, your life shall----" "Pig-head! I no save your wife for back chin! Camp here, I say," and Louis' fitful temper began to show signs of sulking. "For goodness' sake, Eric, do what you're told! We've made a bad enough business of it----" "Give the Frenchman a chance! Do what you're told, I say, ye blunderers! Troth, the Lord Himself couldn't bring success to such blundering idiots," was Father Holland's comment. "I'll take na orders frae meddlesome papists," began the Scotchman; but Little Fellow had forcibly turned the prow of the canoe shoreward. I gave them a shove with my paddle. Frances took the cue, and while her father was yet scolding raised her paddle and had them close to the river bank. "Get your tent up here," I called to conciliate them. "Then come to the bank and watch for the Indians." A bit of clean gravel ran out from the clay cliff. "That's the ground," said I, as the other canoe bumped over the pebbles; and I stopped paddling and dangled my hand in the water. Something in the dark drifted wet and soft against my fingers. Ordinarily such an incident would not have alarmed me; but instantly a shudder of apprehension ran through my frame. I scarce had courage to look into the river lest the white face of a woman should appear through the watery depths. Clutching the water-soaked tangle, I jerked it up. Something gave with a rip, and my hand was full of shawl fringe. "What's that, Rufus?" asked Father Holland. "Don't know." I motioned him to be silent and held it up in the moonlight. Distinctly it was, or had been, red fringe. "Do you think--" he began, then stopped. Our keel had rubbed bottom and Hamilton was springing out of the other canoe. "Yes, I do," I replied, choking with dread. "This is too terrible! He'll kill himself! Go up the bank with him! Keep him busy at the tent! Little Fellow and I'll pole for it. The water's shallow there----" "What do _you_ think?" said the priest to Laplante. "T'ink! I never t'ink! I finds out." But all the same, Louis' assurance was shaken and he peered searchingly into the river. "Aren't you coming? What's your plan?" called Eric. "Certainly we are, but get this truck to higher ground, will you?" I hoisted out the camp trappings. "I want to paddle out for something." "What is it?" he asked. "Something lost out there. I lost it out of my hand." Frances Sutherland, I know, suspected trouble from the alarm which I could not keep out of my speech; for she pressed to the water's edge. "Get the tent ready," I urged. "What's the meaning of this mystery?" persisted Hamilton sharply. "What have you lost?" "Don't press him too closely. Faith, it may be a love token," interjected Father Holland, as he stepped ashore; but he whispered in my ear as he passed, "You're wrong, lad! You're on the wrong track!" I leaped back to the canoe, Little Fellow and the Frenchman following, and we paddled to the shallows where I had caught the fringe. I prodded the soft mud below and trailed the paddle back and forward over the clay bottom. Louis did likewise; but in vain. Only soft ooze came up on the blade. Then Little Fellow stripped and dived. Of course it was dark under water, as it always is dark under the muddy Red, and the Indian could not feel a thing from which fringe could have ripped. Had my jerk disturbed whatever it was and sent it rolling down to mid-current? I asked Father Holland this when I came back. "Tush, faint-heart," he muttered, drawing me aside. "'Tis only a trial of your faith." I said something about trials of faith which I shall not repeat here, but which the majority of people, who are on the tenter-hooks of such trials, have said for themselves. "Faith! Pah!" exclaimed Louis, joining our whispered conference, while Eric and Mr. Sutherland were hoisting a tent. "That shawl, it mean nodings of things heavenly! It only mean rag stuck in the mud and reds nearabouts here! I have told the Great Bear and his snarl Englishman the Indians not come till morning. They get tent ready and watch! You follow Louis, he lead you to camp. The priest--he good for say a little prayer; the Indian for fight; Louis--for swear; Rufus--to snatch the Englishwoman, he good at snatching the fair, ha-ha." He darted to the shore, calling Little Fellow from the canoe and leaving Father Holland and me to follow as best we could. "We'll be back soon, Eric," I shouted. "We're going to get the lie of the land. Keep watch here," and I broke into a run to keep up with the French trapper and the Indian, who were leading into the woods away from the river. I could hear Father Holland puffing behind like a wind-blown racer. Abruptly the priest came to a stop. "By all the saints," he ordered. "Go back to the tent!" I turned. A white form emerged from the foliage and Frances was beside me. "May I not come?" she asked. "No--dearest, there will be fighting." "No--Lord--no," panted Father Holland coming up to us. "We're not swapping one woman for another. What would Rufus do without ye?" "You are going for Miriam?" she questioned, holding my hand. "God speed you and bring you back safely!" "Say rather--bring Miriam," and I unfastened the clinging hand almost roughly. "Come on, slugs, sloths, laggards," commanded Laplante impatiently, and we dashed into the thick of the woods, leaving the white figure alone against the shadowy thicket. She called out something, of which I heard only two words, "Miriam" and "Rufus"; but I knew those names were uttered in supplication and they filled my heart with daring hope. Surely, we must succeed--for the Little Statue's prayers were following me--and I bounded on with a faith as buoyant as the priest's blind trust. Thus we ran through the moon-shafted woods pursuing the flitting, lithe figures of trapper and Indian, who scarce disturbed a fern leaf, while Father Holland and I floundered through the underbrush like ramping elephants. Then I found myself panting as hard as the priest and clinging to his arm for support; for illness had taken all the bravery out of my muscles, like champagne uncorked and left in the heat. "Brace yourself, lad," said the priest. "The Lord is with us, but don't you bungle." A long, low whistle came through the dark, a whistle that was such a perfect imitation of the night hawk, no spy might detect it for the signal of a runner. After the whistle, was the soft, ominous hiss of a serpent in the grass; and we were abreast of Louis Laplante and Little Fellow standing stock still sniffing forward as hounds might scent a foe. "She may not be there! She may be drown;" whispered Louis, "but we creep on, quiet like hare, no noise like deer, stiller than mountain cat, hist--what that?" The night breeze set the leaves all atremble--clapping their hands, as the Indians call it--and a whiff of burning bark tainted the air. "That's it," said I under my breath. The smoke was blowing from wooded flats between us and the river. Cautiously parting interlaced branches and as carefully replacing each bough to prevent backward snap, we turned down the sloping bank. I suppose necessity's training in the wilds must produce the same result in man and beast; and from that fact, faddists of the various "osophies" and "ologies" may draw what conclusions they please; but I affirm that no panther could creep on its prey with more stealth, caution and cunning than the trapper and Indian on the enemy's camp. I have seen wild creatures approaching a foe set each foot down with noiseless tread; but I have never seen such a combination of instincts, brute and human, as Louis and Little Fellow displayed. The Indian felt the ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is--contradictory as it may seem--utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined by both, and the Indian smelt it and tried his tongue on the broken edge. Then both fell on all fours, creeping under the branches of the thicket and pausing at every pace. "Would that I had taken lessons in forest lore before I went among the Sioux," I thought to myself. Now I knew what had been incomprehensible before--why all my well-laid plans had been detected. A wind rustled through the foliage. That was in our favor; for in spite of our care the leaves crushed and crinkled beneath us. At intervals a glimmer of light shone from the beach. Louis paused and listened so intently our breathing was distinctly audible. A vague murmur of low voices--like the "talking of the trees" in Little Fellow's language--floated up from the river; and in the moonlight I saw Laplante laugh noiselessly. Trees stood farther apart on the flats and brushwood gave place to a forest of ferns, that concealed us in their deep foliage; but the thick growth also hid the enemy, and we knew not at what moment we might emerge in full view of the camp. So we stretched out flat, spying through the fern stalks before we parted the stems to draw ourselves on a single pace. Presently, the murmur separated into distinct voices, with much low laughing and the bitter jeers that make up Indian mirth. We could hear the crackling of the fire, and wormed forward like caterpillars. There was a glare of light through the ferns, and Louis stopped. We all three pulled abreast of him. Lying there as a cat watches a mouse, we parted first one and then another of the fronds till the Indian encampment could be clearly seen. "Is that the tribe?" I whispered; but Louis gripped my arm in a vice that forbade speech. The camp was not a hundred feet away. Fire blazed in the centre. Poles were up for wigwams, and already skins had been overlaid, completing several lodges. Men lay in lazy attitudes about the fire. Squaws were taking what was left of the evening meal and slave-women were putting things to rights for the night. Sitting apart, with hands tied, were other slaves, chiefly young women taken in some recent fray and not yet trusted unbound. Among these was one better clad than the others. Her wrists were tied; but her hands managed to conceal her face, which was bowed low. In her lap was a sleeping child. Was this Miriam? Children were with the other captives; but to my eyes this woman's torn shawl appeared reddish in the fire glow. "Let's go boldly up and offer to buy the slaves," I suggested; but Louis' grip tightened forbiddingly and Little Fellow's forefinger pointed towards a big creature, who was ordering the others about. 'Twas a woman of giant, bronzed form, with the bold stride of a conquering warrior and a trophy-decked belt about her waist. The fire shone against her girdle and the stones in the leather strap glowed back blood-red. Father Holland breathed only one word in my ear, "Agates;" and the fire of the red stones flashed like some mystic flame through my being till brain and heart were hot with vengeance and my hands burned as if every nerve from palm to finger-tips were a blade point reaching out to destroy that creature of cruelty. "Diable's squaw," I gasped out, beside myself with anger and joy. "Let me but within arm's length of her----" "Hold quiet," the priest hissed low and angry, gripping my shoulder like a steel winch. "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord! See that you save the white woman! Leave the evil-doer to God! The Lord's with us, but I tell you, don't you bungle!" "Bungle!" I could have shouted out defiance to the whole band. "Let go!" I ordered, trying to struggle up; for the iron hand still held me. "Let go, or I'll----" But Louis Laplante's palm was forcibly slapped across my mouth and his other hand he laid significantly on his dagger, giving me one threatening look. By the firelight I saw his lips mechanically counting the numbers of the enemy and mechanically I audited his count. "Twenty men, thirty squaws and the slaves," said he under his breath. An Indian left the fire and approached the captives. "See! Watch! Is that woman Miriam?" demanded the priest. "She'll take her hands from her face now." "Of course it is!" I was furious at the restraint and hesitancy; but as I said before, the experienced intriguer proceeds as warily as a cat. "You not sure--not for sure--_Mon Dieu_--no," muttered Laplante; and he was right. With the forest shadows across the captives, it was impossible to distinguish the color of their faces. Taking a knife from his belt, the Indian cut the cords of all but the woman with her hands across her face. A girl brought refuse of food; but this woman took no notice, never moving her hands. Thereupon the young squaw sneered and the Indian idlers jeered loud in harsh, strident laughter. This roused the big squaw. She strode up, Little Fellow all the while with glistening teeth following her motions as a cat's head turns to a mouse. With the flat of her hand she struck the silent woman, who leaped up and ran to a wigwam. In speechless fear, the child had scrambled to its feet and backed away from the angry group towards the ferns; but the light was fitful and shadowy, and we could recognize neither woman, nor child. "I can't stand this any longer," I declared. "I must know if that's Miriam. Let's draw closer." Father Holland and I crawled stealthily to the very border of fern growth, Louis and the Indian lying still and muttering over some plan of action. "Hist," said the priest, "we'll try the child." Unlike naked Indian children, the little thing had a loose garment banded about its waist; but its feet were bare and its hair as raven black as that of any young savage. It stood like some woodland elf in the maze of heavy sleepiness, at each harsh word from the camp, sidling shyly closer to our hiding-place. We dragged forward till I could have touched the child, but feared to startle it. Putting his hand out slowly, Father Holland caught the little creature's arm. It gave a start, jerked back and looked in mute wonderment at our strange hiding-place. "Pretty boy," crooned the priest in low, coaxing tones, gently tightening his hold. "Is it white?" I whispered. "I can't see." "Good little man," he went on, slowly folding his hands about it. Drawing quickly back, he lifted the child completely into his arms. "Is boy sleepy?" he asked. "Call him 'Eric,'" I urged. "Is Eric sleepy?" The child's head fell wearily against the priest's shoulder. Snuggling closer, he lisped back in perfect English, "Eric's tired." At once Father Holland's free hand caught my arm as if he feared I might rush out. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then he said, "Give me your coat." I ripped off my buckskin-smock. Wrapping the sleeping boy about, the priest laid him gently among the ferns. "Where's the mother?" asked Father Holland with a catching intake of breath. I pointed to the wigwam. The big squaw had come out, leaving Miriam alone and was engaged in noisy dispute with the men. Louis and Little Fellow had now wriggled abreast of us. "Ha, ha, _mon brave_--your time, it come now! You save the white woman! I pay my devoirs to the lady, ha, ha--I owe her much--I pay you both back with one stroke, one grand stroke. Little Fellow, he watch for spring surprise and help us both! Swoop--snitch--snatch--snap her up! 'Tis done--tra-la!" and Louis drew up for all the world like a tiger about to spring, but the priest drew him down. "Listen," commanded the churchman, in the slow, tense way of one who intended to be obeyed. "I'll go back and come up by the beach. I'll brow-beat them and tongue-whack them for having slaves. They'll offer fight; so'll I. They'll all run down; that's your chance. Wait till they all go. I'll make them, every one. That's your chance. You rush! Try that! If it fail, in the name of the Lord, have y'r weapons ready--and the Lord be with us!" "They'll kill you," I protested. "Let me go!" "You? What about Frances?" "Pah!" said Louis. "I go myself--I trick--I trap--I snare 'em----" "Hush to ye, ye braggart," interrupted the priest. "Gillespie is as flabby as dough from an illness. 'Tis here you sit quiet, and help with Miriam as ye'd save y'r soul! Howld down with y'r bouncing nonsense, lad, and the saints be with ye; for it's a fight there'll be, and there is the fightin' stuff of a soldier in ye! Never turn to me--mind ye never turn to help me, or the curse of the fool be on y'r head--and the Lord be with us!" "Amen." But I spoke to vacancy. While a rising wind set the branches overhead grating noisily, he had risen and darted away. Louis Laplante, contrary to the priest's orders, also rose and disappeared in the woods. Little Fellow still lay by me, but I could not rely on him for intelligent action, and there came over me that sense of aloneness in danger, which I knew so well in the Mandane country. The child's slightest cry might alarm the camp, and I shivered when he breathed heavily, or turned in his sleep. The Indians might miss the boy and search the woods. Instinctively my hand was on my pistol. It was well to be as near Miriam's tent as possible; and I, too, took advantage of the wind to change my place. I moved back, signalling the Indian to follow, and skirted round the open till I was directly opposite Miriam's wigwam. Why had Louis gone off, and why did he not come back? Had he gone to keep secret guard over the priest, or to decoy the vigilant Sioux woman? In his intentions I had confidence enough, but not in his judgment. At that moment my speculations were interrupted by a loud shout from the beach. Every Indian in camp started up as if hostiles had uttered their war-cry. "Hallo, there! Hallo! Hallo!" called the priest. Indians dashed to the river, while bedraggled squaws and naked children rushed from wigwams and stood in clamorous groups between the lodges and the water. The topmost branches of the trees swayed back and forward in the wind, alternately throwing shafts of moonlight and shadows across the opening of Miriam's wigwam. When the light flooded the tent a solitary, white-faced form appeared in dark, sharp outline. The bare arms were tied at the wrists, and beat aimlessly through the darkness. And there was a sound of piteous weeping. Should I make the final, desperate dash now? "Don't bungle His plans," came the priest's warning; and I waited. The squaws were very near; and the angular figure of Diable's wife hung on the rear of the group. She was scolding like a termagant in the Sioux tongue, ordering the other women to the fray; but still she kept back, looking over her shoulder suspiciously at Miriam's tent, uncertain whether to go or stay. We had failed in every other attempt to rescue Miriam. If the Lord--as the priest believed--had planned the sufferer's aid, His instruments had blundered badly. There must be no more feeble-fingering. "Thieves! Thieves! Cut-throats!" bawled Father Holland in a storm of abuse. "Ye rascals," he thundered, cutting the air with his stick and purposely backing away from the camp to draw the Indians off. Then his voice was lost in a chorus of shrill screams. The moonlight shone across the wigwam opening. The captive had heard the English tongue, and was listening. But the Sioux squaw had also heard and recognized the voice of a former prisoner. She ran forward a pace, then hesitated, looking back doubtfully. As she turned her head, out from the gloom of the thicket with the leap of a lynx, lithe and swift, sprang the crouching form of Louis Laplante. I felt Little Fellow all in a tremor by my side; the tremor not of fear, but of the couchant panther; and he uttered the most vicious snarl I have ever heard from human throat. Louis alighted neatly and noiselessly, directly behind the Sioux woman. She must have felt his presence, for she turned round and round expectantly. Louis, silent and elusive as a shadow, circled about her, tripping from side to side as she turned her head. But the fire betrayed him. She had wheeled towards the forest as if spying for the unseen presence among the foliage, and Louis deftly dodged behind. The move put him between the fire and his antagonist, and the full profile of his queer, bending figure was shadowed clear past the woman. She turned like some vengeful, malign goddess, and I thought it all up with the daring trapper; but he doffed his red toque and swept the advancing fury the low bow of a French courtier. Then he drew himself erect and laughed insolently in the woman's face. His careless assurance allayed her suspicions. "Oh, 'tis you!" she growled. "'Tis I, fleet-foot, winged messenger, humble slave," laughed Louis, with another grotesque bow; but the rogue had cleverly put himself between the squaw and Miriam's tent. I should have rushed to Miriam's rescue long since, instead of watching this by-play between trapper and mountain cat; but as the foray waxed hotter with the priest, the young braves had run back to their tents for guns and clubs. "Stand off, ye scoundrels," roared the priest, in tones of genuine anger; for the Indians were closing threateningly about him. "Stand back, ye knaves, ye sons of Satan," and every soul but Louis Laplante and the Sioux squaw ran with querulous shouts to the river. "Cruel! Cruel! Cruel!" sobbed a voice from the wigwam; and there was a straining to break the thongs which bound her. "Cruel! Cruel! Hast Thou no pity? O my God! Hast Thou no pity? Shall not a sparrow fall to the ground without Thy knowledge? Is this Thy pity? O my God!" The voice broke in a torrent of heart-piercing cries. I could endure it no longer. "Have at ye, ye villains! Come out like men! Now, me brave bhoys, show the stuff that's in ye! A fig for y'r valor if ye fail! The curse o' the Lord on the coward heart! Back with ye; ye red divils! Out with ye, Rufus! The Lord shall deliver the captive! What, 'an wuld ye dare strike a servant o' the Lord? Let the deliverer appear, I say," he shouted, weaving in commands to us as he dealt stout blows about him and receded down the river bank. "Take that--and that--and that," I heard him shout, with a rat-tat-too of sharp thuds from the staff accompanying each word. Then I knew the quarrel on the beach was at its height; and Louis Laplante was still foiling the Sioux's approach to Miriam's wigwam like a deft fencer. "Follow me, Little Fellow," I commanded. "Have your knife ready," and I had not finished speaking when three shrill whistles came from Louis. 'Twas his old-time signal of danger. Above the hubbub at the river the Sioux squaw was screaming to the braves. Bounding from concealment, I tore off the layer roofing of the wigwam, plunged through the tapering pole frame, shaking the frail lean-to like a house of cards, and was beside Miriam. Again I heard Louis' whistle and again the squaw's angry scream; but Little Fellow had followed on my heels and stood with knife-blade glittering bare at the tent-entrance. "Hush," I whispered, slashing my dagger through the thongs around her hands and cutting the rope that held her to the central stake. "We've found you at last. Come! Come!" and I caught her up. "O my God!" she cried. "At last! At last! Where is the child? They have taken little Eric!" "We have him safe! His father is waiting! Don't hesitate, Miriam!" "Run, Little Fellow," I ordered, "Across the camp. Get the child," and I sprang from the wigwam, which crashed to the ground behind me. I had thought to save skirting the woods by a run across the camping-ground; but when my Indian dashed for the child and the Sioux saw me undefended with the white woman in my arms, she made a desperate lunge at Laplante and called at the top of her voice for the braves. Louis, with weapons in hand, still kept between the fury and Miriam; but I think his French chivalry must have been restraining him. Though the Sioux offered him many opportunities and was doing her best to sheathe a knife in his heart, he seemed to refrain from using either dagger or pistol. An insolent laugh was on his face. The life-and-death game which he was playing was to his daring spirit something novel and amusing. "The lady is--perturbed," he laughed, dodging a thrust at his neck; "she fences wide, tra-la," this as the barrel of his pistol parried a drive of her knife; "she hits afar--ho--ho--not so fast, my fury--not so furious, my fair--zipp, ha--ha--ha--another miss--another miss--the lady's a-miss," for the squaw's weapon struck fire against his own. "Look out for the braves, have a care," I shouted; for a dozen young bucks were running up behind to the woman's aid. "Ha--ha---_prenez garde_--my tiger-cat has kittens," he laughed; and he looked over his shoulder. That backward look gave the fury her opportunity. In the firelight blue steel flashed bright. The Frenchman reeled, threw up his arms, and fell. One sharp, deep, broken draw of breath, and with a laugh on his lips, Louis Laplante died as he had lived. Then the tiger-cat leaped over the dead form at Miriam and me. What happened next I can no more set down consecutively than I can distinguish the parts in a confused picture with a red-eyed fury striking at me, naked Indians brandishing war-clubs, flashes of powder smoke, a circle of gesticulating, screeching dark faces in the background, my Indian fighting like a very fiend, and a pale-faced woman with a little curly-headed boy at her feet standing against the woods. "Run, _Monsieur_; I keep bad Indians off," urged Little Fellow. "Run--save white squaw and papoose--run, _Monsieur_." Now, whatever may be said to the contrary, however brave two men may be, they cannot stand off a horde of armed savages. I let go my whole pistol-charge, which sent the red demons to a distance and intended dashing for the woods, when the Sioux woman put her hand in her pocket and hurled a flint head at Little Fellow. The brave Indian sprang aside and the thing fell to the ground. With it fell a crumpled sheet of paper. I heard rather than saw Little Fellow's crouching leap. Two forms rolled over and over in the camp ashes; and with Miriam on my shoulder and the child under the other arm, I had dashed into the thicket of the upper ground. Overhead tossed the trees in a swelling wind, and up from the shore rushed the din of wrangling tongues, screaming and swearing in a clamor of savage wrath. The wind grew more boisterous as I ran. Behind the Indian cries died faintly away; but still with a strength not my own, always keeping the river in view, and often mistaking the pointed branches, which tore clothing and flesh from head to feet, for the hands of enemies--I fled as if wolves had been pursuing. Again and again sobbed Miriam--"O, my God! At last! At last! Thanks be to God! At last! At last!" We were on a hillock above our camp. Putting Miriam down, I gave her my hand and carried the child. When I related our long, futile search and told her that Eric was waiting, agitation overcame her, and I said no more till we were within a few feet of the tents. "Please wait." I left her a short distance from the camp that I might go and forewarn Eric. Frances Sutherland met me in the way and read the news which I could not speak. "Have you--oh--have you?" she asked. "Who is that?" and she pointed to the child in my arms. "Where's Hamilton? Where's your father?" I demanded, trembling from exhaustion and all undone. "Mr. Hamilton is in his tent priming a gun. Father is watching the river. And oh, Rufus! is it really so?" she cried, catching, sight of Miriam's stooped, ragged figure. Then she darted past me. Both her arms encircled Miriam, and the two began weeping on each other's shoulders after the fashion of women. I heard a cough inside Hamilton's tent. Going forward, I lifted the canvas flap and found Eric sitting gloomily on a pile of robes. "Eric," I cried, in as steady a voice as I command, which indeed, was shaking sadly, and I held the child back that Hamilton might not see, "Eric, old man, I think at last we've run the knaves down." "Hullo!" he exclaimed with a start, not knowing what I had said. "Are you men back? Did you find out anything?" "Why--yes," said I: "we found this," and I signalled Frances to bring Miriam. This was no way to prepare a man for a shock that might unhinge reason; but my mind had become a vacuum and the warm breath of the child nestling about my neck brought a mist before my eyes. "What did you say you had found?" asked Hamilton, looking up from his gun to the tent-way; for the morning light already smote through the dark. "This," I said, lifting the canvas a second time and drawing Miriam forward. I could but place the child in her arms. She glided in. The flap fell. There was the smothered outcry of one soul--rent by pain. "Miriam--Miriam--my God--Miriam!" "Come away," whispered a choky voice by my side, and Frances linked her arm through mine. Then the tent was filled and the night air palpitated with sounds of anguished weeping. And with tears raining from my eyes, I hastened away from what was too sacred for any ear but a pitying God's. That had come to my life which taught me the depths of Hamilton's suffering. "Dearest," said I, "now we understand both the pain and the joy of loving," and I kissed her white brow. CHAPTER XXIX THE PRIEST JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY Again the guest-chamber of the Sutherland home was occupied. How came it that a Catholic priest lay under a Protestant roof? How comes it that the new west ever ruthlessly strips reality naked of creed and prejudice and caste, ever breaks down the barrier relics of a mouldering past, ever forces recognition of men as individuals with individual rights, apart from sect and class and unmerited prerogatives? The Catholic priest was wounded. The Protestant home was near. Manhood in Protestant garb recognized manhood in Roman cassock. Necessity commanded. Prejudice obeyed as it ever obeys in that vast land of untrameled freedom. So Father Holland was cared for in the Protestant home with a tenderness which Mr. Sutherland would have repudiated. For my part, I have always thanked God for that leveling influence of the west. It pulls the fools from high places and awards only one crown--merit. It was Little Fellow who had brought Father Holland, wounded and insensible, from the Sioux camp. "What of Louis Laplante's body, Little Fellow?" I asked, as soon as I had seen all the others set out for the settlement with Father Holland lying unconscious in the bottom of the canoe. "The white man, I buried in the earth as the white men do--deep in the clay to the roots of the willow, so I buried the Frenchman," answered the Indian. "And the squaw, I weighted with stones at her feet; for they trod on the captives. And with stones I weighted her throat, which was marked like the deer's when the mountain cat springs. With the stones at her throat and her feet, the squaw, I rolled into the water." "What, Little Fellow," I cried, remembering how I had seen him roll over and over through the camp-fire, with his hands locked on the Sioux woman's throat, "did you kill the daughter of L'Aigle?" "Non, _Monsieur_; Little Fellow no bad Indian. But the squaw threw a flint and the flint was poison, and my hands were on her throat, and the squaw fell into the ashes, and when Little Fellow arose she was dead. Did she not slay La Robe Noire? Did she not slay the white man before Monsieur's eyes? Did she not bind the white woman? Did she not drag me over the ground like a dead stag? So my fingers caught hard in her throat, and when I arose she lay dead in the ashes. So I fled and hid till the tribe left. So I shoved her into the water and pushed her under, and she sank like a heavy rock. Then I found the priest." I had no reproaches to offer Little Fellow. He had only obeyed the savage instincts of a savage race, exacting satisfaction after his own fashion. "The squaw threw a flint. The flint was poison. Also the squaw threw this at Little Fellow, white man's paper with signs which are magic," and the Indian handed me the sheet, which had fallen from the woman's pocket as she hurled her last weapon. Without fear of the magic so terrifying to him, I took the dirty, crumpled missive and unfolded it. The superscription of Quebec citadel was at the top. With overwhelming revulsion came memory of poor Louis Laplante lying at the camp-fire in the gorge tossing a crumpled piece of paper wide of the flames, where the Sioux squaw surreptitiously picked it up. The paper was foul and tattered almost beyond legibility; but through the stains I deciphered in delicate penciling these words: "In memory of last night's carouse in Lower Town, (one favor deserves another, you know, and I got you free of that scrape), spike the gun of my friend the enemy. If R-f-s G--p--e, E. H--l-t-n, J--k MacK, or any of that prig gang come prying round your camp for news, put them on the wrong track. I owe the whole ---- ---- set a score. Pay it for me, and we'll call the loan square." No name was signed; but the scene in the Quebec club three years before, when Eric had come to blows with Colonel Adderly, explained not only the authorship but Louis' treachery. 'Tis the misfortune of errant rogues like poor Louis that to get out of one scrape ever involves them in a worse. Now I understood the tumult of contradictory emotions that had wrought upon him when I had saved his life and he had resolved to undo the wrong to Miriam. Little Fellow put the small canoe to rights, and I had soon joined the others at the Sutherland homestead. But for two days the priest lay as one dead, neither moaning nor speaking. On the morning of the third, though he neither opened his eyes nor gave sign of recognition, he asked for bread. Then my heart gave a great bound of hope--for surely a man desiring food is recovering!--and I sent Frances Sutherland to him and went out among the trees above the river. That sense of resilient relief which a man feels on discharging an impossible task, or throwing off too heavy a burden, came over me. Miriam was rescued, the priest restored, and I dowered with God's best gift--the love of a noble, fair woman. Hard duty's compulsion no longer spurred me; but my thoughts still drove in a wild whirl. There was a glassy reflection of a faded moon on the water, and daybreak came rustling through the trees which nodded and swayed overhead. A twittering of winged things arose in the branches, first only the cadence of a robin's call, an oriole's flute-whistle, the stirring wren's mellow note. Then, suddenly, out burst from the leafed sprays a chorus of song that might have rivaled angels' melodies. The robin's call was a gust of triumph. The oriole's strain lilted exultant and a thousand throats gushed out golden notes. "Now God be praised for love and beauty and goodness--and above all--for Frances--for Frances," were the words that every bird seemed to be singing; though, indeed, the interpretation was only my heart's response. I know not how it was, but I found myself with hat off and bowed head, feeling a gratitude which words could not frame--for the splendor of the universe and the glory of God. "Rufus," called a voice more musical to my ear than any bird song; and Frances was at my side with a troubled face. "He's conscious and talking, but I can't understand what he means. Neither can Miriam and Eric. I wish you would come in." I found the priest pale as the pillows against which he leaned, with glistening eyes gazing fixedly high above the lintel of the door. Miriam, with her snow-white hair and sad-lined face, was fanning the air before him. At the other side stood Eric with the boy in his arms. Mr. Sutherland and I entered the room abreast. For a moment his wistful gaze fell on the group about the bed. First he looked at Eric and the child, then at Miriam, and from Miriam to me, then back to the child. The meaning of it all dawned, gleamed and broke in full knowledge upon him; and his face shone as one transfigured. "The Lord was with us," he muttered, stroking Miriam's white hair. "Praise be to God! Now I can die in peace----" "No, you can't, Father," I cried impetuously. "Ye irriverent ruffian," he murmured with a flash of old mirth and a gentle pressure of my hand. "Ye irriverent ruffian. Peace! Peace! I die in peace," and again the wistful eyes gazed above the door. "Rufus," he whispered softly, "where are they taking me?" "Taking you?" I asked in surprise; but Frances Sutherland's finger was on her lips, and I stopped myself before saying more. "Troth, yes, lad, where are they taking me? The northern tribes have heard not a word of the love of the Lord; and I must journey to a far, far country." At that the boy set up some meaningless child prattle. The priest heard him and listened. "Father," asked the child in the language of Indians when referring to a priest, "Father, if the good white father goes to a far, far away, who'll go to northern tribes?" "And a little child shall lead them," murmured the priest, thinking he, himself, had been addressed and feeling out blindly for the boy. Eric placed the child on the bed, and Father Holland's wasted hands ran through the lad's tangled curls. "A little child shall lead them," he whispered. "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation. A light to lighten the Gentiles--and a little child shall lead them." Then I first noticed the filmy glaze, as of glass, spreading slowly across the priest's white face. Blue lines were on his temples and his lips were drawn. A cold chill struck to my heart, like icy steel. Too well I read the signs and knew the summons; and what can love, or gratitude, do in the presence of that summons? Miriam's face was hidden in her hands and she was weeping silently. "The northern tribes know not the Lord and I go to a far country; but a little child shall lead them!" repeated the priest. "Indeed, Sir, he shall be dedicated to God," sobbed Miriam. "I shall train him to serve God among the northern tribes. Do not worry! God will raise up a servant----" But her words were not heeded by the priest. "Rufus, lad," he said, gazing afar as before, "Lift me up," and I took him in my arms. "My sight is not so good as it was," he whispered. "There's a dimness before my face, lad! Can _you_ see anything up there?" he asked, staring longingly forward. "Faith, now, what might they all be doing with stars for diadems? What for might the angels o' Heaven be doin' going up and down betwane the blue sky and the green earth? Faith, lad, 'tis daft ye are, a-changin' of me clothes! Lave the black gown, lad! 'Tis the badge of poverty and He was poor and knew not where to lay His head of a weary night! Lave the black gown, I say! What for wu'd a powr Irish priest be doin' a-wearin' of radiant white? Where are they takin' me, Rufus? Not too near the light, lad! I ask but to kneel at the Master's feet an' kiss the hem of His robe!" There was silence in the room, but for the subdued sobbing of Miriam. Frances had caught the priest's wrists in both her hands, and had buried her face on the white coverlet. With his back to the bed, Mr. Sutherland stood by the window and I knew by the heaving of his angular shoulders that flood-gates of grief had opened. There was silence; but for the hard, sharp, quick, short breathings of the priest. A crested bird hopped to the window-sill with a chirp, then darted off through the quivering air with a glint of sunlight from his flashing wings. I heard the rustle of morning wind and felt the priest's face growing cold against my cheek. "I must work the Master's work," he whispered, in short broken breaths, "while it is day--for the night cometh--when no man--can work.--Don't hold me back, lad--for I must go--to a far, far country--It's cold, cold, Rufus--the way is--rugged--my feet are slipping--slipping--give a hand--lad!--Praise to God--there's a resting-place--somewhere!--Farewell--boy--be brave--farewell--I may not come back soon--but I must--journey--to--a----far----far----" There was a little gasp for breath. His head felt forward and Frances sobbed out, "He is gone! He is gone!" And the warmth of pulsing life in the form against my shoulder gave place to the rigid cold of motionless death. "May the Lord God of Israel receive the soul of His righteous servant," cried Mr. Sutherland in awesome tones. With streaming eyes he came forward and helped me to lay the priest back. Then we all passed out from that chamber, made sacred by an invisible presence. * * * * * VALEDICTORY. 'Twas twenty years after Father Holland's death that a keen-eyed, dark-skinned, young priest came from Montreal on his way to Athabasca. This was Miriam's son. To-day it is he, the missionary famous in the north land, who passing back and forward between his lonely mission in the Athabasca and the headquarters of his order, comes to us and occupies the guest-chamber in our little, old-fashioned, vine-grown cottage. The retaking of Fort Douglas virtually closed the bitter war between Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Westers. To both companies the conflict had proved ruinous. Each was as anxious as the other for the terms of peace by which the great fur-trading rivals were united a few years after the massacre of Seven Oaks. So ended the despotic rule of gentlemen adventurers in the far north. The massacre turned the attention of Britain to this unknown land and the daring heroism of explorers has given place to the patient nation-building of multitudes who follow the pioneer. Such is the record of a day that is done. 
53885	----	book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) _A_ Gentleman _of_ COURAGE _Other Books by_ JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD The Alaskan The Country Beyond The River's End } _A Trilogy of the_ The Valley of Silent Men } _Three River_ The Flaming Forest } _Country_ God's Country, _The Trail to Happiness_ Baree, Son of Kazan The Courage of Captain Plum The Courage of Marge O'Doone The Danger Trail Flower of the North God's Country--and the Woman The Gold Hunters The Golden Snare The Great Lakes The Grizzly King The Honor of the Big Snows The Hunted Woman Isobel Kazan Nomads of the North Steele of the Royal Mounted The Wolf Hunters [Illustration: Frontispiece--_PETER_ was the same Peter, but now he was a man] _A_ Gentleman _of_ COURAGE _A Novel of the Wilderness_ _By_ JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD _With Illustrations by Robert W. Stewart_ [Illustration] COSMOPOLITAN BOOK CORPORATION NEW YORK MCMXXIV _Copyright, 1923, by International Magazine Company._ _Copyright, 1924, by International Magazine Company._ _Copyright, 1924, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York. All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian._ _Printed in the United States of America by_ J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK _The Illustrations consist of A Frontispiece and a Centerspread reproduced in Color from the Original Paintings by_ ROBERT W. STEWART _A_ Gentleman _of_ COURAGE _A_ Gentleman _of_ COURAGE CHAPTER I Pierre Gourdon had the love of God in his heart, a man's love for a man's God, and it seemed to him that in this golden sunset of a July afternoon the great Canadian wilderness all about him was whispering softly the truth of his faith and his creed. For Pierre was the son of a runner of the streams and forests, as that son's father had been before him, and love of adventure ran in his blood, and romance, too; so it was only in the wild and silent places that he felt the soul in him attuned to that fellowship with nature which the good teachers at Ste. Anne de Beaupré did not entirely approve. Nature was Pierre's God, and would ever be until he died. And though he had crept up the holy stair at Ste. Anne's on his knees, and had touched the consecrated water from the sacred font, and had looked with awe upon mountains of canes and crutches left by those who had come afflicted and doubting and had departed cured and believing, still he was sure that in this sunset of a certain July afternoon he was nearer to the God he desired than at any other time in all his life. Josette, his wife, slender and tired, her dark head bare in the fading sun, stood wistful and hoping at his side, praying gently that at last their long wanderings up the St. Lawrence and along this wilderness shore of Superior had come to an end, and that they might abide in this new paradise, and never travel again until the end of their days. Back of them, where a little stream ran out of the cool forest, a tireless boy quested on hands and knees in the ferns and green grass for wild strawberries, and though strawberry season was late his mouth was smeared red. The man said, pointing down, "It makes one almost think the big lake is alive, and a hand is reaching in for him." "Yes, they are Five Fingers of water reaching in from the lake," agreed Josette, seating herself wearily upon a big stone, "though it seems to me there should be only four fingers, and one thumb." And so the place came to be named, and through all the years that have followed since that day it has tenaciously clung to its birthright. The boy came to his mother, bringing her strawberries to eat; and the man, climbing a scarp of rock, made a megaphone of his hands and hallooed through it until an answering shout came from deep in the spruces and balsams, and a little later Dominique Beauvais came out to the edge of the slope, his whiskered face bright with expectancy, and with him his little wife Marie, panting hard to keep pace with his long legs. When they were together Pierre Gourdon made a wide and all-embracing sweep with his arms. "This will be a good place to live in," he said. "It is what we have been looking for." With enthusiasm Dominique agreed. The women smiled. Again they were happy. The boy was hunting for strawberries. He was always empty, this boy. Pierre Gourdon kissed his wife's smooth hair as they went back to the camp they had made two hours earlier in the day, and broke into a wild boat song which his grandfather had taught him on his knee in the wicked days before he had known Josette at Ste. Anne, and Dominique joined in heartily through his whiskers. The women's smiles were sweeter and their eyes brighter, for fatigue seemed to have run away from them now that their questing men-folk were satisfied and had given them a promise of home. That night, after supper, with their green birch camp-fire lighting up the blackness of the wilderness, they sat and made plans, and long after nine-year-old Joe had crawled into his blanket to sleep, and the women's eyes were growing soft with drowsiness, Pierre and Dominique continued to smoke pipefuls of tobacco and to build over and over the homes of their dreams. Young and happy, and overflowing with the adventurous enthusiasm of the race of _coureurs_ from which they had sprung, they saw themselves with the rising of another sun pitched into the heart of realities which they had anticipated for a long time; and when at last Josette fell asleep, her head pillowed close to her boy's, her red lips that had not lost their prettiness through motherhood and wandering were tender with a new peace and contentment. And a little later, while Pierre and Dominique still smoked and painted their futures, the moon rose over the forest-tops in a great golden welcome to the pioneers, and the wind came in softly and more coolly from the lake, and at the last, from far away, rose faintly a wilderness note that thrilled them--the cry of wolves. Dominique listened, and silently emptied the ash from his pipe into the palm of his hand. "Where wolves run there is plenty of game, and where there is game there is trapping," he said. And then came a sound which stopped the hearts of both for an instant, a deep and murmuring echo, faint and very far, that broke in a note of strange and vital music upon the stillness of the night. "A ship!" whispered Pierre. "Yes, a ship!" repeated Dominique, half rising to catch the last of the sound. For this was a night of forty years ago, when on the north shore of Superior the cry of wolves in the forest was commoner than the blast of a ship's whistle at sea. The pioneers slept. The yellow moon climbed up until it was straight overhead. Shadows in the deep forest moved like living things. The wolves howled, circled, came nearer, and stopped their cry where the kill was made. Mellow darkness trembled and thrilled with life. Silent-winged creatures came and disappeared like ghosts. Bright eyes watched the sleeping camp of the home seekers. A porcupine waddled through it, chuckling and complaining in his foolish way. A buck caught the scent of it, stamped his foot and whistled. There were whisperings in the tall, dark spruce tops. Caverns of darkness gave out velvety footfalls of life, and little birds that were silent in the day uttered their notes softly in the moon glow. A bar of this light lay across Josette's face, softening it and giving to its beauty a touch of something divine. The boy was dreaming. Pierre slept with his head pillowed in the crook of his arm. Dominique's whiskers were turned to the sky, bristling and fierce, as if he had taken this posture to guard against harm the tired little wife who lay at his side. So the night passed, and dawn came, wakening them with the morning chatter of a multitude of red squirrels in a little corner of the world as yet unspoiled by man. * * * * * That first day from which they began to measure their new lives the axes of Pierre and Dominique struck deep into the sweetly scented hearts of the cedar trees out of which they were to build their homes at Five Fingers. But first they looked more carefully into the prospects of their domain. The forest was back of them, a forest of high ridges and craggy ravines, of hidden meadows and swamps, a picturesque upheaval of wild country which reached for many miles from the Superior shore to the thin strip of settlement lands along the Canadian Pacific. Black and green and purple with its balsam, cedar and spruce, silver and gold with its poplar and birch, splashed red with mountain ash, its climbing billows and dripping hollows were radiantly tinted by midsummer sun--and darkly sullen and mysterious under cloud or storm. Out of these fastnesses, choked with ice and snow in winter, Pierre knew how the floods must come roaring in springtime, and his heart beat exultantly, for he loved the rush and thunder of streams, and the music of water among rocks. At the tip of the longest of the five inlets which broke like gouging fingers through the rock walls of the lake half a mile away they decided upon the sites for their cabins. Against those walls they could hear faintly the moaning of surf, never quite still even when there was no whisper of wind. But the long finger of water, narrow and twisted, as if broken at the joint, was a placid pool of green and silver over which the gulls floated, calling out their soft notes in welcome to the home builders, and in its white sand were the prints of many feet, both of birds and of beasts, who played and washed themselves there, and came down to drink. Between these two, the open and peaceful serenity of the inlet and the cool, still hiding-places of the forest, were the green meadowland and slopes and patches of level plain, a narrow strip of park-like beauty at the upper edge of which, in the very shadow of the forest, Pierre and Dominique struck off their plots and squared their angles, making ready for the logs in which the afternoon saw their axes buried. The days passed. Each dawn the red squirrel chorus greeted the rising sun; through hours that followed came the ring of steel and the freedom of voice which is born of love and home. Pierre sang, as his grandfather had sung long years ago, and Dominique bellowed like a baying hound when the chorus came. Women's laughter rose with the singing of the birds. Josette and Marie were girls again, and the boy was forever leading them to newly discovered strawberry patches hidden among the rocks and grass and ferns. It was a new thing for the wilderness, this invasion of human life, and for a long time it fell away from them, listening, frightened and subdued. But the birds and the red squirrels gave it courage, and softly it returned, curious and shy and friendly. The deer came down to drink again in the dusk, and moose rattled their antlers up the ridge. Pop-eyed whisky jacks began to eat bannock crumbs close to Josette's hands. Jays came nearer to scream their defiance, like wild Indians, in the tree-tops, and thrushes and warblers sang until their throats were ready to burst, and twenty times a day Pierre would pause in his labor and say, "This is going to be a fine place to live in, with the sea at our front door and the woods at our back." He called Superior "the sea," and twice in the first week they saw far out in its hazy vastness white and shimmering specks which were sailing ships. Log upon log the first of the cabins rose, until the roof was covered, and scarcely was it done when Josette and Marie were planting wild morning glories and crimson splashes of roses about it, and were digging in the dark, cool mold of birch and poplar thickets for violet roots, and out in the sheltered fens and meadow-dips for hyacinths and fire-flowers; and in the hour before dusk, when the day's work was over and supper was eaten, they would go hand in hand with their men-folk to study and ponder over the fertile patches of earth here and there where next spring they would plant potatoes and carrots and turnips and all the other fine things they had known back in the land of Ste. Anne. It was August when the two cabins were finished, small in dimensions but snug as dovecotes, and in the eyes of Josette and Marie grew a deeper and more serious look. For they were housewives again, with little to do with, but with a world full of endeavor and anticipation ahead of them. And it worried them to see that the fruits were ripening, red raspberries so thick the bears were turning into hulks of fat, black currants and saskatoons among the rocks, and all over the ridgesides great trees of wild plums and mountain ash berries, waiting for the first frosts to make them ready for preserves and jams. So Dominique, one day, set out to blaze a trail to the nearest settlement, thirty miles away; and thereafter their men-folk took turns, one and then the other, going with empty pack and returning with sixty pounds of burden, and berries were put into cans and dried and preserved--until Pierre and Dominique began to tease their wives and ask them if they wanted their husbands to turn into bears and sleep on their fat all winter. It was this banter which reminded Josette of candles, and in September they killed two bears and made several hundred of them. With the first frosts of autumn Pierre said even more frequently than before, "This is a fine place to live in," and Josette and Marie, seeing what the frosts were doing, rose each morning with new wonder and new joy in their eyes. For if these frosts were giving to the waters of the lake a colder and harder sheen, with something of menace and gloom about it, they were also painting the ridges and hollows and all the forest land as far as they could see with a glory of color which they had never known at Ste. Anne. Breath of winter came in the nights. Higher grew the great birch piles of firewood which Pierre and Dominique dragged close to the cabin doors, and very soon came the days when the carnival of autumn color was gone and all but the evergreen trees assumed the ragged distress of naked limbs and branches, and winds broke down fiercely over the wilderness, and the moan of the lake, beating against its rock walls, grew clearer and at times was a muffled and sullen roar half a mile away. But these changes were not frightening to Pierre and his people. Canadian winter was, after all, the heart of their lives; long months of adventure and thrill of deep snows and stinging blizzards on the trap lines, of red-hot stoves, and snug evenings at home telling the tales of the day, and appetites as keen as the winds that howled down from the north. This season, of all seasons, they would not have changed. It was then the wolf howl took on a new note, the foxes cried out hungrily at the edge of the clearing in the night. The call of the moose floated awesomely through the frost of still evenings, and the bears hunted their dens. One after another songbirds departed, leaving the whisky jacks and the jays behind, and the ravens gathered in flocks, while in the thickets and swamps the big snowshoe rabbits turned from brown to gray and from gray to white. All hunting things were astir, from the wolf and the fox and the little outlaw ermine to the owl and the dog-faced fisher-cat, and in November Pierre and Dominique dipped their traps in hot bear grease and prayed for the first snow. It came in the night, so quietly that none heard the breathless fall of it, and the world was white when little Joe got out of his bed at dawn to look at his rabbit snares in the edge of the timber. That was the beginning of their first winter at Five Fingers. It was a cold, dry winter, and there was never a day that a haunch of venison or moose meat was not hanging behind the cabins. Trapping was good, and the store of pelts grew as the weeks went on, until Pierre and Dominique both swore in the same breath that it was a paradise that they had found on this north shore of Superior, and each day they made new promises of what they would buy for Josette and Marie in the spring. The snow piled itself deeper, and the lake froze over. In January it was thirty degrees below zero. The white world, Josette called it, and at times they all played in it like children. There was Christmas, and then New Year's, and a birthday for Marie, and games and stories at night round the crackling stoves in the cabins. Pierre and Dominique built toboggans, and from the crest of the ridge where they had first looked down upon the Five Fingers they sped in wild races over the open and halfway across the snow-crusted ice of the middle finger. And yet when Dominique came in one day and said quite casually that he had heard the chirp of a brush warbler back in the big swamp Marie gave a little cry of delight and Josette's eyes grew suddenly bright. It meant spring. A day or two later Pierre said the coats of the snowshoe rabbits were turning rusty, which meant early spring. Then came discovery of the first bear track, the track of a foolish bear who had come out hungrily, like a woodchuck, only to hunt himself a den again when he saw his shadow freezing in the snow. After this there was more sun in the morning and less of the cold of sullen twilight each night, and before even the crust of the snow had begun to thaw Pierre brought in a poplar twig to show how the buds were swelling until they seemed ready to pop. "I have never seen them fatter," he said. "It means spring isn't far away." When the first robin came Josette told her husband she could already smell the perfume of flowers. He was a cold-footed and crabbed-looking bird, forlorn and disappointed at the world's chill aspect, and for a few minutes he sat humped up on the roof log and then flew away. This was the beginning. The snow began to thaw on the sunny sides of the slopes, and after that the change came swiftly. In April a steady and swelling murmur ran through the forests, the music of the gathering waters. Meadows and flats became flooded, little creeks changed suddenly into rushing torrents, lakes and ponds crept up over their sides, and the tiny stream which passed near the cabins, quiet and gentle in summertime, was all at once a riotous and quarrelsome outlaw, roaring and foaming in its mad rush down to the Middle Finger. Half a mile away was a larger stream whose flood sounds came to them like the distant roar of a cataract. It was glorious music, with something in it that stirred the blood of Pierre and his people like tonic and wine. Pierre, in his optimism and love of life, explained it all by saying, "It is good to have a long, cold winter that we may fully enjoy the spring." The birds seemed to return in a night and a day--robins perky and glad to get back from the lazy southland, thrushes and catbirds and a dozen kinds of little brown warblers and brush sparrows whose voices were sweetest of all the spring songsters. The earth itself began to breathe with swelling roots and tips of green; the first flowers popped up; the poplar buds exploded into fuzzy leaves, and Pierre and Dominique worked from morning until night, clearing the patches they were to plant this year, and spading up the rich, dark soil. It was about this time Pierre gave voice to a thought which had been growing in his head all winter. He was standing with Josette at the tip of the green ridge from which they had first looked down upon Five Fingers. "Ste. Anne was never as fine as this, _chérie_," he said. "No, not even before the woods were cut," agreed Josette. He took her hand and held it softly in his own, and Josette laid her cheek against his shoulder so that his lips could touch her smooth hair. Pierre always liked it that way. "I have been having a dream," he said, his voice a little queer because of its secret, and because he knew how its confession would thrill the one at his side, "and I have said nothing about it, but have done much thinking. Would not a little church look pretty down there, just where the tip of the evergreen forest reaches to the Middle Finger?" "A church!" whispered Josette, her heart giving a sudden swift beat. "Yes, a church," chuckled Pierre softly. "And over there, in that green bit of meadow--what a place for a home for our old friend Poleon Dufresne, and Sara, and all the children. And there is room for the Clamarts, too, and Jean Croisset and his wife. It is a big land, with plenty of fur and game and good rich soil underfoot, and I have thought it is not right to keep it all to ourselves, _douce amie_." From the door of her cabin some distance away Marie Beauvais wondered just why it was that Josette threw her arms so suddenly round her husband's neck and kissed him. And Pierre, with a heart full of happiness, little guessed that with the fulfilment of his dreams would come tragedy into the wilderness paradise at Five Fingers. CHAPTER II It was five years later that Simon McQuarrie and Herman Vogelaar came to Five Fingers. They were a queer but lovable combination. Simon was a Scotchman, tall and spare, with a thin face which seldom broke into a smile and which had the appearance of being made of flint. His companion was a Dutchman, short and round as a dumpling, with a pink, smooth face, light blue eyes and a great habit of puffing when he exerted himself a little, which came, Simon said, from overeating. They had been boys together more than thirty years ago in a little Ontario town, and now they were partners, timber-looking, prospecting and bartering and saving a little money as the years went on. Herman was a widower, and his only daughter, Geertruda, had married Jeremie Poulin back in Quebec, and Jeremie was a cousin of the Clamarts and lived now at Five Fingers. It was Herman's first visit. He had come to see the new baby and had brought Simon along with him. The instant Simon's shrewd eyes came upon the clearing and the little settlement, with the fingers of water reaching in from the big lake, he began having thoughts which he did not at once announce to Herman. The years had brought changes to Five Fingers. The single-room cabins which Pierre and Dominique had built were gone, and in their places stood larger buildings of clean-cut and nicely squared logs, with flowers and garden plots around them, and rows of smooth stones painted white. Josette, now almost forty, was still slim and pretty, and Pierre was more than ever her lover, in spite of a great disappointment which he kept shut up in his own heart. He wanted children. His love for them was a passion, but for him stalwart young Joe, now fourteen years old, was the first and the last. Pierre had implicit faith in prayer, and ever since that first summer at Five Fingers he had prayed devoutly that God might send more children. And God answered, though somewhere there was a slip that puzzled Pierre, for the more he prayed the more children came to Dominique and Marie. First there was a pair of them, Louis and Julie, then three singles as regularly as could be--Aimé and Félipe and Dominique--and with each one of them Marie grew plumper and jollier and began questing about in her head for a name to be given the next. But Pierre was happy, for if they were not entirely his own there were at least children all about him. Poleon and Sara Dufresne had come with three children and had built their cabin a stone's throw away; Jeremie and Geertruda had a baby, and at the edge of the green bit of meadow which he had pointed out to Josette five years ago were the homes of Jean Croisset and Telesphore Clamart, and Aleck Clamart was courting Anne Croisset. With Pierre he was secretly making plans for a home the following year, after one more season of trapping. And right at the tip of the evergreen forest, where Pierre had promised, was the little log church in which they gathered each Sunday, and to which Father Albanel, a wandering minister of the forests, came once and sometimes twice a month. As the population had grown, so had the clearing expanded. There were a good dozen acres or more under careful tillage, and in the open were cattle and several horses, and in every wild meadow for miles about a stack of harvested hay in season. There were chickens and geese and a community flock of turkeys, and at all seasons plenty of eggs and milk and cream and the sweet butter, and the dug-out cellars were filled to the brim with good things to eat when the first cold blasts of winter came. Pierre and Aleck had built a boat, and the six families had combined in the purchase of two nets, so there was no lack of fish either winter or summer at Five Fingers. For two winters, much against his desire, young Joe had been sent back over the new Canadian Pacific to attend school at Ste. Anne. Simon McQuarrie made note of all these things with the judgment of a fox and the keenness of a weasel. No one would have judged Simon for what he really was, at least not on short acquaintance. In him was a heart so honest he would have cut off a little finger before taking a mean advantage of any other man or woman. But, as Herman put it, he was always looking around to see what he could pick up. Herman furnished the laughter, the jollity, the never-ending good humor and four-fifths of the stomach of the partnership, and Simon was the ferret who smelled out the dollars; so when Simon said one day, "I never knew a better place than this for a little mill, Herman," the proud grandfather of baby Tobina knew something was in the air. First of all, with his native shrewdness, Simon took stock of the happiness at Five Fingers. This contentment, the community affection which brought all together like members of one family, was a big asset in the very beginning. The mill itself could be made a sort of family affair, and a boat arranged for twice or three times a year to run up from Duluth or Fort William and carry away the lumber. There was enough fine birch and cedar and spruce right about them to keep going for years, and the mill would bring even greater prosperity than trapping, which was sure to wear out now that the settlements were filling up rapidly along the line of the railroad. At last he talked over the matter with Pierre, and Pierre called in Dominique, and there was a meeting of all the men-folk of the families at which it was agreed nothing could be finer for Five Fingers than a mill. Simon promised the first thing to be made from its lumber should be a schoolhouse, and they would have to see to it the schoolhouse had a teacher, for if Dominique and Jeremie and Poleon kept up the pace they were going there surely must be teaching at Five Fingers. This was on Saturday. The next day Father Albanel came, a little, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked man who loved life and all living things, and who had no settled church because he saw in nature a greater God than he had ever been able to find in the Book written by man, a freedom of thought which had been labeled heresy by those who traveled the old and unchangeable paths. But Father Albanel was loved by every man, woman and child who knew him, and while his stricter brethren chanted and prayed in their vaulted cathedrals and little mission houses, his Church was ten thousand square miles of forest land. And on this Sunday Father Albanel prayed that Simon McQuarrie might be able to keep his promises. So the mill came. There was not much to it, but when on a certain September afternoon a tug and a scow came creeping up the middle inlet every soul in Five Fingers was down to meet them, and every heart was beating with the biggest excitement that had ever come into the lives of Pierre and his people. With the tug came Simon McQuarrie, proud as an admiral in command of a fleet, and with him a Norwegian engineer and his wife, two mill-hands, and a sallow-faced, anemic-looking young man who was to teach Jeremie Poulin's children and Dominique's kindergarten during the winter for fifteen dollars a month and board. The mill was set up, with only pieces of tarpaulin for roof at first. Axes rang merrily in the woods, and the three horses at Five Fingers dragged in the logs at the ends of chains. Even the women were excited, and the children waited eagerly for the set day when smoke would pour from the tall boiler stack and the saws would begin to hum and grind. This happened on the fifth day, and when at last steam was up, and the long belt began to turn, and the big, shining saw to whirl, there rose a great hurrah, and even Baby Tobina waved her tiny fists and crowed as loudly as she could. Then the sharp teeth of the saw touched the end of the first log, and there came the first of that beautiful, droning song--the song of live steel cutting through sweet wood--which was to last for many years at Five Fingers, and which may be heard at times to this very day. No one, not even his sweetheart wife, Josette, was permitted to look deeply and completely into the heart of Pierre. As time passed he saw his beloved forest dragged in, a log at a time, to be cut into pieces by that droning, merciless saw. He watched the life's blood of the timber pile up in great golden heaps of sweet-smelling sawdust in which the growing children loved to play, and down on the shore he saw his wilderness garnered in huge piles of boards, waiting for the little black tugs to come in and drag them away. He knew that it was all as it should be, for new prosperity came with the mill, more comforts and happiness for the women and children, and a few more people to Five Fingers. This was progress. Yet an ache was in his heart which he kept to himself, and which would never quite die away. For with a passion next to his love for children he loved his forests, and with him every tree was a word of God. Yet he would not have changed conditions, for he knew it was himself who was wrong. Everything told him that. Even the wild things seemed to love this more intimate companionship with man, for the birds and squirrels were never more numerous about Five Fingers. They sang and chattered with the music of the mill, ran over the roofs of the houses and built their nests under the eaves, and in winter came to the very doorsteps to eat crumbs and grain thrown out for them. It was Pierre whose word was unwritten law at Five Fingers. One of his laws was that no living thing that was not a pest should ever be harmed near the settlement, and when ice and snow were heavy in the hills and between the ridges deer came out shyly to eat with the cattle. Pierre went no more on the trap line but attended to the business of the mill, and Josette pleased him by saying this made her happiness complete. In spare hours one could always find children about him, and in the evenings, when the droning of the mill saw had ceased, there were games and races and fun among the sawdust piles, and never a day passed that the home of Pierre and Josette was not filled with childish laughter and the patter of little feet, although the little girl they prayed for never came to bear their name. "But she will," said Pierre, keeping up that undying hope in his heart. "Some day, my Josette, there will come a little girl to be a sister to Joe." Even Joe, his one child, seemed to be getting farther away from him, for as time passed the boy needed no urging to return to Ste. Anne, but was restless and ill at ease when back home from school, and was excited when the day drew near that would take him from Five Fingers again. He was eighteen when Josette learned his secret, and she laughed softly, and kissed him, and told Pierre so that he would not worry any more. The girl was none other than Marie Antoinette, the beautiful little daughter of Jacques Thiebout, whom they had known years ago on the St. Lawrence. She was a year younger than Joe, and had told him he must wait until she had finished completely with the school of Ste. Anne de la Perade, for that was her ambition, and her father's, too. Then she would come with him to Five Fingers. Tears of joy filled Pierre's eyes the night Josette whispered the secret to him, for if the little girl they both wanted persisted in not coming they would at least have grandsons and granddaughters to make up for it. "And it may be this is the answer to my prayers," Pierre said to himself. "For Joe's children will be of our own flesh and blood, and we shall love Marie Antoinette as our own. And as Joe is younger and stronger than Dominique, who is growing fat, I do not see why he should fall behind him in the matter of family." Few changes came to Five Fingers as the years rolled on. The little mill continued to hum and the axes to ring farther and farther back in the forest, and twice or three times in a season the boat came up with loads of supplies and carried away the lumber. Not a single year did the stork fail to build his nest somewhere about the sawdust piles. Twice he visited Aleck Clamart, who married Anne Croisset; two little Dutchmen he brought to Geertruda Poulin, and there were nine pairs of feet to shoe in the home of Dominique and Marie when young Joe Gourdon brought Marie Antoinette to Five Fingers as his wife. The mill did not run that day, for it was a day of feasting and rejoicing, and all the world held no prouder monarch than Joe. Marie Antoinette, tall and slim, with her great dark eyes, her glad smile and her outreaching arms of love for the people who had now become her own, was as sweet and beautiful as his mother had been in the days of her youth. And Pierre, in his joy, found in her a rival, for the children gathered round her in dumb worship, and in her pretty arms Marie Antoinette gathered every one, kissing each in turn, even to bashful Louis, the eldest son of Dominique. And when, in their cabin, she flung those same pretty arms around Josette's neck and called her Mother, Pierre winked hard and went outside to puff at his pipe, for he felt like a boy who wanted to cry. God had been good to him. God had blessed Five Fingers. In the going down of the sun his eyes rested upon a green slope where no plow had touched and no cabin had been built. Religiously that sacred little plot had been held for the time when death might find its way among them. And death had not come. Gratitude welled up in Pierre's heart and choked him--gratitude and pride and faith, for all this was the handiwork of the great and good God he believed in, the God of his forests, the open, the sun and the sky. And the thought came to him that when at last there was a break in the little green slope it was only right that he should be the first to go, for God had filled his measure to the brim, and it seemed to him he could hear the whisper of a message from the violets and red roses of that little knoll in the setting of the sun. Marie Antoinette, coming to him so quietly he did not hear, put her little hand in his and whispered, "It is beautiful here, my father!" CHAPTER III As long as men remain to tell the story of the Inland Seas the great autumn storm of 1900 will not be forgotten. It has been set down as a matter of history, and a hundred tales could be told of the ships that went down and the men who died in those days when the Five Lakes were like five mighty churns, whipping and tossing their waters in maelstroms of destruction. It was not cold. A part of the time the sun shone brightly, and back in the woods from the Superior shore birds sang, and flowers still bloomed. To Pierre and his people this was of strange and mysterious portent, for though they had seen many storms at Five Fingers there had never been one like this, with that terrific roar of enraged waters against rock walls and birds preening themselves and chirping in the sunshine of the forest. On the second day Pierre took Josette and Marie Antoinette down to the tip of the wooded peninsula that lay between the Second and Middle Finger that they might see the lake as they had never seen it before. It was fun for the women. The wind choked them at times, and they had to scream to be heard, and it whipped their long hair loose until they were like panting naiads, clinging to Pierre's hands, their eyes shining and their hearts thrilled with the excitement of the adventure. Pierre, laughing, told Josette she was as lovely as a girl with her shining hair all about her in a windblown tangle and her cheeks as pink and soft as Marie Antoinette's. But he was only half heard, for the seas were roaring among the rocks below them like the steady thunder of countless guns. When they came out of the last rim of sheltering spruce and looked beyond the black and dripping rampart of rock that held back the raging waters Josette clung to him in sudden fear, and Marie Antoinette gave a cry that cut like a knife above the wind. Pierre's heart went dead and still as he stared gray-faced out to sea. There was a twist on his lips where laughter suddenly died. Out from the shore lay an entanglement of reef and rock, jutting up like great heads of sea-monsters in the quiet and calm of summer, a resting-place for gulls, and strangely quiet and beautiful at times when the water rippled between them in wide paths of green silver. Through this network of waiting traps ran the channel in which the tug made her way to and from the Middle Finger. But there was no channel today. It was lost in a fury of thundering flood, lashing itself into ribbons, and among the rocks, half a mile from where Pierre and his women stood, a ship was beating herself to pieces. In his first moment of horror Pierre knew they had come just in time to see the end. She was a schooner of possibly three hundred tons, and had plunged broadside upon the long, low reef which Josette herself had named the Dragon because of the jagged teeth of rock which rose from it like the spines of a huge fin. Her tall masts were gone. A mass of wreckage tangled her deck, and Pierre fancied that even above the roar of the surf he could hear the crash of her rending timbers as she rose and fell in mighty sledge-hammer blows upon the reef. As he waited, struck dumb with horror, the vessel was raised half out of the sea, and when she fell back her stern split asunder and the foaming water engulfed her until only her bow was held up by the projecting spines of the Dragon. Marie Antoinette cried out again, and her face was waxlike in its fear and horror, for very clearly in that moment they saw a moving figure in the bow of the ship. In an instant the figure was inundated and gone. Life leaped back into Pierre. "If any live they may sweep into this pit of the Middle Finger," he shouted. "We must help them." Then he turned to Marie Antoinette and placed his mouth close to her ear. "Go back," he cried. "Go back and bring help as swiftly as you can!" Scarcely were the words spoken when Marie Antoinette was gone with the quickness of a bird, her long hair streaming about her like a veil as she ran. Pierre looked at Josette. She was not frightened now. Her face was white and calm and her eyes were pools of steady fire. She was looking on death. She could almost hear the cries of death. Her glance met Pierre's, and her lips moved, but he did not hear her words. It was then, looking again toward what little remained of the schooner, that they saw something sweeping in toward them among the nearer reefs. It came swiftly, now almost submerged, then popping up for an instant, and was swept at last upon a rock where the waters split like a mill race at the very edge of the smoother sea that ran through the mouth of the Middle Finger. "It is a raft," shouted Pierre, "and someone is on it!" Josette's cry rose shrill and piercing: "_It is a woman!_" They could see the figure flung upon the rock, with a hand clutching at its slippery sides, and Pierre's breath came in a sudden gasp of despair when he saw it was a woman. Her face was a ghost's face in the surf mist, and her drenched hair streamed upon the rock as the water ebbed away. She seemed to see them as they stood at the cliff edge, and Pierre thought he heard her voice rise faintly above the thunder of the water, crying out for her life. He turned and ran to a ragged break in the cliff and climbed down swiftly to the narrow shore line at the edge of the Finger, shouting for Josette to remain where she was. But Josette was close behind him when he began tearing off his clothes. She was terribly white. Blood streaked one of her soft cheeks where she had stumbled against a sharp-edged rock coming down. But her eyes were filled with a strange and unchanging fire, and she fell upon her knees among the stones to unlace one of Pierre's boots while he freed himself of the other. She looked up at him. A glory of strength shone in her face even as her heart was breaking in its agony. For she knew that Pierre Gourdon, her husband, was going into the pit of death; and she tried to smile, and Pierre kissed her lips swiftly and sprang into the sea. She stood up straight and watched him as he fought his way through the shore surf toward the seething maelstrom where the woman lay upon the rock. Josette could see her clearly. She could see the water and white spume leaping up about her, reaching for her, thrusting her up and then dragging her back, and almost she prayed that God would take her and cover her completely with the sea so that Pierre might turn back. For a little her courage left her and she called wildly upon Pierre to return, telling him she was his wife and that the woman on the rock was nothing to him. And then the woman who was fighting for her life seemed to look into the eyes of Josette through the distance that separated them--and Josette held out her arms and cried encouragement to her. All sound but the roar of water was lost to Pierre. He was swimming now, and a hundred forces dragged at his body, beating him one way and then the other, while with all his strength he fought to keep himself in the right direction. He knew what it meant to be carried beyond the rock into that deadly place which they called the Pit. There he would die. He would be pulled down by the undertows, and a little later, when they were done with him, his body would be thrown up at the foot of the cliff. The thought did not fill him with fear. It gave him strength to know Josette was watching him in this struggle against death, and that she was praying for him--and for the woman on the rock. Only Josette and the other woman could measure the eternity of time it took him to win the fight. In the last moment a mighty hand seemed to gather him in its palm and sweep him up to the rock, and he found himself clinging to it, facing the woman. She was as white as he had seen Josette. Her eyes were as dark, and there was something in them that was more terrible to look at than fear. Pierre was exhausted. He drew himself up a few inches at a time, trying to smile the encouragement he could not speak. His eyes reached the level of the rock, and he looked over and down--and saw then what it was the woman was holding in the crook of her arm. It was a little girl, six or seven years old, and forgetting in his amazement the thundering menace of the sea Pierre thought that in all his life he had never seen anything so beautiful as this child. She was not hurt. Her eyes were wide open--great, dark eyes that were velvety pools of terror--and her face, lovely as an angel's, looked at him from a mass of jet-black hair that dripped with water and clung about her neck and shoulders like silken strands of seaweed. It was as if a vision had crept up from the foaming surf to taunt him, a vision of a face he had painted in his dreams and had prayed for and hoped for all through the years of his life, and he dashed the water from his eyes to see more clearly. Then he reached down and drew the child to him and held her fragile, slim little body in his arms. The woman's face changed then. Its fierce resolution died out. She became suddenly limp, and seeing her weakness Pierre caught hold of her so that the surf would not beat her from the rock. "I will get you ashore," he shouted. "You must not give up! You must hold to the rock!" He bent his face to the child's. "And you----" She lay against his breast. Her eyes were looking up at him steadily, and words choked in Pierre's throat. Those eyes, it seemed to him, were too beautiful for a child's eyes. Her lips were still red. But her face was the color of a white cameo in its frame of wonderful black hair, and the thought came to him again that it was an angel the storm had blown in from the sea. The woman was drawing herself up beside him. Another wave broke against the rock, smothering them in its surf. Out of it came her voice. "I am Mona Guyon," she cried, so close that her head touched his shoulder. "This is my baby. Her father--went down--there--beside the rock--a few minutes ago. Take her ashore----" A roaring flood inundated them. When it was gone Pierre drew in a deep breath. "You must hold to the rock," he shouted again. "I will come back for you. It will be easy--easy for all of us to get ashore--if you will hold to the rock!" When the roar of the surf died away for a moment he told the child what to do. She must put her arms round his neck and ride ashore on his back and draw in deep breaths whenever her face was out of the water. They would swim to the shore very quickly, and then he would come back for mother. He even laughed as he told her how safely and quickly it could be done. And then he kissed her; there on the rock Pierre Gourdon kissed the soft little mouth he had prayed for so many years, and bowed his head a moment, asking God to help him. Then he lay flat on his face and drew her into just the right place on his back, and when her arms were round his neck he tied her hands tightly together under his chin with a strip which he had torn from his shirt. She could not get away after that. They would go ashore together, one way or the other. Slowly he lowered himself over the slippery lee of the rock, and again he smiled at Mona Guyon. The hour of his Calvary had come, and his heart beat fiercely with the strength of two praying women as he slipped into the sea with his precious burden. The twisting undercurrents reached out like the tentacles of an octopus and tried to drag him into the doom of the Pit. But it was not Pierre Gourdon alone who was fighting for the right to live. The woman on the rock was fighting for him, and the woman ashore--standing to her waist in the boiling surf--no longer had heart or soul or strength of body, for all had gone to him; and about his neck were the arms of a child that gave to him the courage, not only of those who loved and prayed, but of the good God who had called upon him to play his part in this day and hour. So he fought, and won at last to the place where his beloved Josette reached out and caught him and helped him to the stony shore, where he sank down weakly, with the child in his arms and her face looking up at him from his breast. He had kept her above the water--that had been the never faltering thought in his mind; and now there seemed to be something of awe, of reverence, of unspoken worship in those strangely beautiful eyes of l'Ange, as Pierre called her in his heart, and suddenly her arms tightened round his neck and with a little cry she kissed him. Then she was in Josette's arms, and Pierre rose to his feet. A sudden dread swept over him as he looked out at the rock again. It seemed to him the seas were higher, and the woman was not as he had left her. Her face was down, she was limp, a dark blot without life or resistance, and he saw a huge wave drive up and move her like a sodden chip a little nearer to the edge of the Pit. She was not _holding on_, as he had prayed God she would! A few more waves like that last one, a taller crest, an angrier thrust from the sea--and she would go. He turned to Josette. She was on her knees among the sharp stones with her arms about the child, and both she and little Mona were looking up at him, waiting, knowing that only Pierre Gourdon was master of himself and of life and death in this hour. He had never seen such eyes as theirs--Josette's in their agony of fear for him, little Mona's so strangely, gloriously beautiful, saying more to him in their childish terror and entreaty than human lips could have spoken. "I am going back," he said. "It will be easy this time!" They heard him above the smashing fury of the Pit, and Pierre, catching an unknown note in his own voice, knew that he was lying. As he faced the beat of the sea he made as if he did not hear Josette calling wildly to him that help would surely come in a few minutes, and he must wait. A few minutes and it would be over, for he could see that with each thrust of the frothing surf over the crest of the rock the woman was a little nearer to death. It was a harder fight this time. At least it seemed so to Pierre, for the old strength was no longer in his limbs, and something seemed to have gone out of his heart. If he could reach the rock, just reach it and cling to it and hold the woman until Marie Antoinette's message brought the men! That was all he prayed for now, all he hoped for. It was inconceivable for his imagination to go beyond those things--the rock, the woman, a jutting tooth of reef to hang to for their lives. He could feel death all about him as he fought and swam. It struck at him, choked him, blinded him, dragged at his breath until it seemed as if he must give up and go riding with it into the maelstroms of the Pit. It laughed and jeered at him and roared in his ears, but through it all he saw the rock, and at last the same strange current caught him with the force of a gargantuan hand and flung him to it. He tried to climb up, and slipped back. He tried again and again, and then began to make it, an inch at a time. Something was singing in his ears. It was like the droning hum of the saw in the mill. For a moment he rested. He could not see the top of the rock, but he could see the shore, and there were many figures on it now--men running down to where Josette was again standing waist-deep in the water. With new courage he pulled himself up, and then he gave a cry--a madman's cry of horror, fear and futile warning. The woman had slipped to the very edge of the rock--the edge that lipped the fury of the Pit. She was half over. And she was slipping--_slipping_.... He scrambled toward her, flinging himself down the treacherous dip to catch at her long hair. He caught a strand of it, but it pulled away from him--and he thrust himself another foot and buried his fingers in the wet mass of it. In that moment the sea took her. It dragged her down, and Pierre, holding fast to her hair, went with her into the black death of the Pit; and as he went his wide eyes saw once more the blue of the sky and the tops of his beloved forests, and out of his soul came a soundless cry, the faith and gratitude of a man who was not afraid to die, "After all--God has been a long time good to me--Pierre Gourdon!" Even then, in that roaring baptism of death, his mind was on the woman. It would not do to let her body beat itself among the rocks alone, and in some way--as they were twisted and torn by the rending currents--he got his arms about her. He made no effort to fight, except to hold her. To fight against the forces which had him in their power was impossible. He was like a chip in a boiling pot, twisted and turned, now thrust downward and then up, but never far enough to snatch a breath of air. He felt the blows of the rocks. Then he began going down, until it seemed in the last moment that he was falling swiftly through illimitable space. Consciousness of the woman's presence was gone, but he still held her in his arms. Only the strong hands of Joe Gourdon and Simon McQuarrie held Josette from joining her husband in the heart of the Pit. She struggled against them, crying out her right to go to him, until they brought her to the narrow rim of beach under the cliff and her eyes fell on little Mona. The wind had blown the child's wet hair back from her face, and a bitter cry came to Josette's lips and resentment burned in her for an instant like a fire. Pierre was gone because of _her_, because of this beautiful, star-eyed child and the woman! They had taken him from her. And here was the child, living, staring at her with those eyes which had made Pierre call her _l'Ange_--staring at her--while Pierre--and the other woman--dead and beaten among the rocks.... And then.... "_My mother!_" It was the child's voice, two words crying out to her, faint and yearning and filled with agony above the lash of the sea, and with an answering cry Josette fell down sobbing upon her knees and opened her arms and held the little stranger tightly against her breast. For a space after that she was blind to what happened about her. Dominique stood between her and the sea, even as he saw the grim joke which the fiends of the Pit were playing upon them this day. For these fiends were seldom known to give up their playthings, whether logs or sticks or living things. Once he had known them to keep the body of a dog for days, and at another time a strong-limbed buck had died there, and it was a week before they had tired of him and had thrown him ashore. But this day there was a change. Joe Gourdon and Jeremie Poulin and Poleon Dufresne had leaped waist-deep into the surf and were bringing out the bodies of Pierre and the woman! It was Marie Antoinette who knelt beside them first, and unclasped Pierre's arms from about the woman. And then Josette saw them. She staggered to her feet and ran past Dominique, and the first she looked upon was the white, dead face of the mother. Very tenderly then she took Pierre's head in her arms, and bent her own over it until both their faces were shrouded in her long hair. "He isn't dead," she whispered. No one heard her, for she was saying it only to herself, and then to Pierre. "He isn't dead. He isn't dead." She repeated the words, swaying her body gently with Pierre, and the others drew back, and Marie Antoinette hid little Mona's face against her while Simon McQuarrie and Telesphore Clamart bore the dead woman between them round the end of the cliff. And Josette kept repeating, "He isn't dead, he isn't dead," and she kissed Pierre's lips, and pressed her cheek against his cheek, and the women and men of Five Fingers stood back and waited, none daring to be first to break in upon these sacred moments which belonged to Josette and her dead. At last Marie Antoinette came up softly and knelt beside Josette and put a loving hand about her shoulder. Josette's eyes turned to look at her and they were soft and glowing and so strange they frightened Marie Antoinette. "He isn't dead," she was still saying, and she bowed her face down again to Pierre's. Choking the sob in her throat, Marie Antoinette put her hand to Josette's face--and a great shock ran through her. She had touched Pierre's cheek. She felt with her other hand, and drew back Josette's hair, her heart suddenly throbbing like an Indian drum. Then she saw it was not the madness of grief that kept Josette repeating those words, but the intuition of a soul which had felt the nearness of its mate, for Pierre's eyes slowly opened and the first vision which came to him out of a roaring sea of dreams was the face of his wife. From the group of tensely waiting people Mona had come, sobbing in a strange, quiet way for her mother, and as Marie Antoinette drew a little back Josette caught the child close to her, along with Pierre, and as Pierre reached his arms up weakly to them both the thought came to him again, "_God has been a long time good to me--Pierre Gourdon!_" CHAPTER IV It was the blue jay that mellowed the fear of death in the swiftly beating heart of Peter McRae. He had always been a friend of the blue jays, and this particular bird had perched himself in a spruce top a hundred feet away, screaming defiance at Peter's enemies and telling him to keep up his nerve and not be afraid. Without going beyond his fourteen-year-old power of reasoning Peter had a strange and abiding faith in the Canadian blue jay tribe. He was a boy's bird, if there ever was one, with his everlasting cocksureness, his persevering courage and his hundred and one little tricks of outlawry and piracy--a bird who was always ready for a fight, never ran away from trouble, and who lived up beautifully to the man-made law, "Do others before others do you." He was a gentleman and a sportsman even if he was a robber and a pest, and Peter loved him. He could see this particular blue jay very clearly. Shouting voices and the crack of rifles had not frightened him away, and he was making a great commotion in the spruce tops, screaming until it seemed his raucous cries must split his throat. Then, too, there was the cheerful little sapsucker who persisted in pecking for grubs in the end of the big log behind which Peter and his father were hidden, and two newly mated red squirrels who chattered and ran up and down a tree a little farther on, one chasing the other. A big yellow butterfly slowly opened and closed its fan-like wings almost within reach of Peter's hand. These things kept the madness of utter fear out of the boy's brain. His thin, rather frail face was very white; his blue eyes were round, and staring; his body, not so strong as it should have been, was doubled up behind the log, and his heart throbbed like a hammer inside him--but his courage was not gone. There were no tear stains about his eyes. In one of his hands he clutched a twisted stick. From the blue jay and the sapsucker and the yellow butterfly his eyes rested upon the face of Donald McRae, his father. That father, so far back as Peter could remember clearly, had been not only a father, but mother and brother and pal as well. "One thing you must live up to all your life, Peter," this father had told him a hundred times, "and that is to be a pal to your own boy when you have one, just as you are now a pal of your dad's. If a dad and his boy are not pals they shouldn't have been born." So they had been that, with no secrets between them except one that had led up to this tragedy of today, and which the boy had not yet begun to understand. All he knew was that for some mysterious reason they were fighting for their lives, and were now sheltered behind a log, and that men a little distance away were watching and waiting to kill them with guns. The man smiled at him and chuckled in a way Peter loved. But the smile and the chuckle did not hide the flame smoldering deep in his eyes, nor the pallid tenseness of his face, nor the trickle of blood that persisted in running down his cheek and wetting the soft roll of his collar. He was bareheaded and sweaty; his blond hair, very much like Peter's, was wildly disheveled; his hands gripped a gun, and lying on his stomach, he had made himself a loophole by digging leaves and mold from under a crooked elbow in the log. Through this he had watched for his enemies. His grin was chummy and companionable as he turned to Peter. "Everything all right?" he asked. "Not afraid, are you?" Peter shook his head. "I'm not much scared." "Getting hungry?" "No." "Thirsty?" "A little--not much." The man laughed. He did not feel like laughing. But he laughed, fighting to make it appear natural and unstrained. "You're a trump, Peter. God knows you're a trump!" A rifle cracked in the thick fringe of balsams and jack pines a hundred and fifty yards from them, and a bullet struck the log with a sodden _chug_. The man wiped the blood from his cheek with a handkerchief that was stained red. "Does it hurt, dad?" "Nothing but a scratch, Peter." He put his face to the ground and peered under the log again. Peter changed his position, uncramped his legs and doubled himself up in another fashion, hugging the earth closely. The blue jay was having a fit, and the sapsucker perked his bright-eyed little head at him not more than a dozen feet away. He could hear a bird singing, and one of the red squirrels was chattering his late afternoon song in a mountain ash tree overhanging the river. Between his knees was a clump of violets. The log was almost at the edge of the river, which was a swollen flood, and the stream bent itself around like a hairpin, shutting them in on three sides. That was why they were safe, Peter's father had told him. No living thing could swim it to get behind them, and in front of them was a narrow neck of land which was open and clear right up to the thick edge of the swamp a rifle shot away. Across that open no one had dared to come. A dozen times during the past hour Peter had wished the river was not there, for it held them prisoners even if it did keep their enemies back. Across it, not much farther away than he could have thrown a stone, was a deep, dense forest of primeval darkness, low and swampy, in which he conceived a thousand hiding-places for himself and his father. Peter's mind sometimes traveled beyond his years, and as he looked at the stream, yearning for the safety of the other side, he wondered why the blue jay and the sapsucker and the singing brush sparrow should have wings while they had only legs and arms. Only wings could carry them over the stream. In the dry months of summer it was not much more than a creek, with sand bars and pebbly shores and polished rocks sticking out of it. Now, in this flood time of spring, it had no shores and was a thing gone mad. It was deep and black, and swept past with a steady, growling roar, eating into the banks on its way, uprooting trees and slashing itself into caldrons of boiling fury where the channel narrowed or where it leaped over the great boulders and rock débris of rapids. From where he crouched Peter could see one of these places a quarter of a mile below, and there the water was not black but white, and leaped and spouted as if huge monsters were churning it. Under ordinary conditions the swollen stream would have lured and fascinated him. It came out of a vast and mysterious Canadian wilderness, and it disappeared into an adventure land of forests equally vast and strange. With it rode many things of interest--huge piles of driftwood, shooting down on the crest of the flood like islands; big logs that sped with the swiftness of monster serpents; and great trees, freshly torn out by the roots, and with their tops trailing and swishing like whips urging on a living thing. Peter was staring at it when a hand rested itself gently on his head. Donald McRae was watching him, and a slow torture had burned itself like the scar of a living coal in his eyes and face. More than the earth he walked upon and more than the God he believed in, he loved this boy. It was Peter, with his thin, quizzical face, and his mind and courage developed beyond his strength and years, who had made life bearable and joyous for him. As he had worshiped the mother, linking his soul with hers until it had been taken away, so he worshiped this one precious part of her she had left to him. Without Peter.... He choked back the thickness in his throat as he placed his hand on the boy's head. It was a habit with him to talk with Peter at times as if he were a man, and the man-way in which Peter's eyes met his now gave him courage. "They won't try to cross that open before dark," he said. "They're afraid of us in the light, Peter. But they'll come when it's dark. And we can't wait for them. We've got to get away." The boy's face brightened. He had a consummate faith in this father of his. He waited, keenly expectant, twisting one of the blue violets between his thin fingers. "Does the creek frighten you, son?" asked the man. "It's pretty swift, but I'm not much scared of it." "Of course not. You wouldn't be your dad's boy, if you were. See that log down there, the big dry one, half in the water?" He pointed, and Peter nodded. "When it begins to get dusk we'll crawl down and take a ride on that. It won't be hard to get away." For the first time a tremor came in the boy's voice. "Dad, what are they trying to shoot us for? What have we done?" Donald McRae made a pretense of peering through his loophole again. He wanted to cry out with the sickness that was in his heart, and in the same voice call down the vengeance of God upon the makers of that grim and merciless law which at last had come to corner and destroy him where he had built his little cabin home in the edge of the wilderness. It was impossible--now--to answer that question of Peter's, "_What have we done?_" He raised his head, and faced his boy. "It's five o'clock. We'd better have a bite to eat. When we take to the water it will spoil our grub." From the pocket of a coat which lay at his side he took some biscuits and meat. Peter made a sandwich and munched at it, yearning for a little of the black river-water to go with it. When the man had finished he drew from an inside pocket of the same coat a wallet, a pencil and a corked bottle half filled with matches. In the wallet he found a sheet of paper, and on this he wrote for several minutes, after which he folded the sheet of paper very tightly, thrust it into the bottle with the matches, and corked it in securely. Then he gave the bottle to Peter. "Put that in your pocket," he said, "and remember what I'm telling you now, Peter. We're going to make for a place called Five Fingers. A man lives there whose name is Simon McQuarrie. Don't forget those two--Five Fingers and Simon McQuarrie. What I have written and put in the bottle is for him. If anything should happen to me----" He broke in upon himself with a cheerful laugh. "Of course nothing _will_ happen, Peter, but if it should--you promise to take that bottle to him?" "I'll take it." "Where?" "Five Fingers." "Who?" "Simon McQuarrie." "Right. Now keep watch through this hole while I cut some leather strings out of the tops of my boots. We may need them to harness the log with when we go to sea. Won't they be surprised when they come and find us gone--eh--Peter?" "You bet they will!" agreed Peter fervently. Quietly he began watching the open through the hole which his father had made under the log. He breathed a little more tensely, for he realized the deadly importance of his vigil. Yesterday one of his ambitions had been to wear a uniform when he was old enough, one with stripes and brass buttons, and with a big revolver fastened to a cord hung around his neck. He had looked upon the wilderness police with the awe of a youngster who loved romance and adventure. Today he hated them. Only a little while ago he had waited for his father at their cabin, with a good dinner ready for him. Then his father had come, galloping on a horse Peter had never seen before. "I've had a little trouble with the police, Peter, and we've got to hit into the woods," he had said. The suddenness of it had taken Peter's breath away. They did not wait to eat any of the dinner he had prepared. Even then the police almost caught them before they reached this log. There were four of them. His father had kept them back with his rifle, and Peter was disappointed in his marksmanship. He was sure he could have done better himself. His father missed every time, even though his bullets did go close enough to make their enemies dodge behind trees. And always before that he had been proud of his father's shooting! His hand touched the cool barrel of the rifle, and a thrill ran through him. It was a thing he had never felt before. He was sure _he_ would not miss if he could only be given a chance, for he had often hit rabbits at that distance of a hundred and fifty yards, and a man was many times larger than a rabbit. An inch at a time, slowly and carefully so that his father would not notice what he was doing, he poked the barrel of the rifle through the hole. He would be ready, anyway. He had forgotten fear. His blood was hot. His father had always talked to him about playing square, and never taking a mean advantage, and always to fight for women, no matter who they were. Well, there were no women here, but it wasn't playing square when four men came after his father like this. If they would come out, clean and sportsmanlike, one at a time, and fight with fists instead of guns.... "You see, Peter," his father was saying as he cut a thin strip from his boot top, "I couldn't leave you in the cabin alone. I've got to get you down to Five Fingers. If Simon McQuarrie isn't there, you wait for him. And don't show anyone else that paper in the bottle!" Peter was not listening. His heart had given a sudden terrific jump and was half choking him. In the edge of a clump of dwarf banksians something had moved. And then his father turned--just in time to catch his hand, to stop his finger at the trigger, to drag him back from the hole. Never as long as he lived would he forget the terrible look that had come into his father's face. To hide it Donald McRae leaned over his son and hugged him close to his arms, and for a space the law might have descended upon them without resistance. From the shelter of the evergreens Corporal Crear of the Provincial Police was looking toward the log. His men were lying close about him. "We've got to go out and get him when it's dark enough," he said. "Don't shoot unless you have to, but if that happens--shoot straight. Only be sure it's not the kid. That's what puzzles me--why McRae has the kid with him out there behind the log!" Only Donald McRae and Peter could have solved that mystery for Crear, and even then Crear might not have understood. It was something which belonged entirely to Peter and his father. As they waited for the sun to dip behind the tall evergreen forest across the river, they lay very close together, and their eyes met frequently and their hands and bodies touched. There was something pathetically doglike in the man's dependence upon his boy. Take Peter away from him and his heart was gone, for Peter was the one thing he had left of a great faith and a great love that would never die. More than once a cold fear had swept over him at the thought of something happening to him, and he had always prayed that if anything did happen, it would come to both at the same time. Even now he would not have sent Peter back to the safety of the cabin. That would have meant dissolution for himself--and strangers and a heartbreaking tragedy of aloneness for Peter. Across the river there was hope, and a refuge for Peter at Five Fingers with Simon McQuarrie. A woman had put an undying faith in the justness of God in Donald McRae's soul, and always there were two things in his breast, faith and memory of the woman, like stars which no darkness could dim. Their glow lay warmly in his eyes as he saw the courage with which the boy waited for the setting of the sun. As the long shadows came creeping across the river Peter no longer felt the fear which had made his heart beat so uncomfortably fast. His father's presence and the touch of his hand filled him with an utter confidence. The man even pointed out to him the mysteries of an ant home which they had accidentally destroyed in the log, and told him a story of how once upon a time he had gone down a flooded stream like this, and what fun it had been. Then the shadows came more swiftly. The sun at last left only a golden glow above the forest. The blue jay and the sapsucker were gone. Out of the woods came the melodious dusk song of many red squirrels. A flock of crows sailed overhead on their way to the evening roosting place. The rush of the river seemed more gentle and lost its menace for Peter. The churning turmoil of the distant rapids was mellowed in a soft mist, and a little later they could not make out clearly the driftwood going down with the stream. "Now is our time," said Peter's father. "Creep after me, flat on your stomach." It took them only a minute to reach the big dry log. They could move freely here, for the upward dip of the bank concealed them. Donald McRae did not let Peter guess the tension he was under as he worked. He stood his rifle where the police would easily find it and laughed softly as he tied one end of a stout leather thong about Peter's wrist and the other end about his own. After that he rolled the log into the water and tested it to get its proper balance and tied the other leather thongs to a projecting stub. "It's just right," he announced cheerfully. "A canoe couldn't have been better built for us, Peter. Are you ready?" "I'm ready," said Peter. He was in the water to his knees; now he went in to his waist. It was cold, biting cold; his teeth clicked, but he did not say anything about it. He looped his arms about the stub and through one of the leather thongs, and from the opposite side of the log his father twisted the fingers of one hand tightly in his coat. Then they began to move. His feet lost bottom and the cold water shot up to his armpits, taking his breath away. His father grinned cheerfully at him and he tried to grin back. In a moment they were in the current and the shore began to slip past them with amazing swiftness. It was not unpleasant, except for the icy chill of the water, which seemed to take the place of blood in his veins. There was no resistance against his body; the log carried them buoyantly and smoothly, so that after a little he had courage to look about him. Their log had swung quickly into mid-stream, and they were overtaking a more slowly moving mass of driftwood. The thought came to Peter that it was like a race. Then something alive caught his eyes on the flotsam. It was a furry, catlike creature with short, perky ears and a fox's face, and he could almost have touched it with his hands when they passed. "A fisher-cat," said his father. "He will have a nice swim when he hits the rapids!" Peter was wondering just how much of a chance the fisher-cat had when something drifted against him. It was a drowned porcupine, floating belly up. The porky must have had a nice swim, too! He shivered. The roar of the rapids was growing, and it was no longer pleasant to hear. The musical cadence which distance had given it was gone, and a sullen, snarling undertone of menace and wrath began to pound at the drums of his ears. In the twilight it looked as though they were racing straight into the mouth of a huge churn out of which milky froth was spouting. Then two things happened which seemed odd to Peter. The dead porcupine was clinging to the log as if some sort of life held it there, and the fisher-cat's raft of driftwood which they had overtaken and passed was now _passing them_. To Peter this last was unaccountable, but to Donald McRae, who understood the whims and caprices of flood currents, there was no mystery about it. For a moment the fisher-cat seemed about to make a leap for the log. Then he huddled back and disappeared with his raft in the rougher water that preceded the gray wall of spume. The man's hand tightened its hold on Peter. "Hang on and don't get scared," he cried. "We'll go through this like a rubber ball!" That was the last Peter heard of his voice, and suddenly his father's face was blotted out from his vision. A huge mouth opened and engulfed them. He could feel himself going down it, with roaring gloom and mighty explosions of water bursting itself against great rocks all about him. For a space which seemed an eternity he gave himself up for lost, and he wanted to scream out to his father. But the water smothered him. It thrust him under, buried him, then tossed him up to breathe. He hung on, as his father had told him, and after three or four minutes which were so many hours to him he could breathe easier and the roaring grew less. They had come through a half-mile of the rapids then. The last of the rocks snapped at them, like growling dogs at their heels, and suddenly the water grew deep and smooth where it swung shoreward in a great eddy. For the first time Peter felt a hurt. It was his father's hand, holding him in a grip that only death could have broken. And then he saw his father's face. Donald McRae was gasping for breath. Even Peter would never know the fight he had made to keep the log running right during those three or four minutes in the rapids. Slowly the current brought them to the shore. It was the shore they wanted, too, with its deep evergreen forests and its hundreds of miles of untrailed hiding-places. The big pool was dotted with drifting masses of débris. One of these, very near to them, Peter was sure he recognized. But the fisher-cat was no longer on it. He was terribly cold, and when at last his father brought the end of the log to the shore and helped him out to dry ground the boy fell down in a sodden heap. He was ashamed of himself and tried to get up. Donald McRae took one of his hands. "You must walk, Peter--run if you can. Come on!" He almost dragged him into the darkness of the forest, and Peter began to use his legs. It made him feel better. But his teeth chattered and his body shook as if he had the ague. Two or three hundred yards in the shelter of the timber they came to an overturned spruce tree, and near this was a birch with festoons of loose bark hanging from it. Donald McRae stripped off an armful of the bark, and one of Peter's blue hands fished out the precious bottle of matches from his pocket. Very soon the flames were leaping up joyously, and he felt their warmth entering into his body. He helped to gather wood. In a quarter of an hour there was a glow in his face, and the big backlog of pitch-filled cedar was a flaming furnace. Darkness settled heavily in the forest, and he was no longer afraid or uncomfortable as he continued to dry his clothes. His father, in a period between wood-gathering, cleaned his pipe and began to dry out some of his soaked tobacco. That was cheerful and inspiring. It always seemed chummier and more homelike to Peter when his father was smoking his pipe. Later they broke off cedar and balsam boughs until they had a soft bed two feet deep within the warmth of the fire. When the last thread in his clothing was dry Peter crept into this bed. He had no idea of sleeping but made himself a comfortable nest and sat bright-eyed and watchful while his father rested with his back against the log and smoked. A hundred times they had made camps together that were very much like this one. On hunting and fishing expeditions, and when berries were ripe, and on the trap lines, they had slept out many nights with boughs for a bed. But there had never been the thrill of tonight. The cumulative significance of what had happened was just beginning to find itself in Peter's head. This night was different from all other nights. The darkness which had gathered heavily about them was different, the fire did not seem as friendly, and his father, smoking his pipe, was changed. Always in their adventuring they had been in quest of something--fish or venison, berries or fur. Now something was after them. It was this slow process of mental and physical change from the hunter into the hunted, and its understanding, that was creeping into Peter's soul. He loved night with its mystery of darkness, its stars and its moon, but now he could feel and hear it breathing secret plottings and danger. When the fire crackled too loudly or its flames leaped too high he shivered, fearing it would betray them. He wondered why his father remained in the light now that they were warm and dry, for there were safer hiding-places in the great pits of gloom that encompassed them. But he said nothing, feeling strangely that even to voice fear would bring reality upon them. He watched his father, and the brightness in his eyes--something new and strange that lay in them--was like a stab to Donald McRae. In this hour he saw the boy's soul changing. Peter, at last, was beginning to build up the truth. Something terrible must have happened--somewhere--or the police would not be after his father. He had believed the police were omniscient, that they hunted only bad people. That was what they were for--to shut bad people in prisons, or hang them, or shoot them. _And they were after his father!_ The man saw these things in Peter's eyes and in his pale, thin face. And suddenly a revulsion of horror and of rage swept over Peter. If the police said his father was bad they were liars. He hated them, and if the chance came to him he would get even with them. He would beat out their lives with a club. He would kill them--if they didn't leave his father alone! He said nothing. But he got out of his nest in the evergreen boughs and sat close to his father against the log, and Donald McRae put his arm around him and puffed hard at his pipe to keep the firelight from revealing what was in his eyes. The world might be against him, but Peter would be like this, his friend and pal to the last. He knew it, and thanked God. CHAPTER V Peter did not know when he fell asleep. He was buried in the sweet-scented cedar and balsam when his father awakened him. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, and it came to him quickly where he was. The fire was out and dawn was breaking up the gloom of the forest. He missed the fire, and the bacon frying over it, and the pot of coffee steaming in the coals. Those were the usual things that greeted him when he woke up in camp. And this morning he was hungry. They headed straight into the heart of the unexplored timberlands south and west, and with empty hands and no pack on his back Donald McRae talked as cheerfully as though they had a week's rations with them. But his eyes were constantly questing for something to eat, and it occurred to him as a sort of tragedy that he had not tied his rifle to the log. He did not explain to Peter just why he had left it where the police would easily find it. By midday their hunt for food had become a thrilling adventure to Peter. It stirred his blood even more than thought of their enemies, for the police seemed an interminable distance away now, shut out by miles of wilderness. There was something fascinating about it, too. There were birds about them and rabbit runways in every dip and swamp they came to, and deer and moose and caribou tracks so plentiful in places that they made trails like the hoof-beaten paths of cattle. But there was nothing they could get at, except porcupines. During the morning they could have killed half a dozen of these animals with clubs, but each time porcupine flesh was suggested for dinner Peter made a grimace of revulsion. Twice they had tried it experimentally on their camping trips and both times it had nauseated him. He insisted he would rather starve than eat any more of that ill-smelling, fatty stuff the porcupine was made of. He would chew spruce gum instead. There was plenty of it on the trees they passed. "If you get too hungry we'll roast some lily roots," said Donald, "but if you can hold out until night we'll have the feast of our lives." Peter held out. The sun was still up when they came from heavy timber into a long, narrow meadow running into a swamp on the other side. This was the sort of place Donald McRae had been looking for. In the edge of the swamp were rabbit runways beaten fresh and hard. They chose the site for their camp in the rim of the high timber, and while Peter brought in firewood Donald made snares from another section of boot top. These he set in the runways. It was scarcely more than dusk when the first big snowshoe ran his head through a noose and found himself swinging at the end of a sapling. An hour later he was roasted, and in the light of their fire they divided the feast between them. Peter didn't mind the absence of salt and bread and potatoes. Nothing he could remember had ever tasted quite so good to him as the unseasoned rabbit. Food and the warmth of the fire made him drowsy, and very soon after they had finished their supper Donald tucked him snugly into the bed of evergreens they had made and covered him with his coat. Peter fell asleep instantly, and for several minutes the man remained on his knees at his side, the smile of tenderness in his face changing slowly into a look of haggard grief. When he rose to his feet the luster had died out of his eyes and years had fallen upon his shoulders. He caught his breath sobbingly as he stared into the wall of chaotic darkness beyond the firelight. It was only Peter who counted now, and this night was the last Peter would be with him. Tomorrow he would be alone, an outlaw, a hunted man running away to save his life. And Peter.... A moan came to his lips, a dry and broken cry of hopelessness, and his eyes fixed themselves in their anguish upon the heart of the fire. Without Peter, would God give him strength to live? What would the days be like--and the nights--and the months and years to come without Peter? For Peter was not only Peter. In taking the mother, God had given her soul back to him in the body of her boy. She was a part of him, speaking with his voice, looking out of his eyes, loving with his love, a comrade and pal to the man in spirit even as she had been in her own sweet life. And now--tomorrow--he would lose them both. The law was after him. Its hounds would follow him from hole to hole, like foxes after a rabbit, and probably in the end they would get him. He closed his eyes to shut out the thing that was hurting him. When he opened them a face seemed to have taken form in the glow of the fire like a soul come to give him courage and resolution, sweetly sad in its inspiration, glorious in its consolation and cheer. Every day through the years this visioning of his wife had come to him; through those years she had walked hand in hand with him, she had been with him in the upgrowing of Peter, had helped to teach him the love of God and the glory of nature, and had laughed and cried and sung with them as sunshine and shadow came. And always, in the darkest hours, Donald McRae saw her face, sweet and strong and never afraid. And so it was tonight. "This is your last great fight for our Peter," her eyes seemed to say to him. "You must be strong." And then she was gone. Slowly the fire died out, and he put no more wood upon it, but sat motionless and silent until it was only a red glow of ember and ash. He did not sleep. The moon rose and the clear sky above was filled with stars. In their light he walked back and forth in the open, a solitary figure with a thousand still shadows about him. It was the sort of night he loved, a spring night breathing and whispering of summer and sweet with the perfumes of balsam and spruce and growing things under his feet. These things were a part of his God, and of Peter's God. Just as the woman had built up his faith in him, pointing out its truth and beauty and glory, so had he built up in Peter an illimitable faith in this God which was nature. It strengthened him now. The glow of the moon, the softness of the stars, the gentle whisperings of the wind, the low music of running water and the thrill and tremble of inanimate and voiceless life about him were a part of his religion. "Love a tree and you love God," had been his text for Peter. And as long as there remained trees and flowers and the songs of birds and eyes and ears with which to see and hear, hope could never die. His brain cleared and his heart grew stronger as he paced more swiftly through the moonlight. The world was gloriously big, he told himself again and again. Somewhere in it was a place for him and Peter, and when he found it, far away from the menace of the law, Peter would not fail to come when he called. But tomorrow he must be strong enough to lie and strong enough to leave Peter at Five Fingers with Simon McQuarrie. Toward dawn he built up the fire and cooked another rabbit which he caught in one of the snares. It was ready when Peter crawled out of his balsam bed. He did not know his father had not slept during the night. Donald McRae began to whistle when he saw the boy was awake, and though an uncomfortable thickening, persisted in his throat he fought to make the whistling cheerful just the same. He announced his plan to Peter as if it were born of sudden inspiration and happily solved a temporary problem for them. He told him about Five Fingers and their old friend, Simon McQuarrie. Peter could just remember the Scotchman and Simon's fat Dutch partner and friend, Herman Vogelaar. Donald McRae seemed to recall them now with great pleasure, and he was sure Peter would enjoy his little visit with them, especially as there were several boys and girls of his own age to play with at Five Fingers. Of course he would come back soon, and maybe they would live at Five Fingers, if Peter liked it there. He continued to build up the lie, but something of trouble remained deep back in the boy's eyes. Donald tried not to see it too much, for it was the look he would have seen in the woman's eyes, if she had been in Peter's place. They traveled until noon and ate their lunch. The afternoon was well gone when they heard the striking of an axe ahead of them. A quarter of an hour later they could hear several axes, and the distant crash of a falling tree. Donald McRae steeled his heart, and stopped. Yet in this moment he was smiling. "That is Five Fingers," he said. "Can you go on alone, Peter?" Peter nodded. "But I don't want to," he said. "I want to go with you, dad." "You must go to Five Fingers, Peter. I'll come back soon. I promise that. I'll come back--soon." A gulp came in Peter's throat. "I'm not tired. I can go a long ways yet, dad. I'd rather go with you." The man drew him into his arms. "I'll come back tomorrow," he lied, fighting to speak the words calmly. "And you must get the paper in the bottle to Simon McQuarrie as soon as you can. You aren't afraid to go alone, are you, Peter?" "No, I'm not afraid." "Then--you must go." He hugged him close for a moment, and rested his cheek on Peter's disheveled hair. "Maybe I'll come back tonight," he whispered desperately. "Good-by, little pal. Hurry--and give Simon the paper--and--good-by!" His lips burned against Peter's forehead. It was that kiss which startled Peter, and when his father turned away, and then looked back, smiling and waving a hand, a suffocating feeling remained in Peter's heart as if he could not get all the air he wanted to breathe. He tried to wave his hand in response, but in a moment it fell limply to his side. Donald McRae saw the gesture and a sob came in his breath. He disappeared behind a windfall, stopped and looked back. Peter was slowly turning toward Five Fingers. The small figure was pathetic in its aloneness. Twice it paused and turned, and then went on, and was hidden at last by a screen of evergreens. "God be with you and care for you, Peter, and give me strength to bear this parting," sobbed Donald McRae. With white and haggard face he turned into the North. CHAPTER VI Beyond the thicket of young jack pines Peter did not hurry. His feet dragged, and he listened, hoping he would hear his father's voice calling him back. In half an hour he did not travel far beyond the evergreens. Then he knew his father was gone. He continued in the direction of Five Fingers, recalling his promises. Tonight or tomorrow his father would return. He hoped it would be tonight, for there was a lump in his throat which he could not get rid of, and something in his heart which frightened him with suspicions and fears which he was too young to analyze. But he knew his father would not lie. He would come back. He wondered what was written on the paper he was taking to Simon McQuarrie. Probably it told about the wickedness of the police, and Simon would help in some way. Other questions came into his mind now that he was alone. Why hadn't his father gone on to Five Fingers with him? The chopping of the axes had ceased, but he knew he was heading in the right direction. He came into openings filled with the stumps of trees that had been cut down, and these clearings were carpeted with white and pink spring flowers and masses of violets. He had never seen such beautiful violets, or so many birds at this season of the year. There were robins and thrushes and dozens of little warblers and brush sparrows, and the cutting down of trees seemed to have brought all the sapsuckers and woodpeckers and gaudily colored blue jays in the woods. The sun was delightfully warm, too, though in another hour it would be settling behind the tree tops. In this glory of peace and quiet he proceeded quietly and cautiously, for his father had taught him always to do that in the forest. So he came without sound of footfall or crackling brush to the edge of a little opening beyond a thicket of poplars and birch, and here he stopped suddenly and his heart jumped up into his mouth. Standing in a warm pool of sunlight not twenty feet away from his concealment was a young girl. She was almost as tall as Peter and so lovely to look upon that he stared at her in amazement and admiration. He thought she had seen him, and his first vision was of her face and a pair of beautiful dark eyes, laughing up at a red squirrel, chattering in a tree top a few paces away. Then she sat down, gathering her flowers about her, and eyes and face were lost to him in a mass of shining, black hair that fell quickly about her, almost touching the ground she was seated upon. At first he was astonished. Then timidity and fear crept upon him and he wanted to steal away as quietly as he had come. He drew back a step and was preparing for the next when an unexpected interruption rooted him to the spot. The wild and agonized yelping of a dog came from the thick brush beyond the girl. Instantly she was on her feet, her slim body quivering with the tension in which she waited. And then she called, "Buddy--Buddy--come here!" With a series of pain-filled yelps the creature called Buddy responded. He darted out of the brush and came like a streak across the open. It seemed to Peter the half-grown pup was all legs and head and tail, and that from the sounds he made he must be mortally hurt. Whimpering and crying, he cringed at the girl's feet and kissed the hand she reached down to him. But she did not look at him. She had dropped her flowers and her attitude was fierce and expectant as she waited. Peter could see the bushes moving across the open and in a moment a boy burst through them. He was half again as big as Peter, and he had a stick in his hand. He followed the dog, half running, and Peter began to hate him as he came. "Any person who will strike a dog should never have been born," his father had taught him from the beginning; and this boy with his thick red face and hulking body had been beating the pup. He was panting triumph when he came up, and the pup slunk closer between the feet of his mistress. The pursuer was at least two years older than Peter. He had thick hands and little eyes and a bullet head, and his eyes were glowing with wickedness. For an instant Peter saw the girl's eyes. They were dark pools of flaming fire. Then like a little tigress she was at the other. Her hands struck at his face and for a moment the bully was caught at a disadvantage. He dropped his stick and caught her in his arms. His hands buried themselves in her hair, and Peter saw her blows becoming more and more futile. The pup snarled and darted in at the boy's feet. A kick sent him back howling. Horror and rage possessed Peter when he saw the girl's head thrust backward, and without a sound he ran out of his cover and caught her assailant by the throat. Then, when the girl was freed, he struck. That was another thing his father had taught him, to fight when it was necessary to fight--_and always for a woman_. His fists struck hard and furiously, and he heard a bellow of alarm and pain from the bully. The older boy stumbled and fell, and Peter was on him like a cat. He realized this was no time to "play the game fair." They rolled and twisted on the ground, and blood streamed from the bully's nose and mouth. Once Peter saw the girl. She was standing very near, her lips parted, her wonderful eyes shining at him. That glimpse of her was a mighty encouragement. He fought harder, driving his fists home, and kicking. Then they were on their feet again. It was the bully who renewed the battle. Mauled and bleeding, he had recovered from the surprise attack and his greater bulk and weight began to tell. Exhausted by two days and nights of hunger and flight, Peter felt his strength going. He went down, and the bully flung himself upon him. It was then Peter caught a second glimpse of the girl. She had caught up the stick and was standing over them. He could hear the stick as it struck blow after blow, and his enemy rolled over, half stunned. They were both at the bully then, Peter with his fists and the girl with her stick, and the older boy took to his heels in a wild flight for the safety of the thicket out of which he had come a few minutes before. Peter wiped his nose and mouth with his sleeve and gasped hard to get his breath. The girl was breathing hard, too, and she was looking at him with such wonder and gladness in her eyes that he wished he was back in the timber again. Then she came to him and began nursing his face with a soft handkerchief, and said things which he could not remember afterward, and Buddy the pup jumped up against him, wagging his knotty tail and licking his hand. Peter drew back and tried to grin. For a moment he had felt enormously uncomfortable in the presence of this lovely little goddess of the woods, with her soft handkerchief dabbing at his face. Now his old cheer returned. He was glad the fight was over and was strongly conscious that the girl had played no small part in the final victory. So he said apologetically, "He'd got me if you hadn't come in with the stick." She stood back and looked at him. She was younger than he, probably not more than thirteen, but to Peter she appeared to be infinitely older in these first minutes of their acquaintance. It bothered him to meet her eyes squarely, they were so big and dark and filled with soft fire, like the velvety, jet-black hair that streamed in dishevelment about her. "He is twice as big as you," she retorted. "I hate him. He belongs with the tug from Fort William, and every time he comes we have a fight." "He's a--a woman-hitter," said Peter. She accepted his compliment with a dignified nod of her head. Then she stamped her foot and shook her stick in the direction the bully had gone. "If he ever tries to do again what he tried today--I'll--I'll----" "He won't while I'm around," helped out Peter, swelling with a bit of pugnacious pride. "I wasn't in good shape, and I've been traveling pretty hard, and we didn't have a lot to eat. I can lick him when I'm fed up and rested." The girl was almost womanly in her swift intuition. Her eyes glowed softly at Peter. "Who are you?" she asked gently. "I am Mona Guyon, and I live with Josette and Pierre Gourdon at Five Fingers." "I'm Peter," said the boy. "Peter McRae." "Where you from?" was her next query. Peter took time to swallow. His father had not told him how to answer questions. Then he pointed. "From away off there, miles and miles. My father brought me until we could hear the axes, and then I came on alone. He's coming tonight or tomorrow." "Is your mother with him?" "She's dead." He was not looking at her when she came to him and took his hand, and in all his life he had never felt such a warm, soft little hand clinging to his own as Mona Guyon's. "My mother is dead, too, Peter," she said. "And so is my father. They were drowned--out there six years ago. It was Pierre Gourdon who brought me in from the rock." It was an uncomfortable moment, and yet something of joy passed into Peter. His fingers, smoke-stained and soiled, tightened about Mona's hand as they both looked off over the cuttings to the wall of the vast forest that shut out Lake Superior from their view. They could plainly hear the distant murmuring of the surf. "I'm glad you've come," she said. "I hope you're going to live here. Are you?" "Maybe," said Peter. "You're brave, and I like you. If you were that hateful Aleck Curry, who looks like a toad----" "I wouldn't be him," interrupted Peter. "No, but if you _were_, and you tried to do what he did, I wouldn't hit you with a stick." Peter's mind floundered in a futile effort to understand. "I can lick him tomorrow," he ventured. With a little laugh she pulled him to the scattered flowers. He helped her pick them up and put them into one big bouquet. Her soft hair touched his hands and he found it easier to look into her eyes. His heart beat fast and he was strangely happy. He forgot his swelling eye and a stiffening lip, but he did think of his father. He would surely beg his father to live at Five Fingers. It would be wonderful there, with someone like Mona to know and fight for. Then he thought of his message. "I've got something for Simon McQuarrie," he said. "Dad told me to hurry with it." "And you're hungry." She took his hand again, in a possessive and matter-of-fact way. There was something maternal about it, something so sweetly glad and friendly that a great wave of comradeship swept through Peter. He was no longer nervous or afraid. Tonight or tomorrow his father would come, and they would all be happy. Through a glory of warm sunset they crossed the cut-over opens and came soon to the crest of the green slope that looked down on a little paradise hidden away in the heart of a great wilderness, a paradise of green meadows, of water shimmering like silver in the sun, and of the few log homes wherein lived the people whose paths Pierre Gourdon had blazed through the forests many years before. "That is Five Fingers," said Mona. And down the slope she led the way with Peter, still holding him by the hand. He was speechless as they went. Everywhere he looked the earth was gloriously green, and in this green were the scattered cabins, with little spirals of smoke rising from their chimneys. He could smell this smoke, faintly sweet with the perfume of jack pine pitch and cedar. He saw the big, yellow dunes of sawdust about the mill, and in the mill itself, which had only a roof and no sides, the huge steel saw that was silent for the day blazed like a mirror in the sun. The lowing of cattle came up from the green meadows, and he saw horses grazing, and then his heart gave another jump, for between them and the little plain where the settlement lay were a doe and fawn. His fingers tightened suddenly about Mona's hand, and he stopped, an excited wonder escaping in a cry from his lips. The girl laughed softly and freed her hand for a moment to braid back her lustrous hair. "That is Minna," she said. "We named her after Geertruda Poulin's last baby. Pierre Gourdon allows no killing for miles and miles around here, and the deer feed out of our hands and eat our hay with the cattle in winter. Only----" Her lovely face clouded, and Peter saw a glow of distress in her eyes. "The men kill porcupines because they eat our chairs and doors and windows. But they bury them for me, over there in my porcupine cemetery, and I plant flowers all around them. I love porcupines." "So do I," said Peter. She took his hand again, and they continued down the slope. "Uncle Pierre lets me have three of them for pets," she said. "I have a great many pets, hundreds of them. All the birds and deer and bears and wild things for as far as you can see belong to me, and none of them are afraid of me. Uncle Pierre gave them to me, and no one harms them. No one except Aleck Curry," she added with a quick note of fierceness rising in her voice. "He would kill them all if he dared. I hate him!" "I'll lick him if he doesn't leave them alone," offered Peter. "I can do it when I'm fed up." She squeezed his hand. "That's their boat--down there--with the big scow. It comes from Fort William four or five times each spring and summer to take the lumber away. Aleck's father owns it, and I hate him, too. He laughs at Uncle Pierre and wants to bring hunters up." Peter was silent. A miracle was unfolding itself in his soul and under his eyes. As they came near to the first of the cabins he thought again of his father and his message. "Where does Simon McQuarrie live?" he asked. The girl pointed to a little cabin near the mill. "Over there. And that's where I live--in the first of those two big cabins with the rows of white stones around them. Uncle Pierre and Aunt Josette live there, and Marie Antoinette and Joe in the other. Joe is Uncle Pierre's boy, and Marie Antoinette is his wife. You'll love them. Everybody does--except Aleck Curry." "I smell bacon," suggested Peter. The girl sniffed. "It--it's from Simon McQuarrie's cabin," she announced, a little disappointed. "Won't you come down to our place? Please!" "I've got to see Simon," persisted Peter. "My father told me to see him first." Simon saw them coming. His hard Scotch face softened as he saw Mona, and he scarcely noticed Peter until they were at his open door. Then Mona said, releasing her proprietary hold on the boy's hand: "This is Peter McRae. His father is out in the woods, and he's coming tonight or tomorrow. Peter wants to see you about something and he's hungry. He just whipped Aleck Curry, and that's why his eye is black and his lip swollen. Good-by, Peter!" There was something wholly and beautifully satisfying about Mona, and Peter felt himself strangely alone when she left him and he found himself in the cabin with Simon. And then a thing happened which would have amazed all the people in Five Fingers could they have seen it, for Simon McQuarrie, with his honest heart and hard face, had never revealed himself a man of emotion. Yet scarcely had Mona gone when he drew Peter into his arms, and his thin gray face shone with a strange light as he looked over the boy's head into the sunset that flooded the open door. "Peter--Peter McRae," he said as if speaking to himself. "Helen's boy--and Donald's. It's been a long time since I've seen you, Peter, a long time. And----" He held him off and looked at him in a way that puzzled Peter. "You look like your mother, boy, when she was a little girl. I knew her then." Peter was fishing in his pocket. "My father sent this to you," he said, giving Simon the bottle. The Scotchman opened it, and Peter watched his face as he read what was on the paper. He saw the lines about Simon's mouth harden and little wrinkles gather about his eyes. Then he turned, crushing the paper tightly in one hand, and added half a dozen slices of bacon to those already in the pan on the stove. After that he read the paper very deliberately a second time, and burned it. He cut more bread, brought out a pie, and while he added finishing touches to a feast that made Peter's eyes shine, he talked--but not about the paper in the bottle. When supper was ready he ate little himself, but watched the boy. Peter was starved. When he was done Simon rose to his feet and passed a big, lean hand over the boy's fair hair. His heart ached. Yet a duty had been imposed upon him, and he did not draw away from it. Words which Donald McRae had heavily underscored in the message he had sent kept repeating themselves in his mind, like a voice which he could not put off or deny. "Tell him _now_, tonight, as soon as he comes to you," Donald had written. "Before the stars are over me again I want to feel that he knows the truth, and understands, and has forgiven me. It may be I am a coward because I do not tell him myself. But I cannot. I am afraid. I want to think of him always as he has been. I cannot leave him with a heart breaking or his faith dying. God will bless you, Simon. It is for Peter's sake--and Helen's--even more than mine." They sat down on a bench, facing the last of the sunset, and Simon put his arm about the boy's shoulders. He tried to begin, and something rose in his throat and choked him so he could not speak. He tried again, and said: "So Mona found you, and you fought Aleck Curry and whipped him?" "She helped me," confessed Peter. "But I was empty. I can lick him now, when I'm fed up." Simon's arm tightened. His long fingers touched the boy's cheek gently. "You like Mona?" "Yes, sir." Simon waited. Then he said: "Do you want me to tell you a story, Peter--a story about another girl like Mona, who lived a long, long time ago?" Peter nodded, wondering whether Simon would then tell him something about the letter that was in the bottle. The story was short, for Simon McQuarrie was a cold and--most people thought--an emotionless man. But his heart was beating painfully as he began his tale. "A long time ago there was another girl just like Mona, and just as lovely and sweet, Peter, and there were three boys who grew up near her. But one of these boys was almost a man, much older than the other two, so that when the girl came to young womanhood he was really almost old enough to be her father. And these three all loved her, every one of them, but one of the three was very much like this Aleck Curry you fought and had a heart in him that didn't know what clean love was. Well, of course, she loved just _one_ of them, Peter, and he was the best and noblest of the three. Her name was Helen." "My mother's name," said Peter quickly. "Yes, and the odd thing about it is the name of the man she married was Donald, just like your father's. That's why I'm telling you the story, Peter. It--it's queer." Peter was silent. "The man who was almost old enough to be her father was glad in a way," went on Simon. "No one ever knew just how badly it broke him up, but their happiness in time made him happy, and he was the best friend they ever had. At least, I think he was. But the black-hearted one of the three was different, and one day when Donald and the older man were away he came to her cabin and insulted her, even though she had a little baby in her arms. And just then the other two came back. What would you have done, Peter?" Peter's body had stiffened. "If he was like Aleck Curry--I'd--I'd have killed him," he said. Simon drew in a deep, slow breath. "And that is just what happened, Peter. Donald killed him. He didn't mean to do it. It was an accident. But it happened. And the other man deserved it. He was better dead than alive. But it made a murderer of Donald, and they hang murderers. So the older man cared for the woman and the baby for three years, while Donald hid himself in the forests. Then--Helen died. And Donald came back and took the boy, and for years after that the law didn't know where he was, and they were happy together, and would always have been happy if the law hadn't found him again, and----" Simon's voice choked. His arm hugged Peter until it hurt. And then he finished, almost whispering the last words, "Peter, I know it's all true, because the older man's name was Simon McQuarrie--and I'm Simon McQuarrie--and--the boy's name--_was Peter_." It was out. He bowed his grizzled cheek to the boy's face and fought hard to choke back the thickening in his throat. It seemed a long time to him that Peter did not move or speak. But he could feel the tremble of the boy's body, and he knew that Peter understood. "So he won't come back," he said, trying to bring a note of comfort into his strained voice. "At least not for a long time, Peter. And he wants you to live with me. That's what he wrote on the paper you brought in the bottle." Still Peter did not speak. He was staring through the door, and it was hard for Simon to find more words. "We'll take good care of you here, Peter." Then Peter spoke. "Dad won't come back tonight or tomorrow?" "No." "Nor ever?" "Maybe he'll come, but it will be a long time." "And they're after him, like they were back there in the woods. They want to--_hang him_?" "They won't catch him, Peter. That is why he left you here. He can travel faster without you and is safe right now. But we must tell no one else about him. We must keep it all between ourselves--a secret." Peter slipped out quietly from under Simon's arm. He had no more questions to ask, and Simon made no effort to follow him as he went out into the last glow of the day. Slowly Peter walked past the mill and the yellow sawdust piles toward the timber which axes had not touched at the edge of the clearing. But he no longer took notice of the sunset glow or the twitter of birds or wondered at the molten gleam of the Middle Finger. He entered into the shadowing twilight of the forest and for the first time a sob broke from his dry lips. Then he called his father's name aloud, and the silence that followed emptied his heart of its last hope. He sank down in a huddled heap beside a tree, and his grief found vent in a low sobbing that broke strangely and terribly in the gloomy stillness of the trees. It was in this hour that Peter needed the comfort of a woman's arms. His world was gone. Without his father he wanted to die. The darkness crept closer about him. And then a little hand, timid, soft, touched his cheek. "Peter!" It was Mona. Her beautiful eyes were glowing softly at him in the dusk as he raised his head to look at her through his tears. She knelt down beside him, and he choked back his sobs, struggling to hide his grief and his tears from her. And then Buddy the pup snuggled under his arm and kissed his cheek with his cool tongue. Mona was dabbing at his eyes again with her little handkerchief, and her voice was soft and sweet in its mothering gentleness. It was then Peter forgot Simon's warning, and there in the deepening gloom of the forest, with Mona close beside him, he told what it was in his heart to tell--all about the police, and the fight and the running away, and now the losing of his father. "There isn't anyone else but my dad," he half sobbed at the end. "I even lost my dog. I haven't got anything now--an' I wish I was dead!" "You don't," she reproved, her two hands holding one of his own tightly, "and you _have_ got someone. You've got me. I'll take care of you. I will, Peter. I promise. And you can have Buddy, and all my pets--everything I've got. And--he will come back. Your father, I mean. All we got to do is wait." Her eyes were glowing at him in the dusk. "Why, your father is alive and he _can_ come back," she said straight from the heart. "Mine can't. He is dead. And so is my mother." An emotion new and strange swept over Peter--a flash of dawning manhood stirred to mysterious life by that note of something which had come from Mona's lips, a woman of the future whispering to him, chivalry calling, a boy's soul and a girl's rising for a moment above their years to point out the way to a new tomorrow. Peter's heart grew warm again. He rose to his feet, and Mona stood beside him. In the darkness they were very close. "I guess you're right," he said. "Dad won't stay away very long. And I--I'm sorry about your father and mother, Mona. And if Aleck Curry bothers you again, or kicks the dog----" And so they went back through the dusk to Five Fingers, and this time it was Peter who held firmly to Mona's hand. CHAPTER VII His first night in Five Fingers would always remain an unchangeable page in the history of Peter McRae. Time would not dim nor obliterate it but would only mellow the memory of its loneliness and its torture. In the hours when it seemed to him his world had come to an end, years pressed their weight of experience and understanding upon his shoulders, and for a little while pain and the poignancy of fears made him old, and he ceased to be a boy of fourteen. Simon McQuarrie had left a candle burning in the loft of his cabin. By its light he had made Peter's bed, and had hugged the boy to him for a moment before saying good night; and in going, with his head and shoulders above the trap in the floor, he had paused for a moment to say: "Don't worry, Peter. They won't get your father. And you must sleep, because Mona will be looking for you early in the morning." Then he had gone. And now, two hours later, Peter was alone and still awake. The candle had burned out, but the moon was coming up over the eastern forests. It was a splendid spring moon, big and round and full of golden fire, and its glow came in a flood through the open window of the loft. At the window sat Peter, huddled and quiet. He knew Simon was sound asleep. All of Five Fingers was asleep. From the window he counted six or seven of the dozen log homes which made up the little settlement, and their windows were dark. They were floating in a great, yellow sea of moonlight. He could make out the dark walls of the forest and the silvery sheen of Middle Finger Inlet. From beyond that sheen came the low murmur of Lake Superior beating against the rocks half a mile away. In springtime there was always this moaning of the big lake at Five Fingers, even on still nights when there was no wind. And tonight it was so quiet Peter could hear his own heart beating. At times it hurt him. It rose up in him somewhere and choked him. Once or twice, if Simon had been awake, he could have heard the boy sobbing. But Peter was beyond that now. His pale, thin face looking at the moon over the tree-tops had grown tense and set in its understanding and grief. Out under that moon his father was being hunted. Men were after him--men who would kill him or hang him if they caught him. He was no longer puzzled. His father was gone forever, just as his mother was gone, only she was dead. He gulped hard, and his fingers clutched at the rough wood of the windowsill. He could not remember his mother except as a beautiful dream. She had come to him sometimes that way, and he had felt the soft warmth of her hands and the sweet breath of her kisses in his sleep. In his brain he treasured a picture of her, but it was only a picture, while his father had been very real. Since the first day he could remember, it was his father who had made up his world, his father who had been pal, comrade and mother to him all his life, and who now--out under the light of the wonderful moon--was being hunted by men with guns, just as they had so often hunted the big white rabbits in the swamps. Again and again as he sat alone at the window his mind went over the events which had passed so swiftly since the day before yesterday, when his father galloped in from the railroad settlement with the officers of the law at his heels, and together they ran into the safety of the woods, leaving the little cabin in the clearing which had been their home. After that had come the longer flight, two days and nights of exhaustion and hunger, and the final parting when they heard the axes of the men at Five Fingers. It was when he came to that point his heart rose up and choked him, and he wanted to cry out in the stillness of the night. If only his father had put greater faith in his strength and years, and had let him go along! He could run, and hide, and live without anything to eat for a long time, and he could sleep on the naked ground, and swim streams, and he wasn't afraid. But his father had sent him on alone to this strange settlement of Five Fingers, where he had met Mona, and Aleck Curry, and Simon McQuarrie.... When his thoughts came to Mona a bit of comfort crept into Peter's soul. It wasn't so bad, with Mona near him. She had come into his life in a most unexpected and beautiful way, and had helped him whip the beast of a boy who had kicked her dog. He could still feel the warm thrill of her little hand as she led him through the woods and slashings into Five Fingers and he could see her eyes glowing at him in the dusk as she said: "Your father is alive and he _can_ come back. But mine can't, Peter. He is dead. And so is my mother." Peter could almost hear her speaking those words now, whispering them, as if she realized in that instant the sacredness of the trust he had put in her. And she was right. His father was alive, and could come back, while hers.... The distant murmuring of the lake came to him faintly. It made him shiver. Out there, somewhere, her father and mother had been drowned. He wondered if Mona was awake and was also listening to that sound, so faint at times that it was like a breath of air. It must haunt her, he thought. It was always telling her about what had happened, just as she had told it to him, coming down the slope into Five Fingers, and probably it made her cry when she was alone nights. It was terrible to remember one's father and mother dying like that, both at once, and Peter shuddered. It made him a little ashamed, too. The sense of manhood which his father had planted and nurtured in him began to rise above his own hopelessness and heartache, and he leaned out of the window to look at the cabin of Pierre and Josette Gourdon, where Mona lived. That was dark, too. But Mona might be awake. He hoped so. Next to his father she was the biggest thing that had ever come into his life, and thought of her, and of her nearness, and of her lying awake thinking about him, sent a warm and comforting feeling through him, just as her gentle hands and soft eyes had brought him a mothering consolation in the earlier darkness of the forest that night. It seemed to him, now that the reaction had come in his mind, that everything about the night was assuming a new aspect. It was the kind of night he and his father loved, and its stillness, its shadows and floods of yellow moonlight brought him a new message. _Their_ moon, they had always called it. "You were born on a night with the moon shining like that," his father had told him. "It came in at the window to look at you, and it was mighty pleased." So the moon had always been a personal thing to Peter, just as it had been to his father. And the Man in the Moon, Peter observed, was in a friendly humor tonight. There was a sly look in his eyes and an odd twist to his mouth, as if he were winking at Peter and telling him how beautifully everything was coming out, both for his father and for himself. Between Mona and the moon the sickness grew less in his heart, and remembering he had not said the prayer which his father had never let him forget, he bowed his face on the windowsill and whispered the words to himself. When he raised his head a big gray shadow was floating silently in the air just outside his window. It was one of the huge owls which turn snow-white in winter. He could hear the soft flutter of its wings as it twisted and turned and disappeared, more like a ghost than a living thing. And then a swift patter of little feet came on the roof of the cabin. It was another of the night folk, a flying squirrel. A few yards away was the big tree in which it must hide itself during the day. He wondered if the owl and the winged squirrel were among Mona's pets. His ears began to attune themselves to the different sounds of the night. It wasn't so empty, after all. There was always the murmur of the lake, and he could hear the occasional soft thud of hoofs in the meadow, and the mooing of a cow. A loon sent out its quavering love call from somewhere beyond the dark wall of the forest, and a wolf howled to the north. Now and then, deep in his sleep, Simon McQuarrie gave a snort in the room below. It was as if he were under water and came up at intervals for air, Peter thought. Then he heard an odd chuckling, and a porcupine came waddling through the moonlight toward the cabin. Peter could see him clearly. He was big and fat and stupidly happy, and chattered like a cooing baby as he approached Simon's woodpile. And at last the tenseness went out of Peter's face, and his eyes brightened in the moonglow, and he pursed up his lips to whistle down softly at Porky. He wanted to warn him of the doom which Mona had said hovered over all porcupines at Five Fingers. But the creature was deaf and dumb and blind. He found the axe which Simon had forgotten, and grunted his satisfaction. Then he humped himself into a comfortable ball and his teeth began working like swiftly beating little hammers upon the helve of the axe, which was salty with the sweat of Simon's hands. Peter whistled. "Get out, Porky!" he called softly. He was considering the necessity of going down to save Simon's axe when a second chattering shadow waddled in out of the moonlit open between the cabin and the forest. It was another porcupine, a huge, black fellow who was carrying on an animated debate with himself as he advanced. Peter grinned. He loved to hear the porcupines talk to themselves. But he had never heard one quite like the big black fellow. It was as if a mother pig were coming with a litter of little grunting ones at her heels, and he wondered if Simon would sleep through it all. The newcomer made straight for the woodpile and the gray possessor of the axe helve turned to meet him. The axe was between them, a sweet morsel for porcupine teeth. Low, throaty sounds floated up to Peter. It might have been a meeting of brothers, or of sweethearts, or at least of very good friends if one judged by those sounds. Then came a swift, flail-like movement of tails, followed by grunts and squeals and blows that sent a thrill of excitement through Peter. It was a glorious fight from the beginning, and somehow the big black fellow made him think of Aleck Curry, and in his eagerness to see the battle he leaned half out of the window. The fighters rolled directly under him and he heard loose quills flying against the cabin as the tails struck out like clubs. For a time he could not see who was getting the bad end of it. Then the black, who was more than ever like Aleck Curry, got a swing from the gray's tail that must have filled him with quills wrong-side in, for he let out a wail and began to retreat. Not until then did Peter hear a sound from the room below him. A door opened. In another moment Simon McQuarrie came round the end of the cabin. Simon was a tall and ghostly figure in his nightgown, which fell to his knees, and in his hand he carried a club. The club rose and fell and Peter heard a sickening blow. A feeling of horror shot through him. "Don't kill the white one!" he cried. "Don't kill it!" Simon McQuarrie, about to make for his second victim, looked up at the window in surprise. Peter saw the gray porcupine ambling back toward the timber, grunting and protesting as he went, and Simon made no effort to overtake him. "They were having a fine fight," explained Peter. "That black one was Aleck Curry, and the other was licking him. He was smaller, too." For a space the Scotchman stood silent in the moonlight. Then he asked, "Have you been asleep, Peter?" Peter shook his head. "No." "What have you been doing?" "Just looking at the moon." Simon turned slowly, with a suspicious upward glance at Peter. "Better go now," he advised. "If you don't I'll ask you to come down and sleep with me." As he disappeared round the end of the cabin, his scant nightgown flapping above his long and bony legs, Simon muttered under his breath: "Donald was wrong in having me tell the lad. Better to have lied and never let him know. As it is----" An expression which only Donald McRae would have understood settled in his face, and he paused for a moment at his door to look across the open where Pierre Gourdon's home lay in the radiance of the night. He could see the window of the room in which Mona slept, and the lines about his stern mouth softened. "Poor little devils, both of them," he said, and went in to his bed. Peter heard the door close. It seemed easier for him now to lie down upon the blankets. The moonlight streamed in upon him, and Peter could _feel_ it. There was always that something warm and comforting about the moon. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts no longer brought a lump into his throat or hurt him. It was as if an older mind were helping him over certain difficult places. It assured him his father was safe. The police would not get him, and it would not be long before he returned. If he failed to do that he would surely write, and Peter could then go to him. He began to think of Mona. She was, after all, the pleasantest thing he had ever had to think about, in spite of his happiness with his father. He reviewed the fight of that day and grew warm with anticipations of tomorrow and a renewal of hostilities. His hands clenched when he pictured Aleck Curry with his ugly face and big, heavy body, but they relaxed when he visioned Mona as she had taken part in the fight, with her shining black hair streaming about her and flaming eyes so beautiful he had at first been afraid to look at them. In his life in the wilderness he had never had much to do with girls, but here was one who pleased him completely, and all the ideals which his father had built up in him were roused and set on fire. His mother must have been like Mona when she was a little girl, because it seemed to him his father had always pictured her like that. Then he grew uneasy and shame crept a little upon him. It made him squirm in his blankets to think that Aleck Curry would have whipped him if Mona hadn't joined in those last two or three minutes of the fight. That Aleck was bigger and older than he, and that he had fought under the disadvantages of hunger and exhaustion, did not satisfactorily explain his own failure to Peter. He was glad his father had not seen that fight, even though he had been taken at a great disadvantage. But _Mona_ had seen it. She had seen him on the ground in those final moments, with Aleck about to pommel him into disgraceful submission, and she had come in to save him. There was only one thing to do under the circumstances, and the inspiration of it comforted him. He would go out early in the morning, hunt up Aleck Curry and lick him. He was sure he could do it now, even though he was smaller and lighter than Aleck, for he would be rested and would have a good breakfast to start with. He fell asleep. The big owl hooted softly from the top of a stub near the mill, and the flying squirrel was joined by its mate in a game of tag on the roof. The moon sailed higher, and under it a buck and a doe crossed within a stone's throw of Peter's window. All this Peter missed in an excitement of his own as his unsettled mind traveled swiftly from one dream to another. First he was fleeing with his father, and they were pursued by a horde of enemies, and all of these enemies were Aleck Currys. After that he dreamed of Aleck and Mona, and he fought so fiercely, with Mona's dark eyes and hair filling his vision, that Simon heard him twisting and groaning and climbed quietly up the ladder from below to look at him. For a long time the stern Scotchman watched Peter, and in the fainter light of the moon which now filled the room a miracle of change passed over his face and it became as gentle as a woman's. No one, since long years ago, had ever caught that gentleness in Simon McQuarrie's face. "It seems only yesterday," he whispered softly to himself, in a moment when Peter's pale face lay quietly in the crook of his arm. "Only yesterday, Helen." Something trembled inside him, and he knew the mother was in that room with Peter, watching over him as he had seen her many times in those years when he had cared for the two, those beautiful but pitiless years when he had hardened his heart against all hope for himself in his devotion and duty to his hunted friend, Donald McRae. Only yesterday! And yet many hard and tedious years had passed since then, and through them he had gone like a piece of iron that is hardened into steel by the alchemy of fire. Tonight had come the mysterious change. He climbed down softly, his heart trembling. He loved Peter. He loved him as he had loved the mother. CHAPTER VIII Peter awoke with the dawn, and with that dawn he saw Five Fingers rousing itself into life. All the sweetness of spring was in the air. The delicious morning song of the robins was the first cheering sound that came to him. It was like a beautiful chorus. "A man cannot be so wicked that the song of a robin will not stir some good in his heart," Donald McRae had taught Peter. "God made that song to begin the day with, and only those buried in the darkness of cities cannot hear or understand the message. Always think kindly of people in the cities, Peter. They are unfortunate." And Peter thought of that as he looked out of the window on the few log cabins at Five Fingers. He had never seen a real city, but here, with the rose-flush of the rising sun painting the eastern sky beyond the forests, was everything of beauty and glory his mind could conceive. "Here," he seemed to hear his father saying, "is God." Silvery wreaths of smoke were rising from the stone and clay chimneys of Five Fingers. He heard the gulls and caught the flash of their white wings over the Middle Inlet. Down there, too, was the squat, black tug owned by Aleck Curry's father--the tug which came up from Fort William three or four times a year to carry the lumber away. It was the one ugly thing he could see, and he was glad it did not belong at Five Fingers, and that Aleck Curry did not belong there. Already he was taking a possessive interest in the place, and his heart felt a gloating pride in the fact that he was a part of it, and Aleck Curry wasn't. He saw men coming up from the bottoms, leading horses. A cheery whistle came to him clearly. The mill, nearly buried in its big yellow piles of sawdust, was only a little distance away, and a man was stoking the boiler with wood. The cloud of smoke that rose out of the tall stack was white and clean, and Peter knew how sweetly it smelled. He sniffed, trying to catch it. And then a wriggling creature came under his window and began making contortions as it looked up at Peter. It was Buddy, the pup. He was just the kind of dog Peter loved, all knots and knobs, with big feet and joints and a head twice too heavy for his body. "He's growing," thought Peter, as he called down to him. "He's going to be a fine dog." A few minutes later Poleon Dufresne passed Simon's cabin with a pail of milk and heard the Scotchman whistling. This was unusual, and he paused to thrust in a curious face at the door, smiling good morning. Simon was getting breakfast with an almost boyish enthusiasm, and when Poleon saw Peter scrubbing his face his jaws fell apart in amazement. "Morning, Poleon," greeted Simon. "This is Peter--Peter McRae, and I've adopted him. He's the son of an old friend of mine, and he came last night as a sort of surprise. He's going to bide with me." This was a lot of information for Simon to give on any one subject at any one time, and Poleon came in with his pail, grinning his appreciation. He laid a hand affectionately on Peter's shoulder and told him how glad the people in Five Fingers would be to have him among them. Peter liked Poleon's round, rosy face with its cheery blue eyes, and when about to go Poleon turned a third of the contents of his pail into an earthenware crock and said to Peter: "That's for you, boy. Simon here doesn't care for milk, but he must get plenty of it now for you. There's nothing like milk to make you fat and healthy." It was Saturday. Peter learned that fact half an hour later while he was helping Simon wash the breakfast dishes. It came from a voice behind them, and Peter turned to find Mona standing in the door. "It's Saturday and there is no school," she announced. "So I have come to get you acquainted with Five Fingers, Peter." An enormous thrill ran through Peter. She was even lovelier than yesterday as she stood with her slim little figure framed in the doorway. Her beautiful dark eyes were shining, and looking at him, and her wonderful black hair was plaited in a braid that looked like a rope of velvet. Even Simon's undemonstrative face broke into an appreciative smile. Once he had told Pierre Gourdon it was not good for a child to be as beautiful as Mona. But a new thought came into his mind this morning, a strange and weird thought for a Scotchman of his nature, and he chuckled softly as he told Peter to wipe his hands and go with Mona. Then he went to her, and tilted up her pretty chin, and ran his hand over her smooth hair that was like silk to his work-hardened palm. He had never done that before, and Mona was surprised. She was surprised, too, at the changed look in his face and eyes. He seemed to be a different Simon McQuarrie from the one she had always known. "So you helped Peter whip that young rascal Aleck Curry, did you?" he asked with a wicked note of exultation in his voice. She flushed a little and cast a swift glance at Peter. "Peter had him whipped when I went in," she replied loyally. "No, I didn't," corrected Peter. "He was just going to mess me up in proper shape when you hit him with the stick. But I can lick him today." Mona smiled proudly at him. Then she looked sternly at Simon. "You killed one of my porcupines." "I had to," explained Simon. "He was eating my axe. Peter will take him over to the cemetery for you." He returned to his work and Peter and Mona went to the dead porcupine. Buddy was sniffing suspiciously at the corpse, and at sight of the red stains on the earth Mona shivered. "He didn't need to kill it," she said. "I heard you call to him to let the white one go. He could have let this one go, too." "You heard me?" She nodded. "I saw the candle in your room until it went out. Then I sat at the window in the moonlight. I didn't feel like sleeping." "Neither did I," said Peter, his heart beating strangely. "I--I was wondering if you were awake. Did you hear the lake?" "I always hear it." He picked up the dead porcupine, feeling that he had said something wrong. Mona took the other foot and together they carried their burden beyond the farthest cabin to a high little meadow at the foot of a green knoll. Here, Peter observed, were many scores of green little mounds, and many others over which the grass had not grown, and still others very fresh. And everywhere among them flowers were growing. Mona pointed out a spade, and he dug a hole. When the porcupine was buried, Mona said: "That is the twenty-seventh this spring. I wonder why porcupines like cabin doors and windowsills and axes and table legs when there are so many nice things to eat in the woods?" "It's the salt," explained Peter. "They like to eat anything somebody has handled. Once, when we were away, they ate our windows until all the glass fell out." "I put salt in the woods, lots of it," said Mona. "The deer like it too, and the rabbits, and the mice, and almost everything alive except the birds. Uncle Pierre has the tug bring me a barrel of salt every time it comes. Last time that beast of an Aleck Curry stole pepper from the tug's kitchen and put it in my salt." "I'm going to lick him today," he assured her. In her possessive little way she took his hand as they walked back. "I don't want you to fight him, not unless you have to, Peter. He isn't worth it. You have nice eyes, and they don't look good swollen half shut. I wish mine were blue." "I don't," declared Peter with a suddenness that startled him. "They're--they're----" "What?" she insisted. "They're--awfully pretty," finished Peter bravely. "I never seen--I mean I never _saw_ such pretty eyes." He felt like wriggling down into his collar, and looked away from her. Mona blushed, and if Peter had observed he would have seen her eyes sparkling. "And I wish I had light hair, too--like yours," she added. "I _don't_," he fought manfully. "Your hair is--prettier than your eyes. When I first saw you, there in the sun, I thought----" "What did you think?" she asked with interest. "I dunno. I dunno what I thought." He was tremendously uncomfortable, and was glad the musical droning of the sawmill began just then. That was another thrill, the clean, high-pitched cutting of steel through wood. There is something chummy and companionable about the sound of a sawmill at work in the heart of a forest country. It is friendly even to a stranger and makes one feel at home, and when Mona and Peter came to the mill the half-dozen men there were going about their duties as if they were a pleasure instead of work. They were a happy lot. Peter could see that with his boyish eyes, and his heart responded quickly to the gladdening pulse of it. Then Mona ran up quickly behind a man who was twisting a log with a long cant hook and tried to cover his eyes with her hands. In a moment the man had turned and had her up off the ground, tight in his arms. Mona kissed him, and Peter thought he had never seen the face of any man filled with a happiness like that which he saw in Pierre Gourdon's. And Mona, holding out her hand to Peter, said: "This is my Uncle Pierre. Come and kiss him, Peter." And there, with both the young folk in his arms, and the big, steel saw laughing and wailing in their ears, Pierre Gourdon, into whose heart God had put a passionate love for all children, kissed Peter. In thus welcoming the boy he drew him so close that for an instant Peter's face touched Mona's soft cheek, and so warm and sweet was it that through all the years that followed Peter never forgot that wonderful moment. Then Pierre Gourdon said, holding Peter off at arm's length, and looking at his eye which was still dark, and his lip which was swollen: "So you are the young man who whipped Aleck Curry for annoying Mona? Why, Aleck is half again as big as you----" "And I didn't whip him," interrupted Peter. "Not alone. I was tired and empty as a drum. He was licking me when Mona jumped in. She helped a lot." Laughter filled Pierre's eyes, and then a shadow followed it. The gentleness in his face gave way to a stern resolution. "Aleck is not a good boy," he said. "I will not have him troubling you, Mona. If he does it again you must tell me." "She needn't do that," protested Peter quickly. "I'll take care of her. I'm going to lick Aleck Curry today." Pierre Gourdon looked at the boy, and the sternness left his face. "Peter, you're a man. I love boys like you." He ran his hand over Mona's silken hair, just as Simon McQuarrie had done. "I guess I won't worry over you and Aleck any more, _Ange_. I think Peter is going to do what he says." "I won't have him fight Aleck," declared Mona. "If he does, I'll fight, too!" When they had left Pierre and were going toward the Gourdon cabin, Peter asked, "What did he mean when he called you _Ange_?" "It's a name he gave me the day he brought me out of the water when my mother and father were drowned," explained Mona softly. "It means something much nicer than I am." "I don't believe it," said Peter. "What does it mean?" "Angel." "Oh!" Peter was silent for several moments. Then he said: "I like it. I guess that was what I must have been thinking when I saw you first yesterday, there in the sun, with your hair all down and the flowers around you. First off you sort of scared me." "I _must_ have looked ugly enough to scare anyone," agreed Mona depreciatively. "But I like my hair down when I'm alone in the woods." "So do I," said Peter. "And you wasn't ugly. What's that building down there, with the box-like thing on top of it? Looks like a church." "It is--and our school. Uncle Joe's wife, Marie Antoinette, teaches us. She's beautiful, Peter. Uncle Pierre says she is as lovely as Aunt Josette was when she was young. Aunt Josette is beautiful, too. You've been to school a lot, haven't you?" "Not so much." "But you talk well." "My father taught me. Every day I studied, and he heard my lessons, even when we were on the trail. My dad was----" He stopped, the odd thickening coming in his throat again. "I love your father," said Mona gently. "Last night I prayed he'd come back, and he will. Uncle Pierre says it was prayer that brought me to him. He says prayer is always answered, if you believe hard enough." "My dad says that, too." "And I'm going to pray every night, Peter. I'm going to pray for your father to come back. _And he will._" The little doubt which had planted itself like a seed in Peter's mind was growing in spite of Mona and the beauty at Five Fingers. "If he comes back they may catch him," he said. "And if they do that----" She saw a queer, twisted look like a shadow in his face, and her fingers tightened. "They'll kill him," he finished. "That's what Simon McQuarrie says." After a moment Mona said: "I wish we could tell Uncle Pierre. He always brings things out right. And this is coming out right, too, Peter. I know it." Without logic, she was sweetly comforting. Her gentle assurance was a buoy to which Peter's courage and hope clung tenaciously, and he stole a hungry look at her when her eyes were turned away, and his heart beat fast. In a vague and unanalytical way the thought was in his mind that God could not help answering Mona's prayers. If He did not, there could be no God. And he was sure there was one--just as sure as he was of the trees and flowers and birds and blue sky all about them. Donald McRae had planted that faith deeply in his boy. "Did you ever have many prayers answered?" he asked her. "Yes, when I prayed _hard_," she replied. "I'm praying for something to happen to Aleck Curry, too. And it's going to happen, Peter. I know it's going to happen." "What?" "Anything--almost. I wish the crows would pull his hair out!" Suddenly she stopped herself with a jerk. "There he is now--down there on the Finger. He is throwing stones at my gulls!" "I'll stop him," said Peter, starting off. She caught him by the arm. "I won't like you if you fight. Aunt Josette and Marie Antoinette are waiting for us, and they won't like you either." She took possession of him again, and Peter gave himself up, though he could hear a challenging shout coming faintly from Aleck. And then out of the door of one of the cabins came a tall, slim woman with a face so sweet in its smile of welcome that Peter smiled back shyly, even before Mona had said, "This is my Aunt Josette." For an hour after that he was meeting people at Five Fingers. First there was Marie Antoinette, who was younger than Aunt Josette, but only a little prettier, Peter thought, and who said she would have a place for him in school next Monday morning. From one cabin to another Mona made him go with her, until he had met the Poulins and Dufresnes and Croissets and Clamarts and children and babies until he began to have trouble in remembering their names. Then they came to the last cabin of all, and this cabin looked like a doll's house to Peter. And the person they found in it was like a doll, too. At first Peter thought she was a playmate of Mona's, for she was only a little taller, with blue eyes and red lips and gold-brown curls tied back with a ribbon. Mona introduced her proudly. "This is Adette Clamart, Peter--Jame Clamart's wife, and she _graduated_ from the school of Ste. Anne de la Perade before Jame brought her to Five Fingers! And the baby----" She dragged him to the side of a crib and Peter looked down upon the round, cheerful face of young Telesphore Clamart, eight months old. Telesphore eyed Peter speculatively for a moment and then his countenance broke into a smile and he held up a pair of chubby arms. Mona uttered a gasp of delight. "He likes you, Peter! Put your head down. He wants to hug you." Peter felt himself growing red and hot as he bowed his head to young Telesphore. The baby dug his fingers in his hair and squealed in triumph. It was the first baby he had ever touched, and suddenly he forgot the two girls and his embarrassment as he felt a soft little mouth touching his cheek. He laughed back at Telesphore, and when the baby freed his hair and he stood up straight again he thought Adette's eyes, bright with the glory of motherhood, were almost as beautiful as Mona's. He fumbled in his pockets to find something for Telesphore and produced his jack-knife. "You can have that," he said, speaking directly at Telesphore. When they were about to go Adette put her hand affectionately on his shoulder. "Mona told us what happened yesterday in the woods, Peter, and Jame and I love you for giving Aleck Curry that beating. It was splendid of you to fight for Mona like that!" In the clearing Peter said to Mona: "It isn't true. I didn't lick Aleck Curry. Why do you tell them that?" "It is true," retorted Mona with an obstinate little toss of her head. "I was getting the worst of it when you came in with the stick." "No, you weren't. He was almost choking for breath. I couldn't help hitting him with the stick--that's all." And then she added: "Why is it you don't want me to think you whipped him? I've told everybody you _did_!" Her question and a quick flash in her eyes sent a little thrill through Peter. Was it possible Mona really believed he was getting the best of the fight when she began pommeling Aleck Curry with the stick? He flushed as he thought of his position at that moment, flat on his back with his legs in the air and his arms helpless under Aleck's weight, and Aleck himself just on the point of annihilating him! Surely Mona could not have been blind in those moments. She must have seen his peril, even if Aleck was panting for breath. Peter looked at her, trying to measure the truth of the matter. But Mona's eyes were innocent. If she was lying to him, she was doing it beautifully. In a vague sort of way the problem weighed itself in Peter's mind, and he saw even more clearly that it was necessary for him to whip Aleck Curry that day. The responsibility had now become a grim and insistent one, for if Mona really _thought_ he had whipped Aleck, he must do it in fact to save his own self-respect; and if she was shielding him from embarrassment and shame, as he partly believed, by spreading a false report of the combat, then it was doubly necessary for him to retrieve himself and prove his prowess by whipping the tug master's bullying son. From the corners of his eyes he began questing for Aleck, who had disappeared from the strip of sand below them, though he did this in such a way that Mona did not guess his intention. She showed him her pets, and it was then Peter saw something which he had never seen before, though he loved all wild things. At Mona's soft little calls the big-eyed moose birds which Peter called whisky jacks fluttered about her and ate crumbs out of her hands. Down on the white sand of the Middle Finger the gulls gathered close about them, like a flock of chickens, begging in soft, throaty notes for the tidbits which she had brought from the cabin. She sat down in the sand and they climbed over her lap. One huge white fellow pecked at her shining braid. "That's Bobo," she explained. "He always wants to eat my hair!" A one-legged gull hopped on her lap and began eating greedily the handful of bread-crumbs which she offered him. "And this is Dominique. I call him that to tease Dominique Beauvais, who is so fat and round. I don't know how he lost his leg, but I believe Aleck Curry must have shot it off a year ago. I wish Aleck's father would never bring him here again!" CHAPTER IX It was almost noon when Peter left Mona and returned to Simon McQuarrie's cabin. His head was in a whirl and his heart stirred uneasily between joy and grief. Not for many minutes at a time had his thoughts been away from his father. Even when Mona's dark eyes were smiling at him and her sweet voice was talking to him, his father's white and hunted face was a vision that never quite faded out of his momentary flashes of happiness. Deep down in his heart was an emptiness which even Mona could not fill, an aching pain which her beauty and her gentleness softened but could not quite drive away. And Mona tried. In her heart, which was sometimes a woman's heart in a child's breast, she knew that Peter was grieving and fighting to hide his grief. The tragedy in her own life, and a sorrow which had been deeper and more pitiless than Peter's, made her understand and feel what even Adette in her young motherhood might not have sensed so clearly. It seemed only yesterday to Mona that her mother had laughed and played with her under the big, white sails of the ship, with her father watching them, and only yesterday that the terrible thing had happened in the sea. No one, not even Pierre Gourdon, knew how vividly those hours and days came back to her at times. The forest and the wild things shared her secret, but no others. Over the two graves in the little cemetery at Five Fingers she had said quietly to Peter that morning, "My father and mother, Peter"--and that was all. Something in her voice held Peter from asking for the story of that frightful hour in the maelstroms of the Pit, where Pierre Gourdon had saved her and her father and mother had died. But he felt it. It crept into him and became a part of him, and even Pierre Gourdon would have found it difficult to explain what was born in their hearts in those moments when Peter looked at the big stone into which had been roughly cut the words, "Paul and Mona Guyon, Died Sept. 27, 1900"--and then said gently to the girl who stood fighting bravely at his side, "I'm sorry, Mona." For to Pierre they were children. But there was something in Peter's soul that was struggling beyond childhood as he returned to Simon's cabin. Three days, and this day most of all, had shown him his first dim vision of the bridge which spans the illusive way between boy and man. He had lost his father. But his father was not dead, while Mona's was gone forever. Out of the chaos in his mind these facts kept repeating themselves, and with them came ever more insistently the desire to do something for Mona. And one possible achievement loomed big--the whipping of Aleck Curry! Thought of it made his blood tingle. He did not ask himself what it was that Aleck had done to incur Mona's displeasure. It was sufficient for him to know that she was praying for calamity to fall upon his head. She wanted the crows to pull his hair out. She had prayed for that last night--when she had prayed for his father. And she was sure that God answered prayer. But it was his own feud with Aleck that fired both his chivalry and his hatred--memory of that moment in which the tug master's son had thrust Mona's head back brutally in the edge of the forest, with his big, coarse hands fastened in her hair. In his first encounter with Aleck he had saved Mona but had failed to avenge the outrage. He was sure he could do it now. Simon took him among the men after dinner and he became acquainted with them all. They went back into the cuttings, and it was three o'clock before Peter found himself alone. Then, instead of going back to Mona, he circled in the edge of the timber until he came to the end of the finger of evergreens that reached almost to the inlet. His heart gave a jump when he saw Aleck on the tug shooting at the flying gulls with a slung-shot. Peter had made up his mind to challenge his enemy calmly and without excitement, as his father would undoubtedly have challenged a man in a similar situation. But his plan changed suddenly. He picked up a stone and hurled it with such accuracy that Aleck, seeing the missile, dodged. Then he jumped ashore. Peter waited for him. He was not afraid, but his heart was beating fast. Aleck seemed to have grown considerably overnight, Peter thought. He was almost as big as Jame Clamart, and his face was red with an exultant passion as he advanced, stuffing the slung-shot into one of his pockets. There was no doubt this was just the opportunity Aleck was looking for, and Peter retreated with caution into the balsams and cedars. Aleck began to run--and Peter ran. He was light as a rabbit on his feet, and as he hopped over logs and underbrush he heard Aleck crashing like a big animal behind him. Twice he allowed his enemy to come almost within reach of him, and then spurted ahead. At last, in the edge of a little cut-over clearing, Aleck stopped. He was puffing and blowing and his fat face was covered with sweat. "Runny-cat!" he choked derisively. "Runny-cat--runny-cat----" He caught himself in amazement as Peter turned and advanced toward him. "Always smile when you're in a tight place," Peter's father had taught him, and Peter tried bravely to live up to the rule. A fixed grin was on his face. "I'm going to lick you," he announced cheerfully. "You're nothing but a girl-beater and a windbag, an' your wind's all gone. I wasn't running _away_ from you, Fatty--I was leadin' you _on_!" Aleck stood aghast, gulping hard to get his breath. It seemed impossible that a boy so much smaller than himself would dare face him with such monumental nerve. The bully in him was maddened by Peter's next insult. "You're nothing but a girl-fighter--a hair-puller--a big tub of fat," Peter informed him, "an' you'll be yelling for help when I get half done with you!" And then Peter jumped in. He was quick. His fists were small but hard. His wind was good. And the suddenness of his attack took Aleck off his guard. The first blow was what Peter called a stomacher, and Aleck let out a huge grunt. He bellowed anathema as he began to swing his heavy arms. Peter reached his nose and one eye and his mouth. He was like a hornet. His two small fists were swiftly moving hammers, and Aleck had never experienced anything like the hail of their blows. They took away from him what breath he had left; his nose began to bleed, his lip was cut, and then Peter gave him another stomacher. Could he have lasted for five minutes at the speed he was going, Aleck would have been a wreck. But Peter was delivering all his metal in one smashing broadside. Aleck floundered and puffed. One eye closed quickly. Blood smeared his face and shirt. His big mouth began to swell. He was not fighting muscle and brawn--but _nerves_. Every nerve in Peter's body was at its breaking point, and he was like a thing gone mad. But he was beating against a mass of dull and stupid flesh that had but few nerves to be shocked into submission. His blows began to carry less force, and he was compelled to breathe with his mouth open. He gave Aleck one last slashing cut in the mouth and then his strength seemed to break. His enemy's arms tightened around him and they went down together. Peter was under, just as in that other tragic moment when Mona had saved him. But there was no Mona to save him now, not even Buddy to nip at Aleck's legs and heels. His one consolation was a final look at Aleck's face close above him. He had done a pretty good job, anyway. In another minute or two the bully would have quit. Both rested, gaining their breath. Then Aleck began to pommel, weighting Peter down with his entire bulk. "I got you now," he managed to gasp. "I got you!" Peter saved his breath. He realized the futility of struggling against that weight with what little strength was in him and concentrated all his effort in shielding his face. Aleck was like a porpoise, and every half-minute or so was compelled to cease his jabbing to get a new supply of breath, a large amount of which he wasted in verbal laceration of Peter's feelings as he pommeled with his fists. "I'm a tub of fat, am I?" he demanded at the beginning of each fresh attack. "I'm a windbag, eh? A girl-beater, am I? Take that, an' that, an' _that_! An' yell for your girl, Petey, yell for your girl to come an' help you!" Then he would pause again to gather lung momentum for another attack. Each assault left Peter a little bit more helpless than before. He could feel himself swelling. One eye, he knew was entirely shut. The other he saved by shielding it against his arm. His thoughts were growing a little hazy, too, but all his mental and physical discomfort was dissipated by the threat of a new horror which came in a sudden inspiration of triumph from Aleck's swollen lips. "I'm goin' to yell for Mona," he said. "I'm goin' to have her come and see what I've done to you! A tub of _fat_, am I? Take that--an' that----" And he did yell when he got his wind again. In reality his challenge for Mona to come and see her Petey licked was husky and not far-reaching, but it seemed to Peter the whole world must hear it. "An' when she comes I'm going to make you say you're licked or I'll beat your head off," Aleck told him. And then he sat up straight, his heavy bulk astride Peter's slim body, and called Mona's name again. Peter's brain went hot. Was this to be the answer to Mona's prayer? Had Mona really prayed, or had she fooled him? Faith rode over his doubt. Mona wouldn't lie. She had prayed, and the trouble right now was with him--and not with Mona's prayer. Aleck's swollen face was growing purple in its vociferous calling for Mona. In a moment of safety Peter took a look at it with his one good eye. A thrill shot through him when he found the weakness had left his arms. He was breathing easily, too, in spite of Aleck's weight. If he could only get up--if he could have just one more chance at that fat, swollen face---- It was something quicker than Peter himself that moved him, an intuitive flash, a lightning-swift call of his brain upon hidden forces of self-preservation within him--a twist, a convulsion of his body, a squirming upheaval so sudden and unexpected that Aleck lost his balance with Mona's name half out of his mouth, and the other half never came. He fell sprawling, and Peter was upon him again like a cat. Aleck's face was his target, and he beat it--fast, furious and hard. He was amazed at the return of his strength. It exhilarated and inspired him, and in his mad enthusiasm he bit one of Aleck's ears. A roar of pain came from the bully. Peter's fist lodged squarely in Aleck's eye, and a second howl followed the first. At heart the tug-master's boy was a coward, like every bully, and in another minute he was crying for quarter. But Peter's momentum was too great to be stopped on such short notice. He continued, until in the end Aleck Curry was a blubbering, wind-broken, thoroughly whipped rascal, hiding his face in the earth. Not until then did Peter stand up, seeing the world dimly with one eye. And then--in that glorious moment of triumph and answered prayer--his heart stopped dead in his body for a single moment. Not ten feet away from him stood Mona! Even with his fading vision he saw the wild flush in her face and the joy in her eyes. The truth they betrayed turned his darkening world suddenly into a paradise. _She had seen him whip Aleck Curry!_ He turned to Aleck. "Get up!" he said. "Get up or I'll kick in your ribs!" Aleck dragged himself to his knees, then slouched to his feet. He was a pitiable sight. His eyes were little slits. His face was swollen until it looked as though he had the mumps. He was blubbering and gasping for his breath, and for a moment he did not see Mona. "Are you licked?" demanded Peter, coming close to him. Aleck drew back and put up a shielding hand. "I guess I got enough," he conceded. "If you ain't sure--I mean if you _aren't_ sure--I'll finish it," said Peter. "I got enough." "Then gimme the slung-shot." Aleck surrendered the weapon. In that moment he caught a dim vision of Mona. He gulped and swallowed a lump in his throat. "Now promise Mona you won't bother her any more. Promise--or I'll lick you again!" "I promise." "An' you won't throw stones at her gulls?" "No." "All right, Fatty. Now go on back to the tug. _And stay there!_" He watched Aleck until he had disappeared among the cedars. Then, his business done, he turned toward Mona. A little shyly, with shining eyes, she came to him. He wiped his eye. He could just see her. "Oh, Peter!" she whispered softly. He could feel her soft little handkerchief at his face, just as he had felt it that first day in the edge of the forest. And she was saying, "Peter--you're glorious!" And then something happened that sent a tremble through the world on which Peter stood. Raising herself on tiptoe, Mona kissed him softly and sweetly on his swollen lips. "There, that is what Aleck Curry has wanted all the time, and I'm _giving_ it to you. Say thank you, Peter!" "Thank you," said Peter. CHAPTER X Peter was conscious of the fact that he had lived a long time in the last three days and four nights. His adventures during that brief period of time had run the entire gamut of human emotions, with the possible exception of a desire to laugh, and his fourteen years of life seemed entirely out of fact. This philosophy did not strike Peter, but it did work into the troubled soul of Simon McQuarrie as he told Pierre Gourdon why it was that Peter's father was a hunted man, fleeing for his life, and how it had come about that Peter was now in Five Fingers seeking refuge with him. "And I'm going to keep him," he said. "I love the boy." What Simon had to say struck deep into Pierre Gourdon's heart, for it recalled the day of years ago when he had made his great fight in the sea to save a strange woman and her little girl, and had succeeded in bringing only the child, Mona, ashore. And Mona had grown to be a part of his soul. So when Simon had finished, Pierre nodded his head thoughtfully and said: "Mona brought Peter to me today. He has the making of a man in him. And he has promised to whip Aleck Curry if he troubles Mona again." He chuckled and shrugged his shoulders. "Aleck is almost twice as big as Peter," he added. "But the boy has courage. It may happen. And--we will make this a home for him, Simon." "And if that round-headed young blackguard of an Aleck sets upon Peter again," said Simon slowly, "I'll make his father take it out of his hide or never sell him another foot of lumber!" The gentle smile did not leave Pierre's eyes. A forest man, and son of many generations of wilderness people, a warm thrill of superstition and an immeasurable faith in the God that had made his beautiful world lay deep in his soul. Simon guessed what was in his mind when he saw him looking at a green patch of flower-strewn slope where lay the graves of Mona's father and mother. The smile faded slowly from Pierre's face, and a little of anxiety, of dread almost, replaced it. "The years have been kind to us," he said, speaking more to himself than to Simon. "It has been a long time since Dominique Beauvais and I brought our wives through these forests for the first time, and now there are more than fifty of us here--all our own people and friends. There has been little of tragedy and much of happiness. The plot up there is empty--except for Mona's people. Sometimes--I am afraid." "Peace and comfort have been with us," agreed the Scotchman. Behind them were the yellow piles of sawdust and the droning of the big steel saw in Simon's little mill as it cut its way through the hearts of timber. Simon loved the mill as Pierre loved the cabins he had helped to build, for the mill had brought prosperity to the wilderness people. It had also made necessary the ugly black tug which lay down in Middle Finger Inlet. The creases grew deeper in Simon's hard face as his eyes rested on the tug. "I wish some other man than Izaak Curry was taking our lumber," he said. "Maybe I'd like him if it wasn't for his boy. If that ugly lad ever puts his hands on Peter again, or on Mona----" He hunched his gaunt shoulders with a suggestive grunt. Pierre was looking off toward the timbered line behind which Lake Superior was hidden, half a mile away. For a moment after Simon's threatening words he remained silent. His face was thoughtful. "It is strange," he said, giving voice to what was in his mind. "Through children has come most of our happiness at Five Fingers, Simon--and all of our tragedy. It was seven years ago that the strange ship went to pieces out there and I saved Mona from the sea. She is one of us now, and if she should be taken away our hearts would break. And now comes Peter, whose mother is dead, and whose father is worse than dead--for Peter--because he is an outlaw. It makes me think of a long time ago when a boy came into Ste. Anne de Beaupré, away down on the St. Lawrence, just as Peter came to Five Fingers three days ago. His father and mother were dead of the plague back in the forest, and he was ragged and starved, and the first person he met was a little girl, just as Peter met Mona, and afterward he fought for her, and married her when he grew old enough, and--she is Josette, my wife. It is almost as if Peter was _me_. And I am wondering----" He did not finish. But Simon nodded understandingly. "Things happen like that," he said. * * * * * Out of the edge of the evergreen timber which ran down to the white sands of Middle Finger Inlet Mona was leading Peter. One of his eyes was entirely closed. His lips were swollen and his face was grimy and red with the marks of battle. He was a little dizzy. There was a ringing in his ears, and with his one good eye he could see the world but dimly. The green forests were a blur. The sunlight was a mellow glow. Mona's face, flaming with pride and joy, was an ethereal vision of loveliness which he saw as if through a number of gossamer veils. But in spite of his wrecked appearance his heart was beating with a swift and glorious exultation. He had kept his promise to Mona, to Simon McQuarrie and to Pierre Gourdon, for he had met and whipped Aleck Curry. The tug-master's son had begged for mercy, and the riotous thrill of it all was that Mona had looked upon that splendid battle and the ignominious defeat of the overgrown bully upon whose head she had earnestly prayed calamity might fall. Peter was fighting hard to maintain a calm and dignified mental balance as they came out of the forest. Mona's fingers clung to his hand. Her face was flushed and her eyes were shining like lovely stars. But it was the kiss he felt most of all--that warm and sweet and amazingly unexpected tribute she had placed on his lips in the moment of his triumph. It was a new thing to Peter. Since his mother had died he had never experienced anything like it and he could only faintly remember his mother. Through the years since then his father had kissed him every night before he went to sleep. But Mona's kiss was different. It remained with him in a strange and embarrassingly persistent way. "I knew you could do it," Mona was saying, a tremble of pleasure in her voice. "I just knew it, Peter! Does your eye hurt?" "Not much." "Can you see?" "Pretty good." She drew in a breath of deep and sincere appreciation. "I got there just in time to see you bite Aleck's ear," she said. "Oh, how he did howl!" Peter's conscience smote him. "It ain't--I mean, it _isn't_ fair to bite another fellow's ear," he explained, "but he stuck it in my mouth and I couldn't help it." "I wish you'd bit off his nose," said Mona. "If I were a boy and had hold of his ear with teeth like yours, I wouldn't let go." A generous impulse filled Peter's breast. "I'll lick him again tomorrow if you want me to," he offered. They went up the green slope from the inlet. Peter could hear better than he could see. He could hear the soft croaking of the gulls and the singing of the birds and the steely music of the saw in the mill. His bad eye was toward Mona, so that unless he gave his head a full turn he could not see her at all. A sweaty discomfort possessed him whenever he believed she was making a fresh survey of the disfigurements Aleck had fastened upon him. With his triumph rode the humiliating conviction that his face was out of joint and not pleasant to look at. "It'll be better tomorrow," he said. "What will?" she asked. "My face. It must look sort of funny." "Not half as funny as Aleck Curry's," she comforted him. "And if anyone dares to laugh at you--after what happened out there----" Peter caught the flash in her dark eyes. In spite of his protest she pulled him through the open door of Jame Clamart's cabin. Adette was bending over the crib of young Telesphore. Her big blue eyes widened and she gave a little gasp when she saw Peter, his hand still held in Mona's. And then, to his horror, she giggled. In an instant Mona was at her side. "Adette Clamart, don't you dare laugh!" she cried. "If you had seen it! If you had seen him whip Aleck Curry----" "But his eye!" exclaimed Adette chokingly. "I mean _that_ eye, Mona--the one that's open! It looks so--so funny!" "He's better-looking right now than Jame Clamart will ever be," retorted Mona with fierce dignity. "He hasn't got a snub nose, anyway--and that's what your baby is going to have when he grows up!" "But his _eye_!" persisted Adette, the giggling choking her. "Why is it so round and glassy, Mona? It's just like the end of my new glass salt shaker! Oh, oh, _oh_----" "_Adette Clamart!_" Peter, stunned and speechless, watched Mona drag Adette into the kitchen. As if drawn by an irresistible magnet, his one eye followed them, and Adette--looking back--gave a final little screech of laughter before the door closed behind her. Peter heard the tittering beyond that door, and Mona's protesting voice rising above it. He felt as if warm water had been poured down his back. He was clammy, and his heart had sunk down into his middle. He must be a terrible sight! Then he saw young Telesphore looking at him over the edge of the crib. In one of his fat fists the baby clutched the knife which Peter had given him earlier in the day. Peter went nearer and grinned at his young friend. The effort hurt him. Telesphore's mouth fell slowly ajar as he stared at Peter. He gave no sign of recognition. The jovial comradeship of a few hours ago was gone and his gaze was steady and perplexed. And then, as if desirous of possessing another strange article of interest, he dropped his knife and reached for Peter's one eye. Peter drew back. Adette was still laughing at him and Telesphore did not recognize him! He remembered a little mirror hanging on the wall and hurried to it. He was shocked. The thrill of triumph left him. His pride sank--and he sneaked through the open door as quickly as he could and trotted toward the big yellow piles of sawdust, hoping he might reach them before Mona discovered his flight. Screened by the piles, he came up behind Simon McQuarrie's cabin and almost bumped into a little man with a great head of shaggy gray hair, a round face with rosy cheeks, and eyes that were at first amazed and then twinkled merrily as they looked at Peter. He was a stranger. But swiftly and instinctively Peter liked him. Something in the way he rubbed his hands together and chuckled built up a confidence and comradeship between them immediately. Peter attempted a grin. "I been in a fight," he acknowledged cheerfully, for there was an attitude and quality about this little man that demanded some kind of explanation. "I been in a fight with Aleck Curry." "And he worsted you," guessed the merry stranger. "No, sir. I beat him up. I made him howl, and he promised never to bother Mona or her pets again. Mona knows. She saw it." The little man placed a hand on his shoulder. It was a gentle hand. Its touch comforted Peter. "Come in and let me fix you up, Peter. That is your name, isn't it--Peter McRae?" "Yes, sir." They went into the cabin. The little man seemed at home in Simon's place, for he found the medicine cupboard immediately, and was soon busy poulticing and bandaging Peter's tortured face. "Aleck is a troublesome boy," he said. "I hope you punished him well. But he is so much larger than you! Aren't you afraid of what may happen next time?" Peter shook his head. "I know how to do it now. I run away from him until he's winded, then beat him up. I'm going to lick him again tomorrow if Mona wants me to." "Good!" smiled the little man. His face grew rosier and a light was in his eyes that pleased Peter. "But I wouldn't try it on Sunday," he advised. "It's bad luck to fight on the Lord's Day. If you'll wait until Monday, I will take you out into the woods and show you a few tricks that may help you! And if it can be quietly arranged, Peter, I would like to see the next fight you have with Aleck Curry. "You like fights?" asked Peter. "In a good cause--yes." Peter was thoughtful as his cheerful and comforting companion fastened a bandage over his closed eye. "Sunday isn't such a bad day for a fight," he argued. "You could get Aleck Curry out in the woods somewhere, tell 'im you wanted to show him something, an' I could sneak up--an' we could have it right there. I ain't--I mean I'm _not_ afraid of Sunday!" "I'm not thinking so much of you as I am of myself," said the little man, laughing softly. "I mustn't let pleasure come before duty--on Sunday. You see, I have to preach tomorrow." "You have to--_what_?" "Preach. Down there in the little church. I'm Father Albanel, Peter." For the second time in the last half-hour Peter's earth seemed slipping unevenly under his feet. _Father Albanel!_ Mona had told him about the wonderful forest missioner who had no church and no set religion, but who wandered through hundreds of miles of wilderness, preaching the faith of God wherever he went, and who came every few weeks to Five Fingers. "All the forest people love him, and he is so good I think God must love him most of all," she had said. "He buried my father and mother." And this was Father Albanel--this little man with the jolly face and twinkling eyes, and he--Peter McRae--had invited him to witness a fight on Sunday! He squirmed uneasily. He could feel the hot blood rising up through his neck into his face. He wet his swollen lips and tried to save himself. "I didn't know you was the preacher," he said. "I guess mebbe it isn't right to fight on Sunday." Father Albanel's hands pressed gently upon the boy's thin shoulders. "It's right to fight any time, Peter--when you have a just fight to make. God loves a peacemaker but He also has no use for a coward--and no one but a coward would refuse to fight for Mona. Will you come and hear me tomorrow?" "I'll come," promised Peter. When Father Albanel had gone he climbed up the ladder to his bed of blankets close under the sweet-smelling cedar roof and undressed. The sun was low in the west and the afternoon song of the mill had ceased. The robins were chirping their evening notes. It was supper time, and Simon McQuarrie was late. Half an hour passed before Peter heard him enter the cabin. He came directly to the ladder and climbed up. In the twilight he bent over Peter. "Feeling sick, Peter?" "No, sir." Simon knelt upon the edge of the blankets. "I've heard about the fight," he said, in a voice which trembled a little in its unaccustomed softness. "Mona told me, and then Adette, and after that I went down to the tug to have it out with Izaak Curry--and his boy. But--Peter--lad, when I saw Aleck I had no heart to speak harshly to his father. I'm proud of you!" In the silence he bent his face nearer to Peter's. "Want something to eat, lad?" "I can't eat," explained Peter huskily. "My mouth is swollen shut." It was then Simon McQuarrie's hard lips touched Peter's cheek--the first kiss he had given in many years. "Good night," he whispered. "You're Donald McRae's son--every inch of you!" And Peter listened to his heavy feet as he slowly descended the ladder. CHAPTER XI The moon did not come up that night. Darkness shut in the earth, and with it came a warm and sullen stillness, broken only by low intonations of distant thunder, advancing over the roofs of the forest. A long time after Simon had gone Peter went to the window and sat staring out into the gloom. The air was drowsily heavy and bore with it the cooling breath of rain. After a little a swift whispering ran through the forest and the first gentle patter of raindrops fell on the cabin roof. The thunder crashed nearer and vivid flashes of lightning cut like flaming knives through the blackness. In a moment, it seemed to Peter, the storm broke in a deluge that set the log walls atremble. It beat straight down, and did not come in at the window. Peter did not stir. As long ago as he could remember his father had taught him to be unafraid of the awesomeness and beauty of thunder and lightning, and many times they had watched a storm together until the boy was thrilled by the significance and the mystery of it. It was his father he missed tonight, the immeasurable thrill of his voice, his presence and his love. Without reason his eyes strained questingly in those brief moments when the lightning flashes filled the world with a white radiance. In that light he could see the mill, stark and vivid, like a skeleton illumined by fire, the trees, the cabins, the stub in which the flying squirrels lived, and the edge of the forest. He did not miss that half of his vision which he had lost in his fight with Aleck Curry; he had forgotten the fight, and even Mona Guyon. For a time his thoughts were alone with his father, and with his yearning and his loneliness an unreasonable hope filled his soul--the hope that his father would keep his promise and that out in the glare of the lightning he would see him coming from the forest into the clearing. His heart ached for that. He did not know it, but under his breath he was sobbing a little. It was the truth, forcing itself upon him, the sullen, terrible truth, driving him back from the window and sending him creeping to his blankets, where he lay huddled and still. He had never hated anyone, not even Aleck Curry. But he was beginning to hate somebody--something--now. He hated the men who were after his father, and he was beginning vaguely to hate that controlling force which both his father and Simon McQuarrie had told him was the law. If his father had only taken him! If they were only together now, away out there in the forest, under a log or snuggled in the shelter of an overturned root--anywhere--just so they were together! Why had his father lied to him, promising him he would come back in a day or two? Why had he sent him on alone to Five Fingers? Peter choked back the sob in his throat. _He knew._ It was because his father loved him--because he knew that he could never return, and wanted him to have a home with Simon McQuarrie. Burying his face in his arm, Peter gave up to his grief. It was a silent, choking grief that ate into his heart but brought no cry to his lips. The thunder and lightning passed and the rain settled into a steady patter on the roof. It was like hundreds of gentle fingers tapping within a few feet of Peter's head. It comforted him in his aloneness and his grief. Mona was listening to that same friendly patter on the cedar shingles. Tomorrow he would see her again, and his heart grew warm. A part of her seemed to come into the darkness of his room, and he could see her eyes shining and feel the touch of her hand--and the kiss. And afterward he fell asleep, stirred by the strange and comforting sensation that Mona was near him. But in sleep he lost her. He dreamed that he was trying to steal away from Five Fingers to go in search of his father, but again and again Simon McQuarrie caught him and brought him back. At last success came. It was night, and he was crawling out through his window into the moonlight, with a pack on his back. He jumped to the ground and made for the woods. And then a strange thing happened. Where his father had left him he found footprints on the earth. They were very clear, and shining, as if made of bright silver, and they reached a long distance ahead of him through the forest. It puzzled him that his own feet left no trail at all while his father's trail was so clear. Days and nights seemed to pass as he followed persistently this silvery trail. Then he came to a wonderful forest where the trees were so tall their tops seemed lost against the sky. He walked on flowers. Great masses of purple violets crushed under his feet, roses filled the air with sweetness, wild geraniums nodded and bowed to him, and crimson splashes of fire-flowers carpeted long aisles and broad chambers of this mysterious paradise. He came at last to a waterfall. It did not roar, like waterfalls he had known, but fell with a rippling song. Near the waterfall was a cabin, and straight to the door of the cabin led the silvery trail! Peter followed it. He opened the door and went in and his father was there. He turned to greet Peter and did not seem surprised. His face was smiling and happy, and tender with the old cheer and the old love. "_I thought you would come soon, Peter," he said. "I've been waiting for you._" It was then Peter awakened. The patter of rain on the roof had ceased. The night had cleared and was filled with stars, and a sweet warmth came in through the open window. His dream had been overwhelmingly real, and it left him with his heart beating strangely. He did not sleep again but lay awake until the stars began to fade in the gray light of dawn. Then he dressed himself, making no sound that might disturb Simon. When he looked down from his window he almost expected to see the marks he had made in his dream-leap. And it could be done--that jump! He crept out backward, lowered himself full length from the windowsill and dropped easily to the rain-softened earth. He went toward the stream which came down from the timbered hills and ridges. The birds were beginning to sing, the robins first, twittering their sweetest of all songs, with eyes half closed. It grew gently, each soft note increasing in strength until the invisible chorus filled the clearing with its welcome to the day. A thrush joined in. Bright-winged bluebirds flew ahead of him, and sweet-voiced brush sparrows cheeped and fluttered in their coverts, waiting for the sun. Even the water dripping from the trees held in its sound the cadence of whispered song. And as if this melody held a spell which they were powerless to combat, or which inspired them to silence, the raucous jays were still and aloof, the whisky jacks waited in fluffy brown balls, a cock-of-the-wood clung to the side of a tree, his plumed head and powerful bill making no sound upon the wood, and ahead of Peter a gray owl retreated to a deeper and darker hiding-place. The forest was a cathedral, and its symphony seized upon Peter's soul and lifted it on a great wave of anticipation and hope. His father was listening to the birds, too. He was waiting for the sunrise. And a stirring thought came to Peter. If his father did not return, he would do what he had done in his dream--go in search of him. He was sure he could find him. He undressed at the edge of a pool in which the water was warm enough for a swim, and came out of it a little later shivering--but still thinking. The early rays of the sun were breaking over the tree-tops when he returned to the clearing. His bad eye was half open and most of the swelling was gone from his lips. Simon was getting breakfast and was surprised that Peter should come through the door instead of down the ladder. During the next hour his shrewd eyes saw a change in the boy. Peter was restless and asked questions. Where would his father be likely to go? Had he said anything about it in his letter to Simon? The Scotchman shook his head, guessing a little of what was in Peter's mind. He explained the vastness of the forests. They reached a thousand miles north and twice that far east and west, and one might lose himself in them all his life. Their bigness did not discourage Peter. "I think I can find my father," he said. "If he doesn't come back I'm going to try." The thought gripped him more tenaciously as the early hours of the morning passed. Simon brushed and mended him, and said he should have new clothes as quickly as they could be brought from the settlement on the railroad, and he talked of Aleck's defeat, and of Mona, and of the wonderful beaver colony two miles away, but the new thrill in Peter's blood swept over all other things that might have interested him. He would not tell Simon, but he was going in search of his father--soon. It might be that night, or the next, if he could get things together for a pack. The sun was well up when he saw Mona come out of the Gourdon cabin, and he went across the clearing to meet her. He was a little upset, for he would have to apologize for running away from her in such a boorish fashion yesterday. Mona's appearance this morning set his heart aflutter. She seemed almost as old as Adette Clamart, and not at all like the little fighting comrade who had helped him whip Aleck Curry at their first meeting. She was dressed in spotless white, and her long hair rippled and shone in the sun, and her dark eyes were so beautiful that for a moment or two Peter could find nothing to say as she looked at him. Mona was not entirely unconscious of her disconcerting loveliness, and her eyes shone and the color grew prettier in her cheeks when she saw its effect on Peter. "This is my Sunday dress," she said, helping him out of his embarrassment. "Do you like it?" Peter shifted, and thought quickly. "You look like a snowbird, one of the kind with a black topknot," he complimented her. "What do you think of _me_?" And he turned so that she could see where Simon had mended his rusty clothes. The sparkle died out of Mona's eyes, and in the moment when his back was toward her Peter did not see the look of pity and tenderness that took its place, and with it a shadow of something else, as if he had hurt her. "I put on this dress for you. That's what I think of you, Peter." "I got better clothes," he explained, "but we came away so fast we didn't have time to bring them." "I'm glad you didn't. I like you the way you are. Do you like me, Peter--really?" "A lot." "How much?" Peter turned over various terms of measurement in his mind. "Next to my father," he said. "Then why did you run away from me when I was in the kitchen with Adette Clamart?" she asked. Peter flushed. "I dunno. Guess I didn't like to be laughed at. And the baby--he didn't know who I was." The soft notes of a bell tolled over the clearing, and Peter drew himself erect and breathed a little tensely as he listened to it. "I used to hear a church bell like that, a long time ago," he said, softly. "I can just remember it." She touched his arm as they listened. "I was coming to take you to church. Father Albanel says you promised." She started down the slope, walking slowly, with Peter at her side. He thought it was interesting how the sound of the bell suddenly opened the doors of Five Fingers. Pierre Gourdon came out of his cabin with his wife, and Josette was dressed in white, like Mona; and Marie Antoinette, waiting with Joe and their two children to greet them, looked like a slim white angel to Peter. Even Geertruda Poulin, who was almost as wide as she was high, wore a dress as white as the gull's wings down in Middle Finger Inlet. The children were prim and starched and the men were in clothes which Peter had not seen them wear before, their faces shining with the effect of lather and sharp razors. And loveliest of all the girls and women, Peter thought, was Mona--lovelier even than Adette Clamart, who came hurrying to them with laughing eyes and red lips and rebellious curls dancing about her pink cheeks to beg Peter's pardon for laughing at him the preceding afternoon. To Peter's infinite dismay Adette seized his head between her two small hands and kissed him squarely on the eye which had looked so funny to her yesterday. "There, I'm sorry, Peter," she said. "But you did look so funny." She was gone like one of the dainty, golden canaries that nested in the clearing, running to catch up with Jame, her husband, who had Telesphore in his arms. Fire leaped into Mona's cheeks. "I won't have Adette Clamart doing that," she protested indignantly. "If your eye needs kissing----" Peter was wiping it with the back of his hand. "That's right, wipe it away," she encouraged spitefully. "I hate her!" Peter said nothing. But he saw Mona's lovely eyes flash in Adette's direction when they were seated on one of the wooden benches in the little church. Adette smiled mischievously and nodded her head, but Mona made no response except to tilt her pretty chin a little higher in the air and look straight ahead of her to the platform where Father Albanel was ready to begin the service. The little missioner's face was even rosier and jollier than yesterday, it seemed to Peter, and he was smiling and nodding and rubbing his hands as if this particular hour was the happiest of his life. Peter, looking secretly about him, was impressed by the fact that this was unlike any other Sunday meeting he had ever attended. He missed the serious and almost awesome solemnity of the other similar occasions he could remember. Here everyone was free and easy and refreshingly happy. Even Simon McQuarrie's emotionless face was more gentle, and he smiled when he saw Peter, and a ripple of laughter ran easily through the gathering when young Telesphore crowed delightedly and waved his arms in an embracing greeting to all about him. Then came the tinkle of a bell, and suddenly the room was very quiet. What happened after that was like a dream to Peter, and it seemed constantly to be awakening something new and happier within him. He had never heard singing like that which filled the little church. Mona's voice was clear and soft as the crested warbler's song which he loved; and when she looked at him and whispered, "Sing, Peter," his courage came to him, and a little at a time he lifted his voice until his boyish tenor rose clearly at her side. When they sat down she was nearer to him, so near that her wonderful white dress crumpled close against him and a tress of her shining hair fell upon his hand. "I love your singing, Peter," she whispered to him again. His heart beat fast and his hand twitched nervously under the silken caress of her hair. Until now--this hour when they sat so close together in the church--he had not felt the deeper stir of that emotion which was growing in him. Surreptitiously his fingers closed about the soft tress of hair. Mona did not know it, no one knew it but himself, and he looked straight ahead while his heart beat still faster and the warm thrill of his secret sent the blood into his face. Father Albanel was talking. And in a trance Peter listened. What struck him, and what he remembered so clearly afterward, was the way in which the little missioner talked about all living things, as if the flowers and trees had hearts and souls, and God loved the forests and all wild things just as much as He loved people. Peter had heard his father say many of those same things, only in a different way--for Father Albanel's voice was like deep music that reached down into the soul, and there was no whisper or stir among those who listened to him. He seemed to be looking straight at Peter when he talked about Faith, and what faith meant in the lives of men and women and children; and to make this clear to the children of Five Fingers he told the legend of Nepise, the beautiful Indian maiden, who was known as the Torch-Bearer. It seemed to Peter the missioner was describing Mona, for Nepise was the loveliest girl among all her people, with eyes that were pools of beauty and hair that fell about her like a shining black garment. The story became a tragic and living thing to him; he saw the plague-stricken Indian people, and when Nepise died the effect upon him was like a shock. But she had made her dying people a promise--a wonderful promise!--to come back in spirit, bearing with her the Torch of Life, and with this flaming torch she would go from tepee to tepee and from village to village, and all who had faith in her would see her and to them would come health and happiness. And Nepise kept her promise, and forever after that, and up to this very day, the Indian maiden was known throughout the wilderness as the Torch-Bearer. When Father Albanel had finished Peter looked at Mona. Her red lips were parted, her eyes were aglow, and in her white throat a little heart seemed beating. And when they stood up again to sing his fingers still held the soft tress of hair, and this time Mona saw it, and smiled at him, and Peter was no longer afraid of his secret. After Father Albanel's benediction Mona led Peter a little hurriedly from the meeting-house, but without losing her prim dignity so long as she thought Adette Clamart's eyes might be upon her. "I shan't speak to her all day!" she confided in Peter. They passed near the tug and saw Aleck Curry fishing from the stern, and Mona told him that neither Aleck nor his father ever came to church. Then they came to a narrow foot trail that was new to Peter and for half an hour walked slowly out on a green-timbered point of land until they reached the big lake. It was the finest view Peter had ever had of Superior. The great sea seemed to engulf the world, and away out there were three white dots which were ships under canvas. It was warm and calm, and he was puzzled by a sullen, booming roar until Mona led the way down a break in the cliff and showed him the Pit, where the surf and undertows boiled and rumbled even in fair weather. And in storm---- She tried to tell him what it was then, when the great rocks were like so many monsters, grinding things to pieces, and when nothing that lived could exist for more than a minute or two in what Pierre Gourdon called the maelstroms. They found a clean white rock, worn smooth by the water, and sat down, and Peter wondered at the change which came into Mona's face. "Can you remember your mother, Peter?" she asked softly. He was silent for a moment, and then said, "I've seen her a good many times when I was asleep." "Do you still see her?" "I did two nights ago." "Is she pretty?" "Yes." "So is mine." She folded her hands in her lap and added quietly: "Out there is where my mother and father were drowned. Uncle Pierre tied me to his back and brought me ashore." Then she told him the story of the wreck of the sailing ship, and how Aunt Josette and Marie Antoinette and Father Albanel and all the people of Five Fingers said it was a miracle that even one should come ashore alive. And she was that one. "Father Albanel sometimes comes down here with me," she said. "I love him. He always tells me about Nepise. Isn't that a pretty name, Peter? It means Willow Bud. But after she died and her spirit came back with the torch they called her Suskuwao, which means the Torch-Bearer. I love her, too. Do you?" Peter nodded. "I was thinking of you," he said desperately, trying to get the choking thought out of him. "Father Albanel was looking at you when he told about the Indian girl. That's what you've been to me since I come--a--a sort of torch-bearer, like he said she was. I dunno what I'd have done if it hadn't been for you." It was out, and for a moment or two the suffocating realization of what he had said made it difficult for him to breathe easily. Mona did not look at him. Her shining eyes were fixed steadily upon the vastness of the lake. "Was that why you touched my hair, Peter?" "I guess so." "You like me--_like that_?" He nodded again, finding the moment too tremendous for words. And this time Mona was looking at him. There was an earnestness in her face which made her seem older to Peter. Her eyes were a woman's eyes, calm and steady in their gaze, as they studied him for a moment. "And I like you, Peter," she said then, "I like you so much--that I never want you to go away from Five Fingers." "And I never want to go," he said. "Not if my father comes back." "He will come!" Her voice was quick and sure and filled with a vibrant ring that sent a little tremble through him. She was sitting very straight, and a gust of wind stirred her hair so that it rippled and floated about her, and Peter--looking at her with wide eyes and swiftly beating heart--thought of Father Albanel, and of Nepise the Torch-Bearer, and the beautiful faith the little missioner had visioned entered into him and he believed. And the strange and thrilling impulse came to him to put his hand to that soft cloud of Mona's hair and tell her that he believed. But he did not move, nor did he speak. For a space Mona seemed to be far away from him, gazing at something which he could not see out beyond the turmoil of the Pit. Her fingers were interlocked in her lap, and not until the voice of Jame Clamart hallooed down from the top of the cliff was the spell of silence broken. Mona started but did not look up. She knew Adette was there, smiling down at them and ready to wave her hand. Quite calmly she said to Peter: "It's that Adette Clamart. Will you promise never to let her kiss you again?" "Sure--I promise," said Peter. "As long as you live?" "As long as I live." "Cross your heart, Peter!" Devoutly Peter took the solemn oath. "I'm glad," said Mona. "I don't like kissing--but if it has to be done I'll do it!" And a fiery little note in her voice was so combatively possessive that Peter suddenly felt himself a helpless but willing slave in chains. And in the days and weeks that followed his first Sunday in the settlement this bondage was stronger than the hungering loneliness for his father which pulled him at times toward the big forests of the north. Mona's world became his world. He began to fit into its play, its duties, and the family communism of its environment. He went to school. At odd hours he worked about the mill and helped in the spring planting, and later in the tilling of the soil. In the passing of the summer Mona and Peter spent much of their time together in the cool depths of the forests. On these adventurings they were inseparable, and their favorite haunt, specially on Sunday afternoons, was a beaver colony a mile and a half up the shore of the lake and a little back in the rough ridges and hills. The beaver settlement was Mona's own property, and it was one of the laws of Five Fingers that no one should despoil it with trap or gun. It was five years ago, Mona told Peter, that four old beavers emigrated from some one of the colonies back in the hills and she and Pierre discovered them building a dam at this place. There were now over thirty of them. A long time ago they had ceased to be afraid of her, and some of them were so friendly she could touch them with her hand. But they were alarmed when Peter came with her and for days scarcely a head would show when he was about. Very slowly and with extreme caution they began to accept him as a part of Mona, and the first cool breath of autumn was in the nights before they would openly disclose themselves or play on their slides or proceed with the varied duties of their lives when he was watching the big dark pool in which they had built their homes. CHAPTER XII In September a sinister and foreboding gloom seemed to creep out of the wilderness surrounding Five Fingers. The golden autumn, with its soft Indian summer and its radiance of color, died almost before it was born. The birch leaves did not turn yellow and gold but stopped at a rusty brown; the poplar leaves curled up and began to fall from their stems before the first frost; mountain ash berries were pink instead of red, and heavy fogs settled like wet blankets between the ridges, while in the swamps the rabbits were dying in hundreds and thousands of the mysterious "seven years' sickness." The men at Five Fingers, and especially Pierre Gourdon and Dominique Beauvais, who read the wilderness as if it were a book, regarded these matters with anxious eyes. It was Pierre who called attention to the going of the bluebirds a month before their time, and noted first that the red squirrels were gathering great stores of cones, and that the robins were restless and uneasy and were assembling in the flocks which presaged sudden flight. Then, one sunset, a great flock of wild geese went honking south. They were high and flying very fast. Pierre Gourdon pointed up. "When the wild geese race like that in September--it means a bad winter. Only twice have I seen it. The last time was two years before we came to Five Fingers--a year of starvation and plague; and the other time----" He shuddered, and shrugged his shoulders, for that other time was in boyhood, when his mother and father had died back in the forests, and he had dragged himself starving and nearly dead to Ste. Anne de Beaupré. Colder nights came, filled with moaning winds, and the days were darkened by ash-gray skies through which the sun seldom shone warmly, and more and more frequently came the honk of geese racing south. Peter could hear them at night, in darkness and when the stars were shining, coming from the north, crying down their solemn notes of passage from the high trails of the air. And these same nights he heard the wolves howl back in the hollows and ridges and deeper hunting grounds of the forests, and Pierre Gourdon listened uneasily to the cold, hard note in their voices, and said to Dominique: "The wolves will run lean this winter, and when hunger trails the wolves, famine is not far behind." But it was the dying of the rabbits more than the crying of the wolves that worried them at first. The plague-stricken animals were lying everywhere, even up to the steps of the cabins, and one day Peter counted so many in a corner of the swamp that Simon McQuarrie's eyes widened a little with doubt when he told his story. Once every seven or nine years had the rabbit plague swept on its devastating way through the wilderness, but never had Pierre or Dominique or Simon seen it so destructive as this year, and the nearer howling of the wolves and the strange, clammy nights with their deathlike fogs roused in Pierre Gourdon's heart the ghosts of old superstitions and old fears put there in tragic days when he was a boy. And then came a night when the world seemed filled with wet smoke, and on that night the gray Canada geese came down from the north in a multitude so great that they filled the sky over Five Fingers with a winged deluge, and thousands of them dropped into the inlet and the clearing to rest. Their honking was a bedlam which made sleep impossible, and with the dawn Peter could see them darkening the fields and the water of Middle Finger Inlet. When the various companies and regiments began taking wing the sound they made was a steady thunder that sent a weird and thrilling shudder through earth and air. There were ten thousand pair of wings in that southward moving host, Pierre Gourdon said. Peter had never thought there were so many wild geese in the world and it puzzled him that not one of them was killed by the men at Five Fingers. "A wild goose mates but once," Pierre explained. "If his mate dies, he does not take another, but lives alone for the rest of his life. Memory and loyalty like that men do not have, and so it is a crime to kill them." Then he added, looking up thoughtfully at one of the winged triangles racing through the sky, "And the gray goose lives a hundred years!" In October what were left of the big snowshoe rabbits began to turn white, and the wind kept steadily in the north. Snow fell early. All through November the big lake was lashed by fierce gales; the Pit roared and whipped itself into furies, and the gulls were gone entirely from Middle Finger Inlet. In a single night, it seemed to Peter, winter came. And from the beginning it was a black, ominous winter. For days at a time there was no sun. The sky was shut in by a gray canopy of cloud. When snow fell it was hard and biting, and riding with the wind, it stung the flesh like fine shot. In December came a change. The winds died, the skies cleared a little, and day and night it snowed until the wilderness was smothered and the evergreen forests bent to the snapping point under their burden. Trails were closed and the hollows between ridges were filled. One day Poleon Dufresne snowshoed in from the railroad settlement, half dead from exhaustion and bearing the news that all the world was shut out by snow, and that it lay twenty feet deep in the open places. And quietly he gave other news to Pierre Gourdon and Dominique and Simon McQuarrie. The dreaded plague of the wilderness--the smallpox--had already begun to stalk through the northland. Following the deep snows came a cold so intense that the men no longer ran the hazard of frosted lungs by working in the woods, and all wild life seemed to have become extinct. Between the lake and the settlements along the line of steel one could scarcely have found the trail of a cloven hoof, for the deer and moose were yarded deep and struggled breast-high against snow for the bush-browsing that kept them alive, while the caribou, milling against wind and storm, had left the snow-smothered country for feeding grounds farther north. It was a winter that began--first of all--with starvation. The icy coating of the trees left no budding for the grouse; small creatures smothered in thousands under the hardening snow crust which could soon bear the weight of a man; foxes and ermine gnawed bark in their hunger; with the rabbits gone, owls died of a sickness which ravages them in times of forest famine--and the empty stomachs of wolves brought them nearer and nearer to the clearing until frightened horses broke halters in their stalls and cattle bellowed in their terror. Peter had never heard wolves as they cried out now. Sometimes their wail of hunger was almost a sobbing in the night, and again it was bitter and vengeful as hoof and horn beat them back from some yarded stronghold of moose and deer. Each day and week Peter came to understand more of the tragedy through which he was passing. It was one of the "black years." Father Albanel came to the settlement early in January; he was thin and haggard, his eyes deep-set, the rosy color gone from his face. In the little church he asked the people of Five Fingers to offer up prayer for the thousands who were sick and the hundreds who were dying through all the great wilderness from Hudson Bay to the Athabasca and from Big Lake to the Barren Lands. Over all that country the plague was raging, sweeping like a forest fire from tepee to cabin, until in certain far places the great Hudson Bay Company could no longer bury its dead, and masterless dogs ran with the wild things in the forests. Pierre Gourdon's face was almost as haggard as Father Albanel's, and Mona called Peter's attention to it, with a tense and strange look in her eyes. "I overheard Uncle Pierre and Aunt Josette when they were talking last night and they said they weren't afraid for themselves but that they were afraid for me," she said. "Why should they be, Peter? I don't get sick easily." "You're a girl, that's why," he explained. "But if I should get sick--what would you do? Would you dare to come and see me?" "I'd come." "Even if it was the plague?" "I'd still come." [Illustration: _OLD SIMON_ held Peter off at arm's length, his stern face working in a strange way ] [Illustration: _PETER McRAE_ had come home and a whisper of gladness ran among the crowd ] "I'd like to have you, Peter. If I was sick and you didn't come, I think it would make me feel so badly I wouldn't get well." And that night, with the wolves wailing at its doors, the blighting hand of the red plague fell upon Five Fingers! It touched Geertruda Poulin first, and Jeremie, her husband, nailed a red cloth over his cabin door to keep the children at a distance, and that rag, fluttering in the winds, soon filled their hearts with a greater terror than if they had seen a _loup-garou_ haunting the edge of the forest or the grim hunters of the _Chasse-galerie_ riding through the gloomy sky, for they were told that to go near it meant death. And then, three days later, little Tobina fell ill, and with a pale, brave face and eyes in which there was no sign of fear Marie Antoinette went into the plague-stricken cabin to nurse them. After that Joe Gourdon's face was like a mask carven out of stone until the night when Jame Clamart pounded at his door and cried out the terrible news that Adette was down with the fever. And that midnight Josette calmly kissed Pierre and Mona good-by and went to her. Until she was gone Pierre held back the sob in his throat--then it escaped him, and he held Mona close, so close that it hurt her. It was on a Sunday morning, bitterly cold and filled with gusty winds, that Jeremie Poulin staggered out from his door and flung up his arms to the sky, and the word passed from cabin to cabin that Geertruda was dead. Alone, barring all others from their company, Simon McQuarrie and Father Albanel dug with picks and grub-hoes the first new grave in the little cemetery. Chunk by chunk they broke out the frozen earth, and when it was dark--so dark no eyes could see them--they helped Jeremie Poulin carry his dead over the clearing and upon their knees prayed with him at the grave-side. After that they lived in one of the barns, visiting only the sick and the dead, and each morning and evening Simon would shout to Peter through the megaphone of his hands, asking him if he felt pain or dizziness or fever, and warning him to stay in the cabin. Then Sara Dufresne and two of her three children were stricken and Jean Croisset died so suddenly that the shock of it stopped every heart in Five Fingers. Pounding of hammers came from the barn, and the next morning there was another mound of brown and frozen earth in the cemetery. A day later Dominique Beauvais, with his house full of children, nailed up the red badge of sickness over his cabin door. Each day Peter saw Mona. They spent their hours together, and Pierre Gourdon watched them as a hawk watches its young. At night they sat at their windows, for after Jean's death the skies cleared and a glorious moon filled the world with light. And one night Peter heard the hammers pounding again, and in the gray of dawn--still sleepless and wide-eyed--he saw Father Albanel and Simon and Jeremie Poulin come from Dominique Beauvais's cabin bearing a long, grim thing among them; and when they had reached the burial slope he saw them turn back, and enter the cabin again, and come forth once more with their shoulders bent under a burden. Peter's heart choked him. He sobbed and clutched his hands at his breast. It was Félipe and Dominique, the two youngest of the Beauvais children, whom he had seen carried to the burial plot. Sobbing, he ran toward Mona's home. The door opened and Pierre Gourdon came out. Peter stopped a few paces away, for there was something in Pierre's face that frightened him. At first he thought it must be the madness of the fever; then his ears caught words, strange, hard words that froze his blood and that seemed to come with a mighty effort from Pierre's ghastly face. Mona was sick! She was in bed--and he must return to Simon McQuarrie's cabin and not come again within breathing distance of the house! Peter moved closer to the door, powerless to speak, and Pierre thrust him back so roughly that he fell to the ground. "Go away!" he commanded, raising a hand as if to strike the boy. Through the open door Peter had a glimpse of Josette's face looking out at him, so white and haggard that for a moment he thought it was an old woman's face. He cried out to her but in the same moment she was gone and there came no answer. Then he spoke half defiantly to Pierre. "I want to see Mona," he said. "I promised her I'd come if she was sick." "Go!" said Pierre again, pointing sternly toward Simon McQuarrie's cabin. "You can come halfway to learn how Mona is, but if you come this near again I shall have you taken from Five Fingers!" Peter drew slowly away, staring in horror at Pierre and the cabin behind him. He slumped down on the doorstep at Simon's place and did not feel the bitter cold. He saw Pierre enter the cabin, and then he watched the gray figures in the distant cemetery as they moved slowly about, piling the last of the frozen clods upon the burdens they had carried through the dawn a few minutes before. And Mona was down with that same sickness--which meant death! In his torment he picked and twisted at his clothes until his thin fingers were blue with the cold. Pierre came out again and put up the red cloth, and then he went to intercept the three men who were on their way from the cemetery to their quarters in the barn. Father Albanel and Simon McQuarrie returned with Pierre and entered the cabin where Mona was sick. In a few minutes Simon came out and seeing Peter huddled on the doorstep, approached as near to him as he dared. He asked the same questions, and gave the same warnings, and assured Peter that Mona was only slightly ill, and that she would get over it very quickly. But there was in his face the same look that had been in Pierre's, and Peter knew he was lying. "She is going to die," his heart kept crying, and he dragged himself into the cabin and flung himself upon Simon's bed, and when Joe Gourdon came in he was crying, his head buried in his arms. With his beloved Marie Antoinette keeping guard in Jeremie Poulin's house of death, Joe was making a courageous fight. "Tobina Poulin is past all danger, and if things go well Aunt Marie Antoinette will come home in a few days, and then you can come to us," he comforted Peter. "Meanwhile I'm going to stay with you." But Joe's cheerfulness was mostly forced. News came early in the day that Adette Clamart was very close to death, and that Jame and Father Albanel were constantly at her bedside. That night sheer exhaustion brought sleep to Peter. He was awakened by a pounding at the door. Joe's voice called out below and another answered it from outside. It was Jame Clamart, going from cabin to cabin in a madness of joy, telling the people of Five Fingers that the crisis was over and Adette would live. Peter could hear the running crunch of Jame's boots in the hard snow as he hurried on to the next neighbor and for a long time after that he lay awake in the cold darkness of his room, thinking of Mona. Fear of death had not gripped him so terribly before. In the tragedy of others he had felt shock; its suddenness and horror had stunned him and filled him with dread, but the physical grief of it had not touched him deeply until now. He was sick, but the sickness was in his heart, as if something had been cut out of it, leaving in its place an emptiness which made breath come to his lips in smothered sobs. And that something which had been taken away from him was Mona. When he closed his eyes he could see her clearly on her white bed, her long hair streaming about the pillow, her face pinched and thin, and all the time she was wondering _why he did not come_. She was going to die; he could think of nothing but that, and after a little one thing persisted in traveling through his brain so frequently and so terribly that he called aloud for Joe. The maddening picture was that of Father Albanel and Simon and Jeremie Poulin marching through the gray dawn to the burial plot with the bodies of Félipe and Dominique Beauvais. Joe came up, and for the rest of that night Peter lay in the shelter of his arm and fell asleep again. The next day came with good omen. A bright sun rose over the forests, clearer and warmer than it had been for many weeks. Herman Vogelaar, whose laughter had gone with the death of his daughter, Geertruda, came at breakfast time with the word that Adette was entirely out of her fever, and that Poleon Dufresne's wife and three children were much better than yesterday. Father Albanel, he said, had spent the last half of the night with Mona. Mona was very sick. She was worse than Adette had been, or even Geertruda, in the same length of time. He was afraid----But Joe gave him such a fierce scowl he did not finish. Peter saw the scowl and the nervous twisting of Herman's fingers at the lapels of his coat as he tried to think of something with which to cover his blunder. He wanted to ask Herman to speak what had been on his lips, but instead he put on his coat and cap and heavy mittens and went out into the day, hoping that somewhere he would see Father Albanel. As if his hope were a prayer quickly answered, Father Albanel came from the Gourdon cabin. The little missioner advanced, keeping the wind well in his face, and when he was fifty paces from Peter he stopped and called to the boy to stand where he was. Peter tried to speak bravely when he asked if Mona was going to die. "She is very sick," said the missioner. "We must pray for her, and believe with all our might that she is going to get well. I think God will let her live." "I promised I'd come if she was sick. I got to keep my word. I'm not afraid." Father Albanel shook his head. "It is impossible, Peter. There are too many of us down now." "I won't get sick," said Peter doggedly. Father Albanel spoke sharply. "Keep to your cabin, my boy, and be as brave as Jame Clamart has been. If Mona grows worse, I will tell you." Each morning after this he brought news of Mona to Peter. For a week there seemed to be no change. On the eighth day she was worse; on the tenth Pierre and Josette and Father Albanel were fighting desperately to save her life. The tenth night came. It was past midnight when Peter crept softly to his window and opened it. With as little sound as he could make he drew himself through and dropped to the ground. He ran away quickly, the brilliance of the stars sending his shadow along with him. He did not stop until he reached the Gourdon cabin, and there he hugged closely against the log wall, his heart beating wildly as he waited. Above him a light glowed feebly against the curtain in Mona's room. He wanted to call to her; he puckered his lips and almost gave the whistling signal which she knew. Then he heard a sound, a movement of some kind, and stealthily he approached a lower window. He could see Josette very clearly. She was seated in a chair with her face bowed in her hands, and Pierre was standing at her side, gently stroking her hair. Father Albanel was behind them, his face white and torn with grief. Then Peter saw that Josette was crying. A terrible fear gripped him as he drew away from the window. What he had seen could mean only one thing. Mona--_was gone_. He looked up at the dim light above him again, and in that moment his soul cried out against all those who had kept him away from her. He went to the kitchen door, opened it, and entered. This time he would scream and fight if they tried to keep him back. But no one heard him. Father Albanel's voice came to him faintly. He was praying. Peter reached the stair and went up quietly. The door of Mona's room was open. A lamp, turned low, was burning on the table. He approached the bed, scarcely knowing that he was moving toward it. His heart was crushed, his world crumbled and gone, for Mona must be dead or they would not leave her like this, and Josette would not be crying down below. Even his father could not have helped him now. Nothing could help him, with Mona _gone_. He stumbled to his knees beside her and his cold fingers twined themselves about the soft braid of hair that fell over the side of her bed. A stifled, despairing sob broke from him then as he stared at the thin face that lay so still and lifeless in the pale light of the room. He had a great desire to touch it but a moment of dread made him hesitate. Then his hand crept slowly over the coverlet until it rested against Mona's cheek, and the sobbing in his throat was choked back, for the flesh he touched was hot. His heart thumped until the sound of it seemed to fill the room. Mona's eyes were opening! They were looking at him! And then---- Two thin, white arms reached up and encircled Peter's neck, and very faintly he heard his name whispered. He pressed his face down close to Mona's. "I'd have come sooner," he apologized, "but they wouldn't let me in!" And somehow, in that great moment of their lives Peter's lips touched Mona's, and as the girl's flagging spirit came at last in triumph back from the edge of death Father Albanel entered the room; and when he saw what had happened he spoke no word, but in silence made the sign of the cross upon his breast and stood with his gray head bowed in voiceless prayer. CHAPTER XIII It was many minutes before Peter looked up and saw Father Albanel standing at his side. The little missioner made no movement except to place a hand gently on the boy's head. Mona's eyes were wide open and in them was a light of almost unearthly happiness as she looked at Peter. In the pale lamp-glow it seemed as though death had already possessed her, except for those great, shining eyes out of which Father Albanel saw all fever had gone. In a voice that was low and choking he said, "You must come away now, Peter--for a little while." Mona's hands rose in weak protest to Peter's shoulders, and he bent to meet them, pressing his face down again without shame or embarrassment so that her soft cheek lay close against his own. Joy and gentleness fought with a gathering fear in Father Albanel's face, and a little at a time, but firmly, he drew Peter away, while between the words he was speaking he breathed a prayer to Sainte Anne and the Mother Mary asking that the boy might be spared the curse of the deadly malady with which he had come in contact. At the door Peter turned, and Mona's eyes were so strangely and darkly beautiful that he reached back his arms to her with a little cry. "I'll come again, Mona! I will! I'll come _soon_!" They went down into the room where he had seen Josette and Pierre, with his hand held tightly in the little missioner's. He had never seen a face more terribly white than Josette's, and Pierre was like a haggard old man. He looked up at Father Albanel. The missioner's face was streaming with tears, and through the tears he was smiling. Then he began to speak. He told how Peter had stolen into the house and had gone to Mona. "God sent him," he said. "He has done more than all the physicians and medicines in the world could have done, for he has brought Mona back from the very gates of death. _She will live!_" The last three words drowned all others for Peter. His breath came in little jerks. Then he found himself crying--in Josette's arms. Josette pressed Peter to her and covered his pale, cold face with kisses. Her great eyes seemed to drown him with their nearness, and then she too was sobbing, with his face hugged close to hers. It all passed in a very few moments, it seemed to Peter, and Josette went with Father Albanel to Mona's room. She came back in a little while. Her eyes were shining and the whiteness was gone from her face. "It is true--God has been good to us again," she said, looking into Pierre's wildly questioning eyes. "The fever is broken. Her skin is soft and moist. And--she--_wants Peter_!" Josette and Pierre understood the look that came into Father Albanel's face. They waited for him to speak. "Please let me go," begged Peter. "I won't make a noise. I'll sit quiet." Father Albanel swallowed a lump in his throat. "And mebby--if I ask her--she'll go to sleep," urged Peter. The missioner nodded his gray head. "That's it," he said, looking first at Pierre and then at Josette. "I think if Peter were there, she would sleep. The boy has already been exposed. It cannot be worse. It is God's will. Let him go and sit beside her." A joyous thrill went through Peter. Father Albanel turned to him and put his hands on the boy's shoulders. "You must tell her you can stay only if she will try very hard to go to sleep. After that you mustn't talk to her. And just as soon as she is asleep you must slip away quietly and come back to us here." "I promise," said Peter. Josette helped him off with his coat. Then she kissed him, and Peter went softly up the stair. Though he came with scarcely more sound than a shadow to her door Mona heard him. Her eyes were watching for him, so big and shining in her thin white face that to Peter she seemed all eyes. He did not trouble with a stool or chair but knelt beside her bed. Mona's hands went up to his face and their gentle touch drew him down until she kissed him on the lips. There was no hesitation in her act. It was as if she had always kissed him. "Please kiss me, Peter," she said. He kissed her. "I was dreaming that over and over," she smiled at him faintly, "and you didn't come. Now it's true. And--I'm--so--glad----" "You mustn't talk," he warned, remembering his duty. "They said if _you_ said anything after I told you this I'd have to go downstairs. They want you to sleep. "An' I want you to _sleep_," he added courageously. "You mustn't say another word--not one!" Mona started to speak, then put a finger to her lips, and her eyes glowed at Peter until he felt creeping through him an overwhelming desire to kiss her again. She tucked her hand in his, and he settled down, sitting on the floor. Mona closed her eyes and gave a deep sigh. Her fingers squeezed Peter's, and Peter's fingers squeezed back. Half an hour later Josette tiptoed up the stair. Quietly she came through the dim light to the bedside. Mona was asleep. She was breathing evenly for the first time in many days. Peter had leaned over so that his cheek was resting on the thick, soft braid of her hair. Mona's hand was still clasped in his. And he too was asleep. Josette drew back as quietly as she had entered and returned to Pierre and Father Albanel. Hours later Peter awoke. He thought he was dreaming at first. Then he found his fingers buried in Mona's braid, and saw her pale face against the pillow. Everything returned to him in a moment, and he moved his cramped legs an inch at a time, and very quietly got on his feet. Mona was asleep. He bent over and listened to her breathing. Then he looked at the little clock that was ticking on a shelf above her table. It was four o'clock. Almost time for the gloomy dawn to come. He must have slept a long time! And Mona had slept too. His heart beat joyously as he backed slowly toward the door, careful not to make the slightest sound. In the room below he found Father Albanel sitting with his gray head bowed over a book which had fallen into his lap. But Josette heard him, still as he had been, and came out of her room. She was in a white nightgown with soft arms bare to her elbows and her hair in two long, loosely plaited braids. To Peter she was more than ever like an angel. "Sh-h-h-h!" she whispered, putting a finger to her lips. "Everyone is asleep, Peter--except you and me!" She took his hand and led him into the spare room which had once been Joe's, and sat down with him for a few moments on the edge of the bed. "You are going to stay with us for a while," she said in a voice so low and sweet that it was like music to Peter. "Will you like that?" He shook his head affirmatively. "I wanted to come all the time. I promised Mona I would--if she was ever sick." Josette drew his head gently against her breast. He could hear her heart beating. "I am Mona's mother. After this--how would you like me to be _your_ mother?" she asked softly. "I--I'd like it. But I gotta live with Simon. Dad told me to--until he comes back." The arm about his shoulders tightened a little. "Yes, you must live with Simon. I wouldn't take you from him. But I'm going to be your mother, Peter--just the same. From now on, all the time, you belong to me just as Mona does." "I guess that's why Mona likes me--because I haven't got a mother," he tried to explain. "But my dad's coming back. He'll love you too. Nobody can help loving you, can they?" "I don't know, Peter." "Simon says they can't. My mother was just like you. I've dreamed of her lots of times." "Does she look like me--in your dreams, Peter?" "Last time I thought she _was_ you. We were out in the woods picking flowers, an' Mona was there. Then she faded away. She always fades away, just sort of melts until you can't see her--my mother, I mean." Suddenly he asked, "Did you ever see Mona's mother?" "Yes, Peter." "Was she pretty?" "All mothers are pretty, Peter." Peter pondered for a moment. "I guess mebby they are," he said, and then added a little dubiously, "except now and then. I'll bet Aleck Curry's mother isn't pretty!" "To Aleck--she is beautiful," whispered Josette, and drew herself gently away from him. "You must undress and go to bed now, Peter. Good night!" For a while after she was gone he sat on the edge of his bed wondering what she had meant in saying that thing about Aleck Curry and his mother. A beast like Aleck _couldn't_ have a pretty mother. But her words troubled him even after he was undressed and in bed. If by any chance Aleck _did_ have a pretty mother--why--it wasn't right for Mona and him to hate Aleck as they did, that was all! He didn't sleep much between then and morning, and when he came out of his room, just as the first cold light of the winter sun was falling in the clearing, happier faces greeted him. Mona was better. In the reaction of joy that had swept over the household there was once more laughter in the kitchen. Josette went up the stair singing. And when at last she called down for Peter he found Mona bolstered up in her bed, and Josette was brushing her hair, which streamed about her in long, beautiful cascades of silken softness. Mona's eyes and face were different this morning. She was more like the Mona he had known, only thinner and whiter, and she smiled at him when he came through the door. With Josette so near, Peter was a little self-conscious and clumsy in his greeting. But Mona held out her arms, just as she had done last night, and pulled him down to her, and kissed him. From that day the great fact in the lives of the two children was accepted in Five Fingers. Mona and Peter belonged to each other. And so sure was Father Albanel of God's intention in the matter that he felt no worry about Peter, in spite of the fact that the boy had come in fearfully close contact with the deadly malady. "He will not catch the sickness," he said confidently. "God didn't send him for that." And as day after day passed, and only good news continued to come from the Gourdon cabin, those who had at first doubted also came to believe; for Mona's coming back from death, and Peter's escaping the plague, were miracles like those which happened at the precious shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, and only God could have brought them about. In two weeks Mona was out of bed and on her feet. And from that day, Peter noticed, she did not hold out her arms to him again, or ask him to kiss her. But her eyes were always soft and full of happiness when he was near her. The last of winter passed, and spring came. May followed April, and flowers sprang up in the clearing. The birds returned, work began in the fields, and in the sweetness and promise of life Five Fingers rose out of the grimness of its tragedy. One warm day when they had gone to the big beaver pond, just a week after Mona's fourteenth birthday, Peter said something that he was _thinking_, and didn't mean to say at all. He had been thinking it off and on for a long time, and the words slipped out of him before he knew it. "You never ask me to kiss you any more," he said. "Girls don't ask boys to kiss them--not unless they're sick," replied Mona, looking at him with eyes so bright that Peter felt every drop of blood in his body rushing to his face. "Then I--I sometimes wish you was sick again!" blundered Peter. "Peter!" "Yes, I do," he affirmed stubbornly. Mona's cheeks were flushing until they were the color of a rose. Suddenly her eyes flashed and she stamped a little foot. "You don't want to kiss me _or you'd ask for it_!" she cried. "I always had to make you!" It was a new thought for Peter to ponder upon. Half an hour later, when they were almost home, he came to a decision. "I do!" he exclaimed suddenly. "You do _what_?" asked Mona, who had been livelier than ever in hunting for flowers. "You know." "I don't." "You can guess." "I'm not going to guess." "I'll give you three chances," offered Peter. "I don't want them." Peter was desperate. "You didn't mean what you said, then?" "What did I say?" "You said I didn't want to kiss you or I'd ask for it." "Well--you haven't asked." "I did. I just asked." Mona's lovely eyes opened wide. "Did you, Peter? I didn't hear it. Please ask again!" Peter gulped. "Will you?" he asked. "Will I _what_?" "Let me kiss you?" For what seemed at least an hour to Peter she stood looking at him. "If I do--will you promise never to kiss any other girl?" "I promise." "And never let any other girl kiss you? I mean Adette Clamart, too!" "Sure I do." "As long as you live?" "As long as I live." With a little gesture of gladness and satisfaction Mona Guyon held up the prettiest mouth in all Five Fingers, and Peter kissed it. CHAPTER XIV In the weeks and months following the plague at Five Fingers Father Albanel did not forget his promise to Peter, and back in the shelter of the woods, where their secret was safe between them, he taught the boy "how to fight like a gentleman--if he had to fight at all." It was then Peter learned there was something more helpful than brute strength, and as his skill increased and he mastered one after another what the little missioner called "the tricks of the fighting game," his enthusiasm rose to a point where he could scarcely keep his secret from Mona. Their boxing-gloves, which Father Albanel had smuggled from the settlement, they kept securely hidden, and not until years later did Peter know that the holy man who was teaching him had at one time been regarded by fighting men as the handiest man with his fists between Fort William and Hudson Bay. What he had learned he did not fully realize until early in June, when Aleck Curry and his father and the hateful black tug returned to the settlement. Using the influence of a brother who had been successful in politics, Izaak Curry had obtained timber concessions in several directions about Five Fingers, and now built himself a cabin near the shore, but hidden back in the spruce. This he tenanted with a third brother and his wife, and with them Aleck lived while the tug was making its trips between Five Fingers and Fort William. Aleck had grown still bigger, and in spite of Peter's resolution to make friends with him he would have none of it. His hatred for Peter was like some deadly thing that had poisoned every drop of blood in his veins, and Mona's growing beauty, and her quite open affection for his rival, stirred something that was more than hatred--more than brooding vindictiveness--in Aleck's heart. His father was rich, and he knew what that meant back in town; and his uncle was a power in politics, and had recently become Commissioner of Provincial Police. It enraged him that these facts carried no weight in Five Fingers. His own importance as the son of a rich man and the nephew of a Commissioner was utterly unrecognized here, while in town it had given him a position of first rank in spite of his bullying nature. This lack of appreciation, as he thought of it, he laid entirely at Peter's door, for it was Peter who had robbed him of his chances with Mona in the first place, and it was Peter who was keeping her away from him now. So it was not long after Aleck's arrival before the climax came. It happened well out of sight of everybody, where Aleck had schemed that it should be, for he wanted no interference in his "beating up" of Peter. In the end both boys returned to the settlement with bleeding noses and black eyes. Neither was whipped. Aleck was dumbfounded. That his size and weight and all the training he had given himself during the winter had failed to beat Peter was unbelievable. For two weeks after the fight there was not a day, excepting Sundays, when Father Albanel and Peter did not "take a walk" in the woods together. And along with these secret sessions Peter took advantage of every opportunity to run and swim that he might add to his wind. Almost daily he accepted insults from Aleck in order to avoid a fight, and never a day passed that Father Albanel did not repeat his warning to Peter to postpone further combat as long as possible. But the time came when Aleck once more followed up insult with physical action, with the result that he suffered a defeat so completely decisive that in August he returned to Fort William, fairly laughed out of Five Fingers. Mona now made up Peter's world, and in his heart she kept constantly burning the faith that his father would return. But when winter came again, and another spring, and there was still no word from Donald McRae, Peter came at times to believe that his father was gone out of his life forever. Aleck Curry again returned to Five Fingers in this third summer of Peter's life there. He was nineteen now, and was commissioned by his father to take an interest in his lumber business along the coast. A year had made a big change in him, and his hatred for Peter and his passion for Mona he kept more to himself. His father told Simon that in another year Aleck was going to join the provincial police, and would soon hold a commission in it.... Early in September, when Mona was in her sixteenth year, the event against which Peter had been steeling his heart for many months became a fact. Pierre and Josette had long planned that after Marie Antoinette's teaching in the little settlement school Mona should spend a year, and possibly two, under the tutelage of the Sisters in the Ursuline Convent in the city of Quebec. On the day Mona left, accompanied by Joe's wife, who went to see her safely settled in the distant city, Peter's world went as black as on that other day when his father disappeared out of his life. The winter that followed was an endless one for Peter. Once each week, as surely as the weeks came round, he received a long letter from Mona, and five times during the winter he made the trip to the railroad settlement alone that he might not miss the love and cheer which came from her. And he was at the train to meet her, with Pierre and Josette and Marie Antoinette and Joe, when she came from the school in June. At first he was dazed by the change in her, she had grown so much taller, and more beautiful, and he stood as if turned into wood while she greeted and kissed all the others. Then she turned to him, and her face was flooded with a color which he had never seen in it before. And after that--he could never remember how it happened--their arms were around each other, and Mona was crying--crying until tears blinded her--and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and then ran away from him to hug all the others again. This summer in Five Fingers decided the lives of Peter and Mona. She was almost seventeen. She would go to school one more year, because that was the desire of Josette and Marie Antoinette. She would be nearly eighteen then. And when she was nineteen--on her nineteenth birthday, if Peter liked it that way--she would marry him. During the second year of her absence Peter devoted every energy of soul and body toward making himself worthy of her. He worked and planned and studied hard under Marie Antoinette and Father Albanel. During this year several changes came to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie ended his dealings with Izaak Curry, and to rid their paradise of a bad memory Adette Clamart deliberately set fire to the Curry shack after he had gone, so that nothing remained but a square of ash and charred timbers. "And the wild phlox will cover that next summer," said Adette with a grim little shrug of her pretty shoulders. Aleck Curry joined the police. In a day and a night, it seemed, he sprang into a great bulk of a man, heavy-faced, huge-shouldered, a giant in strength and physique, and with a hatred for Peter in his heart that had grown more merciless with the passing of years. He saw Mona each summer, and when she returned from her second year at school her beauty stirred in him a passion which submerged all other instincts and desires. He became a watchful, waiting beast, hiding the flame that was consuming him, preparing himself for the opportunity which he was determined should some day come his way. As each week brought nearer the day of their own supreme happiness Mona and Peter no longer sensed this menace, or even thought of it, and because Aleck was so utterly outside all the possibilities of her life the deeper sentiment of womanhood growing in Mona compelled her to treat him more kindly. Even Simon's suspicions were dulled, for during the winter preceding her nineteenth birthday Aleck visited the settlement only twice. Another spring and summer followed. The twelfth of the coming October was Mona's birthday. On that day she would become Peter's wife. It was planned that they should live with Pierre and Josette until the good logging snows came, when all of Five Fingers would join in building their home. It was on a day in August that Mona set out alone for the beaver pond, carrying a basket in which was her own and Peter's supper. Peter, returning from a trip up the shore, had promised to meet her before sundown in their old trysting-place, where two winters before he had built her a little "play-house" cabin. And on this same afternoon, as Mona left the settlement, a stranger was making his way toward it. An attitude of unusual caution and a haunted way of looking about him were the two things one would have noticed first as he came out of a swamp into an open forest of white pine. He drew in a deep breath of the freer air, and with a gesture of relief wiped his face with a hand that was rough and twisted and scratched by contact with briers. He was oddly disheveled and smeared with swamp oil. His gray head with its grizzled and uncut hair wore no hat, his shirt was in rags at the throat and sleeves and his trousers were tucked into high boots which bore evidence of having gone through mud and water to their tops. Upon his shoulders he carried a pack, and though the tenuity of its folds emphasized its lightness in weight, the man freed himself from his burden with an audible gasp of relief. Then he leaned against a pine and looked back at the swamp from which he had come, listening with singular intentness for any sound which might strike with warning or unusual import upon the languorous stillness of the afternoon. His face was pallid under its stubble of beard even after the heat and exertion he had passed through; his cheeks were sunken as if by sickness or hunger, and his lips were drawn and thin. In his eyes seemed to lie all the strength that remained in the man. They were furtive and questing as they watched, missing no shadow that moved. The sweetness of ripened summer, its lazy whisperings and the stillness which comes in a deep wood when the sun is overhead lay about him or trembled softly in the air. For hours he had been in an oven of swamp heat and winged pests; here it was cool. In the pine tops a hundred and fifty feet above his head was a faint stir of the breeze that came from Lake Superior. It reached down and touched his hot cheeks. He could taste the invigorating freshness of it, and there came slowly a change in his restless eyes, a softening of the tense lines about his mouth, a lighting up of his face where before it had held only suspense and watchful uncertainty. He picked up his shoulder pack, carrying it in his hand as he turned away from the swamp. The transformation in the man's face was strangely at odds with the painful physical effort which accompanied his tedious progress. He no longer looked behind him but kept his eyes ahead, as if anticipating at any moment the appearance of something of vital importance toward which he was struggling with the last bit of strength that remained in his body. When at last he came to a little brook, gurgling between the pine roots, he fell rather than knelt beside it, and drank like one dying of thirst. Then again and again he plunged his face into hands filled with cold water and wet his head until his gray hair was dripping. He followed the brook. Several times he stumbled and fell in the rougher places and once his toe caught a root and he plunged into the stream itself. At the end of an hour he had traveled a mile. Then he came to a knoll of hardwoods, crossed it and made his way down through a lacework of yellow birch until he arrived at the edge of a deep, still pond that began in sunlight and lost itself in the almost cavernous coolness and shadow of a spruce and cedar forest. Instinctively the man knew it was a beaver pond, and almost instantly he had proof it was alive. A warning tail lashed the water with the sound of a paddle struck sideways, and across the pool, a short stone's throw away, an object moved through the water. Dizzily the man sat down. His vision was clouded so that it was difficult for him to see even the moving object. He fell upon his side and stretched himself out on a couch of thick green grass. In another moment he was lying with his eyes closed but with ears keenly alert. During the next half-hour he heard every sound about him; then his pale eyelids closed heavily and a weariness of brain and body which he could no longer combat dulled his senses to a physical and mental inertness which was almost sleep. In this state of somnolence he had lain for possibly a quarter of an hour when a sound reached his ears which first opened his eyes and then brought him in a quick and defensive movement to a posture that was half sitting and half crouching. The sound came again, and amazement replaced the alarm in his face. What he heard was a feminine voice, strangely soft and subdued in this place of coolness and shadow and mysterious stillness. It was a note of laughter, almost birdlike in its sweetness, and the man's fingers clutched at the breast of his ragged shirt as he listened. Then he began to crawl slowly in the direction of the sound, making his way through a green thicket of willows, careful that no twig snapped under his weight to give warning of his approach. Suddenly he came upon a scene whose unexpectedness was almost a shock to him. He had reached the farther edge of the willows, and before him was a little meadow not more than half an acre in extent, green and filled with wild flowers. Almost within reach of his hands was a mountain ash weighted with ripening fruit, and under this tree, close to the edge of the pool, a girl was seated on the grass, partly facing him. His first glimpse of her was of a bowed head crowned by a wealth of coiled hair; then, as she looked up, he saw her face. Her cheeks were flushed, her dark eyes shone, and as she laughed again she snuggled her face close down over a furry thing scrambling about in her lap. The man saw there were two of these creatures--baby beavers. His eyes wandered a little. At the edge of the pond, half out of the water, was a full-grown beaver. And this older inhabitant of the place was conscious of his presence in the willow thicket! The girl was talking and laughing with the little ones, calling them by name. One was Telesphore and the other Peterkin--and the man drew in his breath with a gasp. He watched her tease them with a carrot. One scrambled up and tangled a foot in her hair. "Peterkin!" she cried. "Peterkin--you little ruffian!" The old beaver remained stolid and motionless, watching the menace in the willows. A companion swam lazily past, scented the danger and struck the water a blow with his tail before he dived. The girl looked up quickly and spoke to the old beaver. "What is the matter, Peter?" she cried. "Don't be foolish. Come and get your carrot!" It was then she heard a little cry behind her, and turned and saw the man's face in the willows. CHAPTER XV Mona Guyon was not afraid. She was startled, and thrilled by an instant intuitive sensing of the unusual and the significant in the man's unexpected appearance. Yet the color did not leave her cheeks nor did a cry come to her lips. She thrust the baby beavers from her lap and rose unexcitedly to her feet, tall, slim and amazingly beautiful. She was looking steadily at the man, and as she looked her heart beat a little faster, for the wilderness had taught her a quick and definite understanding of the story she saw written in the wild face among the willows. Its tragedy flashed upon her before her parted lips had found words--hunger, sickness, the emaciation and weakness of a man who found less discomfort upon his hands and knees than upon his feet. As she looked at him a change came into his face that the man himself could feel as there swept over him a slow and inundating sense of shame. Every instinct of chivalry in him revolted at the ridiculous and alarming figure he must be making of himself. But even in this moment of surprise and distress he did not entirely lose his sense of humor. He tried to smile. The effort was nothing short of pathos. "I beg your pardon," he said as he rose a little unsteadily to his feet and came out of the willows. His raggedness and the coarse stubble on his face could not conceal the consciousness of pride with which he straightened himself and bowed to her. "I have come upon you like a wolf, and I know I look like a wolf. But I assure you I am as harmless as a sheep, and if you don't mind dividing your carrots with me----" He nodded toward the little yellow pile of carrots she had brought for her beaver pets. His voice was pleasant. It made her think of Father Albanel, and as he spoke a smile was in his eyes and on his pale lips. She went quickly to his side and put a hand on his arm. Its firm young touch seemed to steady him. "What has happened?" she asked. "You look----" "Sick--and a little mad," he finished for her, when she hesitated. "But I'm mostly hungry, and if I may have the carrots----" She helped him to the foot of the tree and he dropped down beside it with a weakness that made him hunch his shoulders in disgust. "I have something better than carrots," she said. "Please sit here and I will get it." She hurried across the little meadow to a deeper shade of thick-growing jack pines on the farther side, and the man turned his head to follow her movements with his eyes. Her beauty was twisting at something in his heart. A long time ago he had known someone like her. The slim figure, walking swiftly across the open, took him back twenty years, and he could almost hear a sweet voice calling his name, and in a place very much like this, with the coolness of the wilderness all about and the sun shining through the trees. His hand touched the scrub of beard on his face and he shivered. The thought came to him that the girl was afraid of him and was running away. As she disappeared among the banksians he reached for one of the raw carrots and began to eat it. Mona returned so quietly that he did not hear her until she was at his side. She brought a basket and a small pail of cold spring-water. She spread a napkin on his lap and loaded it with the contents of the basket. He was sensitively conscious of her eyes upon him and he tried not to appear ravenous as he began with meat and bread. "I'm spoiling your picnic, child," he said, speaking to her feebly like a man who was very old. "I'm sorry." "You're not spoiling it," she cried, leaning toward him with a gesture full of sweet tenderness. "Oh, I have been so happy today--God has made me happier by bringing me here in time to help you!" "Happy," he whispered, as if to himself. "It is wonderful to be happy. I have known--what it is." It was her struggle to appear natural now as he ate. She had never been so intimately close to starvation and pathos and weakness in man. "Were you lost?" she asked. He caught quickly at her suggestion. "Yes, lost--in the woods and the swamps between the railroad and here. I was trying to find a place called Five Fingers." She gave a little exclamation. "I'm from Five Fingers. It is not far. Uncle Pierre calls it a mile and a half." Mona wondered at the strange silence which came over the man, and the suddenness with which his hunger seemed to be satisfied. "You have been an angel to me," he said, when he had finished. "And--things love you. Even the wild creatures." He was looking at the baby beavers, humped into furry balls at the edge of the pond. "You called one of them Peterkin, and the old beaver Peter. I wonder--why?" "And there is a bear cub I call Pete," she added. "It is because--" "Yes----" Her eyes were shining. "Because I am going to marry a man whose name is Peter." It did not seem strange to her that she should be confessing the secret of her happiness to a man she had never seen before. There was something in his eyes which made her want him to know, a mysterious gentleness that seemed to plead for her confidence and her friendship. It gave her a pleasurable thrill to tell someone that she loved Peter and was going to be his wife. And this man was unlike any other who had ever come from the outside world into the wilderness isolation of Five Fingers. In his rags and misfortune and his whitening hair and pale, thin face, she saw something which stirred more than her pity. And it was more than faith. Just what it was, in that moment, she did not know. She was puzzled by the tremor which ran through his body coincident with her mention of Peter. "And this Peter----" he began feverishly. The words seemed to choke in his throat, and he passed a hand over his eyes as if to wipe away a mist. Then he said: "He is a lucky lad. Is his name Peter McRae?" "Yes. How did you know?" "And--you love him?" She nodded. "I was only thirteen then, but I loved him the first day he came to Five Fingers and fought Aleck Curry for me. Aleck was a bully and was pulling my hair." The mysterious stranger bent his gray head so that she could not see his face. "That was six years ago last May, in the afternoon. And--Peter--did he ever tell you about--his father?" "Yes, that same night. It was in the edge of the forest, and it was growing dark. He had brought a letter from his father to Simon McQuarrie, and Simon had told him the truth. He said his father had killed a man--accidentally--a long time ago, but that the police wouldn't believe it was an accident and were after him, and would hang him if he was caught. And ever since then----" She was at his side, staring at him as he slowly raised his head, the color gone from her face and her white throat beating with the sudden mad pounding in her breast. "Ever since that night--that very hour--we have prayed together for Peter's father to come back. And you--_you_----" He could not escape the wild questioning in her eyes and their demand to be answered. "Would you have _me_ Peter's father?" he asked uncertainly. "This way--an outlaw--ragged--dirty--a beggar----" There was an almost tragic note of hopefulness in his voice. "Yes," she cried, her voice breaking in excited entreaty from her lips. "If you are Peter's father, tell me. We have waited. And I have told him you would come. Oh, I have _promised_ him that, and have asked God every night to make it come true. Are you----" Her hands were reaching out to him. "Yes, I am Peter's father." There was no flash of joy or pride in his acknowledgment of the truth. His head sank upon his breast as if a sudden weariness had overcome him, and a moan of protest was in his voice. And then a thing happened which swept the bitterness and grief from Donald McRae's heart. He caught a glimpse of Mona's face, gloriously flushed in this moment of her answered prayer; and then her arms were about him, her soft cheek against his rough stubble of beard, and for an instant he felt the swift pressure of her lips against his. He raised his hand and touched her hair. "Child," he cried brokenly, "dear child----" She sprang up from him, half laughing and half sobbing, and ran out from under the mountain ash tree and stood in the edge of the clearing. With her hands in the form of a megaphone she called: "Peter! Peter! _Oh, Peter!_" With a protesting cry he climbed to his feet and went to her. She saw the white, almost frightened look in his face and eyes. "Don't do that!" he exclaimed. "For God's sake--don't! Peter must not know I am here." In her amazement her hands fell slowly from her face to her side. "Why?" she demanded. "Because----" He stopped, listening to a voice that came faintly from out of the forest. "That is Peter," said Mona. "We are going to eat our picnic supper here--at the pool." "It is Peter--_coming_----" "Yes." He tried to breathe steadily, tried to speak calmly as he took her hand and stroked it with nervous gentleness. "What is your name?" "Mona Guyon." "Mona--Guyon. It is a pretty name. And you are sweet and good and beautiful. Peter's mother was like you. And--I am glad you love my boy." A new strength seemed to possess him. The voice came again out of the forest, a little nearer this time, and Donald McRae held the girl's hand closer, and a tremor went through him as he smiled at her in the way he used to smile at his boy in the old days of their comradeship and happiness. "That is my call," he said evenly. "Peter's mother and I used it twenty years ago, and afterward I taught it to Peter. It carries a long distance in the woods." It was not his poverty and his weakness that affected Mona most. Something more than pity overwhelmed her--his forced calmness, the strange light in his eyes, the almost superhuman fight he was making to rise up out of his rags and his misery in the most tragic hours that could have come into his life. His words and his appearance set her heart pounding fiercely. She was a little frightened and wanted to put her arms about him again and hold him until Peter came. What did he mean? "Why mustn't Peter know you are here?" she demanded. "_Why?_" He led her back in the willows. In a moment they were hidden. "Are you brave enough to hear? And do you love Peter enough to help--me?" he asked her. "Yes, yes, I will help you." He stood so that he could look out of the willows and across the meadow through which Peter would come. A moment of despair and hopelessness twisted the muscles of his face. "He must not see me," he said in a voice that was hardly more than a strained whisper. "Child, you must understand--you most of all. Don't you know why I ran away from Peter that day near Five Fingers, and sent him on to Simon McQuarrie? It was so Peter might have a chance in life that he never could have with me, even if I escaped the law. I, too, have prayed--every day and every night through the years that have been more than eternities for me; prayed that good and happiness might come to him, and that in time even the memory of his father would wear away. But never for an instant have I been able to forget my boy. He has been a part of my soul and body, walking with me, sleeping with me, sitting with me beside my hidden camp-fires at night, until at times the desire to see him once more was so strong in me that it almost drove me mad. And all this time I was hunted, running from place to place, living in swamps and hidden depths of the forests, avoiding men and places of habitation--but with Peter always at my side, just as he looked that last terrible day at the edge of Five Fingers when he pleaded with me to take him along----" His lips trembled and a shiver ran through his body. "And through those years Peter _was_ with you--Peter and I," replied the girl. "Summer nights we used to ask the moon where you were, and when it was cold and stormy we--we prayed. And on Christmas--Peter always got a present--for _you_." A joyous light passed over his haggard face. "You thought of me--on Christmas?" "Yes, always. And Peter asked me to keep the presents carefully in my cedar chest, for we knew you would come back some day. And now----" It was Peter's voice that came to them again, much nearer. Donald's arms fell away from the girl, but she raised her face quickly and kissed him. Her eyes were filled with tears. "Peter is wondering why I do not answer. Please--please----" In his indecision he bowed his face in his hands. It was with an effort that he shook himself free of temptation. "I must tell you quickly, and you must understand," he said desperately. "The police are close after me again. That is why I was in the great swamp to the north--to get away from them. If I come back into Peter's life now it can only be for a few hours, and you know what it will mean--a fresh tragedy for him, a new grief, pain, disgrace, a black cloud of unhappiness over the paradise which you have made and can make for him. I have come back to see him, to look at him, to carry away a new picture of him in my heart. But he must not know. And if you love Peter--if you care a little for what is in the heart of his father--you will make it possible for me to look upon my boy. I will hide here, in the willows; and you two, there under the ash tree----" "It is wrong," broke in Mona. "Oh, it is terribly wrong!" "No, it is right," he persisted. "It will make me happy--to see him so near to me, hear his voice and know that life and God and _you_ have been good to him. If I see Peter, child, if his hands touch me, if we are together again--it may cost me my life. For those things would hold me; I could not go away again after that, and the police are near, very near, and if they should catch me----" The sag that came into his shoulders gave eloquence to the thing which he did not finish, and Mona's eyes burned with a fire which dried up her tears. "If I bring Peter down there, under the tree, will you promise not to go away until I have seen you again?" she asked. "Yes, I promise that." "Even if it is tomorrow, or the next day?" "I will wait." It was hard for him to lie, looking into the beautiful eyes that were fixed upon him so steadily. But he did it splendidly; so well that Mona did not guess the falsehood back of his last great fight. She turned from him swiftly with her face toward the meadow. "I will bring Peter--down there," she said. She ran to the mountain ash tree and in a few breathless seconds rearranged the luncheon basket and tossed half eaten bits of food into the pond. Then she hurried across the meadow. Peter's call came to her again, and this time she answered it. In the deep shade on the farther side of the meadow she stopped and pressed her hands to her face. Her cheeks were hot. She was fighting against a sense of overwhelming guilt, for in this hour, this very minute, she knew she was not only betraying Peter, but committing the sacrilege of repudiating answered prayer. And Peter must not know! He could not fail to see her excitement, unless--she laughed softly as the old, sweet thought came to her. Peter loved her hair. He loved to see it down, as on that first day six years ago when he came upon her in the edge of the forest near Five Fingers. She paused again, and her fingers worked swiftly among its lustrous coils until they fell about her. Peter would guess nothing now--when she came to him like this, in a way that shut his eyes to all the rest of the world. She could hear him coming through the brush. He was running, and she guessed at the alarm which was urging him because she had failed to answer his calls until that last time, when she knew her voice had not sent forth the old cry in just the way it should have greeted Peter. She stood very still, so that when Peter leaped over a fallen tree not twenty paces away from her he did not see her. He stopped, his head thrown back, breathing quickly, and listening; and in this moment Mona recalled the other day of years ago when he came into the cutting near Five Fingers and found her struggling with Aleck Curry, the bully of the settlement. He was the same Peter, only now he was a man. His hair had not darkened and his eyes were the same blue. He was the clean-cut, fearless, sensitive Peter who had gone into battle for her against a boy nearly twice his weight and years older. The years had given a splendid change to his body. He was still slim, like the old Peter, and there was a litheness and alertness in him which filled her with pride. She held her breath, watching him, and exulted when she saw the anxiety in his face. Then he called again, and in the moment of silence which followed she suddenly clapped her hands and laughed. Peter turned in amazement, and when he saw her standing as she was, with her long hair streaming about her, he drew in a deep breath, and the blood surged into his tense face as he came to her. The happiness which swept his anxiety away brought a responsive glow of joy into her eyes, and as she held out her arms to him she forgot for a moment the man hidden among the willows near the mountain ash tree. For a little while Peter held her so close she could feel the thumping of his heart, and not until he had kissed her hair and her lips did he seem to have breath to ask why she had not answered his calls. "To punish you for making me wait so long at the pond," she said. "But"--she raised a soft tress to his lips--"I was sorry, at the last moment, and did _this_ for you, Peter. Will you forgive me?" She was thinking of Donald McRae again, and slipping her hand into Peter's, she led him toward the pond. And Peter, in the sweetness and joy of her presence, guessed nothing because her fingers tightened in his hand or because her breath came more quickly than usual. They drew nearer to the ash tree and the willows. She knew that Donald McRae was now looking upon the face of his boy; she could see the clump of twisted bushes behind which he was hidden, and caught a movement in their tops, as if an animal or a breath of wind had disturbed them. They were under the ash tree when she flung back her hair, no longer making an effort to hide from Peter the distress in her face. He was shocked, even a little terrified at her appearance. Involuntarily her glance went beyond him to the thicket which concealed Donald McRae. It was only a few steps away, and she knew Peter's father could distinctly hear what they said. Then she looked at Peter again, and smiled gently at his suspense as she raised one of his hands to her lips in the soft caress that always wiped away his troubles. And in that same moment she drew him a step nearer to the willows. "Something happened before you came," she said, speaking so that Donald McRae would not lose a word of what she was saying. "I think I must have had a--a--dream--and it was terrible!" She shuddered, and listened to the breaking of a twig in the willows. "I am foolish to let it frighten me." His arms were about her, his fingers smoothing back her shining hair as relief leaped into his face. "You were asleep, _Ange_--with me bursting my throat to make you hear from the forest?" She did not answer his question. Instead, she said: "Peter, you have not lied to me? You believe in prayer?" He bent his lips to her white forehead. "Yes, _Ange_, and yours most of all. God has answered you, and always will." "And we have prayed a long time for your father to come back?" He nodded wonderingly. "Yes, a long time." She spoke slowly then, and her words were for Donald McRae and not for Peter. "And if your father does not come, if you never see him again, your faith in the God we have prayed to for so long will be a little broken, will it not, Peter?" She waited, holding her breath for fear even that sound might come between Peter's answer and the man in the bushes. "He will come--some day--Mona." "That was what he promised you--the day he sent you on alone to Five Fingers, and ran away from you? And you have always told me that next to your faith in God you believed in your father. You have never thought that he lied to you that day in the edge of the forest?" He stared at her, speechless, and in that moment she faced the willows with a glow of triumph in her eyes. "Down in the little church at Five Fingers Father Albanel has always taught us not to lie and to be true to our promise," she said, speaking directly at the willows. "Peter, if your father should break his faith, or I should break mine, it would be terrible. And that is what happened--in my vision--and it has frightened me." She rested her cheek against his arm so he could not see her face. "I was here--under the tree--when in this vision your father came. He was ragged and tired and sick--and so hungry he ate carrots I brought for the beavers. He had come just to look at you, Peter, but not to let you know. He said it would make you unhappy; that it was best for you that he should never come into your life again--and he made me promise not to tell you that he was here. "And I promised. I did--I promised him I would be a traitor to you, after all the years we have waited for him, and prayed for him, and _believed_ in him." Her arms crept up to his shoulders. "If I should do a thing like that God would never forgive me, and you--if some day you found out what I had done--would never have faith in me again. Would you?" She hid her face against his shoulder, her heart beating wildly, her body trembling. For she had seen another movement in the willows and she was afraid that Donald McRae was going away. "It was only a dream," Peter was saying, holding his arms closely about her. "You are not afraid of dreams, Mona?" And then from behind them came a voice. "_God forgive me my weakness!_" it cried. "_Peter--Peter----_" Donald McRae stood out in the open at the edge of the willow thicket. He had forgotten the rags and mud that covered him, and was no longer a fugitive with the lines of a hunted man in his face. The present was for a space obliterated--the present with its menace of the law, its exhaustion and its poverty; and he was standing once more in the warm glow of that day of six years ago when he had said good-by to Peter. In those seconds, when Peter stood shocked into deathlike stillness by the sound of the voice behind him, Mona could see Donald McRae with his outreaching arms; but as Peter turned slowly, facing his father, the strain broke in a hot flood of tears that blinded her vision. And then---- "_Dad!_" It was the strangest cry she had ever heard from Peter's lips, and with an answer to that cry in her own choking breast she turned away as the two men came into each other's arms. She passed out of sight along the edge of the pond, scarcely seeing the path ahead of her, and unconsciously she kept repeating Peter's name in a whisper, as if--even though she had prayed so long for this hour to come--she had never quite expected its fulfilment. CHAPTER XVI Under the ash tree, for a few moments Peter was the boy again; the boy of yesterday, of years ago, when the world had held nothing for him but his father; and there was no change in the touch of the hands that had always given him comfort and courage and a love that was almost like a woman's in its gentleness. Not until Donald McRae held his boy off, with a hand on each shoulder, did something besides the madness of joy at his father's homecoming begin to thrust itself upon Peter. Then he saw the change--the naked breast, the half-bared arms, the mud and the rags, and the face and hair in which years had stamped their heels unpityingly. He tried to choke back his horror, to keep it out of his face, and to do this he laughed--laughed through the tears and sobbing breath--and pointed to a white birch tree in which a blue jay was screaming. "The blue jay, dad!" he cried. "Remember that day--behind the log--with the blue jay in the tree-top, and the sapsucker pecking at our elbows, and the violets between my knees----" The hands on his shoulders were relaxing. "I've never seen a blue jay but what I've thought--of you," said Donald McRae. "And the river--behind us--and how we got away from the police--and the rabbits we roasted--and--and----" The world was twisting and turning round again. He tried to smile, and reached out gropingly for Peter. "The swamp was hot, Peter. And I am tired--tired----" Peter's arms caught him as he swayed. His thin face was whiter, and his eyes closed as he still tried to smile at his boy. Mona, braiding her hair as she waited beyond the willows, heard Peter's frightened call. When she came running to him he was kneeling beside his father, cooling his face with water from the pond. Donald McRae lay upon the grass. He was scarcely breathing, and under the scrub of beard his emaciated face was like wax. An agony of fear and grief had driven the happiness out of Peter's face, and he tried to speak as he looked up at Mona. She saw what had happened as she knelt beside him and took Donald McRae's head tenderly in her arms. Excitement and his last great effort to fight down his weakness had given a semblance of strength to this shell of a man. But it was gone now, and the full measure of its tragedy struck like a charge of lead to Peter's heart. Mona, feeling Peter's grief, and guessing swiftly the thought that had made his wordless lips white and trembling, said to comfort him: "He hasn't been this way long, Peter. It was the swamp. He told me the police were after him, and he hid himself there. The heat--bad water----" She tried futilely to explain away the horror of the thing--to make Peter believe this wreck of a man was not the product of months and years of hardship and suffering, but had reached his condition because of a passing torment that had covered only a few days in the swamp. But she knew she was failing, and she stopped before she had finished, with her head bowed before Peter's eyes. She heard his tense lips whisper "the police" as if the words choked him as they came out, and then he went down again to the edge of the pool for water. She wet her handkerchief when he returned and held it over Donald's eyes, and Peter unlaced the worn-out, muddy boots--and suddenly a sound came from him, a little cry of unutterable understanding as his hand found in the trampled grass the half-eaten carrot which his father had dropped. She had never seen Peter's face so white, and never before had she seen a look in his blue eyes so unlike the Peter she had grown up with, and played with, and loved. "He is breathing easier," she said. "It was the excitement, the shock----" He nodded, and replied in a dead, even voice: "I know what it was, _Ange_. I know." He took one of his father's hands and held it between his own, looking at the face in Mona's arms into which life was beginning to return and breath to come more evenly. "It has been a long time, dad. Six years--six years like those three days when the police were hunting us in the forest, and you caught rabbits for me to eat. But it is ended now." Mona's heart throbbed. "We will keep him with us, Peter--always! We will hide him--somewhere--never let him go away again! Oh, it will be easy for us to do that, and Father Albanel--and Simon--will help us----" A deeper breath trembled on Donald McRae's lips, but it was not that breath, or the faint moan that came with it, that stopped her before she had finished. Peter was looking over her head at something beyond her. He dropped his father's hand, and what she saw in his face drew a gasping cry from her even before she knew its cause. She turned and looked. And then, in an instant, she was on her feet with Peter. So quietly that no sound of footfall or breaking twig had given warning of his approach, a man had stolen upon them. He stood not a dozen feet away, dressed in the field service uniform of the Provincial Police. That was the first terrible fact which telegraphed itself to her brain; the man was an officer, he was after Donald McRae, and he had caught them! But this first alarm gave place to a greater shock as her eyes saw the face above the uniform. It was a large, coarse face streaming with sweat; the lips were heavy, the nose big, and the eyes were small and too close together for one who bulked so large. It was a face filled with triumph--an exultation which the man made dramatically poignant as he stood with his heavy hands on his hips, looking from one to the other with a smile that was deadly in its promise twisting the corners of his mouth. He did not speak, did not even move, but waited while his presence crushed like a weight of horror upon the two who were staring at him. His eyes rested on Mona, and the wicked gleam in them--the thought which they could not hide, merciless, sure, almost gloating--drew his name from her lips in a cry that was filled with fear, with half disbelief, with a note that almost called for pity. "_Aleck--Curry!_" The man's heavy head nodded, but he did not speak. It was still too great a moment of triumph to be broken by voice. He looked at Peter, and then, slowly, significantly, at the unconscious form of Peter's father. God could not have given him a greater hour than this! For if it had not been for that man and for Peter, he might have had the girl. It was Peter who had come in his way from that first day when they had fought over Mona in the edge of the clearing; it was Peter who had whipped him, Peter whom he had grown to hate above all other things on earth--and it was Peter's heart and soul and happiness, almost his very life, that he now held in the hollow of his hand! And he would make him pay. "Yes, _it is ended now_," he said, repeating Peter's words of a few moments before. "And I'm rather glad. The swamp was hot and filled with mosquitoes." Something clinked as he fumbled at his belt and the sound sent a chill of horror through Mona. He held out the manacle irons so that she could see them. "I've got to do it," he said, a mocking apology in his voice. "Distasteful, but necessary." He faced Peter. "Your father knew we were close behind him, and it won't do him any good to play dead. He's slippery, and I'm going to put these on him. I guess----" He swung his heavy head toward Mona again. "I guess Father Albanel and old Simon can't help him very much from now on. It was nice of you to think of it, though, Mona. You were always so tender-hearted--when it came to Peter!" He was still the old bully and his voice trembled with the suppression of his triumph. This was his master stroke. It was not capture of the man whom the law would condemn to hang that thrilled him most; it was the twisted beauty in Mona's face, the shock and terror in her eyes, and the helplessness and despair he saw in Peter's. He did not hurry, did not call for an instant upon the dignity of the law, but twisted the knife of his vengeance slowly. When Mona's eyes turned from him to Peter her heart stood still. He was gray. There was no blood in his lips. He was looking down upon the still, upturned face of his father, and his hands were clenched. When he raised his head she saw that his eyes were no longer Peter's eyes. He advanced slowly toward Aleck Curry, and the manacles rattled as Aleck dropped them to his belt and shifted a hand to his pistol holster. Peter did not hear the click of steel or sense the menace of the shifting hand. One thought pounded maddeningly in his brain; his father had come back to him, he was _home_, and in the first hour of his return this beast had come into their lives again to break down every hope and prayer they had built up during the years. In Aleck Curry he saw not only that merciless law which had run his father like a rat from hole to hole, but a monster of vicious hate, a lustful, bullying boy grown into a still more vicious giant--and Peter's desire was to kill him. Mona saw the deadly intent in his slow advance even as Aleck Curry saw it. She saw more--the hand on the pistol, the tightening fingers, the dangerous gleam that flashed in Aleck's eyes--and Peter with only his naked hands! A cry of warning came to her lips--of a terror which robbed her of the power to move. The cry ended in a scream, for as Peter leaped in, Aleck raised the pistol and fired. A terrible sickness came over her, a sickness which for an instant swept away her strength. Peter felt the hot breath of the pistol in his face and the explosion was so near it fell like a blow against his eardrums. It was not a shot intended only to frighten him, for death had missed him by less than the width of his hand. Aleck released the trigger of his automatic and crooked his finger again, but even quicker than that movement was Peter, who flung himself with all his weight under his enemy's arm as the second shot was fired. He did not strike, but with both hands clutched Aleck's wrist, and at the same time tripped his foe so that they went to the earth together, with Aleck on his back. In this instant there came upon Peter a crushing realization of the almost deadly odds against him. Into every nerve of his body flashed the truth--that he was fighting a man who wanted to kill him, who in reality had the right to kill him, and whom the law would not only vindicate but would commend for killing him. He was an outlaw, fighting against the almighty omniscience of that law, and what the world would regard as justice. And his survival now, like that of his father, depended upon beating it. He must break his enemy's wrist. Get the gun. Kill or be killed. Every ounce of his strength he exerted upon the wrist as Aleck flung his free arm in a powerful and throttling embrace about his neck. He drew the wrist in, twisted it, and tried with a sudden effort to give it the final breaking snap, but it was like a piece of steel that would not break. The thick fingers did not loosen their hold on the pistol, and in spite of his desperate effort Peter's staring eyes saw the black muzzle of the weapon forcing itself a fraction of an inch at a time toward his body. Now, when it was too late, he knew that in this close embrace he was not a match for Aleck. His quickness and his tirelessness counted for nothing. Aleck, slow, heavy, with not a quarter of his endurance, but with the brute strength of three men in his coarse body, could crush the life out of him in close quarters. Yet these first few thrilling instants Peter knew this thought was not in the other's mind. All of his enemy's great strength was being exerted in an effort to point the pistol at his body. Those two or three minutes in which he knew he was fighting to save his life seemed like an eternity to Peter. He saw Aleck's face, twisted in a leering grin, its bloodshot eyes laughing at him, its thick mouth mocking him as the powerful arm and wrist broke down with a slow, torturing sureness all the force he was putting against it. The gun was already at right angles to his body, and suddenly Peter realized why Aleck Curry had not used the choking force of his other arm before this. He had waited for the right moment--and that moment had come. The arm tightened. It was like a half-ring of steel, crushing Peter's neck and twisting his head so that his widening eyes left the pistol and stared into the lower branches of the ash tree. In that moment he saw Mona. She was staggering up from the edge of the pond with something in her hands which looked like a chunk of mud. Her face passed over him, desperately white, and then she had fallen on her knees and he could hear the _beat_, _beat, eat_ of that something in her hands close to his ears. A terrible cry came from Aleck Curry, and the throttling arm about Peter's neck relaxed until he could turn his head again, and he saw Mona pounding his foe's pistol hand with the stone that had looked like a chunk of mud. He saw the hand redden with blood saw the thick fingers loosen their grip on the pistol, and then swift as a flash Mona had snatched the big automatic and was backing away with it in her hand. With a mighty, upward heave of his body Peter freed himself, and with that movement came a wild cry out of him, a joyous approval of what Mona had done. Aleck lunged after him. They came to their feet. Peter's fist shot out to the other's jaw, and as Aleck staggered backward, almost falling under the force of the blow, Peter turned to take the pistol from Mona. She was halfway to the pond, and even as he cried out in warning and dismay the weapon left her hand, circled through the air and disappeared with a splash in the water. At his cry she faced him and ran back and thrust the mud-covered rock in his hand. Then he saw the terror in her eyes--the agony of fear that had made her throw away the weapon that had almost taken his life. He let the rock slip from his fingers and fall to the ground in spite of the exclamation of protest which came from her white lips. He did not see her stoop quickly and pick it up as he advanced to meet Aleck Curry. His foe was hunched forward, like a gorilla, his head lowered, his huge fists clenched, his face distorted by the shock of Peter's blow and a rage which gave him a terrible aspect. Then he rushed in, his arms apart, his great hands reaching for the man he hated. With the quickness of a cat Peter met his attack, avoiding the arms and the huge hands, leaping in, striking and darting back. He drove blow after blow, and one of them, catching Aleck again on the jaw, had behind it all the weight and force of his body. But even that scarcely more than rocked the brutish head on its thick neck. He advanced slowly and steadily, taking the blows as he moved like a juggernaut upon Peter, driving him an inch at a time toward the edge of the pool. Suddenly Mona ran in from behind, and with both hands she raised her stone and beat it between Aleck's shoulders. She raised it again, trying to strike his neck or his head, when with a bellow Aleck flung himself around, his great arm flying out like a beam. The blow caught Mona with all its force and sent her in a crumpled heap to the earth. Not a cry came from her lips, but a yell of fury burst from Peter's. He rushed in, and a hurricane of blows smashed into Aleck's face, cutting his lips, blinding him and choking the breath in his throat. But in that blindness and pain his hand reached out and caught Peter as their feet sank in the mud at the edge of the pond. A cry of triumph came from his bleeding mouth. At last his moment had come. As Peter felt himself dragged into the deadly embrace his mind worked swiftly. His one chance now lay in the depths of the pool, and unless he could get his enemy there he was lost. Thrusting up his hands, he clenched them in Aleck's hair and put all his weight in dragging the head downward. The movement had its effect, and a step was gained toward the edge of the muddy shelf that terminated abruptly in eight feet of water. Unconscious of the trap, Aleck bent himself forward, putting all the crushing strength of his arms in the grip about Peter's body, and as Peter flung the weight of his head and shoulders in the same direction their balance was upset and they plunged into the pond. As they struck the water Peter drew a great breath into his lungs, and in the same moment his foe relaxed his grip and began to flounder wildly in an element in which, even in the days of their boyhood, he had never been at home. His face rose above the surface for an instant, and Mona saw it as she staggered to the edge of the pond. It was then a deadly weight attached itself to one of his kicking legs, and not until Peter had dragged his burden to the muddy bottom of the beaver stronghold did he release his hold. He shot up for air, and scarcely had Aleck's body struggled to the surface when he dived again, and a second time bore his victim under. This time he expelled most of the air in his lungs, and for a few seconds hung on like an anchor. A third and a fourth time, Aleck rose, fighting for his life, but the fifth time it was Peter who buoyed him up and brought him nearly unconscious to the shore. He noticed the livid mark made by Aleck's hand on Mona's forehead as she helped him drag the heavy body out of the water. In another half-minute he had the manacles intended for his father about Curry's wrists, and with his belt he securely lashed his prisoner's legs together. Then he faced Mona. The same question was in their eyes. In Mona's it was a wordless terror. Peter looked at his father. He was stirring. A hand rose weakly from the grass. He had seen nothing of the struggle, heard nothing, and thought of him was first to leap into Peter's mind. "He doesn't know what has happened!" he panted. "We must get him away, Mona. If anything would kill him now, it would be knowledge of this--that the law has found him--and that I--in helping him--have become an outlaw myself." She came to him quickly and put her hands to his face, just as she had done on that other day years ago when he had fought his great battle with Aleck. "They can't blame you alone, Peter. I helped." She held up her lips, but instead of kissing them he pressed his own to the reddening mark on her forehead. "There is the little cabin," she whispered. "We can take your father there. And--I love you, Peter!" She stood back from him, her eyes shining with sudden inspiration. Aleck Curry had coughed the water out of his lungs and was twisting in his bonds. His voice called loudly as Peter bent over his father. Donald's eyes were opening. "We must hurry!" urged Mona. "We must get away--where he is safe--where he cannot be found!" Peter raised his father in his arms. The weight of the emaciated body sent a stab of pain through him. It was as if he had picked up the limp form of a boy. Mona, close at his side, smiled into the grief-filled eyes he turned toward her. Together they hurried across the meadow. And then Mona ran on ahead, following a scarcely worn path through deep timber until in a few moments she came to another little meadow; here, under a clump of hardwoods, was a tiny cabin of logs--the "play-house" Peter had built for her two winters ago as a refuge and rest place for her when she came to visit her beaver pets. Inside a screened porch was a couch of saplings, and on this she had spread blankets and cushions by the time Peter arrived. Donald's eyes were wide open, and he was smiling up wanly at Peter. "Never thought the day would come when you'd be lugging your dad around like this, did you, Peter?" he asked, and tried to laugh. But the moment his head touched the soft cushions his eyes closed again. Peter drew Mona away. "There is a boat down on the shore of the lake," he said, his voice steady again. "I'm going to force Aleck Curry into it and take him out to that little rock island two miles from the mainland. No one ever goes near it, and we can keep him there a prisoner until dad gets well, and then----" An angry yell came from the beaver pond. "Aleck is getting nervous," he finished. "You stay with dad, Mona. Tell him I've gone to Five Fingers for things he needs. I'll come back that way, and will get here before dark. Good-by, _Ange_!" He kissed her. For a moment Mona clung to his hand. "When you are down by the big stub--and if everything is all right--send me back the call," she entreated. She watched him until he disappeared. Then she sat down close beside Donald McRae and held one of his limp hands. After what seemed to be a long time there came back to her clearly Peter's signal-cry, telling her that all was well, and that he was on his way to the prison island with Aleck Curry. Over the forest fell a deep and quieting silence. Never had it seemed so intense to Mona, as she sat with Donald McRae's hand held closely in her own. The man's fingers were intertwined with hers as if he was afraid she would leave him; and his breath, coming more evenly and yet as faintly as the breath of a child, told her that complete exhaustion had at last overcome him with a sleep that was almost like death. Twilight dusk began to fill the aisles of the woods, and with this dusk the last red glow died out of the west, and with it came the hour Mona loved more than all others--when darkness began to close in a velvety mantle over the world. The stillness, the soft whisperings of the forest and the peace that always came with night gave her courage and strengthened her faith. And at last, from beyond the beaver pond, she heard again Peter's cry. He was returning. And as if he, too, had heard that cry, Donald McRae stirred softly and whispered Peter's name. CHAPTER XVII Quietly Mona went out to meet Peter. "He is sleeping," she said, as Peter's arm closed about her in the thickening darkness. "If he can only pass the night that way he will be strong and well again in the morning." Yet her voice trembled as she tried to bring him comfort. "Aleck is safe?" she whispered. "He is on the island?" "Yes, he is safe for tonight--and maybe for a number of days. After that----" He stopped, not knowing how to finish, and Mona's soft hand caressed his cheek. "We will tell Simon, and Uncle Pierre, and Father Albanel," she suggested. "Surely they will know how to help us!" "I've been thinking about that," he said slowly, with his lips against her hair. "You must promise me not to tell them, Mona. I think it is necessary. At least they must not know until tomorrow or the next day. Will you remember that?" "You are sure it is best?" "I believe so." "Then I will remember." They drew near to the door of the cabin and listened. Faintly they could hear Donald McRae's breath as he slept. "I must take you home," he whispered. They hurried through the gloom, hand in hand. In half an hour they had reached the cliff trail that led to Five Fingers, and here Mona insisted that Peter turn back, while she went on alone. She was glad Pierre and Josette were at Joe's house when she came to the settlement. She called good night to them through the open door, and went to her room, with the excuse that she was tired. She sat down at her window, and watched the moon come up. Later she heard Pierre and Josette when they returned. And after that, one after another, the lights went out in Five Fingers until the cabins lay like great shadows in the slumbering stillness. In this stillness she heard the clock in her bedroom tick off every second of the hours. Until now she had never believed that answered prayer could bring with it a grimness and torture of tragedy like that which had descended upon her life and Peter's. Passionately she sobbed out her hatred for Aleck Curry, the monster who at last had descended upon them with his vengeance. As the hours dragged on she found herself fighting more and more desperately against the desire to steal quietly from her room, tiptoe down the stairs and go to Simon McQuarrie's cabin that she might confide in him all that had happened that afternoon. Only Peter's warning to keep their secret locked tightly in her own breast held her back. Yet in Simon rested her last hope, for from the first day Peter had come into the old Scotchman's life he had found home--and a protection and love which in Mona's thoughts made him almost of Simon's flesh and blood. The impulse to go to him--to be false to Peter for the first time in her life--was a torment in her brain, and where one little voice had urged her at first, a hundred added to their insistence now. Slowly the revolt became a conviction that it was right and reasonable she should go to Simon, in spite of her promise to Peter. Quietly she opened the door to her room and went down the stairs, making no sound to disturb Pierre and Josette Gourdon. A slim, pale figure, she crossed the clearing and paused in the shadow of the cabin where the Scotchman lived. Instinctively she looked up at Peter's window even though she knew he was in the forest with his father. Then she knocked on the door. Her heart throbbed as she listened for a response inside. It seemed to beat loudly, as if crying out against her faithlessness in breaking a promise to Peter. She knocked again, and in a moment she could hear McQuarrie moving. She counted his slow footsteps as they came across the floor. Then the door opened, and his tall, gaunt figure stood above her, swathed in a nightgown that fell to the toes of his feet. At any other time Mona would have laughed at the grotesqueness of his appearance as he stared down into her white face, with a nightcap on the back of his head. He reached out a hand. "_Ange!_" he gasped. "_You!_ What is the matter?" She slipped past him and closed the door. "Please light a lamp," she said. "Please----" Simon struck a match. The flare of it illumined his face, tense and set in its amazement. When the lamp was lighted he took down a coat from a peg in the wall and put it on. Then he turned to Mona again. She stood before him with her hands clasped at her breast, and in her dark eyes was a look that alarmed him. And he could see in her bare throat the little heart-beating throb that always came when she was stirred by deep emotion. With a desperate little cry she caught his hand. "Something terrible has happened," she whispered. "Something--you should know. But I promised Peter. I promised him I would tell no one--not even you. But I've got to turn that promise into a lie. If I don't----" The words broke on her lips. And then: "Peter's father has come back. He is with Peter now in the cabin near the beaver pond!" Simon McQuarrie stood back from her, his hands dropping slowly and limply to his sides. Then he raised one of them as if to brush a shadow from his forehead, and his nightcap fell to the floor. "Donald McRae--has come back!" he repeated, and the deep lines in his face softened as Mona looked at him, and joy trembled in his voice when he spoke. "Thank God, _Ange_! Why do you think it is so terrible? We have waited and hoped for a long time----" He stopped. What he saw in her face and eyes swept a sudden change into his own, and he caught her arm as the gladness died on his lips. "Has anything happened?" he demanded. "Has anything happened--to Peter--or to Donald McRae?" She began telling him in a low voice, while Simon stared at her with his big hands reaching out as if to grip at something in the space between them. "I was at the beaver pond when Peter's father staggered out of the willows and almost fell at my feet. I didn't know who the man was, but he was sick and tired and starving--so hungry he ate carrots I had meant for the beavers. I gave him our lunch, and while he was eating I learned he was Peter's father. It made me happy. Peter was coming to join me, and I told Donald McRae. He begged me not to let Peter know he was there. He wanted to hide in the bushes, and look at him without being seen, and then go away again. He said that was why he had come back--just to get a look at his boy. He told me the police were after him again, that they were driving him like a rat from hole to hole, and that his presence could only bring unhappiness and tragedy to Peter. So he hid in the willows, and Peter came." "And then?" "In the end Peter's father staggered out of the bushes, and I left them together. Peter called me a little later and I ran back. Donald McRae was on the ground and at first I thought he was dead. Not until then did I realize how terribly sick and weak he was. We were on our knees beside him when he looked up, and there--there--grinning down at us--was the man Peter's father had been running away from. Oh, he was terrible--big and sweaty and leering down at us, almost laughing in his triumph, and--Simon--Simon--it was _Aleck Curry_!" Her despair broke in a sobbing cry, and now the bones of Simon's great hands made a snapping sound as he clenched them, and his thin, hard face was gray in the glow of the lamp. "What happened then, Mona?" "When Aleck went to put the manacles on Peter's father there was a fight--a terrible fight--and Aleck tried to kill Peter with a gun. He shot twice. I helped with a stone, and at last Peter got him into the pond, and almost drowned him. His father was still unconscious when we carried him to the cabin. Then Peter took Aleck down to his boat and to the little rock island two miles out from the shore. He is there now--a prisoner. And--what will happen to Peter? What can the law do to him?" Simon paced slowly back and forth across the floor. His face was a mask of iron. His long nightgown flapped about his feet, and again his big, hard hands hung limp and straight at his sides. "If Aleck escapes from the island and arrests Peter, or reports the affair to headquarters, it means the penitentiary," he said as if speaking to himself rather than to Mona. "And that is what will happen--if Curry has his way. He hates Peter. He would like to see Donald McRae hung, and Peter in prison, and _you_----" A tigerish gleam was in his eyes as he faced her. "Why didn't Peter kill him when he had the chance?" he cried, as for a single moment his self-control broke its leash. "As a boy he was a brute and a bully, and as a man his soul is that of a monster--even though now he is a part of the law. He wanted you--always. I know it and could see it even when you were children. And for what he wants he would wreck the world. Why didn't Peter kill him? Why--with these two hands----" He reached out his long arms and his fingers closed like talons of steel. Then he checked his passion. His arms dropped again. "But it is best he didn't," he finished. "It is best--even though a snake has a better right to live than Aleck Curry!" He continued his pacing across the floor, and with each step his stern face grew harder until at last it seemed to have no emotion at all--the hard, set, fighting face which Simon McQuarrie always turned upon his enemies. For a few moments he seemed to forget Mona. Then he asked: "What is Peter going to do? What does he _plan_ to do?" The question was so sharp it sent a little shiver through her, and Simon's eyes were looking at her with the steely coldness of ice. "I don't know. Peter doesn't know--except that he means to keep Aleck Curry on the island until his father is well and can get safely away." Simon grunted. "You mean the rock with nothing on it--two miles straight out from the beaver pond?" "Yes." The fingers of Simon's hands were twisting again. "Constable Carter dropped in on us late this afternoon," he said shortly. "He told Pierre and Dominique he was on his way into the Georgian Bay country and would rest here for a few days. He lied. He's working with Aleck Curry, and if Aleck doesn't show up soon--if he starts smoke signals going out on the island, and Carter sees them----" "Aleck hasn't any matches," Mona interrupted him quickly. "Peter took them away from him." Simon's face was lightened for an instant by a flash of exultation. "Peter is improving," he conceded. "If he had only used as good judgment at the beaver pond, when he could have rid us of this snake forever----" Mona's cry of horror stopped him. In a moment he was at her side, and his long arms were about her tenderly. "I didn't mean that, Ange!" he cried, trying to laugh as he saw the agony of fear in her eyes. "It's a bad situation, so bad that I don't see a way out for Peter just now--but we won't kill Aleck, and we'll get Peter out of it somehow. He was right in making you promise not to tell anyone, and I'll keep it all to myself--even from Peter and my old friend Donald McRae--until Carter leaves the settlement. I'll manage to get him away in a day or two. And meanwhile you and Peter must keep Curry on the island, and watch every step you take so that Carter won't get suspicious. And above everything else--_most important of all_--don't tell Peter you have confided in me. Let me know everything that happens, but don't tell Peter that I know. Do you understand, Mona?" She felt the suppression of something in his voice that was unlike Simon McQuarrie, something that thrilled and frightened her, yet she nodded her head and said: "Yes, I understand. I won't let Peter know. And I'll tell you--everything." His arms drew her a little closer, and in him above all other men she had faith in that moment. She did not see his face above her, a face which for a single instant darkened with a look so pitiless and menacing that even Simon sensed the danger of its betrayal, and held her for a moment longer. Then with the gentleness which love for Mona and Peter had bred into his stern nature, he led her to the door. "You must go home now, and to bed," he said. "It is your fight as well as Peter's, and you mustn't let anyone see that you are worried tomorrow--especially Carter." He opened the door. "Good night, _Ange_!" "Good night!" she whispered as she slipped out. He closed the door and listened for a moment to her retreating footsteps. When he faced the lamp and looked up at Peter's room, a new and strange light was in his eyes, and he spoke softly, as if to the spirit of someone who was waiting and listening up there. "It's my turn now, and I'll care for Peter," he said. "A long time ago Donald McRae killed the man who insulted his mother, and it is no more than right and just that Simon McQuarrie should kill the man who would destroy her boy." Then, slowly, he began to dress. For a little while Mona hesitated in the shadow of the tall spruce tree that grew not far from Simon's door. She could hear her heart beating as she looked back at the light in the cabin. She was glad it was over, glad she had told Simon the truth, even as she thought of her promise to Peter. Yet one thing she had kept to herself, and for a moment she felt the urge to go back and confide in the iron-willed Scotchman her own personal fear of Aleck Curry. Never until this night had she been afraid of him. She had defied and hated him as a young girl, and as she grew older had loathed and repulsed him for the persistence of his passion. To fear him had never entered her head, even in the days when once or twice she had used her hands in defending herself against, his unwelcome attentions. But now she knew that Aleck's hour had come. Even though he was temporarily a prisoner on the island, he held her happiness and Peter's fate in the hollow of his hand. That fact, its significance, its terrible import for her, she had seen in Aleck's exultant face and eyes at the pool. In that hour his joy and triumph was not that he had run down Peter's father, but that _she_ at last had come within the reach of his desires. And the fight had added to his mastery, for it had outlawed Peter and had given to the man she hated the final power to wreck her world. And she, of all that world, was the only one who knew what Aleck's price for the freedom of those she loved would be. The thought was a monstrous thing in her brain. She had fought it, had beaten it back with the strength of her will, and she struggled with it again as she turned away from the light in Simon's window. Her hands clenched and a bit of savagery leaped through her blood as she went again through the moonlight. She had seen the deadly fire in the Scotchman's eyes, and that fire was now in her own. Over and over she told herself that she was still unafraid of Aleck Curry. Her lips whispered the words. But in her heart, fixed and implacable, remained the fear. She had almost reached the shadow of Pierre Gourdon's cabin when a figure stepped out to meet her. It was Peter. His startled face questioned her in the moonlight. "I thought you were asleep," he said in a low voice. "And so--I was passing under your window. I wanted to be near you for a few moments." He put his arms about her and looked anxiously into her face, and then he laid his lips against her soft hair. "It was impossible." She shivered against him. "I undressed, as you told me to do, and I went to bed. But I had to get up. I kept thinking, thinking--until I felt like screaming, or jumping out of my window and running to you." "You are a little frightened, _Ange_--after what happened at the pool. But it will all come out right. Aleck is safe. He can't harm us----" She looked up quickly, and saw in his eyes the same look that had been in Simon's. Her arms tightened about him. "Peter, you don't need to hide anything from me," she protested. "We're both thinking the same thing--afraid of the same thing. It's Aleck Curry--and what he will do when he gets off the island. We can keep him there until your father is well, and safe. But after that--what will happen to you?" Peter tried to laugh. "They can't do anything worse than send me to prison, and if they do that--would you mind waiting for me, _Ange_?" She knew the effort he was making to speak lightly, almost playfully, and her heart throbbed with the eager quickness of her answer. "I would wait for you all my life, Peter." With a sudden movement he drew her into the shadow of the cabin. His eyes were searching the farther edge of the clearing. "Look!" he said. Her eyes pierced the moon glow. And then, dimly, she saw a moving shadow. It came nearer, and turned toward Simon's cabin. Instinctively she guessed who it was, but waited for Peter to speak. "I found him nosing around when I returned to the settlement," he said. "A little while ago he was here, looking up at your window; then he went to Simon's, and afterward sneaked off into the edge of the forest. I don't know who he is, but I was within ten feet of him and he wears a uniform like Aleck's. He is watching for dad. He is also suspicious and is wondering why Aleck doesn't show up." "His name is Carter," said Mona. "He came to Five Fingers this afternoon." CHAPTER XVIII For a long time they stood in the shadow of the cabin, and the sleepy stillness of the night with its soft chirping of crickets and gentle murmuring of the lake surf brought a soothing peace to Mona. With Peter's arms about her she was no longer afraid. He told her what had happened since she left his father. Twice Donald McRae had awakened from his sleep of exhaustion and had asked for her. A thrill of pleasure was in Peter's voice as he told her this; it made him happy to know that his father loved her, and that he even whispered her name in his feverish slumber. Some day the whole of their prayer would be answered; things would turn out right; and they would all be happy. Not until he had gone, and she was alone in her room, did Mona note how swiftly the time had passed. The hour hand of the little clock was at three. She did not undress, but sat down at her window, with her face turned toward the coming of the dawn. And now that Peter's love and the unbreakable strength of his optimism were no longer at her side, her thoughts began pressing upon her again, dispelling the comfort he had given her and weakening once more her faith and hope in what the day would bring. She was glad she confided in Simon, for he was the rock to which she clung in these hours of her own helplessness. And yet--what could Simon do? Wherein was he less helpless than herself--or Peter? She shivered as she recalled the grim and terrible look that had last rested in his face. And that same look had been in Peter's--a flash which he had tried to hide from her! Her heart jumped and for an instant her fingers clutched at the sill of her window. Would one of them--Simon or Peter--_kill Aleck Curry_? It seemed to her that a terrible truth rushed upon her all at once and caught like a living thing at her throat until it was difficult for her to breathe. There was no hope for Peter as long as Aleck lived! The words almost came from her lips. Unless Peter ran away, wandering and hiding like his father, no power could keep him from going to prison. But if Aleck should never leave the little island--if he died there--and no one knew of the fight at the pool---- She bowed her face in her arms. It would be so easy of accomplishment--so terribly and frighteningly easy! Peter might do it! And Simon--the look in his face--his eyes--what he said---- "No, no, no," she whispered to herself. "Anything--anything but that!" She raised her head to meet the first rose-flush of the dawn. But this morning there was no responsive thrill in Mona's breast. A question was repeating itself in her brain. Would she be able to go through the day without giving herself away? Could she meet Pierre and Josette Gourdon, and Marie Antoinette, and Father Albanel, and Adette and Jame Clamart--and not let them see her torture? Would it show in her face when she met Carter, of the Provincial Police? Until the first white spirals of smoke began rising from the cabin chimneys she sat at her window. Then she rose, and her beautiful face was almost stern in its resolution. She let the sunlight stream into her room, and in its radiance she unbraided her hair and brushed it until it lay about her in the rippling glory that made Peter the happiest and proudest of all men. She dressed it carefully, and tried to sing as she made herself ready to help Josette with the breakfast--for she always sang in this first hour of the day. But the notes seemed to stifle her this morning. It was then, looking out from her window, that she saw a grayish haze rising between her and the face of the sun, and the smell of it came to her faintly. It was smoke. When she went below it was Pierre she met first. He kissed her. But anxiety was in his face. "It is happening again this year," he said. "The forests to the north and west are afire. It will not come near Five Fingers, but it makes my heart ache to know that a world is being turned dead and black because of someone's carelessness!" So it was the fire which gave Mona an excuse for what was lacking in her eyes when she went to help Josette with the breakfast. And it was this same fire, with its thickening gloom of smoke, which helped her through the day. For to Mona a living tree had life and soul, and to see trees destroyed in countless thousands was a tragedy in her life only a little less terrible than the plague of smallpox which had once cast its shadow upon Five Fingers. She went to Simon's cabin as soon after breakfast as she could make an excuse, and there she met Carter. Her first glimpse of him filled her with uneasiness and dislike. He was a hawk-nosed, shifty-eyed man in whom nature seemed to have sacrificed every softening quality to an uncompromising sense of duty, and his eyes rested upon her face so intently as Simon introduced them that she felt her heart tremble. But if he knew of her previous visit to Simon's cabin, or of her meeting with Peter, he gave no evidence of it, and after a casual remark or two about the fire he left her alone with the Scotchman. A worried look was in McQuarrie's eyes. "I've found out more about Carter," he said. "He is the best man in this division and is never sent out on minor affairs. Leaving us so quickly right now shows how clever he is. He doesn't want to create suspicion. He dropped in to ask me the best trail northwest, and says he is going to leave in half an hour to make a report on the fire. That's another lie. In the woods he is like a cat, and he won't go half a mile from the settlement. He is wondering where Peter is, and if he once gets on his trail----" Suddenly he drew his hands together, and a grim smile gathered about his mouth. "If Carter goes to that fire, I'm going with him!" he exclaimed. "Five Fingers is interested, and he cannot very well turn me down." In a few words Mona told of Peter's visit; and then, standing so near that he could not avoid the directness of her eyes, she gave low voice to her suspicion that either he or Peter was planning to kill Aleck Curry. The effect of her words on Simon startled her. He stood dumb, staring at her. Then one of his bony hands reached out and rested on her shoulder. Its fingers hurt her. "Don't even whisper that anywhere--but here," he said. "You understand? _Don't!_ Peter won't kill him. And I'm not worrying about Aleck Curry now. It's Carter." He left her without another word, and went out to overtake Carter. There was something so grim and foreboding in his movement that it chilled her, and as she dropped a few steps behind him she noticed his boots. At midnight she had seen them in his cabin, clean and freshly oiled. Now they were frosted with half-dried mud to their tops. His sourness, the harshness of his fingers on her shoulder, his silence now and the aggressive hunch of his shoulders, together with the mud on his boots, tightened her breath. Had Simon already accomplished the thing she feared? Was that why he was so anxious to follow Carter, go with him--get him away from Five Fingers? She ran up to him, meaning to demand the truth. He anticipated her intention and spoke almost roughly. "Don't ask questions, Mona. Carter has stopped, and is looking. Go home--and stay in if you can't keep control of yourself." The rest of the morning Mona waited anxiously for Peter. At noon, when they were at dinner, Pierre Gourdon talked of little but the fire. It had surely crossed the line of rail thirty miles north, he said, and was traveling steadily eastward. If the wind should quicken and swing into the south there would be danger to the forests about Five Fingers. But the settlement itself was safe, protected as it was by fire-lines and cultivated fields on three sides, and Lake Superior on the other. He wondered where Simon McQuarrie was, and asked Mona if she had seen Peter. He surmised they had gone back to the crests of the high ridges to make a closer observation of the fire. He had already sent out Jame Clamart and Poleon Dufresne to guard the northern ridges, and if the fire threatened to break coastward, all the men in Five Fingers would go out to fight it. He had made preparations. But he didn't like the way Peter and Simon were missing, without leaving any word behind them. Carter was gone, too. Afternoon saw smoke settling like a thin fog about the clearing. The sun was entirely hidden. Animals and fowls came up to the buildings, and men and women gave up their work to discuss with one another the possibilities of the next few hours. A dozen times Mona repressed the desire to steal away and go to the little cabin where Donald McRae was hidden. She knew Peter was there, and now that the smoke was thickening she believed he would soon leave for the settlement. She noticed how hot and sultry it had grown in the last hour. Scarcely a breath of air was stirring, and in the middle of the afternoon Adette Clamart insisted that she go with her for a swim down in the inlet. While they were in the water Peter came up from the lake in a boat. His sail was down and he was rowing. Adette Clamart covered her pretty eyes with her two hands while he bent over to kiss Mona, and in that moment he whispered, "I want to see you in the cabin." He was acting strangely, Mona thought. A few minutes later she joined him in the cabin. "Dad is better," Peter said. "But tonight I'm going to get him away--somewhere. I'm afraid of the fire. With a bad wind it would be on us in an hour or two. Right now I want to take some supplies over to Aleck Curry. Then I'll come back and see you before I return to dad. There's a little breeze on the lake, and I can make the island in an hour. Have you seen Carter?" "This morning. He hasn't been here since then." "And Simon?" "He is gone, too." She got a bundle she had prepared and said good-by to Peter but not until he had promised to return directly from the island by way of the inlet. She watched him until he disappeared in the gray haze that hung over the water, and then looked at the clock to mark the time he would be returning. Scarcely had she done this when a figure stalked past one of the windows. Instantly she recognized it as Simon McQuarrie. He went straight to his cabin, entered it and closed the door. _And Carter was not with him!_ Her heart throbbed as she went outside, determined to follow him. But something held her back. Then she forced herself to follow her first impulse, and a moment later was knocking at Simon's door. There was no answer. She persisted, knocking loudly and calling his name, and still there was no response. Then she tried the door and found it locked. Where there had been fear in her breast there was now conviction. The tiger in the old Scotchman had been at work, and in his own way--_and the only way_--he had solved the great problem of her life and Peter's, and had made the world free again for his old friend Donald McRae. He had rid the island of Aleck Curry, and had done away with Carter. And now he wanted to be alone--alone in his cabin! Not for a moment did she question the reasonableness of her conviction. It seized upon her like a many-tentacled thing, choking back her doubt and overwhelming her with its certainty. It made her steal pantingly to the edge of the forest, and then to the beginning of the long finger of spruce and cedar that reached away out to the entrance of Middle Finger Inlet. Half an hour later she was on the sand and gravel beach under the big cliff, waiting for Peter's return. And now she noticed a change in the wind. Loose tresses of her hair blew seaward. That meant the fire would come over the ridges! In another quarter of an hour she could scarcely see the farther side of Middle Finger Inlet. A black pall of smoke was creeping closer in the north and west. Then, very faintly, she saw something creeping up like a ghost out of the smoke gloom of the sea. She knew it was Peter. He was coming with nerve-racking slowness, it seemed to her. Yet she did not want to cry out to him until he was nearer. He was using his oars, and at times there was a half-minute interval between his strokes. Why was he so slow? Was it because of what he had found on the island? Surely Simon would have left no telltale signs. So far as Peter was concerned Aleck Curry could only be _missing_--nothing more! A shudder ran through her. Then she cried Peter's name. Her voice carried strangely clear. There was silence in the boat. The oars were resting without a sound. "Peter," she cried again. "Peter! I am here--on the point!" He must have heard her, and it was unusual that he did not answer. But the oars rattled again, and she could see the shape of the boat turning slowly, and then growing larger as it came toward her. It was odd, too, that Peter did not come directly to the point, but grounded his boat among the big rocks fifty yards below her--a place where he knew it was difficult for her to go. So she stood on the white sand, waiting for him. She could hear his boots on the rocks; then she saw him approaching through a dusk of early twilight thickened by the smoke of the fire. "Here I am, Peter," she called softly. It did not seem like Peter, for the figure was grotesquely large, and slower of movement. She held out her arms, and her eyes were glowing. It was the smoke and the dusk that made Peter look like that! And then her heart stopped beating. The figure was within ten feet of her. It was not Peter. _It was Aleck Curry!_ CHAPTER XIX In that moment Mona felt for the first time in her life the giving way of living tissue under the sudden overwhelming stress of complete shock. Strength left her body, her arms dropped limply, and she felt herself swaying, as if about to fall. Had there been anything near her she would have caught at it. She did not know that to Aleck Curry she was betraying no physical sign of her weakness--that she was standing like a lifeless creature carved out of rock, except that her wide eyes were blazing and her lips parted. What seemed an age to her covered but a few seconds. Then her mind leaped back, fierce in its command of her. She was wrong! Simon had not been to the island! He had not harmed Aleck Curry--and Aleck had returned in Peter's boat. _What had happened to Peter?_ She did not ask the question. It blazed out of her eyes as Aleck advanced until he was almost within arm's reach of her. He had on only shirt and trousers, and he was barefooted. She could see his naked throat. And surprise, joy, the knowledge of his mastery lay in his heavy face. It was transformed. He smiled at her, and his great arms reached out as if he were Peter and she would come into them. "I made a bargain with Peter," he said, "and he changed places with me. I made him see how much it meant for him, and for his father, and for you. I'd let his father go and forget everything--for something I want. So he changed places with me, and I've come to see you. Lucky you're here. Lucky you called." It was a clumsy lie, and stumbled on his lips. The menace of him filled her with horror. But she did not let him see it--now. He came a step nearer, and she backed away from him. Suddenly her mind whipped inspirational words from her lips. She looked up swiftly to the top of the cliff. "I don't want Carter to see you here," she cried quickly. "He walked down the point with me, and I think he's up there." The significance of her words was not lost upon Aleck. He moved nearer to the cliff, so that one above could not see them. She followed him, fighting back her fear. "Why don't you want Carter to see us?" he asked in a throaty whisper. "Because--if he saw us--everything would be lost. You would not dare help me then. And you will, Aleck--you will help me, won't you?" He was stunned by the change in her. She had laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes were shining at him. "But you must tell me the truth. There isn't any need to lie. What did you do to Peter--when he came to the island?" Her fingers pressed his flesh. There was almost a smile on her lips. "The smoke was thick," said Aleck. "I heard him coming and hid in the water. Then I stunned him with a club. He ain't bad--not badly hurt--but he's safe enough on the island!" Mona crushed back the little cry of relief that wanted to come to her lips. Her eyes glowed at Aleck, and suddenly one of his big hands closed about the one she had laid on his arm. She could feel his breath as he bent over her. "I told you my time would come," he cried in a husky, exultant voice. "_My day!_ And it's here. I got 'em both--safe--one to hang, the other----" "_Sh-h-h!_" She placed a finger to her lips. It was an excuse to draw away from him, get her hand free--and not let him hear the terrified beating of her heart. She looked up again at the cliff. "Did you hear anything?" "No. And if anyone hears _us_ it's going to be your fault and not mine!" It was impossible to escape the look in his face and eyes. It was not necessary for him to use words. But Mona did not flinch from her peril. It was not only her danger, but Peter's, and Donald McRae's, and Simon's if he had harmed Carter. It had suddenly and unexpectedly become her fight--all hers, and she knew that Aleck Curry thought she was yielding, and that the brute in him was held in leash only by this belief that was beginning to possess him. If he guessed the truth, guessed that she was fighting to trick him, nothing would save her, not even her assertion that Carter was on the cliff above them. So she smiled again at Aleck, and laughed very softly, with a nervous twisting of her hands. Her eyes had never looked at him as they were looking at him now. They were like glowing stars, velvety-soft--hiding hate and desperation behind them. She had never looked half so beautiful, or so unresisting, to Aleck Curry. Her fingers pressed his arm again. "I must get Carter away," she whispered. "I've got to do it, Aleck! He mustn't know. I'll hurry. And then I'll come back. I promise!" Horror seized her as she felt him drawing her toward him. But still she did not resist. With a low cry his great arms were about her. She felt herself almost broken against him, and then she was helpless, her head bent back, and his thick lips killing her with kisses. Again her strength left her, and she lay limp in his arms, smothered in his passion. Those moments of helpless and agonized passiveness saved her. To Aleck it was surrender. His arms loosened and allowed her to breathe. Weakly she pressed against him, and he allowed her partly to free herself. But she could still feel his hot breath like a poisonous fume in her face. He bent forward and kissed her again--on the mouth. It almost choked her. "I must--must get Carter away!" she gasped. "Then I'll come back. If you won't let me do that, I'll--I'll scream--and Carter will hear us. But if you'll let me get him away, so he'll never know--never be able to tell Peter----" It was unnecessary for her to finish. Aleck's face was transformed by an iniquitous joy. He looked close into her face, and she looked back at him, unafraid. "I'll let you go--and get Carter away," he said. "If you don't come back soon, I'll go to Five Fingers--and you know what that means for Peter and his father." "I'll come," she lied. She climbed up the narrow footpath to the top of the cliff, and getting her breath there, she called Carter's name--loudly enough for Aleck to hear. Then she began to run. She was still weak, and it seemed to her that the poison of Aleck Curry's embraces and kisses followed her. She began to sob under her breath. There was no turning of the ways for her now. She must tell someone the truth--anyone--the first man she met. But Simon first of all. On the little island Peter might be dying. Maybe Aleck had killed him, for it was in his power to do so and still be within the law. She began to moan his name. Then she came to the crest of a high knoll which was bare of trees, and what she saw ahead of her stopped her, gulping for breath and almost falling in her exhaustion. A wind was in her face. And northward there was no longer a black pall of smoke but a world afire. The glow of the conflagration reached from the earth to the sky. It swept in a great arc, and red seas of flame were leaping from peak to peak of the farther ridges. Pierre Gourdon's fear had become a reality. The fire was racing with the speed of the wind itself upon Five Fingers! She ran on. Her hair caught in the brush, and she clutched it in front of her. She came at last to the edge of the clearing and staggered across it. There were lights in the cabins, in her own home, in Adette Clamart's, in Dominique Beauvais's and half a dozen others. But Simon's was dark. Yet she swayed toward that, hopeful to the last--and almost at the door she came upon Simon. He was rigid and still, like a shadow. She could see his gray, hard face. Then he heard her panting, heard her trying to gasp out her terrible news, and his arms reached out and gathered her to him--and she told him what had happened to Peter. Ten minutes later Simon was leaving in a sailboat. "It's so dark Curry won't see me when I pass through the mouth of the inlet," he said. "And I'll reach Peter in half an hour." Mona went back to McQuarrie's cabin, climbed to Peter's room and lighted a lamp. In a cedar box she found Peter's thirty-eight-caliber automatic and loaded it with skilful fingers. Then she extinguished the light, descended the ladder and left the cabin in the direction of her tryst with Aleck Curry. There was only one thing for her to do, and her mind was quite fixed. It was her right to be at the end of the point waiting for Simon and Peter. And if Aleck threatened her--or put his hands on her again--she would kill him. That was the one way out. It would save Peter, and Peter's father, and herself. It was not a monstrous thing but a just and righteous act--this wiping out of existence of a creature who threatened to destroy everything that made her world a fit place to live in. She had nearly passed the Clamart cabin when a white figure ran out of the gloom, and she had only time to hide the pistol in her dress when Adette Clamart was holding her excitedly by the arm. Adette's lovely face was white, and she was half out of breath from running. "It is terrible!" she cried. "Jame says the fire will be at your beaver pond within an hour, and he has just started in that direction with Jeremie Poulin and Carter--to keep it from coming over the last ridge----" "Carter!" gasped Mona. "Yes. Jame told him about the cabin Peter built, and Carter said it was a shame not to save it, and the beavers. Jame says it is impossible--that a hundred men couldn't keep the fire back--but Carter insisted, and they've gone!" Mona tried to force words from her lips, and thanked God that Adette hurried on, crying back to her that she was making an effort to overtake Jame before he got out of the clearing, to give him a lunch which he had forgotten. Carter had returned--and was on his way to the cabin in which Peter's father was hidden! And that cabin, Jame said, would be in the heart of the fire within an hour! With Peter dead or wounded on the island, and Simon gone, what hope was there now for Donald McRae? If the fire did not reach his cabin first, Carter would get him, and if the fire beat out Carter---- Mona's dry lips gave a little cry. Through the pitch-filled evergreen forest about the beaver pond the fire would sweep in a destroying inundation which no living creature could outrace if the wind was behind it; and Donald McRae, sick and helpless, would be the first human victim in its descent upon Five Fingers. The peril which was threatening Peter's father from two directions worked a swift and thrilling change in Mona. She must beat out Carter--and she must beat out the fire! Thought of Aleck Curry became secondary to this more immediate necessity. She could settle with Aleck later. But she must reach the cabin _now_. There was not a minute or a second to lose if she was to get there ahead of Jame and Carter. She began to run again, following a path through the meadow into the strip of forest between the settlement and the shore of the lake. Her feet and Peter's had worn this trail smooth, and she knew that in the thickening gloom of smoke and night she was traveling faster than Carter and Jame Clamart, who were going by the rougher tote-road. In ten minutes she reached the cliff which ran westward along the lake. Here she was high, and there were no trees to shut out her view of the ridge country. What she saw appalled her. Nowhere in the north was there any longer a wall of blackness. The world was red, with lurid flashings that came and went like mighty explosions. Westward, beyond the beaver pond, she could see the leaping of the flames in the thick spruce and cedar timberlands where ten thousand barrels of pitch and resinous oils were turning sleeping forests into boiling caldrons of fire. The smell of this oil and pitch was heavy in her nostrils, and she could hear the moaning, distant roar of the conflagration as one hears the roar of great furnaces when the fuel doors are opened. But it was the wind that brought quicker fear to her heart. It was beginning to blow strongly from the north and west, and carried with it a heat that was stifling. And with this heat and wind came also a thickening cloud of ash particles, until at last, afraid of their increasing sting, she stopped to take off her skirt and fasten it about her hair and face. Halfway to the pond, with still another mile to go, she saw the flames leaping over the last ridge, and her heart seemed suddenly to give way in a sobbing cry of agony and despair. She was too late. Between that ridge and Peter's father was less than a mile of spruce and cedar and balsam forest, with pitch-sodden jackpines interspersed so thickly that no power less than God could hold back the speed of the holocaust. With the wind that was behind them the flames would be at the cabin before she could cover a quarter of the distance to Peter's father. For a few moments she sank down helpless and without strength, sobbing for breath as she stared at the merciless red death which had beaten her--and Carter. And in these moments her agony was greater than when Aleck had told her about Peter, for now she was picturing a man, creeping out on his hands and knees to face that sea of flame--a man, sick and helpless, crying out for Peter, for her, and dying by inches with their names on his lips. She staggered to her feet and went on, and in her dazed mind lived a prayer that Donald McRae might be given strength to drag himself to the shore of the lake. If that strength had not already come to him, it was now too late, for as she toiled over a high and craggy point in the cliff the wind blew hot in her face, and where the beaver pond should be was a red hell of flames. The trail descended as she forced herself on--descended from the ramparted ledge to the smooth, sandy level of the beach, and suddenly she was conscious of the crashing of bodies in the thickets and the frenzied sound of living things. A great moose swept so near her that she sprang from his path--a monstrous beast with flaming eyes and snorting nostrils, closely followed by a darker, rounder object that she knew was a bear, racing for the safety of the water. She came to the sandy open where the trail swung straight ridgeward toward the beaver pond, and stopped, knowing she could go no farther unless she defied the death from which all other living creatures were flying. Piteously Mona cried out--to Peter, to Simon, to Donald McRae, and then to God; and at last she fell down with her face buried in her skirt, ready to welcome death itself in this hour when not only her world but all that she loved in it were doomed to destruction. It was a sound close to her that uncovered her face, a sound that came strangely above the moaning roar of heat-wind and flame, and staring through the gloom and against the red glare of the burning forests, she saw a grotesque shadow--something that was not moose nor deer nor any four-footed thing she had ever seen in the wilderness; and rising up before it she saw that it was a man bent under a huge, limp burden which he carried. She cried out, and a choking voice answered her--a strange, terrible, unhuman sort of voice, yet the sound of it nearly split her heart, and when the figure deposited its burden in the white sand and stood up she saw that it was Peter. She stumbled toward him. His arms caught her, and she could hear him sobbing under the strain of his fight, and his heart was beating so hard that each throb of it sent a tremor through his body. In his weakness her own strength returned, and in a moment her hands had left his face and she was at the side of the man who lay upon the sand. It was Donald McRae. Now a great light was flaming in the sky over their heads, and she saw that his face and hands were black, and his eyes were closed, though he was breathing. She tore the skirt from about her head and ran to soak it in water, but when she returned Peter was kneeling beside his father, and held back the dripping cloth. "Not water," he said. "We must get--something else. He is burned." She put her arms about Peter, and his face rested for a moment on her shoulder. In that moment he told her that Aleck had tricked him, and had left him on the island. With the aid of a piece of dry driftwood he had managed to swim ashore, but too late to reach the cabin ahead of the flames. He found his father halfway to the lake, fighting his way on hands and knees in the van of the fire. His face and hands were badly burned, but that was all. Another minute and he would have been too late. His voice choked, and Mona's hand stroked his face gently, and she kissed his hot forehead. Then they carried Donald McRae under the shelter of the cliff, where they were free from smoke and heat, with the water rippling in and out among the stones at their feet. And here Mona told Peter of Aleck's coming to the point, though she kept to herself what happened there, and that Simon McQuarrie had gone to the island in a sailboat and would surely come straight to this beach when he found Peter gone. And as they made Donald easier, and waited in the coolness of the cliff for the fire-storm to burn itself out, she told him also of Carter and that no time must be lost in getting away to a place of greater safety. Peter knew what that meant as he bent over his father. In scarcely more than a whisper he told Mona. He, too, must go. It would not be for long--maybe a week, a month, or a little longer. It was not for himself. He was not afraid of either Aleck or the law, because he had done at the pool just what he would do again if it were before the eyes of the whole world. But his father needed him, and never would his heart beat the same, nor would she ever again look at him with a bit of the pride and love which made him so strong, if he failed to do what was right in this hour. Without him his father was lost. He hoped Simon would come with the boat, for in that boat they would escape into the wilderness farther west. Mona made no answer to these things, for it was hard enough for her to breathe with the thickness that was in her throat. But her hand stroked Peter's, and her cheek lay against his, and above the grief in her breast rose a great pride in this man who loved her. And a thought came to her of Sir Nigel, the chivalrous young knight who looked so much like this Peter of hers with his sensitive boyish face, and of how Mary so bravely sent him away to the great wars in which through long years he rose to undying fame; and she subdued her heart, as Sir Nigel's sweetheart must have conquered her own, and at last told Peter it was the thing to do--the one thing to do--and that God and she would love him for it. And even as she did this there was creeping over her an unutterable foreboding, and death seemed to pierce her heart when she heard Simon McQuarrie's boat grounding on the sand. But she smiled, and kissed Peter--and then Simon stood before them. And in another five minutes he was gone again--this time to the settlement for the supplies and medicines which would go with Peter and his father. * * * * * For an hour they were alone, and Donald McRae tried to keep back the moans of pain that came to his lips. But he could not open his eyes, and Mona fanned him gently with a piece of her wet skirt, and told him Simon was hurrying with ointments which would make him comfortable. Peter even laughed and spoke of the sudden on-sweep of the fire as if it were an exciting adventure, and it was good that Donald could not see their tense and grief-filled faces in the gloom. The fire roared through the last of the evergreens and burned itself out against the bare stone knolls and ledges of the lake shore. And then came again the sound of Simon's boat on the sand. "Carter has returned to the settlement and was preparing to come this way in a boat when I slipped out through the inlet," Simon whispered to Mona. With Peter she went to the boat, leaving Simon alone for a few moments with his old friend. And it was Simon who came at the end of a brief interval bearing the burden of Peter's father in his arms. Very tenderly he laid him on the blankets in the boat. "God be with you, Donald," he whispered, a broken note in his voice. "God be with you--always." The stricken man raised a burned hand to the other's face. "They have always been with me, Simon," he whispered back. "God--and Helen. And now that you have made such a fine man of Peter I hope I may go to them--soon." In the darkness Mona crept out of Peter's arms. "Peter, you must wait no longer. You must go." "In a little while I will come back, _Ange_." "And I--by the sweet spirit of Ste. Anne--I promise to be waiting for you when you come, Peter--though I wait until new forests grow where yours and mine have burned. So go--good-by--lover--sweetheart----" And then she had slipped away from him and he made no effort to follow her into the smoky gloom, though a sobbing cry came back to him faintly. For a moment Simon stood aside with Peter. Their hands gripped in the darkness and a strain was in the old Scotchman's low voice as he said: "I've put ointment on your father's face and hands and he is easier. I don't think he is badly burned. Everything is in the boat, lad--provisions, blankets, medicines, a pack and what money I had at hand." He hesitated and the grip of his fingers tightened as he added: "In the bow is your rifle with extra ammunition in the buckskin sack beside it. You'll need it. But don't fight the law unless they force you to it, boy. Remember that. The law finds no excuse, even though scoundrels like Aleck Curry and blood-sucking ferrets like Carter are sometimes a part of it. And let me tell you that I saw with my own eyes when your father killed a man years ago when you were a baby in your mother's arms. It was for your mother he did it and he was right; but in spite of that the law won't rest until it lands him. And it's your job now to beat the law, but without the use of a gun. I love you, lad--but I'd curse you for a coward if you didn't do what you're doing now. For years you and Mona have prayed that God would send your father back to you--and now he has come--and it's God's will behind it. All that is left in a body that was once stronger than my own is his worship for you and his memories of your mother. Take care of him, Peter. And--God bless you both!" Never had the iron-natured old Scotchman said so much in all the years since Peter had come to live with him as a son. And without a word Peter went to the boat, for his throat was thick and choking, and Simon shoved the craft out into the sea until he was waist-deep in the water. Simply he said good-by as if Peter were going only to the nets or the islands outside the mainland, and no tremor in his hard, calm voice betrayed the tears on his cheeks which darkness hid. And as Peter raised the sail McQuarrie waded ashore and was met by a pair of arms and a sobbing voice that cried out in its grief and despair against his shoulder. Another sound came before they turned to the cliff trail that led along the unburned shore of the lake to Five Fingers. From the direction of the settlement a light skiff bore down swiftly upon the strip of sandy beach. Carter, who sat in the stern, was old in the service of the provincial police, a ferret on the trail, a fox in his cleverness, cold-blooded, unexcitable and merciless--and when the bow of the skiff ran into the sand and Aleck Curry leaped ashore he remained quietly in his seat and waited. In a moment he heard voices--the cold, unemotional voice of the Scotchman first and then Aleck Curry's in fierce demand and Mona Guyon's in answer. He went ashore, his thin, hard face smiling in the darkness, and heard Simon tell Aleck that the law no longer had a work to do at Five Fingers, for Peter and his father had died somewhere out in the heart of the fire. He heard Mona's sob, close to Simon's shoulder. Then he opened his flashlight, but not upon them. It illumined Aleck's face, thick-lipped and bestial in its disappointment and passion. What he saw was amusing to a man like Carter and a spark of chivalry made him leave the others in darkness. But he stepped back and cast his light upon the wet sand of the shore. And then he said quite casually, as if his discovery was a matter of small significance: "You lie, McQuarrie! We have come only a quarter of an hour too late. Peter McRae and his father have gone in your boat, and as this breath of wind will scarcely fill a sail, I think Aleck's enthusiasm and a light skiff should make it possible for us to overtake them within an hour!" He chuckled as he switched off his flashlight, and that chuckle was like the rattle of a snake to Mona, deadlier than all the hate and animal passion she had seen in Aleck Curry's face in the one swift moment when it had flashed out of the darkness into light. For Carter was more than a representative of the law. He was its incarnation, and more than Aleck Curry--more than any other man in the world--she feared him now as the skiff sped in the direction taken by Peter and his father. CHAPTER XX For a few minutes after leaving the shore Peter did not trust himself to speak. He could see nothing but a gray chaos except landward, where the red sky and the darker blot of the cliff were visible through the smoke gloom. Even the weather-stained canvas of Simon's boat was indistinguishable, and where his father lay on a pile of blankets at his feet he could make out only a shadow. Now that the fire had burned itself out of the forests between the shore and the ridges the heated winds gave way quickly to a growing calm. The smoke hung like a dense fog and with this change came a strange stillness in which sound seemed to multiply itself until he heard clearly the wailing of a dog at Five Fingers. Then the faint rattle of oarlocks came to him and his hand tightened on the tiller. It was Aleck Curry again--Aleck and the man-hunter, Carter, hurrying to cut them off before they could leave the shore! And suddenly in fierce passion he wanted to shout back his defiance to them just as years ago--three days before he came to Five Fingers--he had felt the desire to kill the men who had driven his father into the forest. Something in these moments brought that day back to him--a vivid memory of the big log behind which they were sheltered, and armed men in the thickets, the blue jay screeching at them, his thirst and hunger and his father's pale, strong face waiting with courage for darkness to come; then the dusk, their escape on a log in the flooded river and their first fugitive camp in the big woods. How wonderful his father had been in those hours of peril which he as a boy could scarcely understand! And now he was lying at his feet, a pitiable wreck because of that same merciless and unfair law which had pursued him then---- Peter cried out. It was not much more than a throat sound, as if the smoke had made him gasp for breath. But a hand rose out of the darkness and touched him. "Peter!" "Yes, dad." "It has all gone wrong, boy. If only I hadn't been so heartsick to see you--if I had never come back----" Peter bent over and his hand rested tenderly against the face which Simon had cooled with ointment. "If you hadn't come I'd have lost all faith in the God you used to tell me about," he whispered. "I wanted to give up but Mona wouldn't let me. She said you would surely come. And this isn't half as bad as that day behind the log when I was a little kid. Remember how you cared for me then--kept me above water when we went into the river, caught rabbits for me to eat afterward and tucked me into bed every night near the camp-fire? Well, it's _my_ turn now. And I'm almost glad you're sick--just so I can show you how much I've grown up since that afternoon you sent me on alone to Five Fingers so many years ago. You lied to me then, dad. You made me believe you'd come back that night, or the next day. Haven't you ever been ashamed of that?" The strain was gone from his voice. It was his _dad_ he was speaking to again, his pal and comrade of the old days, and the thrill of that comradeship was stirring warmly in his blood. "I knew Simon would give you a good home," said Donald. "And he has made a splendid man of you. But I'm sorry, Peter--sorry I came back. After all those years I was hungry to see you. I just wanted to look on your face and then go away again without letting you know. I didn't mean to break into your life like this----" His hand was stroking Peter's and for a moment Peter bent down until his face was close to his father's. Donald was silent but his hand continued its caressing touch. After a little he said: "Did I hear something, Peter?" "I think it was thunder. A storm must be following in the trail of the fire." "I mean out there--near at hand. It was like wood striking on wood." He sank back and Peter reached down and made his head comfortable. "This makes me think of that last night in the woods when you tucked me in my cedar-bough bed and told me to sleep," he whispered gently. "And I'm telling you that now, dad. It's what you need. Try and sleep!" Even as he spoke he heard the distant sound again and knew it was the clank of oarlocks. He fastened the tiller so that Simon's boat was heading for the open sea. Then he crept forward and returned with a blanket, and this blanket he quietly unfolded in the darkness, taking from it the weapon which Simon had loaded and placed there for his use. And Simon's words were running over and over in his head, as steady as the ticking of a clock. "Take care of him, Peter. It's your job now to beat the law." * * * * * As the minutes passed it seemed to Peter that sound became a living, stealthy part of the night, creeping about him in ghostly whispers, hiding behind the canvas sail, rustling where the water moved under the bow, purring at his feet and in the air. This impression of sound by its smallness and its secretiveness served to emphasize the hush which had fallen upon a burned and blasted world. Its muteness bore with it a quality of solemnity and a quickening thrill as if subjugated forces were muffled and bound and might unleash themselves without warning. In this stillness Peter heard the thunder creeping up faintly behind the path of fire. But the sound of the oar did not come again. He strained his eyes to pierce the gloom even though he knew the effort was futile and senseless. The red line of the fire was steadily receding. In places it was lost. Where he had left the cliff and the sandy strip of beach was a black chaos, and it was this darkness with its silence which seemed to reach into his heart and choke him with its oppression and foreboding. Through the stillness a sound came to him, floating softly over the sea, sweet and distant. His fingers slowly unclasped and he bowed his head. It was the bell over the little church of logs and Father Albanel was tolling it. Even now in this smoke-filled hour of the night he was calling the people of the settlement together that they might offer up in prayer their gratitude because homes and loved ones had been spared by the red death that had swept the land. It was like a living voice, gently sweet and soothing as it brought him faith and reverence. _There was a God!_ Every fiber in his body leaped to that cry of his heart. Without a God his father would have died, the whole world would have burned, there would be no Mona, no hope, no anything for him in the darkness of the freedom which lay ahead. His lips moved with Mona's prayer and he stood up quietly so that he might hear more clearly until the last peal of the bell died away. And when the gray silence shut him in again he felt as if a protecting spirit had come to ride with him in the gloom. Softly he spoke to his father but there was no answer. Exhaustion and the peace of the open sea had overcome the stricken man and he was asleep. Encumbered by stillness and smoke, the night passed with appalling slowness. The distant thunder with its promise of rain died away. Half a dozen times Peter lighted matches and looked at his watch. At last it was three o'clock and the horizon of murk and smoke that shut him in receded as dawn advanced. Then came a sudden keen breeze, like the last sweeping of a great broom, and he could see the coast. His own heart was thrilled by the sight of it, for behind the menacing headland of barren rock that rose like a great gargoyle hundreds of feet above the lower cliff was a strip of water which he had once hazarded in a dead calm and which led back half a mile between towering walls of rock and naked ridges into that very chaos of wildness which he had wanted for a hiding-place. Scarcely had this moment of exultation possessed him when the wind died again. At the same time a clearer light diffused itself over the sea. The horizon drew itself back like a curtain and half a mile away he saw an object that sent his heart into his throat. For a few moments he neither moved nor seemed to breathe as he stared at a swiftly approaching skiff. Then he looked at his father. Donald McRae had not awakened. A livid scar lay across his eyes as if a red-hot iron had burned out his sight. His hands were blistered, his lips were swollen and his neck and shoulders were scarred and covered with the ointment which Simon had used. Yet--even then--_his father slept_! The horror of it choked Peter and his soul cried out for vengeance against those who had made this wreck of a man. He turned and his hand rested upon his rifle. He no longer feared the law or Aleck Curry or Carter, the ferret. His desire at first was to kill them. With astonishing calmness he waited, watching the approaching skiff. When it was two hundred yards away he picked up his rifle. He chose the small of Aleck's back for his first shot and raised his gun. In the same moment he observed that with Carter in the stern and Aleck amidships the bow of the skiff was high out of water. It was this situation which saved Aleck and Peter's first bullet crashed through the boat an inch or two below the water line. He followed with two other shots. The effect was almost instantaneous. Aleck Curry lurched away from the oars and the skiff came within an ace of upsetting. In another moment the quick-witted Carter had called Aleck into the stern and there both crouched, their combined weight raising the shattered bow above the water line while Carter stripped himself of his shirt. The shots roused Donald, and with an effort he drew himself up beside Peter. "What is it?" he demanded. He turned his scarred face toward Peter and then with a strange cry covered his face with his hands. "My God, I can't see!" he cried. "Peter--I can't see!" In that darkest moment of his life Peter thanked God the wind came and filled the sail of Simon's boat and that neither Carter nor Aleck Curry shouted after them or made a sound that his father might hear, and like an inspiration a lie came to his lips--he had done some poor shooting at a flock of mallards! He spoke cheerfully of his father's efforts to see, telling him it would be days before he could hope for vision when his eyes were swollen and scarred by burns. And Donald, seeing nothing of the agony in Peter's bloodless face, smiled cheerfully up at the clearing sky in spite of his pain. He did not mind so much about his hands, he said, but it was a hardship to have his eyes covered as Peter was bandaging them now because he wanted to see as much as he could of his boy in the short time they would be together. There was a note of happiness in his voice which was in strange contrast to the pathos of his appearance and his helplessness. And Peter fought to keep up that spirit of cheer and of gladness that was in Donald McRae's heart. But his own heart was breaking--for he knew that his father was blind. Hours later Simon's boat came stealing back to shore in the sunless dusk of the evening. This time the sail was down and with muffled oars Peter rowed cautiously for the break in the cliff. Blended with the deepening shadows of the sea, he worked his boat into the narrow maw of the crevasse whose rock walls rose two hundred feet over their heads. In utter darkness, with the thin streak of light far above, he felt his way for half an hour. Then the fissure widened and after another fifteen minutes of slow progress its walls bulged outward, losing themselves in the gloom, and ahead stretched the hidden inlet, smothered on all sides by precipitous crags and cliffs and towering forest ridges. On a narrow strip of sand he grounded the boat and lighted the lantern which Simon had placed in the outfit. Its illumination threw up grimly the black shadows about them, and questing among these, he found huge masses of torn and twisted rocks so wildly thrown together that among them were many little caverns and grottoes thickly carpeted with white sand. One of these he chose for a camp, but not until he had gathered an armful of bleached driftwood and had started a fire did he return to the boat. It was then, in the yellow light of flaming cedar and pine, that he noted a strange and startling change had come over his father. Donald McRae no longer bore the appearance of a sick man. He stood straight and was breathing deeply. His lips were smiling as he faced Peter and quite calmly he removed the bandage from his eyes. "At last we are home," he spoke softly. "And just beyond you--_I see your mother_!" Instantly he seemed to sense the shock of those words to Peter, for he said: "Don't let that frighten you, lad. Every day and night she is at my side. Only--now--_she is nearer_!" He reached out his hands and almost fiercely Peter's arms closed about him. Donald stroked his hair. It was the old caress, and he spoke to Peter as if to a little boy again. "You're not afraid, Peter?" he asked. "Afraid----" Peter's heart stopped beating. "They can't hurt you," said Donald soothingly. "I won't let them do that, Peter." Peter drew slowly away. His face was gray in the firelight and in his eyes was a growing horror. He tried to speak but no words came from his lips. Donald's scarred face was strangely tranquil. It seemed to Peter that years had dropped away from it. In it was no fear, no sign of strain, no consciousness of the terrible hours they had passed through or of the tragic future which lay ahead. And the truth came to Peter, a suspicion at first, a whisper, growing and overwhelming him until at last it was a dizzying sickness that set him swaying on his feet. In this hour Donald McRae was not the man who had returned after years of wandering to see his boy. His mind had gone back. It had returned to the days of Peter's childhood and his voice was repeating words almost forgotten--a sacred promise of days when Peter had built mighty castles in the air and his father had helped him plan them with the understanding smile that was on his lips now. For he was saying: "They won't hurt a boy, Peter. We'll get away. And then we'll go through the big woods to the mountains just as we've always wanted to do." Peter raised clenched hands to his face to stifle his agony. In the torturing slowness of the hours which followed Donald McRae lived again in the precious years when Peter was a boy, recalling forgotten incidents as if they had happened yesterday, bringing forth their old dreams, painting their pictures of the future as he had done so often with Peter at his side in the afterglow of evenings long ago. And Peter, with his soul torn and bleeding, talked with him. Together they were hunting again. They followed the old trap-lines. They heard the song of birds and planted seeds and flowers in the little garden back of their cabin home, and Peter was kneeling at his father's knees when he said his prayers at night. These things Peter had dreamed of and treasured in his years at Five Fingers, but now they were horrors--coming out of the past with a voice that trembled with the thrill and joy of a strange madness. At last Donald slept. It was after midnight and the last embers of the fire had burned out. Peter rose to his feet and walked up the shore, staring into darkness. The rock walls that inclosed the inlet rose sheer above him, making of the place a deep and sombrous pit. He could see the stars and their distance lent an abysmal solitude to the gloom. About him was no movement and no stir of life; the water lay still; no whisper came from dark forests on the ridge tops; the black walls were dead and in the soft sand his feet alone disturbed the sepulchral quiet. To Peter this strangeness seemed naturally a part of the change that had come into his life. Everything was changed. His world had gone into atoms and now it was reassembling itself; and with deadened emotions, almost dully, he was beginning to accept it. His yesterdays, it seemed, had existed an infinitely long time ago. Five Fingers was no longer home or a necessity and even Mona seemed a vast distance away from him in these hours when his own soul was remolding itself to fit the grimness of a new existence. His mind no longer questioned the path he was to take and no shadow of revolt rose in it. One thought was as steadfastly fixed in him now as life itself. He belonged to his father and his father belonged utterly to him. He must go on with him, care for him, fight for him, save him from that one dread brutality of the law if his own life paid the forfeit in the end. That was settled. Even his love for Mona could not change that duty and older love which urged him. It was more than a resolution; it was as immutably a part of him as the beating of his heart and his own flesh and blood. The stars faded and day broke swiftly above the walls of the inlet. He returned and found his father on his hands and knees groping in the sand. He was gathering sticks and placing them with the remnants of last night's fire, and when he heard Peter's footsteps he paused in his labor and raised a face out of which once more the years of grief and hopelessness seemed to have gone. "Are you hungry, Peter?" he asked. And Peter, as he knelt beside him, knew that he was speaking to Peter the boy and not to Peter the man. Together they built the fire. CHAPTER XXI Nine days Peter and his father spent in their hiding-place under the walls of the lagoon. At the end of that time Donald's burns were healed and his strength had returned. He had taken on flesh and his shoulders were straighter. His eyes were clear again but their vision was strangely shadowed and at a hundred yards the wall of the lagoon was like a dark curtain. For a time it was impossible for Peter to believe that his father's mind was not keeping pace with his physical revivement. Yet with the passing of each day Donald's mental grip concentrated itself more and more on the past until he seemed not to have lived at all beyond those years when Peter was a boy. Together they picked up old threads as if they had never been broken or lost, and in those occasional dark and brooding intervals when Donald's mind dragged itself back into the haunting tragedy of the present Peter found himself praying for the return of that partial amnesia which at first had terrified him. On the evening of the ninth day Peter once more set out to sea. Fifty miles westward he ran ashore in the illusive, gray dusk of morning and burned Simon's boat. Now that their flight northward had actually begun there were moments when his father's attitude almost frightened him. At first Donald's mind was keenly alive to the nearness of danger and in his half blindness he became more watchful and alert than Peter. But it was the peril of years ago that haunted him--the menace of the men who had driven them from their cabin home and who had nearly killed them when Peter was a boy. After the third day Peter began to mark the beginning of the final change in his father. Donald became less watchful and sounds no longer seemed to disturb him. Instincts which warned him of peril became ghosts and at last faded away entirely. By the end of the seventh day there remained only one consciousness of living in Donald's soul; Peter was his little boy, and he was with Peter. Physically he betrayed no sign that his mind had crumbled. His scarred eyes, in which vision had grown even dimmer, held in them a deep and abiding clearness and a strange gentleness grew in his face. And Peter, holding tight to keep his own heart from breaking, knew what it meant. His father was forgetful of all things now but his boy, and was happy. This change more than anything else killed in Peter's breast his last hope of returning to Five Fingers. Sheer madness with its darkness and its misery might have driven him back to Simon and Father Albanel, taking Donald McRae to asylum doors instead of to the hangman. But this which he saw growing in his father was to him a quietly working miracle of God instead of breaking down of body and soul and brain. As day followed day and one cool, dark night added itself to another, a warm and thrilling reaction came to replace with new emotions the gloom and desolation in his heart. Not for an hour did he stop thinking of Mona; her face was with him, her voice, the touch of her lips and hands; she walked with him in the thick aisles of the forest, slept near his side at night, wakened with him in the morning and became in each increasing hour of their separation more completely a part of him. But with this thought of her returned also the old passion of his childhood--his love for his father. His heart stirred strangely to the gentle caress of Donald's hand as it had thrilled when he was a boy. The old chumship rose out of its ashes, smoldered for a while and then burned steadily as if the broken years had never been. Home, mother, father, all the joys and dreams of childhood and early boyhood crept upon him a little at a time, until at last he knew that to sacrifice his father was as unthinkable as to surrender that part of his heart which Mona filled. Between these two loves, encouraged on one side by duty and on the other by desire, lay his grief. Until the end of the third week he did not give up fully his resolution to send word back to Mona. By that time the hazard of such an act had fully impressed itself upon him. He no longer feared Aleck Curry, whose stupidity he had fully measured, but almost as frequently as Mona filled his mind came also dread of Carter. A cold and abiding fear of this man entered into him and he was confident it would not be long before this human ferret of the forests would in some way find their trail. At times he was oppressed by the feeling that Carter was close behind them and he tried to establish in his mind the certainty of his action if his father's enemy should suddenly appear. Thought of what might happen--what probably would happen--made him shudder. For there could be no halfway measures with Carter now. Always on the alert, with his rifle never far from reach of his hands, he swung still farther north and west. Autumn found him in the Dubaunt River country, and the beginning of winter on the Thelon. Here he traded his watch in a Dogrib camp for a score of traps, blankets and new moccasins, invested the last of his money in flour, sugar, salt and tea, and took possession of an abandoned cabin in the neighborhood of Hinde Lake. All through the winter he trapped and set deadfalls and snares. A hundred times during the long winter he fought against his desire to send a word to Mona. Months had not dulled his caution and as soon as the spring break-up made it possible to travel he led his father into the Artillery Lake country. Through the spring and early summer they were constantly on the move, always making a little southward. By the time August came they had completed two-thirds of an immense circle and south of the Athabasca country found themselves in the unmapped region between the Cree River and the McFarland. Here, in a country of ridges and swamps and deep forests, Peter made up his mind that at last they were safely hidden from Carter and all the rest of the world. He breathed easier and began the building of a cabin. This was on a dark-watered, silent little stream, with a vast swamp at their back door, ridge country to right and left of them and an illimitable forest reaching out in front. The nearest point of habitation that Peter knew of was a Hudson's Bay Company post sixty miles away. And this cabin with each log that went into it became a closer and more inseparable part of Donald McRae. Out of that forgetfulness which could scarcely be called madness began to creep memories so warm and vivid that they seemed to breathe with life itself. For Donald was building the old home again, the home of Peter's mother, where the moon had looked in through the window on the night he was born--a home, sweet and whispering with the presence of a woman one had worshiped in the flesh and the other had visioned as an angel in his dreams. After a little it was Donald and not Peter who was building the cabin, and by the time it was finished it seemed to Peter that a strange and unseen spirit of life, gentle as prayer itself, had come to dwell in it with them. Autumn came again with its paradise of color. The cedars, spruces and balsams took on a deeper, richer green; each sunrise bathed the ridges of poplar and birch in new splendor of red and yellow and gold; the nights grew colder, the days were filled more and more with the autumn tang that made blood run red and warm. God was with them here. Donald said that, as in the days of old. And Peter began to believe--and as faith rose in him hope and dreams returned. _Mona's prayer was answered_--the prayer they had said together for years asking that his father might be returned to him, and that they might all find refuge together somewhere in the wilderness world which they loved. And this was the refuge, given to them through the sweet and charitable guidance of God. All that was needed to complete it was Mona. He began to thrill with a greater excitement as the first snows came. Would it be safe to return for Mona _now_? There were times when his whole soul cried out in the affirmative and he was almost ready to begin the long journey. But his caution never quite died and he always pulled himself back in time. Sixteen months had seemed an eternity to him but prudence warned him not to hurry. He would wait until spring. By that time, if Carter were on their trail, the climax would surely come. If the winter passed safely, he would go to Five Fingers and bring Mona back with him. Not for a moment did he doubt she would come, and he continued to add to the glorious castles he built in his mind, shadowed only now and then by oppressing thoughts of the many things which might have happened at Five Fingers in almost two years of absence. Late in February he left for the trading-post with two Indian dogs and a light toboggan to sell his furs. It was not unusual now for Donald to remain alone for several days at a time, for Peter knew the home they had built had become a part of his heart and soul and that nothing short of actual force or his own wishes and plans could drag his father from it. On this trip to the post he expected to be gone five days. It was very cold. Trees cracked and snapped with the piercing bite of the frost and the snow crackled underfoot. For a long time after Peter had disappeared Donald stood in the little clearing staring over the trail where his boy had gone. Something unknown to Peter was finding its way into Donald's brain. Through the night it had worked, gnawing its way slowly and stealthily, and now that Peter was gone it grew bolder. Even as he turned the cabin took on a new aspect for Donald. Though the sun was shining and the sky was clear, a shadow seemed to have fallen over it and the welcoming spirit which had always clasped him closely to its heart was missing when he entered through the door. As the day passed a change came in Donald's face. He was restless and uneasy. Sounds startled him again. In the dusk of evening he did not light a candle but sat quietly in a corner, staring into darkness with his half-blind eyes, and all that night he did not go to bed. The next day there was no sun; the sky was heavy with gloom, the air thick and difficult for Donald to breathe. Mysterious shadows crept about him and at times he tried futilely to seize these with his hands. As the hours passed his mind became more and more like a broken limb from which the last prop had been taken. A hundred times he whispered Peter's name. Then came the beginning of the storm. It broke in mid-afternoon and by night was a howling blizzard. In darkness the cabin shook and the wind screamed overhead and the snow beat like shot against the window. It would be a long time before the forest people would forget this storm because of its ferocity and the tragedy which it left in its wake, but to Donald it was more than a storm--it was a personal thing. In it was the cumulative chaos of all the evils from which he had been a fugitive through the years, and now, cornering him at last, they were fighting to break through the log walls of the cabin. He built up the fire until it roared in the chimney and lighted candles until the cabin was aflame with light. And then, suddenly as a bolt of lightning, some thing came to him. It was _voice_--voice screaming at the window, voice howling over the roof logs, voice moaning and wailing and dying away in the sweeping of the wind. "_Peter!_ _Peter!_ _Peter!_" It was crying--nothing but Peter's name, repeating it a thousand times in its laughing, taunting, moaning efforts to make him understand. A half-savage cry rose out of his breast. He was not afraid, not when his boy needed him--and hatless and coatless he flung up the birchwood bar to the door and faced the storm. "_Peter!_" he called. "_Peter!_ _Peter!_" It all had but one meaning for Donald now. The storm had Peter. It was playing with him, killing him, and these devils in the wind had come to tell him about it in their glee. He could feel them clawing and striking at his breast and face; the snow struck his eyes like tiny spear points and he found it difficult to get his breath in the face of the blast which tried to overwhelm him. He called again as he fought his way out into the blackness and snow. His words drifted away in shreds, whipped to pieces by the wind. Creatures seemed picking up handfuls of snow and hurling it in his face--he could hear their swift movement, the hissing of their breath, their evasion as he struck out at them, and he called Peter's name louder than before to give his boy courage and let him know he was coming. That Peter was near the cabin, that he had turned back and was making a desperate fight to reach its shelter was as firmly a part of Donald's mind as the conviction that all the forces of the darkness and evil were trying to keep him away from his boy. His head was bare and his woolen shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, but he did not sense the terrible cold that came with the blizzard. Among the trees his feet found instinctively the beginning of the trail that was blazed through the forest and he reached out his naked hands and plunged knee-deep through windrows of snow that lay in his way. The thickets whipped and beat at him and branches, ambushed in darkness, reached out from twisting trees to strike him, but he did not feel sting or pain. At last he was sure he heard an answer to his calling but the wind came and roared in his ears and the snow beat so fiercely in his face that he could not locate the quarter from which it came. Then he tricked the wind. He stumbled in the snow behind a tree and lay there until a brief lull followed in the wake of it, when he called again as loudly as he could. But he had the direction of it now and a hundred paces brought him to the edge of a rocky ravine which ran near the trail. Down this he clambered and in the pit-like darkness at the bottom found what he was seeking. Beside a figure rumpled and twisted in the snow he fell upon his knees, moaning Peter's name. Half an hour later Donald came back to the light in the clearing, staggering under the weight of his burden. He opened the door and together the two crashed in upon the floor. On his hands and knees Donald turned and shut the door against the storm. Then he crept to the younger man whose wide-open eyes were staring at him from a thin, white, strangely contorted face, and put his arms about him, holding his head closely against his breast. "You're all right now, Peter," he comforted in a broken, gasping voice. "You're all right----" He tried to laugh as his frozen fingers wiped the snow from the other's hair. "We're home and it's warm and I'll get something to eat----" He crawled to the stove, almost crooning in his joy, and opened the iron door to thrust in more wood. The flames lighted up his face, bloodless from the cold and wet with snow that had already begun to melt and trickle down his cheeks to his bare neck and chest. His hair glistened white--whiter, it seemed, than an hour ago; his breath came huskily as if driven through a sieve; he was a crumpled, frozen, wind-broken wreck, and yet as he turned from the flaming door of the stove to look at the man on the floor there was a strange miracle of triumph and happiness riding over the torture in his face and a smile was on his lips. The storm might beat and howl outside and all the evils of darkness might scream and rage to get in for all he cared now. He had saved his boy! He rose to his feet and stood swaying for a moment, smiling, trying to speak. Then he fell upon a cot. The man on the floor had pulled himself to his elbow. He put a mittened hand to his throat as if to free himself from fingers that were gripping him there. His face too was bloodless. It was a thin face, driven white and hard by exhaustion and pain. He was a man who had been close to death and the shadow of it was still in his eyes. He drew off his mittens and a foot at a time dragged himself across the floor. When he reached the cot he pulled himself up to it and put his arms over the stricken form of the one who had saved him. Donald felt the nearness and raised a hand weakly to the other's face. "You--Peter?" he asked. "Yes, it's me." Donald's blue lips smiled. "They didn't get us, did they, boy? We got away from them----" "Yes, we got away." "And you're warm now--good and warm?" The head over him bowed itself slowly until almost reverently it touched Donald's breast. It was not Peter's head. It was not Peter's voice that answered. But Donald gave a deep sigh of contentment as his fingers found a hand which he thought was Peter's and for a time neither one nor the other spoke again, while near them the fire crackled merrily in the stove and the candles sputtered and flared as if laughing at the storm which was lashing itself into a wailing madness outside the cabin walls. * * * * * For three days and nights no living creature could stand against the storm which swept the Athabasca country, nor could they travel in the intense cold which followed in its wake. It was the fifth of March, twelve days after he had left the cabin, before Peter crossed the Pipestone on his return into the region where he and his father had made their home. His mind was a torment of unrest as he visioned a hundred tragic happenings, any one of which might have visited his father during his absence. The last twenty-four hours he traveled without an hour of sleep. It was midday when he came to a high ridge from which he could look down into a cup of the forest where the cabin stood, a mile away. For the first time he breathed easily when he saw a spiral of blue smoke rising straight up into the clear sunshine of the day. He laughed in his gladness as he came to the trail which led past the spring near their home. He would stop and drink there and then give the old-time halloo for his father. He could see Donald hurrying through the sunshine to welcome him as he heard that cry. As he came round the last turn in the trail he stopped suddenly. Someone was at the spring. The bent figure was less than a hundred yards from him and he could see it rising slowly, lifting a pail filled with water. He shifted his rifle and made a megaphone of his mittened hands at his mouth. It would be a rousing surprise for his dad! But the cry died before it reached his lips. The man at the spring was not his father. Tall and thin and hooded, and walking with a stick as he advanced, the stranger came toward Peter. He progressed slowly and with difficulty, limping with each step he took. His head was bowed and not until they had approached within a few paces of each other did he raise it so that his face was clearly revealed. And then Peter gave a startled cry and swift as a flash swung the muzzle of his rifle upon the other. "_Carter!_" he gasped. A wan smile played over the ferret's face as he raised a hand and thrust back his hood. "My name is not Carter," he replied. "Since twelve days ago I have been Peter McRae--Donald McRae's son." Something in his thin face and strangely sunken eyes sent a cold chill to Peter's heart. Carter had stopped with the muzzle of the rifle touching the pit of his stomach. He made no effort to thrust it aside but stood looking calmly into the other's eyes. "It happened just that long ago," he said. "I was trailing you when I slipped over a ledge and almost broke a leg among the rocks. The storm came and I was about done for, when your father wandered out into the night, calling your name, and I answered. He got me into the cabin and I've been there ever since. From the beginning he thought I was you. I understand now, McRae. I know what I've done--and I wish you would pull that trigger. I deserve it." Peter lowered the gun. "You have not harmed him?" "_Harmed him!_" A dull look of agony filled Carter's eyes as he turned slowly toward the cabin. "No, I haven't harmed him--not since twelve days ago. It was all done before that. Only God will ever know how gentle and good he was to me, thinking I was you--and if by dying I could return what I've taken away from him I'd kill myself. And if I were in your place, Peter--standing where you are--_I'd shoot_!" He gave a stifled cry as Peter hurried past him. In it was a note of appeal that choked and died in his throat. But Peter did not hear it nor did he see fully the look of dread that was in Carter's eyes. He unshouldered his pack at the cabin door, laid his rifle beside it and went in. He was no longer afraid of Carter. Something tighter and more terrible was gripping at his heart. Carter came limping up the trail and when he reached the door he bared his head and quietly followed Peter into the cabin. Peter was on his knees beside the bunk in which Donald was lying. His arms were spread out and his head was bowed upon Donald's breast. White-faced, Carter knelt beside him and put both his hands about his shoulders. "Until _he_ brought me into this cabin twelve days ago I never believed in God," he said huskily. "But I do now, Peter. For twelve days _your father was my father_. I loved him. And I know, if he could have understood, that from the beginning he would have forgiven me--the man who hunted him to his death. If by any merciful chance _you_ can do that, Peter--if you can find it in your heart to let him remain my father and you my brother----" One of his hands found Peter's, clasping it tightly, and the other crept to Donald's face, where it lay cold and lifeless on its pillow. "In God's name say you forgive me!" he whispered. In answer Peter's fingers returned the pressure of Carter's hand and a sob broke on the man-hunter's lips. After a moment of silence he said: "It was the terrible cold and exposure of that night in which he was hunting for you. It reached his lungs. Until yesterday I was not afraid. Then the change came--swiftly. He died this morning, Peter, in _your_ arms, and the last word on his lips was _your_ name--and Mona's." A long time there was stillness in the cabin as the two men knelt beside their dead. CHAPTER XXII In the long days and weeks which followed Peter's return to the cabin and the death of his father a change which seemed to him a little short of a miracle came over the man-hunter. The pitiless Carter, the human ferret, whose years of duty had never been tempered with mercy or conscience, was gone, and in his place was a new Carter, dragging himself a little at a time out of the paths of tragedy and misery which he had followed for so long. Through those years Peter knew that Carter had been a Nemesis and a destroyer. He had not known pity, but only the grim exultation of achievement. Women, love, the extenuation of circumstance, even motherhood in its most beautiful sacrifice, had not stayed his hand when once the law had set him like a hound upon the scent of his victim. He had broken men and women. He had opened doors of blackness and despair to a hundred human souls. Yet the law had been always at his back, urging him on and exulting in his triumphs; he had committed no crime, no sin, and the world had applauded his exploits when it heard of them, visioning him as a splendid part of that mighty mechanism of legal force which made peace and good will on earth possible among men. Yet Carter, in these strange days of his mental and spiritual transformation, knew differently. He knew that he had served too well, and for that reason he hated himself, and called himself a fiend. It was now, after he had hunted Peter's father to his death, that his successes began to dig themselves out of their graves and reappear to him as haunting ghosts. And he prayed God to keep Peter, of all men, from hating him. "I killed your father," he said to him frankly. "I hunted him until his mind and his body broke down and he died. And in the end he accepted me as a son, and I loved him. If I had only known! But I didn't, and my life belongs to you. I give it willingly as the price of a great mistake." And as the sullen winter's end passed Peter found it impossible to hate Carter. Instead, there grew in him a slow and irresistible feeling of brotherhood for the man who had trailed them to their hiding-place at last, and who, in the hour of his deepest grief, had knelt with him in prayer over the frozen grave of his father. In those moments he had learned that it was not Carter who was accountable. It was the system--the law and its inalienable right to strike and kill. Now, late in April, they were going home. Six hundred miles behind them lay the wilderness of the Pipestone and the McFarland, where the hunt had ended and the final tragedy had been enacted. Ahead of them, beyond four hundred miles of still deeper forests was Five Fingers. On this night, as they sat in the yellow glow of a birchwood fire which they had built in the chill of sunset, Carter had drawn a rough map in the edge of the ash. The somber depths of a moonless night lay like a curtain of heavy velvet behind him, and against this his thin and hawk-like face was set so vividly that Peter saw the odd twitch of his lips as he said: "One week for Jackson's Knee, another for the country of Lac St. Joe, two more for the Height of Land, and then you'll be looking down on Five Fingers! They'll all be glad to see you, Peter. And Mona----" He shrugged his shoulders and a little throb came in the pit of his throat when he spoke of Peter's sweetheart. "God knows a man should be happy with a girl like her waiting for him at the end of the trail." "I've been away two years," replied Peter, for it was always that thought which kept pounding at his heart. "At times I am afraid of what may have happened since that night you and Aleck Curry almost got dad and me in the edge of the burned lands." Carter made no sign that he had heard. He was staring into the deep, red embers of the fire. "Your mother was an angel," he said, so quietly and unexpectedly that his words fell upon Peter almost with the effect of a shock. "In the last of those days when your father and I were shut up together by storm and cold in the cabin, and he was accepting me as his son in his madness, he talked of her almost as if she were alive and we were going home to her." "She has been dead twenty years," said Peter. "I know. Dead, and yet living. I can scarcely believe that I hunted Donald McRae until I drove him mad--for doing a thing which I would have done had I stood in his shoes that day when he killed a man! It was justice, Peter. My mother I cannot remember. But _your_ mother he made very near and real for me in those last days of--I can't call it his madness!--it was----" "Forgetfulness," said Peter. Carter bowed his head. "Yes, forgetfulness. Yet some things lived so vividly--things of the past. He made them live and breathe for me--and one picture makes me want to kill!--that picture of the little cabin in the clearing more than twenty years ago--your mother--you in her arms--Donald McRae's homecoming and the vengeance he dealt out to the snake who had come to take advantage of his absence. When I see that vision I want to choke the life out of a human beast I know--Aleck Curry!" Peter made no answer. "I can't undo what I've done," Carter went on. "I tracked your father until his mind broke under the strain, but I can't help that now. It is over. All I can do in the way of reparation is to help you--you and Mona Guyon. And between you two--between your happiness and hers--is one man, a slimy, conscienceless serpent, waiting and watching for your return." "You mean--Aleck Curry?" "Yes, Aleck Curry." Carter stood up, his tall, catlike form bathed in the fire glow, and his hard lips were tightly closed as he stared off into the darkness of the forest. "Sounds queer--that word 'conscienceless' coming from me," he mocked bitterly. "I've never had a conscience or a heart in obeying the word of the law--but I've never thought bad of a woman in the way Aleck Curry thinks of Mona Guyon. He would sell his soul, if he had one, to possess her--even if she came to him for only an hour as the price of your safety and freedom. And you're going home--_an outlaw_!" "By that you mean Curry will hold me in his power when I reach Five Fingers?" "Yes." "And will attempt to force from me a price----" Peter stood looking straight into Carter's eyes. "Yes, partly from you, but mostly from Mona. That is why I've been holding you back, a drag from the beginning. Curry's uncle has become a power politically, and Aleck was given a corporalship a year ago. I would stake my life that he is keeping his secret about you and the part you played in your father's escape two years ago. The knowledge is too precious for him to divulge. You assaulted him, almost killed him, and freed your father; you kept him--an officer of the law--a prisoner on an island; later you fired upon Curry and me with the rifle which Simon McQuarrie gave you--and all this means from five to fifteen years in prison for you, and Curry knows it. The fact that your father was almost blind, and that his mind had broken down, won't help you. Law is law, especially in Canada. Our judges and juries go by the code and not by emotions. And this law, its inviolability, is why Aleck Curry is a greater menace to you now than all the dangers you have encountered since you led your father into the north. "He is moved entirely by two passions, one his desire for Mona Guyon and the other his hatred for you. On the night when we almost caught you both in your escape from Five Fingers he offered me a thousand dollars and his uncle's influence in getting me a sergeancy if I would keep the secret of your capture, and turn our prisoners over to him. It was my humor to let him think he had bought me. And then, in the dawn of that morning, you filled our boat full of bullets--and got way. That's the story, Peter. There is no escaping the trap if you return to Five Fingers. Curry will descend upon you, demand marriage of Mona, or probably worse--and if she refuses----" "She can visit me occasionally in prison," said Peter. His face reflected no trace of the white heat that had mounted into Carter's; he spoke quietly and his hands had lost their clenched tenseness. For a moment Carter gazed at him in silence. "You mean that?" "I do. Aleck Curry holds no power over me that can in any way endanger Mona. If I owe a debt, I am willing to pay it. Neither Mona nor I have anything that we want to sell, and Aleck Curry has nothing that we want to buy." Carter drew in a deep breath. "If you look at it in that way----" "There is no other way." "But Curry and I are the only two men on earth who can swear that you have done these things. The smallest restitution I can make to you for all the wrong I have done your father is to keep my knowledge secret. Torture could not tear it from me. Now--if we can silence Curry, tie his tongue, break him----" "None of which we can do," interrupted Peter. "He has hated me since the day we first fought over Mona when we were boys. Only one thing could stop his vengeance. I would have to kill him, and that is inconceivable. For my father I would have done that. I had even prepared myself to kill you, Carter, if such an act became necessary to save him. But for myself--_no_!" Carter thrust out his hand, but as it gripped Peter's he turned his face away. "You're a lot like your dad," he said. "I see it more every day. I'm going to bed. Good night!" Caution and habit had made the ferret spread his blankets in the pit of gloom outside the glow of firelight. He disappeared in the darkness and a moment later Peter heard him as he stretched himself out for the night. But Carter had no idea of sleeping. For days past a thought had been building itself up slowly in his brain, and tonight he had almost revealed that thought to Peter. He watched him now, and in the firelight the drooped figure and pale, sensitive face of the man he had hunted and whose happiness he had helped to destroy tightened something at his heart until he found it hard to breathe. He had never loved a woman, and had never felt the bond of a great friendship for a man, but for Peter something more than the friendship he had known--a thing that was very close to a man's love for a man--had begun to possess him body and soul. In this one warm emotion of his cold and merciless life Carter felt a deeper thrill than in the hour of his greatest man-hunting triumph, and as he lay in stillness, strengthening that thought which was becoming a larger and more definite thing between Peter and Mona and the tragedy which threatened them, his lips parted in the grim and humorless smile which in all the years of his service had made men fear and avoid him. And with that smile, deadly and uncompromising, Carter whispered to himself: "I guess maybe you needn't worry, Peter. I don't think Aleck Curry and the law are going to get you--not if I can help it." With this settled, it was easier for Carter to give himself up to sleep. For a long time Peter sat near the fire. The birch logs burned down into a mass of coals, and as deeper shadows closed in about the camp he felt himself alone except for the visions which came and went in the dying embers. With a clearness that brought almost physical pain the years passed before his eyes, and when they had gone they had taken with them his boyhood, the father he had worshiped, his dreams and happiness, leaving behind in the ash of the fire only memories shadowed with the gloom of tragedy. But calmly and with a courage inspired by his own grief he was ready to accept what lay ahead of him. The fight, as a physical thing, was over--and he was going home. On that point his mind was fixed and no sense of self-preservation could move it. What was to happen to him when he reached Five Fingers was a matter which Fate should decide. Even in these moments of his decision he felt Mona's nearness and her protest. If in defense of his father he had become an outlaw, there was still a wide world in which he could hide, and Mona would come to him. So the persistent voice of caution whispered to him, and at times that voice was Mona's. Haggard-faced, Peter went to bed, and in the morning it was Carter, cold and mechanically efficient, who pointed out the same way to him. But even as he pressed his reasoning home, Peter observed there was a still deeper and more mysterious change in his companion. It lay more in Carter's eyes than in his voice or the unemotional lines of his face. "You've learned how big the woods are," he said. "Go north, into the Yukon or Alaska. I will see that Mona comes to you--safely." Peter shook his head. "I've also learned what it means to run from thicket to thicket, guarding a hunted thing you love. That would be Mona's share--years of it, until the end. And the end would come sometime. I'd rather pay the debt--and have free years left to me afterward." It was Carter's last effort. From that hour he traveled steadily homeward with Peter, making no protest against this new code which had come into his life of giving, instead of taking, a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. The middle of May found them halfway between Lac St. Joe and the Height of Land, with Five Fingers still a hundred and eighty miles ahead of them. "We'll make it in seven days," said Peter. "Unless the melting snows flood the streams," said Carter. Spring was breaking gloriously. Scents filled the air. Crushed balsam and cedar gave out a redolence that was tonic. The poplar buds were bursting. Birds were returning. On the sides of slopes where the sun struck warmly the snow was gone, grass sprang up lush green, and flowers that budded while the earth was still white began to bloom. Sap dripped from broken limbs, and the whispered breath of a wakening life, of growing things, and of matehood, hope and happiness, seemed to rise between the earth and the sky, night and day. Both Peter and Carter sensed the thrill of these things, yet neither felt their joy. The floods held them back, so that at first their loss was in hours, and then in days. Carter was glad, but he gave no betrayal of that fact. His face in these last weeks had grown quietly and splendidly different from the old Carter's. It was cold, deeply lined, austere, but its sharpness was mellowed and there was no longer the ferret-like gleam in his eyes or the grim hardness in his lips and chin. Not a day passed that his hand did not rest on Peter's shoulder or arm, and in his touch was a gentleness that at times was reflected in the look of his eyes. But in the secrecy of his own thoughts was a dread of the day they would arrive at Five Fingers. Dread--and yet not fear. Peter did not reveal his own fears except as they became a part of his face and eyes in certain moments which a man like Carter could not fail to observe. These fears were not inspired by visions of personal danger, for in adjusting his mind to the necessity of paying his debt to the law he had eliminated the menace of Aleck Curry in so far as it could possibly affect the future of Mona or himself. What he dreaded were the changes which nearly two years might have brought to Five Fingers, and the evil which Aleck Curry could have accomplished in that time. Just what outrage his enemy could have successfully consummated he had no definite idea. Yet the thought seized upon him at times and held him under a dark and oppressive apprehension. On the last day before crossing the Height of Land Carter spoke of what he knew to be in Peter's mind. "You will find Mona safe and well, and as true as the day you left her," he said. "And lovelier, too, Peter, for she needed these two years to round out her glorious womanhood. I'm not worrying about her. I'm putting all my faith in another gamble." "And that?" Carter gave his thin shoulders a suggestive shrug. "Has it occurred to you how nice it will be if--in these two years of change you have anticipated--something has happened to Curry? Death, for instance?" Peter looked at his companion to see if he was joking. Carter's face was set and unsmiling. "Why not?" he argued. "Aleck, although a brother of the Devil, isn't calamity-proof. With him under six feet of good, honest dirt, or mysteriously missing, or kicked out of the force by an authority greater than his uncle--you would be a free man, and Father Albanel could ring the wedding bell the day you reach Five Fingers. Maybe it's only a dream I've had--but I seem to see Aleck Curry safely out of your way, now or very soon. If he has tried to take advantage of Mona Guyon during your absence----" "Simon McQuarrie or Pierre Gourdon would kill him!" "Exactly!" And Carter lighted his pipe and said no more, nor did he raise his eyes to see the strained look which he knew was in Peter's face. That night they slept on the northward slope of the ridge that separated the waterways of a continent. Two days later, on the first of June, they crossed the southern line of rail and camped in the deep wilderness between it and Lake Superior. Carter made his bed with more than usual care. "Our last night," he said. "Tomorrow we should pass the high ridge country before dark and reach Five Fingers in the early light of the moon. Are you a little excited?" "I should like to go on," said Peter. Carter smiled a bit wistfully. Now and then this flash of gentleness had crept into his face of late. "I'd be willing to give up the rest of my life if for a few hours I could have someone waiting for me as Mona Guyon is waiting for you," he answered in a low voice. "Strange that I've let all the years go by without thinking of that, isn't it? But I'm thinking now. And I'm sorry--for a lot of things." "You say you are going to resign from the police as soon as you can," said Peter, looking into the darkness that lay between him and home. "When you do that--come to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie and Pierre Gourdon and Joe and Father Albanel and all the others will make it home for you. And Mona and Marie Antoinette and Josette will love you because you were four-square and helped _us_. And after that--somewhere--maybe at Five Fingers--there will be a girl----" A cough came from the gloom behind Peter, a thick and husky cough as if Carter were choking something back that was in his throat. "One of the few things I remember from years ago is a song called 'The City Four-Square,'" he said. "And when you, of all men, call me four-square--why----" Darkness hid his face. "Good night, Peter!" "Good night," said Peter. CHAPTER XXIII Carter, as usual, had made his bed in deep shadow, and there after a time he slept. The moon rose, but still the shadow enveloped him, while Peter lay in a glow of light when the man-hunter roused himself. He looked at his watch and found the hour a little after midnight. A second time he slept, and a second time he awakened, and thick darkness had come in place of the moonglow. This he knew to be the dark prelude to dawn, and he rose out of his blanket and crept cautiously away from the camp, moving a foot at a time and making no sound. In a quarter of an hour darkness and distance had swallowed him. He waited then. Dawn broke first over the tree-tops and filtered down softly and swiftly into the lower depths of the forest until Carter could see to travel. He lighted a last match to look at his watch and compass and struck due south. He traveled fast, free of pack and gun. Dawn grew into the grayer softness of day. Peter would be awakening now, he thought, or very soon. In an hour, or two at the most, he would know he had been tricked. Even with his advantage Carter sensed the thrill of an impending race and the tragedy of it, if he should lose. Peter was swift and sure in the woods and it was a long way to Five Fingers. High up in the sky a fleet of white clouds took on a crimson flush. The sun rose, and it found Carter's face settling into the hard and grim lines of the hunter whose game had so frequently been the lives of men. In a small leather pouch he had stored some food, and a part of this he ate as he traveled. He lost no time in seeking log and driftwood dams to pave his way over streams but plunged waist-deep into water that was still cold with the chill of snow and ice. It was noon before he stopped to rest and eat what was left of the food in the leather pouch. A second time a miracle of change swept over him, and in his face, his eyes and the lithe swiftness with which he moved he was the ferret again, hot on the trail of game. Late in the afternoon he felt the cool breath of Lake Superior in his face. The sun sank lower. Dusk came. In the beginning of that dusk he emerged from the last rim of the forest and stood with the water of the big inland sea moaning under the dark cliffs at his feet. A sense of exultation and of triumph swept over him. It was something to have mastered the wilderness in this way and to have come out within half a dozen miles of Five Fingers. Peter could not beat that, even in this country which was his own. Thickening darkness made these last miles more difficult and for two hours Carter progressed slowly. The sky was beautifully clear, but rocks and slides and ragged cracks and pits at the cliff edge made his feet wary, and countless stars only served to deepen their shadows. When the moon came up he had reached the huge cliff whose sheer walls rose two hundred feet above the sea, less than half a mile from Five Fingers. A last time he sat down, and with a strange smile on his thin lips watched the full moon as it rose swiftly over the forests, as if eager to reach its higher and more permanent place in the arch of the heavens. He was tired and wet and his clothes were torn. Until now, when the settlement was only a step ahead, he had not realized how exhausted he was or what a fight he had gone through. Surely he had beaten Peter by many miles and could afford to rest for a little while before finishing his task! His eyes closed in restful stillness. In half a dozen minutes he could have slept, but each time that his body wavered on the rock where he sat he forced himself into rigid wakefulness. The temptation persisted, and at last he gave himself five minutes and slept thirty. The rattle of a stone roused him, and he gathered himself up, blinking at the moon. Then he heard iron nails scraping on rock. Instantly he was wide awake. Someone was advancing along the face of the cliff from the direction of Five Fingers. He could see first the shadow of that person, growing in the illusive light mist of moon and stars. It was big and grotesque and the tread of its substance was slow and heavy. He heard a cough which was as unpleasantly heavy as the tread, and a few steps more brought the advancing figure to the little plateau of rock where he sat. Not until then did he rise. The other stopped. The moon laughed down into their faces. The stars seemed to send upon them a more brilliant light. A dozen paces separated them. Then, uncertainly, they shortened it to half the distance. Carter's heart gave a great throb. He would not have to go down to Five Fingers now, _for this was his man_! "Curry!" he greeted. The other stared, half disbelieving. "Is that you--Carter?" he gasped. He advanced again, peering into the other's face. "By Heaven, _it is_!" Carter was very white and thin and strange-looking in the moonlight, and Aleck Curry was heavy and huge, even to his neck and face. He thrust out a hand, but Carter did not touch it. "Yes, it's me," he said, in a voice cold as ice. "Queer why you should be coming this way, Curry. I was going down there to find you." Aleck's eyes pierced the blanket of moonlight behind him. "What luck?" he asked. His voice thrilled with nervous eagerness. He bent his big shoulders toward Carter, looking into his face, his thick lips parted and his narrow eyes gleaming anxiously as he tried to read an answer before words came. "Any?" Carter's slowness was an insult, and with that insult his eyes and lips were smiling. "Yes, I've had luck," he said, when the tenseness of the other's silence seemed about to break. "Donald McRae is dead, and Peter is back there--my prisoner!" * * * * * Half an hour later, down in Five Fingers, the bell over the little log church rang out sweetly and softly the good news that Father Albanel had come in from his monthly trip into the farther wilderness, and that services would be held tomorrow, which was Sunday. In the stillness of the night the music of the bell carried far through the forests, creeping in and out and high above the hidden places, bearing with it the peace and gentleness of benediction and prayer to all things. Peter heard it, far back in the hollows between the ridges, and he paused to offer his gratitude to God for this voice that was welcoming him home. And at the edge of the cliff where the moonlight and the starlight made a vivid arena of the table of rock its message seemed to beat with the clearness of a silvery drum. Then it stopped. Its echoes melted away, and the two men who had heard it there remained unchanged. Carter seemed straighter and harder, his face more like carven stone. But he was ready. And Aleck Curry was like a huge gorilla gathering himself for a leap. "Carter--if you mean that--I'll kill you!" he said in a voice that was thick with passion. "I mean it," replied Carter, biting his words short. "I've taken the trouble to tell you the whole story. But you can't understand and you never will. You're a snake. You're a traitor to both justice and the law. You think your power over Peter will give you vengeance and something from Mona. But it won't. And I warn you again that if you try to use your knowledge, if you offer Peter as a price to Mona, if you give him up to the law when she strikes you in the face--as she will!--then I shall go to the highest authorities and strip you to the skin. The truth will blast you. I will tell how you offered me bribes, and then threatened; I will tell of your affair in the home of Jacques Gautier and expose the horrible trail you have left wherever your slimy soul has gone. I shall investigate the death of the young Indian girl on the Arrowhead. I----" He did not finish. Curry, the man who had waited, the fiend who had kept the fires of hatred and passion burning until they were madness, saw more than the threatened ruin for himself. Reputation, family, his place in the service meant nothing to him. What he saw now in the white and almost deathlike face and gleaming eyes of the Ferret was the end of the dream he had built up--the end not only of his power over Peter but of his last chance to possess Mona. If Carter carried out his threat, if he told the story of Gautier's wife and laid naked the truth of the Indian girl's death on the Arrowhead--then all that he might say against Peter would be discounted in the eyes of the law, and punishment would fall upon himself. But he was not thinking of this punishment. At times the evil mind in his heavy head worked with amazing swiftness--and in this last moment of Carter's threat and defiance he saw the yawning abyss of the cliff behind the Ferret, and its overwhelming temptation. With Carter down there, dead, and Peter walking straight into the trap at Five Fingers, his own power and triumph would be more complete than he had ever dreamed it could be--_for he would make Peter also the Ferret's murderer_! The moon revealed the monstrous thought that leaped like flame into his face, and it was then Carter cut his words short to meet the avalanche of flesh and fury that descended upon him. Swift as a flash he sensed Curry's intention of throwing him over the cliff, and twined his arms about his enemy's neck as they crashed upon the rock. For a moment after that a great shadow of fear darkened the Ferret's soul. A hundred times in their associations on the trail he had witnessed the tests and measured the possibilities of Aleck's huge body and herculean strength. And now he was at death grips with it. That day he had seen a wood-mouse in the fangs of a weasel, and he was the wood-mouse now. And then he thought of Peter--of Peter and Mona and the battle at the pool two years ago when they had beaten this great hulk of a man. Fear went out of him. His biggest thrill in life was in the main chance against death. And this was the biggest of all! A queer thought shot into his head, a surging back of his old pride. He was not the wood-mouse, nor was he the weasel. He was the _ferret_, and Aleck Curry was an unknown beast, ponderous and mighty, but with that vulnerable spot which the ferret always found in its prey. And this time Carter knew he was fighting for more than himself. He was fighting for a man who was dead, and whose spirit was there on the rock watching them. He was fighting for Peter. And he was fighting for a woman. His thin arms and legs fastened themselves about Aleck like things made of wire steel instead of flesh and bone. Over and over they rolled, twisting, bending, breaking, heads and faces gouging on the rocks, and always Carter's quickness made up for the other's weight and strength. Their breath came in panting gasps as the nails in their boots struck fire from the rock. A moan of anguish came from Curry when Carter got the terrible thumb gouge in his eye, and a gasp of agony from the Ferret when Aleck bent his head back until his neck nearly broke. There was something merciless and horrible in the struggle. A little cloud ran under the face of the moon. It was followed by a larger and darker one, as if spirit hands were drawing a curtain between it and the tragedy on the rock. The light of the stars seemed to grow dimmer, as if they, too, shrank from this thing that was happening between the sea and the sky. And over the edge of the cliff came a wailing sob of wind that was already beginning to croon its death song for the victim. Minutes were hours. Gasps, chokings, blows and the panting of breaths were the ticking of the seconds. Moments of stillness, when the two lay crumpled and twisted as if they had died together, were like eternities. And foot by foot they had rolled until they were close to the edge of the cliff. Then it was that a shudder of deeper horror seemed to creep through the night. A black cloud swept under the moon, hiding entirely what was happening at the cliff's edge, and this cloud moved away with appalling slowness. When the moon looked out again one object remained where there had been two. For a long time it lay crumpled there, sobbing for breath. Then it crawled away slowly, dragging itself painfully over the rock, and disappeared at last into the thick growth of the burned-over lands which reached far to the north. * * * * * Under that same moon, hours later, Peter came to the edge of Five Fingers. Out of the sky all sign of cloud was gone and the stars glowed in radiant constellations. Peter knew that it was midnight, and as he looked down from the crest of the slope, where he had first walked hand in hand with Mona when he was a boy, a strange and gentle silence rose up from the bottom-lands to greet him. Five Fingers was asleep. He could see no light and at first he heard no sound. Then came to him the old familiar tinkle of silver bells on distant cattle, and the soft murmur of the sea that was never quite still where it ran in and out among the rocks of the Pit at the end of Middle Finger Inlet. For a space he stood looking down where the dark shadows of the cabins lay in a great pool of mellow light that was like a gossamer mist of silver and gold. His heart beat fast, so fast that he clutched a hand at his breast and swallowed hard to get his breath. Down there, within sound of his voice, was Mona--and all at once his manhood seemed to leave him and he wanted to shout wildly through his hands like a boy, calling her name, rousing her from sleep, shrieking at the top of his voice that he had come back. A sort of thrilling madness possessed him, but of all his desire only a choking sob rose in his throat. He walked down the slope and he saw Pierre Gourdon's home among the scattered cabins. It was there he would find Mona, if---- His heart skipped a beat. If anything had happened, _anything_--sickness--accident--if she had gone away! Two years was a long time. Two years might have brought--a change. His feet seemed to stumble, and then suddenly he stopped, and a cry came to his lips. For he had come to the smooth little patch of green meadow where Mona had made the men of Five Fingers bury the scores of marauding porcupines they killed each year, and he saw here and there freshly made little mounds of soil. Near one of these, which was scarcely dried by a day's sun, was a spade. Eagerly he seized it in his hands. It was _their_ spade, with its broken edge and the iron rod handle which Simon had put on it to replace the wooden one which porcupines had eaten away. Mona was in Five Fingers! She was alive--well--sleeping in her little room where he had visioned her at prayer every night of his life! He took off his pack and dropped it near the freshly made mound. Then he went on, and stopped under Mona's window. It was partly open. He could hear the soft flutter of a curtain in the breath of wind that came up from the shore. Almost afraid to break the stillness he called her name in a low voice. "_Mona!_" The curtain fluttered back at him. It seemed to be laughing at him, seemed to be signaling to him like a hand from the window. Then he saw on their nails against the log wall the long bamboo poles which Pierre Gourdon used in his fishing. A hundred times when he had come in from the woods late at night he had tapped at Mona's window with one of these poles, and she had thrust out her head to blow him down a kiss and say good night. And now, with two hearts seeming to beat in his breast in place of one, he seized one of the poles and gently tapped the old signal on the window-pane. And all at once the curtain ceased its fluttering and he could hear the two hearts pounding mightily against his ribs. He tapped again--_tap-tap-tappety-tap!_ and stepped back into the deep shadow that hung around the edge of the Gourdon cabin in a heavy fringe. Someone came to the window. He knew it--yet he could not see straight up above his head. He held himself back, waiting for some response to his signal. In a moment he would step out in the moonlight, and then---- He heard the curtain fluttering again. Sound came from her room. It continued for a few moments, and ceased with the quiet opening of a door. Then he heard footsteps, quick, light, almost frightened footsteps, and a slim figure came around the end of Pierre Gourdon's cabin and stood white-faced and trembling in the moonlight. It was Mona--Mona as he had left her an hour ago--yesterday--two years ago--unchanged--except that she seemed taller to him, more beautiful. She had thrown a long cloak about her and he could see her hand clutching it at the throat as her wide eyes strained to solve the mystery which the misty chaos of the moonlight was hiding from her. For a space he seemed powerless to move. Then he tried to speak as he revealed himself, ragged and torn and bronzed to Indian darkness by his long fight through the wilderness, but it was only an incoherent cry that stumbled on his lips. Mona saw him. For an instant she swayed like a tall flower, with the whiteness of lily petals in her face as he went to her. And then she gave a cry that even Pierre Gourdon might have heard if he had not slept so deeply--and Peter's arms closed about her. A minute later she held back his face with her two hands. Her eyes were filled with the glory of the stars and her lips were red with the wild, sweet passion of their kisses. Slowly a shadow came, and with it an unutterable tenderness in the words which she whispered to him: "Peter, _I knew_. Carter sent me word--about your father--and _you_----" She drew his head down until she was holding it against her breast. Her heart beat against his cheek. Her lips kissed his hair. "Only you--you and God--know how sorry I am," she whispered. And Peter felt once more like the small boy in the edge of the forest years ago, when Mona had come to him in the dusk of evening to mend his broken heart. For in these first moments of his homecoming it was Mona--again--who thought first of his grief, and not of her own happiness; and holding his head close, pressing his rough cheek in the palm of her soft hand, she told him how Carter had sent word to her all the way down through the wilderness, and how she had kept Carter's message to herself--as he had asked her to do--and had waited night and day for his coming with prayers of gratitude in her heart, and sorrow for him. "And Carter promised to bring you to me," she whispered, "because he said that in the end he had learned to love your father--and you." CHAPTER XXIV Where the shadow of Pierre Gourdon's cabin fell deepest a man had dragged himself and lay like a dark and lifeless blot. Since Peter had tapped at the window this man had scarcely moved, except to breathe and change his position a little as he watched the lovers out in the light of the moon and stars. They were very near to him, so near he might have touched them with a pole less than the length of that which Peter had used. And he heard the girl speak of Carter, and of what Carter had done. It was then he drew himself slowly away, moving with the stealth and caution of one to whom freedom from discovery meant a great deal. Not until the cabin was fully between him and those he had spied upon did he rise to his feet. This movement was slow and brought a gasp of pain from him. He did not stand straight. His shoulders were bent. He was hatless and ragged and his arms and breast were half stripped of clothing. In his hand he carried a heavy stick, and with this stick he helped himself to walk as he struck out in the moonlight. He tried to hurry, but at best his progress was not fast, and to make up for lack of speed he kept the cabin between him and the two from whom he was running away. In the shadow of a second cabin he stopped to rest, breathing deeply, as if what he had accomplished had cost him great effort. One at a time he passed the dwellings in the settlement and made his way across the green open to the little log church. Here he rested for a longer period, and in these moments he noted with satisfaction that trees threw a deep and continuous shadow between him and the edge of the forest. The door of Father Albanel's church was never locked and after a little he opened it and entered. But he bolted it carefully behind him. Then he groped his way through the moonlit seats and opened a window. After that he found the rope which rang the bell. Never in its history had Five Fingers roused itself to the ringing of the bell as it was rung tonight. It was not the Sabbath message. It was not Father Albanel's sweet, slow tolling of peace on earth and good will toward men, nor was it the sad and slumberous requiem for the dead. It was, instead, a wild exultation, an almost savage triumph, a pealing alarm that called upon every soul in the settlement to rise up in instant wakefulness. It filled the forest until its notes beat one upon another and the hills and ridges caught them up and flung them back as they had never done before. Men rose out of their sleep and stumbled for matches; a light appeared here, another there, and still the bell continued to ring until not a cabin in Five Fingers remained in darkness. Not until then did the man who had rung the bell drop from the window of the little church and steal through the shadows of the trees into the forest. There he did not pause but went on with the slowness of either age or exhaustion until he was swallowed in the deeper secrecy of the woods. Pierre Gourdon came first out into the night, bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves, and in front of his cabin he found Mona ahead of him with her long hair streaming down her back and a strange man's arms tightly about her. Almost fiercely he tore them apart--and then he saw it was Peter. Jame Clamart came running up a moment later, and it was Jame who first sent the news abroad in a shout which, next to the mad ringing of the bell, was the wildest thing ever heard in Five Fingers between the hour of midnight and one o'clock in the morning. "Peter McRae has come back!" he yelled. "Peter McRae--_has_--_come_--_back_!" Swifter almost than men could travel word passed that this was the reason for the ringing of the bell--Peter McRae had come home after two years, and Father Albanel, or some other, had wakened them from their sleep to welcome him. Pierre's women were first to take Peter away from Mona--Josette, coming first, and then Marie Antoinette. And after them came Adette Clamart. When she saw Peter she gave a little screech and threw her arms around his neck, kissing him before her husband and all, and then she fell upon Mona and cried hard in her gladness. The little group grew larger; voices, glad laughter, tremulous excitement filled the air, but suddenly a hush fell as a tall and gaunt-faced figure stalked up through the silvery haze of the night and old Simon McQuarrie shouldered his way among them. He said nothing when he came face to face with Peter, but for a moment held him off at arm's length, his stern face working in a strange sort of way, and then, as Mona crept to his side, he clasped them both in his arms and stood for a few moments with his head bowed close down to theirs. And then a whisper of gladness ran among the women, for Father Albanel stood beside Mona and Peter and the little gray missioner's face was streaming with tears of happiness as he, too, put his arms gently about them. "It was Father Albanel who rang the bell," the women whispered softly among themselves. And to this day the people of Five Fingers believe that he did. But on this night, Father Albanel was neither crooked nor bent, nor did he walk with the aid of a stick. * * * * * To Peter it was like a dream, a glorious dream of friendship and of a love that lifted his soul above all thought of fear and tragedy, and not until he was alone with Simon in the cabin which had been his home for so many years before he went away with his father did he think of Aleck Curry or of the payment he had promised himself to be ready to make to the law. But the thing which happiness had held back came out now. The old Scotchman heard Peter's story from the night of the flight almost two years ago, when the forests were burning in the great fire about Five Fingers. And then Peter learned, in turn, that Aleck Curry had built himself a shack in the edge of the timber and was quite frequently at Five Fingers, usually remaining for a week or two at a time. He was there now. That very evening Simon had met him face to face in company with one of the half-dozen government surveyors who for a year or more had been working up and down the shore. He was surprised that the ringing of the bell and the excitement had not brought Curry upon the scene. Probably he was with the surveyors at their camp. Tomorrow he would show up. "And you haven't any idea what became of Carter?" Simon asked. Peter shook his head. "He simply disappeared. I cannot guess why. Maybe he, too, will show up tomorrow." "Peter, who rang the bell?" Peter flushed under his darkened skin. "I think Father Albanel saw Mona and me in the moonlight. He always loved to wander about late at night, when the moon was bright." Simon's gaunt face broke into a strange smile. "It wasn't Father Albanel who rang the bell," he said. "No?" Peter looked at him sharply. "Then it was you, Simon! You saw us?" "No. I was asleep--sound asleep. But I know who rang the bell. It was Carter!" A little thrill leaped through Peter. "It is impossible. Carter would not have run away from me for _that_. Besides----" He did not finish, for Simon had risen and was looking out through the window in a way that puzzled him. "I'm going down to the church," he said. "And I'm going the back way, along the edge of the woods, so that no one will see me. Want to go?" They stole forth through the moonlight into the shadows of the forest. When they came to the church Simon tried the door. "Locked!" he said. "That is unusual!" A few seconds later they stood at the open window. Through this they climbed and one after another the Scotchman lighted a dozen matches until they knew that no one could have remained hidden inside. Simon then closed the window and led the way out through the door, leaving it unlocked. "Careless of him," he grunted. "We'll leave the place just as he found it. Fewer questions will be asked." He did not speak again until they were once more in their own cabin. Peter, feeling the completeness of his exhaustion now, was about to ascend the ladder to his own bed when Simon rested a hand on his shoulder. "Boy," he whispered, "whatever happens after this, forget that Carter came down from the north with you and that he ran away from you back there on the trail. Understand, laddie? _Forget it!_ Lie about it if you have to. For I believe it was Carter who rang that bell tonight, and if he did, and it should so turn out that something has happened to Aleck Curry--why--you see--it might be a suspicious circumstance, pointing to a thing which you and I, with God's blessing on us, will always know could never be true!" Even these words, making significantly clear the suspicion which was in Simon's mind, could not keep Peter from thinking of Mona, and of Mona alone, when he went to bed. But he awoke with the first crowing of Simon McQuarrie's roosters, three hours later. He was going to take breakfast with Mona, he told Simon, and as he was an appalling mess he needed a lot of time to prepare for it. For two hours he scrubbed and shaved and shampooed and manicured himself, and then dressed in the best outfit he had left behind him two years ago. It was only a quarter of six when he finished, but an hour before, he had seen a light in Mona's room and now smoke was rising from the chimney over Josette Gourdon's kitchen. He went out the back way, as he and Simon had gone a few hours earlier, and was sure he had succeeded in coming up behind Pierre's cabin without giving any evidence of himself. But Mona's eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed as he stood very still for a few moments in the doorway, though her back was toward him, and she seemed to be absorbed in a number of purposeless little details at the kitchen table. Peter made no sound, unless the pounding of his heart could be called that. There was a change after all--a change which the silvery radiance of the moon had veiled from him last night. Mona _was_ taller, and--even as he was looking at her now, without clearly seeing her face--she was so much lovelier than when he had left Five Fingers that he was a little frightened. Carter was right. It had taken those two years to make her even more beautiful than Marie Antoinette. And he continued to stand where he was, thinking himself undiscovered, worshiping her in silence from the heels of her little feet to the top of her lustrous head as if a word or a movement from him would destroy the transcendent reality of it all. Mona's cheeks grew pinker and her eyes brighter. Then she turned upon him so suddenly and with such an unexpected knowledge of his presence filling her eyes with laughter and joy that in one swift moment Peter had her in his arms, and kissed her so wildly on eyes and lips and hair that she was compelled to hide her face against his breast to get breath. "You are--breaking me," she protested. "You have grown so strong, Peter. And you are tumbling my hair down that I put up with so much care, because this is Sunday!" She leaned back and shook her head so that the loosened coils of her hair flooded down about her shoulders in a radiant protest to her words. "The two happiest days of my life have been Sundays," he said, holding her more gently. "This is one, Peter?" "Yes." "And the other?" she asked, as if she had forgotten it entirely. "Was that first day you took me to church, when I thought you were a little white angel, and sang with you, and dared to take a tress of your hair in my fingers when I thought you didn't know it." "And since that day I've loved you, Peter. Yes, I loved you in that very hour when you bit Aleck Curry's ear!" He filled his hands with the loosened masses of her hair, crushing the soft coils between his fingers. "_Kiss me._" "Sh-h!" She put a finger to his lips. "It is Aunt Josette! I hear her coming! I must run up the back way and fix my hair!" "It is unthoughtful of Aunt Josette----" "But she is coming!" "_Kiss me!_" She pressed her warm lips to his, and he let her go. Scarcely had she escaped when Josette's light footsteps sounded in the dining-room, and a moment later she appeared in the kitchen. Peter was stirring pancake batter. "Mona gave me this job," he tried to explain. "She'll be back in a minute." Josette smiled at him sweetly, and then quite innocently picked up several hairpins from the floor. "How careless of me to lose these!" she exclaimed, but there was a roguish light in her dark eyes which did not quite escape Peter as she tucked the pins in her own thick tresses. To Peter it was as if he had gone away yesterday, and returned today. Pierre came in yawning, and found him helping with the breakfast. When Mona reappeared her hair was in a long braid. Never had he seen such lovely, velvety softness in her eyes or such sweet color in her face. Josette, with a sly signal to Pierre, maneuvered them to the open door. "When we are ready for you children we'll call you," she said. They walked toward the forest. And there, in the edge of the beautiful green meadow which had always been hallowed as their playground, he saw for the first time a new cabin nearly finished. Mona was looking at him. She saw the surprise and then the cloud that gathered in his face. She took his hand, and her fingers clung to his. "You don't like it?" she asked. "It is a nice cabin, but----" He did not know how to finish. She looked down, very demurely, so that he could not see her eyes for the long lashes that hid them. "It is my cabin." "_Yours!_" "Yes, mine. Maybe I shouldn't tell you the secret, Peter, but I'm going to be married." It seemed impossible that a human heart could rise up and choke one as quickly as Peter's did. Mona was still looking at the ground. "You see, Carter told me in his letter to confide in Simon. And when Simon knew you were coming, and would of course have to marry me very soon, we planned this cabin together and Simon is going to give it to me as a wedding present. Then I'm going to let you live in it. Don't you think I'm nice?" Peter stopped. Mona looked up, frightened. "Don't, Peter--don't!" she entreated. "Aunt Josette is looking, and Uncle Pierre will see you, and all the rest of Five Fingers----" But all the rest of the world could not have stopped Peter. He crumpled her in his arms. * * * * * That day was one in which Peter could not bring himself to reveal to Mona the uncertainty which had been a part of his homecoming. Her happiness completely possessed him, and as hour after hour passed he found himself further than at the beginning from carrying out his resolution to tell her the price which he fully expected the law would ask of him. That he could expect no mercy from Aleck Curry, he assured himself through Simon. But he did not see Aleck, nor did he mention him to Mona. She sensed no danger. No one in Five Fingers could guess at the menace which hung over him, for he believed that even Simon did not know of that first morning of his father's flight when he had committed the fatal sin of firing upon the law. From the fact that Aleck had kept this crime a secret he realized the nearness and deadliness of the trap which would soon spring upon him. But Aleck did not appear. It was not until after morning service in the little church that Mona mentioned him quite casually. He was bigger and coarser and more detestable than ever, she told Peter. He had tried to pay some attention to her, and she knew that he and Simon had frequently had words. It was through his uncle, she said, that he had been given this lazy assignment, covering the country between the railroad settlements and Five Fingers. In the afternoon Peter met Simon alone. The lines in the old Scotchman's face seemed to have grown deeper since morning. They were like little creases cut in stone. "I have been over to the surveyors' camp," he said. "Curry hasn't been there since yesterday morning. And he didn't sleep in his bed last night." "He has gone to the settlements," suggested Peter. "His pack and traveling dunnage are in his shack," answered Simon. "He hasn't gone to the settlements." Simon did not once let his eyes meet Peter's squarely. He spoke even carelessly as he looked away. "You haven't forgotten what I told you about Carter?" "No." "That is well. I wouldn't be surprised if something happened to Curry last night. I saw him dead drunk at dusk--starting out alone along the cliff to the west. I told him to come back, and he cursed me." Simon McQuarrie could not hide a lie. And Peter knew he was lying. A little later Simon struck off into the woods to the east and did not return until after dark. At bedtime Peter asked if he had found anything of interest. "Only a hungry man. I happened to have a lunch in my pocket. The poor devil was so weak he was hobbling along with a stick." "Who was he?" "I didn't ask his name." Simon turned his back to Peter as he prepared for bed. "Queer I didn't ask his name--but I didn't." On the third day after this night Five Fingers received a stupendous shock. Simon McQuarrie and Father Albanel, in seeking lost net buoys under the Big Cliff, had found the body of a dead man. It was Aleck Curry. He was terribly broken and almost unrecognizable by the pounding of his body in the surf that washed in and out among the rocks. The story of his end was quite clear. He had evidently stumbled over the edge of the cliff while drunk, inasmuch as Simon had seen him staggering in its direction on the night he had disappeared. "We'll take him to the nearest railroad settlement and let his friends have him," Simon said to the men of Five Fingers. But to Father Albanel he added, in a voice which others did not hear, "It would be unpleasant, _mon père_, to have him always in our own little cemetery where only those we love are at rest." And so, on that same day, all that was left of Aleck Curry was borne northward through the hills and ridges to his people. Three weeks later Mona and Peter were married. Five Fingers will never forget that day. It was in the full glory of June, and the robins and thrushes were singing outside the little church. In spite of Peter's protest Mona teased him by insisting that she would not tell him where she wanted to spend her honeymoon until the little missioner had said the last words, and they were man and wife. And then, putting her soft mouth to Peter's ear, she whispered, "I want to stay in the new cabin which Simon is giving us." So there, from the beginning, they found their new happiness, and Pierre Gourdon and Josette would walk in the twilights of summer evenings, lovers still, and never grow tired of painting for each other the beautiful and unforgetable pictures of many years ago when they had come through the pathless wilderness to make this paradise in which God, in His great goodness, had made the last of their dreams come true. * * * * * It was on an afternoon in August that Adette Clamart came to Mona's home with her cousin, Adele, who had come from the French country of Quebec to live with her, and announced that a stranger had arrived in Five Fingers and was talking with Simon in his cabin. "Adele met him on the settlement trail," she said. "He carried a basket of flowers for her, and was so very nice that she has fallen in love with him. Haven't you, Adele?" "He was very stiff and frightened every time I looked at him," replied Adele, "and I felt sorry for him. But he was nice--yes. And he had--how do I say it, Adette?--such a strange, stern face, with sadness in it--and----" "Ugh!" shuddered Adette. "He was dangerously hungry, Adele. I know because Jame gets that way." "Whoever he is--_he is coming_!" said Mona, looking through the open door. And so he was, with the old Scotchman on one side of him and Peter on the other, as if they were pulling him along against his will. And as they came nearer Mona's heart gave a sudden flutter, and then a great jump, for this stranger who had carried Adele's flowers was Carter the man-hunter. She ran out to meet him, and though she said only a few trembling words of welcome a light which Carter saw in her eyes made him draw in a quick breath of gratitude and joy. "The new superintendent of the mill," announced Simon a little pompously, when Adette and Adele had joined them. "I'm getting lazy and he is taking my place. Quite a surprise! But we've been planning it a long time, haven't we, Carter?" And Simon laughed mysteriously. Then came a sudden interruption. The bell over the little church began to ring as it had rung on a certain midnight weeks ago. And this time it was surely Father Albanel who was tugging at the rope. In his face was a flush of benevolent joy, and the louder the bell rang the rosier his cheeks grew, and there alone in the church he laughed like a boy. Nudging Carter, whose face had grown strangely fixed and staring, Simon McQuarrie chuckled softly at his shoulder: "Someone rang the bell like that on the night Peter came home. And _now_, Carter, it is ringing our welcome to _you_!" Observing Mona a few moments later, Adette wondered what had happened to make her eyelashes wet with tears. Peter understood, and his hand found Mona's and held it tenderly. With an inspiration born of words which Carter had once said to him about a girl waiting at the end of the trail, he found the opportunity to whisper, "Ask Carter to have supper with us, and also _Adele_." This Mona did in her own sweet fashion, making sure of Carter first, and after his acceptance calling upon Adele to lend herself to his entertainment in a way which gave her no possible excuse for a refusal, had such a thought come into her mind. Simon looked shrewdly at Mona and Adette. Then he turned toward the green ridges to the north over which billowy white clouds were rising. "It's going to rain," he said. "I smell it in the air. It will come tonight." "The crops need it," said Peter. "And most of all--the flowers," added Adele, looking at Carter. "Yes, the flowers--and the woods," he nodded. "It is very dry in the timber for this season of the year." Mona and Peter turned toward their cabin, and Mona's eyes shot a sly signal to Adette. Jame's wife took firm hold of Simon's arm. "If you know what is good for you--come with me!" she whispered, with her back turned to Adele and Carter. For a moment Carter stood helplessly. Then he moved to Adele's side and they followed Mona and Peter. "You like flowers, Miss Adele?" "I love them, Mr. Carter!" As they passed through the door Mona squeezed her husband's hand. "It was a wonderful thought, Peter. Do you think you can kiss me very quickly before they come in?" "I am sure that I can," replied Peter--and kissed her. THE END TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.