Lords of the North Part 13

"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 b.u.mblebee 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 ash.o.r.e 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 lat.i.tudes. Barely a month had pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s, swaying off to the forest margin in billowy ripples, was already knee-high. The woods were an impenetrable ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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,"

a.s.serted 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sumed; 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 ba.s.s tones of the trader whom I had met over Louis Laplante. "What are ye doin' here?"

"Oh, is it only you? Thank fortune!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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.