The Country Beyond Part 16

"Don't worry, McKay. I'll--live."

Jolly Roger bent over the cot, between Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy'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 Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy'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. Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy that, will you?"

Ten minutes later he was paddling up the sh.o.r.e 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 Ca.s.sidy, 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 Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy'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 Ca.s.sidy's chair, her cheeks aflame and her eyes filled with the glow of the sunset. And Terence Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy was laughing, and holding out both hands to McKay.

"McKay, Roger McKay, I want you to meet Mrs. Terence Ca.s.sidy, 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 Ca.s.sidy saying. "And we've written out my resignation together, old man. We've both won. I thank G.o.d you put that bullet into me down on the sh.o.r.e, 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 G.o.d 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 Ca.s.sidy 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 s...o...b..rd Lake country, a week after he left Ca.s.sidy 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 gra.s.s and succulent moss on which the caribou fed in season, but a h.e.l.l on earth when arctic storm howled and screamed across it in winter.

Piled up against a ma.s.s of rock Jolly Roger found a huge snow drift.

This drift was as long as a church and half as high, with its outer sh.e.l.l blistered and battered to the hardness of rock by wind and sleet.

Through this sh.e.l.l 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 Ca.s.sidy, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, and his master had shot him on the white sh.o.r.e of Wollaston.