The Honor of the Big Snows Part 6

"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 Th.o.r.eau 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 c.u.mmins' 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 Th.o.r.eau.

Long after the wolf had pa.s.sed 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 Th.o.r.eau!" he shrieked. "I am Jan Th.o.r.eau--Jan Th.o.r.eau--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 Th.o.r.eau," he panted again and again. "I am Jan Th.o.r.eau, 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, l.u.s.trous 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.