The Land of Frozen Suns Part 18

I cannot say what there was in Barreau's tone that stirred Montell to the depths. It may have been that finding himself checkmated, dominated by a man he hated so sincerely, another fierce spasm of rage welled up within and ruptured some tautened blood-vessel. It may have been some weakness of the heart, common to fleshy men. I cannot diagnose, at best I can but feebly describe.

Montell's jaw thrust forward. He blinked at Barreau, at his daughter, at me, and then back to Barreau. A flush swept up into his puffy cheeks, surged to his temples, a flush that darkened to purple. His very face seemed to swell, to bulge with the rising blood. His little, swinish eyes dilated. His mouth opened. He gasped. And all at once, with a hoa.r.s.e rattling in his throat, he swayed and fell forward on his face.

We picked him up, Barreau and I, and felt of his heart. It fluttered. We loosened his clothing, and laved his wrists and temples with the snow water. The body lay flaccid; the jaw sagged. When I laid my ear to his breast again the fluttering had ceased. Barreau listened; felt with his hand; shook his head.

"No use," he muttered.

Jessie was standing over us when we gave over.

"He's dead," Barreau looked up at her and murmured. "He's dead." He rose to his feet and stared down at the great hulk of unsentient flesh that had vibrated with life and pa.s.sion ten minutes before. "After all his plotting and planning-to die like that."

The girl stood looking from one to the other, from the dead man in the firelight to me, and to Barreau. Of a sudden Barreau held out his hands to her. But she turned away with a sob, and it was to me she turned, and it was upon my shoulder that she cried, "Oh, Bobby, Bobby!" as if her heart would break.

And at that Barreau dropped to his haunches beside the fire. There, when the storm of her grief was hushed, he still sat, his chin resting on his palms, his dark face somber as the North itself.

CHAPTER XIX-THE STRENGTH OF MEN-AND THEIR WEAKNESS

No wind could reach us where we sat. At the worst, a gale could little more than set the tree-tops swaying, so thick stood the surrounding timber. But the blasting cold pressed in everywhere. Our backs chilled to freezing while our faces were hot from nearness to the flame.

Presently, at Barreau's suggestion, we set up Montell's tent-fashioned after an Indian lodge-in the center of which could be built a small fire. This was for her. We chopped a pile of dry wood and placed it within. By that time the moose meat was thawed so that we could haggle off ragged slices. These I fried while Barreau mixed a bannock and cooked it in an open pan. Also we had tea. Jessie shook her head when I offered her food. w.i.l.l.y-nilly, her eyes kept drifting to the silent figure opposite.

"You _must_ eat," Barreau broke in harshly upon my fruitless coaxing.

"Food means strength. You can't walk out of these woods on an empty stomach, and we can't carry you."

A swarm of angry words surged to my tongue's end-and died unspoken.

Right willingly would I have voiced a blunt opinion of his brutal directness-to a grief-stricken girl, at such a time-but she flashed him a queer half-pleading look, and meekly accepted the plate I held before her. He had gained my point for me, but the hard, domineering tone grated. I felt a sudden, keen resentment against him. To protect and shield her from everything had at once become a task in which I desired no other man's aid.

"Now let us see how much of the truth is in the Black Factor," Barreau began, when we had cleaned our plates and laid them in the grub-box.

He turned down the canvas with which I had covered Montell, and opened the front of the buckskin shirt. Jessie stirred uneasily. She seemed about to protest, then settled back and stared blankly into the fire.

Deliberately, methodically, Barreau went through the dead man's pockets.

These proved empty. Feeling carefully he at last found that which he sought, pinned securely to Montell's undershirt, beneath one arm. He brought the package to our side of the fire, considered a moment and opened it. Flat, the breadth of one's hand, little over six inches in length, it revealed bills laid smoothly together like a deck of cards.

Barreau counted them slowly. One-two-three-four-on up to sixty; each a thousand-dollar Bank of Montreal note. He snapped the rubber band back over them and slid the sheaf back into its heavy envelope.

"Le Noir did not draw such a long bow, after all," he observed, to no one in particular. "Yet this is more than they offered me. Well, I dare say they felt that it would not be long--" He broke off, with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he put the package away in a pocket under his _parka_. Jessie watched him closely, but said nothing. A puzzled look replaced her former apathy.

That night we slept with the dogs tied inside our tent, and the toboggan drawn up beside our bed. I did not ask Barreau his reason for this. I could hazard a fair guess. Whosoever had deprived Montell of his dogs, might now be awaiting a chance to do a like favor for us. I would have talked to him of this but there was a restraint between us that had never arisen before. And so I held my peace.

I fell asleep at last, for all the silent guest that lay by the foot of our bed. What time I wakened I cannot say. The moon-glare fell on the canvas and cast a hazy light over the tent interior. And as I lay there, half-minded to get up and build a fire Barreau stirred beside me, and spoke.

"Last night was Christmas Eve," he muttered. "To-day-Peace on earth, good-will to men! Merry Christmas. What a game-what a game!"

He turned over. We lay quite still for a long time. Then in that dead hush a husky whined, and Barreau sat up with a whispered oath, his voice trembling, and struck savagely at the dog. The sudden spasm of rage subtly communicated itself to me. I lay quivering in the blankets. If I had moved it would have been to turn and strike him as he had struck the dog. It pa.s.sed presently, and left me wondering. I got up then and dressed. So did Barreau. We built a fire and sat by it, thawing meat, melting snow for tea, cooking bannock; all in silence, like folk who involuntarily lower their voices in a great empty church, the depths of a mine, or the presence of death. Afraid to speak? I laughed at the fancy, and looked up at the raucous sound of my own voice, to find Barreau scowling blackly-at the sound, I thought.

Before long Jessie came shivering to the fire. The rigors of the North breed a wolfish hunger. We ate huge quant.i.ties of bannock and moose-meat. That done we laid Montell's body at the base of a spruce, and piled upon it a great heap of brush. Jessie viewed the abandonment calmly enough-she knew the necessity. Then we packed and put the dogs to the toboggan, increasing the load of food from Montell's supply and leaving behind our tent and some few things we could not haul. Barreau went ahead, bearing straight south, setting his snowshoes down heel to toe, beating a path for the straining dogs. Fierce work it was, that trail-breaking. My turn at it came in due course. Thus we forged ahead, the black surrounding forest and the white floor of it irradiated by the moonbeams. Away behind us the Aurora flashed across the Polar horizon, a weird blazon of light, silky, shimmering, vari-colored, dying one moment to a pin-point leaping the next like sheet lightning to the height of the North Star. This died at the dawn. Over the frost-gleaming tree-tops the sun rose and bleared at us through the frost-haze. "And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die--" The Tentmaker's rhyme came to me and droned over and over in my brain. The "Bowl" arched over us, a faded blue, coldly beautiful.

At our noon camp a gun snapped among the trees, and a dog fell sprawling. As we sprang to our feet another husky doubled up. Barreau caught the remaining two by the collars and flung a square of canvas over them. A third shot missed. He caught up his rifle and plunged into the timber. An hour or more we waited. When he returned I had the toboggan ready for the road.

"I got his track," he said between mouthfuls of the food I had kept warm. "One man. He struck straight east when he saw me start. There may be more though. It is not like the Company to put all its eggs in one basket."

"You think the Company is behind this?" I asked.

"Who else?" he jeered. "Isn't this money worth some trouble? And who but the Company men know of it?"

"Why bother with dogs if that is so?" I replied. "The same bullets would do for us."

"Very true," Barreau admitted, "but there is a heavy debit against me for this last four years of baiting the Hudson's Bay, and this would be of a piece with the Black Factor's methods. Their way-his way is the policy of the Company-to an end is often oblique. Only by driving a bargain could they have taken the post-Montell could have fought them all winter. Even though they bought it cheaply, I do not think they had any intention of letting him get away with money. Le Noir paid-and put me on the trail; at the same time this bushwhacker held Montell back so that we overtook him-otherwise, with two days' start, he might have beaten us to the Police country, where we would not dare follow. Can you appreciate the sardonic humor that would draw out our misery to the last possible pang, instead of making one clean sweep? Le Noir knows how the North will deal with us, once we are reduced to carrying our food and bedding on our backs. He has based his calculations on that fact. These breeds of his can hover about us and live where we shall likely perish.

Then there will be no prima facie evidence of actual murder, and the Company will have attained its end. They have done this to others; we can hardly be exempt. If we seem likely to reach the outer world, it will be time enough then for killing. Either way, the Company wins. I wish to G.o.d it would snow. We might shake them off then."

We harnessed the two remaining dogs and pushed on. There was nothing else to do. Either in camp or on trail the huskies, to say nothing of ourselves, were at the mercy of that hidden marksman. So we kept our way, praying only for a sight of him, or for a thick swirl of snow to hide the betraying tracks we made. We moved slowly, the lugging of the dogs eked out by myself with a rope. Barreau broke trail. Jessie brought up the rear.

At sundown, midway of a tiny open s.p.a.ce in the woods, our two dogs were shot down. Barreau whirled in his tracks, stood a moment glaring furiously. Then, with a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders, he stooped, cut loose the dead brutes, harness and all, and laid hold of the rope with me.

That night we were not disturbed. Jessie slept in the little round tent.

Barreau and I burrowed with our bedding under the snow beside the fire.

The time of arising found me with eyes that had not closed; and the night of wakefulness, the nearness of a danger that hovered unseen, stirred me to black, unreasoning anger. I wanted to shout curses at the North, at the Hudson's Bay Company, at Barreau-at everything. And by the snap of his eye, the quick scowl at trivial things, I think Barreau was in as black a mood as I. The girl sensed it, too. She shrank from both of us. So to the trail again, and the weary drag of the shoulder-rope.

At noon we ate the last of our moose-meat, and when next we crossed moose-tracks in the snow, Barreau ordered me in a surly tone to keep straight south, and set out with his rifle.

It was slow work and heavy to lug that load alone. Jessie went ahead, but her weight was not enough to crush the loose particles to any degree of firmness. For every quarter mile gained we sat down upon the load to rest, sweat standing in drops upon my face and freezing in pellets as it stood. And at one of these halts I fell to studying the small oval face framed in the _parka_-hood beside me. The sad, tired look of it cut me.

There was a stout heart, to be sure, in that small body. But it was killing work for men-I gritted my teeth at the mesh of circ.u.mstance.

"If you were only out of this," I murmured.

I looked up quickly at a crunching sound, and there was Barreau, empty-handed. I shall never forget the glare in his eyes at sight of me standing there with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. There was no word said. He took up the rope with me, and we went on.

"Where in the name of Heaven are you heading for?" something spurred me to ask of him. The tone was rasping, but I could not make it otherwise.

"To the Peace," he snapped back. "Then west through the mountains, down the Fraser, toward the Sound country. D'ye think I intend to walk into the arms of the Police?"

"You might do worse," some demon of irritability prompted me to snarl.

He looked back at me over his shoulder, slackening speed. For a moment I thought he would turn on me then and there, and my shoulder-muscles stiffened. There was a thrill in the thought. But he only muttered:

"Get a grip on yourself, man."

Just at the first lowering of dusk, in my peering over Barreau's shoulder I spotted the shovel-antlers of a moose beside a clump of scraggy willows. I dropped the rope, s.n.a.t.c.hed for my rifle and fired as Barreau turned to see what I was about. I had drawn a bead on the broad side of him as he made the first plunge, and he dropped.

"Well, that's meat," Barreau said. "And it means camp."

He drew the toboggan up against a heavy stand of spruce, and taking a snowshoe shovel-wise fell to baring the earth for a fire base. I took my skinning knife and went to the fallen moose. Jessie moved about, gathering dry twigs to start a fire.

Once at the moose and hastily flaying the hide from the steaming meat my attention became centered on the task. For a time I was absorbed in the problem of getting a hind quarter skinned and slashed clear before my fingers froze. Happening at length to glance campward, I saw in the firelight Barreau towering over Jessie, talking, his speech punctuated by an occasional gesture. His voice carried faintly to me. I stood up and watched. Reason hid its head, abashed, crowded into the background by a swift flood of pa.s.sion. I could not think coherently. I could only stand there blinking, furious-over what I did not quite know, nor pause to inquire of myself. For the nonce I was as primitive in my emotions as any naked cave-dweller that ever saw his mate threatened by another male. And when I saw her shrink from him, saw him catch at her arm, I plunged for the fire.

"You d.a.m.ned cub!" he flashed, and struck at me as I rushed at him. I had no very distinct idea of what I was going to do when I ran at him, except that I would make him leave _her_ alone. But when he smashed at me with that wolf-like drawing apart of his lips-I knew then. I was going to kill him, to take his head in my hands and batter it against one of those rough-barked trees. I evaded the first swing of his fist by a quick turn of my head. After that I do not recollect the progress of events with any degree of clearness, except that I gave and took blows while the forest reeled drunkenly about me. The same fierce rage in which I had fought that last fight with Tupper burned in my heart. I wanted to rend and destroy, and nothing short of that would satisfy. And presently I had Barreau down in the snow, smashing insanely at his face with one hand, choking the breath out of him with the other. This I remember; remember, too, hearing a cry behind me. With that my recollection of the struggle blurs completely.