The Shagganappi Part 6

The fish and coffee were ready now, and all three waded into that breakfast with fine relish.

Then came the arduous portage around Red Rock Falls, a difficult task which occupied more than an hour. Then away upstream once more, this time Jack paddling bow, with young Fox-Foot, lying on a blanket amidships, wrapped in a well-earned sleep. But once during the entire morning the Indian stirred; he did not seem to awake as other boys do, but more like a rabbit. His eyes opened without drowsiness; he shot to his knees, sweeping the river bank with a glance like the boring of a gimlet. Larry, looking at him, knew that nothing---nothing, bird, beast or man--could escape that penetrating scrutiny. Then, without comment, the boy curled down among his blankets again and slept.

They did not stop for "grub" at midday--just opened a can of pork and beans, finished up the cold fried fish, and drank from the clear blue waters of the river. Then on once more upstream, which now began to broaden into placid lakelets, thereby lessening the current and giving them a chance to make more rapid headway. At four o'clock they reached the forks of the stream--one flowed towards them from the north, the other from the west.

"Which way?" asked Larson, rousing the Chippewa. The boy got up immediately and took the stern paddle, steering the western course. They had paddled something over two miles up that arm when Fox-Foot beached the canoe, built a fire, spilled out the remainder of the pork and beans, threw the tin can on the bank, then marshalled his crew aboard again, and deliberately steered over the course they had already come.

"We lose two miles good work," he explained. "We build decoy fire, we leave tin can, he come; he think we go that way, but we go north." Back to the forks and up the northern branch they pulled, both Larry and Jack not only willing to have done four miles of seemingly unnecessary paddling, but loud in their praise and appreciation of the Indian's shrewd tactics. At supper time Fox-Foot would allow no fire to be built, no landing to be made, no trace of their pa.s.sing to be left. They ate canned meat and marmalade, drank again of the stream and pushed on, until just at dusk they reached the edge of a long, still lake, with sh.o.r.es of granite and dense fir forest. "Larry and Jack, you sleep in canoe to-night; no camp. Lake ten miles long; no current; I paddle--me,"

said the Indian, and nothing that Larry could urge would alter the boy's edict.

"Jack, you must wonder what all these precautions are for, yet you never ask," said Larry.

"Because I know," returned the boy. "We are trying to escape the man in the mackinaw. He is following you. He is your enemy."

"Yes, boy, and to-night you shall know why," replied Larry. "You have taken so much for granted, you have never asked a single question; now you shall know what Foxy and I are after."

"You said you were after furs," Jack smiled.

"Yes, but not furs _alone_, my son," said the man. Then leaning meaningly towards the boy he half whispered, "I am after the king's coin--_gold_! My boy, nuggets and nuggets of _gold_, that I prospected for myself up in these wilds two years ago, found _pockets_ of it in the rocks, cached it, away, as I thought, from all human eyes, awaiting the time I could safely bring it to 'the front.' I knew of but one being in all the North that I could trust with my secret. That being is Fox-Foot.

One night I confided it to him, showing him the map I had made of the lakes and streams of the north country, and the spot where the gold was cached. We were, as I thought, alone in Fox-Foot's log house. That is, alone in speaking English, for his people don't understand a single word that is not Chippewa. We were poring over the map I had made, when something made me look behind me. Against the small hole in the logs that served as a window was a man's head and shoulders--a white man--and he wore a grey mackinaw. Foxy and I were on our feet at once, but the man crashed through the woods and was gone. But he had heard my story, had seen I had a map, and--well, he wants my gold! That is all."

III

"And the grey hair above your eyes, Larry?" asked Jack, in an awed voice.

"_That_ came the time I mentioned when I gave you your revolver, and you remarked you would hate to be in a position where you might _wish_ you had one. I told you I had been there myself. It was last August, on a lonely trail far east of here. I had lain down during the intense heat of the day to sleep, only to wake to see his peering eyes, to feel that my feet were tied together, my hands caught in his vise-like clutch, bound together. Then I was dragged to a tree and lashed to it by yards of leather strapping, and all the time looking into the barrel of his revolver. He searched every st.i.tch of clothing I had on, but he did not find the map. I was not armed, was perfectly helpless, and he left me lashed to that tree, naked all but my trousers and socks. I was there forty hours. The black flies came in swarms, the mosquitoes in thousands, and the second night timber wolves barked in the distance.

Towards morning they came nearer, nearer. The agony from the insects made me desperate, but it was the yapping of those wolves that drove me crazy. I chewed through the leather straps binding my shoulder, chewed the shoulder with it, boy, and broke loose, with the blood running from every fly-bite, my eyes blinded with their poison, my throat cracked with thirst. I staggered to the river to drink, drink, drink, to lie in its cool waters, then to drink again, again, again."

Jack's face blanched, his hands turned stiff with cold, at the horror of the tale.

"When I could really see with my eyes," continued Larry, "I discovered, while looking into the still river, that this powder had puffed itself above my ears."

"And the map?" questioned Jack.

"Oh, the map? Well, he didn't get _that_," answered Larry, in something of his natural voice. "You see, I had once an accident, breaking through the ice on the lake. The map got wet and was almost destroyed, so I copied it out on cotton with marking ink, and sewed it inside the lining of my coat, and it did not crackle, as the paper map would have done had he pa.s.sed his hands over it. Why, he never suspected it was there."

Jack drew a great breath of relief. "I wouldn't care if he did get it, Larry, so long as he left you alive."

"Oh, he's too cowardly to kill a man outright; don't be afraid of that.

But he's after the King's Coin, all right," was the reply.

"And he don't get King's Coin, not while I live--me," said the low voice of Fox-Foot, as, with squared shoulders and set teeth, he gripped his paddle firmly and started up the long stretch of Ten-mile Lake.

All that night Larry and Jack slept in the canoe, while the Chippewa boy paddled noiselessly, mile after mile. Above them the loons laughed, and herons called, and in the dense forest ash.o.r.e foxes barked and owls hooted. A beautiful bow of light arched itself in the north, its long, silvery fingers stretching and darting up to the sky's zenith. But the Indian paddled on. Those wild sounds and scenes were his birthright, and he knew no fear of them.

At daylight he beached the canoe so motionlessly the sleepers never stirred, and he wakened them only when he had the coffee made and a huge pan of delicious bacon fried above the coals. Both of the paleface friends then arose, yawned, stretched, stripped and plunged into the lake, to swim about for a few moments, and then to jump into their shirts and sweaters, and fall upon the coffee and bacon with fine relish.

"I believe," said Jack, devouring his third helping, "that my eyes are better. They don't ache or smart in the least to-day."

"Eye bad?" asked Fox-Foot.

Jack explained.

"I cure, me, if you like. Root good for bad eye grows here, north," said the Chippewa.

"Better let him try," urged Larry. "He knows all these things. His flower seeds have evidently put the kibosh on the man in the mackinaw."

"I get root, you try. No harm," said the Indian. "You scairt put in your eye, then just smell it, and tie round your head."

"I'll try it, by all means," a.s.serted Jack.

So, at noon, while Larry and Jack cooked the dinner, Fox-Foot penetrated the woods, returning with some crooked little brown roots, which he bound about Jack's forehead and made him inhale. They exuded a peculiar sweetish odor, that seemed to wash the eyeball like water, and when the afternoon was half spent, Jack remarked that his eyelids had ceased to smart.

"One week, maybe, be all right," answered the Indian. And his words proved correct. Daily he gathered fresh roots, treating Jack's eyes as skilfully as the oldest medicine man of his tribe could have done, until the poor red rims faded white, and the bloodshot eyeb.a.l.l.s grew clear and bluish. Jack was beside himself with grat.i.tude and delight, his one regret being that there was no possible way of mailing a letter to his parents telling them the good news. This week was one of work, sometimes toil. Often they encountered rapids over which they must portage. Once it was a whole mile through brush and rock and deep, soft mosses, but still they struggled on, until one evening, as they pitched camp and lighted their fire, Fox-Foot said coolly:

"You know this place, Larry?"

"No," was the answer, "never saw it before."

"The reason you say that," said the Indian, "is 'cause you come and go over that bluff behind us. Lake Nameless just twenty yards 'cross that bluff."

"_What_!" yelled Larry.

"I bring you in other side. Bluff separate this river and Lake Nameless.

There is your cache," laughed Fox-Foot, throwing a pebble and striking a point of red rock ten yards away.

Larry and Jack fairly stumbled over their own feet to get there. Every mark that Matt Larson had left to identify the hiding-place of his treasure still remained undisturbed. The round white pebble placed near the shelving rock, the three-cornered flint, the fine, tiny grey bits of stone set like a bird's eggs in a nest of lichen, the two standing pines with a third fallen, storm-wrecked, at their roots--every landmark was there, intact.

Larry almost flew for the pick, and began to hack away at loose rocks, swinging the pick above shoulder as a woodsman swings an axe. Two feet below the surface, the pick caught in a web of cloth. In another minute Larry lifted out an old woollen jersey undershirt, that had been fastened up bag-wise. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his knife, ripped open the sleeves, and the setting sun shot over a huge heap of yellow richness, quarts and quarts of heavy golden nuggets--_the King's Coin_. Larry sat down limply, wiping the oozing drops from his forehead. The two boys stood gazing at the treasure as if fascinated. Then Jack moistened his lips with his tongue, drew the back of his hand across his blinking eyes, moistened his lips again, but no words seemed to come to him. It was Fox-Foot who spoke first. Touching one splendid nugget almost contemptuously with the toe of his moccasin, he sneered "It is the curse of the paleface, this gold. 'Most every white man he sell the soul within his body for gold, gold, but not so Larry. _I_ know him.

He prize this thing because it is the reward of pluck, of work, of great patience, of what white men call 'grit.'"

"Thank you, Foxy," said Larry, rising and extending his fine hand, which grasped the Indian's with a warm, true grip. "You mean that--mean it with all your loyal young redskin heart. Yes, boys, I hope it is for the love of pluck, the pride of 'grit,' that I value this thing. I hope it is not greed, not avarice, not--"

"_Never_!" interrupted Jack's ringing voice. "Never any greed of gold in you, Larry. You best and bulliest of men alive, but I _am_ glad the gold is yours. You deserve every ounce of it," and Jack was clinging to his handsome young uncle's other hand with a heartiness that rang as true as the nuggets lying at his feet. Presently he stooped to lift one. Its rugged yellow bulk reflected the dying sun. It was a goodly thing to look at, rare, precious, beautiful. Then he dropped it among its fellows, his fingers curled into his palms. Unconsciously his hands moulded themselves into fists, and each fist rested with a peculiar bulldog movement above each st.u.r.dy hip. His eyes met Larry's.

"We'll have a tough fight for it," he said, meaningly, "but that gold is going to get past the man in the mackinaw."

"It certainly will, if you're going to act as you look now," laughed Larry. "Why, boy, you look as if you would stop at nothing to outwit our unpleasant follower."

"I shall stop at very little," said Jack doggedly. "Your gold will get to the front, Larry, if I have full fling in the matter."

"Fling away, son," was the reply. "Only always remember: don't _use_ your revolver unless he is killing you."

"Or killing you or Fox-Foot," supplemented the boy.