The Thrall of Leif the Lucky Part 30

After a suspicious sniff, the victor appeared to accept the truth of his conquest. Exactly as though he said, "Come! Here is one good job done; what next?" he got up with a grunt, and, rising to his hind feet, stood growling and rolling his fiery little eyes from one to another of the intruders in the brush.

"If now one could only hurl a spear at his heart!" murmured the sailor at Alwin's shoulder. But the difficulties of path-finding through an unbroken thicket had kept the men from c.u.mbering themselves with weapons so unwieldy.

Leif spoke up quickly, "There is no way but to trust to our knives.

Since I am superior to any in strength, I will grapple with him first.

If I fail, which I do not expect, I will preserve my life as Lodin is doing; and the Fearless One here shall take his turn."

Alwin was too wild with delight to remember any-thing else. "For that, I thank you as for a crown!" he gasped.

Even as he stepped out to meet the foe, Leif smiled ironically.

"Certainly you are better called the Fearless than the Courteous," he said. "It would have been no more than polite for you to have wished me luck."

Anything further was drowned in the bear's roar, as he took a swift waddling step forward and threw out his terrible paws. Even Leif's huge frame could not withstand the shock of the meeting. His left hand caught the beast by the throat and, with sinews of iron, held off his foaming jaws; but the shock of the grappling lost him his footing. They fell, clenched, and rolled over and over on the ground; those terrible hind feet drawing up and striking down with surer and surer aim.

Alwin could endure it no longer. "Let me have him now!" he implored. "It is time to leave him to me. The next stroke, he will tear you to pieces.

I claim my turn."

It is doubtful if anyone heard him: at that moment, swaying and staggering, the wrestlers got to their feet. In rising, Leif's hold on the bear's throat slipped and the s.h.a.ggy head shot sideways and fastened its jaws on his naked arm, with a horrible snarling sound. But at the same moment, the man's right arm, knife in hand, shot toward the mark it had been seeking. Into the exposed body it drove the blade up to its hilt, then swerved to the left and went upward. The stroke which the chisel-shod paws had tried for in vain, the little strip of steel achieved. A roar that echoed and re-echoed between the low hills, a convulsive movement of the mighty limbs, and then the beast's muscles relaxed, stiffening while they straightened; and the huge body swayed backward, dead.

From the chief came much the same kind of a grunt as had come from the bear at the fall of his foe. Glancing with only a kind of contemptuous curiosity at his wounded arm, he stepped quickly to the side of his prostrate follower and bent over him.

"You have got what you deserve for breaking my orders," he said, grimly.

"Yet turn over that I may attend to your wounds before you bleed to death."

In the activity which followed, Robert of Normandy took no part. He leaned against a tree with his arms folded upon his breast, his eyes upon the slain bear which half of the party were hastily converting into steaks and hide. The men muttered to each other that the Southerner was in a rage because he had lost his chance, but that was only a part of the truth. His fixed eyes no longer saw the bear; his ears were deaf to the voices around him. He saw again a shadowy room, lit by leaping flames and shifting eyes; and once more a lisping voice hissed its "jargon" into his ear.

"I see Leif Ericsson standing upon earth where never man stood before; and I see you standing by his side, though you do not look as you look now, for your hair is long and black... I see that it is in this new land that it will be settled whether your luck is to be good or bad..."

He said slowly to himself, like a man talking in his sleep, "It has been settled, and it is to be bad."

Then the room pa.s.sed from his vision. He saw in its place Rolf's derisive smile, and heard again his mocking query: "Is it your opinion that Leif Ericsson needs your protection against wild beasts?"

Of a sudden he flung back his head and burst into a loud laugh that jarred on the ear like grating steel.

When at last Lodin's wounds were dressed so that he could be helped along between two of his comrades, the party began a slow return. By the time they came out on to the shining white beach again, they were a battered-looking lot. There was not a mantle among them but what hung in tatters, nor a scratched face that did not mingle blood with berry juice. But at their head, the huge bear skin was borne like a captured banner. At the sight of it, their waiting comrades burst into shouts of admiration and envy that reached as far as the anch.o.r.ed ship.

"Never was such sport heard of!"--"A better land is nowhere to be found!" they clamored. "In one month we could secure enough skins to make us wealthy for the rest of our lives!"

And then some muttered asides were added: "It is a great pity to leave such a place."--"It is folly to give up certain wealth for vague possibilities." And though the dissatisfaction rose no louder than a murmur, it spread on every hand like fire in brush.

Now there was one man among the explorers who had been a member of Biorn Herjulfsson's crew, and was brimful of conceit and the ambition to be a leader among his fellows. When the command to embark swelled the murmurs almost to an outspoken grumbling, he thought he saw a chance to push into prominence, and swaggered boldly forward.

"If it is not your intention to come back and profit by this discovery, chief, I must tell you that we will not willingly return to the ship.

Certainly not until we have secured at least one bear apiece. We are free men, Leif Ericsson, and it is not to our minds to be led altogether by the--"

Whether or not he had meant to say "nose," no one ever knew. At that moment the chief wheeled and looked at him, with a glance so different from Biorn Herjulfsson's mild gaze that the word stuck in the fellow's throat, and instinctively he leaped backward.

Leif turned from him disdainfully, and addressed the men of his old crew. "Ye are free men," he said; "but I am the chief to whom, of your own free wills, you have sworn allegiance on the edge of your swords. Do you think it improves your honor that a stranger should dare to insult your chosen leader in your presence?"

"No!" bellowed Valbrand, in a voice of thunder.

And Lodin shook his wounded arm at the mutineer. "If my hand could close over a sword, I would split you open with it," he cried.

The other men's slumbering pride awoke. Loyalty seldom took more than cat-naps in those days, in spite of all the hard work that was put upon her.

"Duck him!"--"Souse him!"--"Dip him in the ocean!" they shouted. And so energetically that the ringleader, cursing the fickleness of rebels, found it all at once advisable to whip out his sword and fall into a posture of defence.

But again Leif's hand was stretched forth.

"Let him be," he said. "He is a stranger among us, and your own words are responsible for his mistake. Let him be, and show your loyalty to your leader by carrying out his orders with no more unseemly delay."

They obeyed him silently, if reluctantly; and it was not long before those who had remained on ship-board were thrown into a second fever of envious excitement.

They were not pleasant, however, the days that followed. In the flesh of those who had missed the sport, the bear-fight was as a rankling thorn.

The watches, during which a northeast gale kept them scudding through empty seas with little to do and much time to gossip, were golden hours for the growth of the serpent of discontent. Though the creature did not dare to strike again, its hiss could be heard in the distance, and the gleam of its fangs showed in dark corners. If Leif had had Biorn's bad fortune, to begin at the wrong end of his journey, so that a barren h.e.l.luland was the climax that now lay before him, the hidden snake might have swelled, like Thora Borga Hiort's serpent-pet, into a devastating dragon.

Was it not Leif's luck that the land which was revealed to them, on the third morning, should be as much fairer than their vaunted Markland as that spot was pleasanter than Greenland's wastes?--a land where, as the old books tell, vines grew wild upon the hills, and wheat upon the plains; where the rivers teemed with fish, and the thickets rustled with game, and the islands were covered with innumerable wild fowl; where even the dew upon the gra.s.s was honey-sweet!

As they gazed upon the blooming banks and woods and low hills, warm and green with sunlight, cries of admiration burst from every throat.

Valbrand made bold to warn his chief, "Though I do not dispute your will in this, any more than in anything else, I will say that difficulties are to be expected if men are to be parted from such a land without at least tasting of its good things."

Even for those who had been longest with him, the Lucky One was full of surprises.

"It has never been my intention to continue sailing after we had accomplished the three landings," he answered quietly. "Ungrateful to G.o.d would we be, were we to fail in showing honor to the good things He has led us to. I expect to stay over winter in this place."

CHAPTER XXVI

VINLAND THE GOOD

"... They sailed toward this land, and came to an island lying north of it, and went ash.o.r.e in fine weather and looked round. They found dew on the gra.s.s, and touched it with their hands, and put it to their mouths, and it seemed to them that they had never tasted anything so sweet as this dew.

Then they went on h.o.a.rd and sailed into the channel, which was between the island and the cape which ran north from the mainland. They pa.s.sed the cape, sailing in a westerly direction. There the water was very shallow, and their ship went aground, and at ebb-tide the sea was far out from the ship. But they were so anxious to get ash.o.r.e that they could not wait till the high-water reached their ship, and ran out on the beach where a river flowed from a lake. When the high-water set their ship afloat they took their boat and rowed to the ship and towed it up the river into the lake. There they cast anchor, and took their leather-bags ash.o.r.e, and there built booths."--FLATEYJARBO'K.

It was October, and it was the new camp, and it was Helga the Fair tripping across the green background with a skirtful of red and yellow thorn-berries and a wreath of fiery autumn leaves upon her sunny head.

Where a tongue of land ran out between a lake-like bay and a river that hurried down to throw herself into its arms, there lay the new settlement. Facing seaward, the five newly-built huts stood on the edge of a grove that crowned the river bluffs. Behind them stretched some hundred yards of wooded highland, ending in a steep descent to the river, which served as a sort of back stairway to the stronghold. Before them, green plains and sandy flats sloped away to the white sh.o.r.e of the bay that rocked their anch.o.r.ed ship upon its bosom. Over their lowly roofs, stately oaks and elms and maples murmured ceaseless lullabies,--like women long-childless, granted after a weary waiting the listening ears to be soothed by their crooning.

"I have a feeling that this land has always been watching for us; and that now that we are come, it is glad," Helga said, happily, as she paused where the jarl's son leaned in a doorway, watching Kark's cook-fires leap and wave their arms of blue smoke. "Is it not a wonderful thought, Sigurd, that it was in G.o.d's mind so long ago that we should some day want to come here?"

"It is a fair land," Sigurd agreed, absently. And then for the first time Helga noticed the frown on his face, and some of the brightness faded from her own.

"Alas, comrade, you are brooding over the disfavor I have brought upon you!" she said, laying an affectionate hand upon his arm. "I act in a thoughtless way when I forget it."

Sigurd made a good-natured attempt to arouse himself. "Do not let that trouble you, _ma mie_," he said, lightly. "When ill luck has it in her mind to reach a man, she will come in through a window if the door be closed. It is a matter of little importance."