Title: The Land of Frozen Suns
Author: Sinclair, Bertrand W., 1881-1972
Language: English
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THE LAND OF FROZEN SUNS

A Novel

BY

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Author of “Raw Gold,” Etc.



Copyright 1909, BY
STREET & SMITH.

Copyright, 1910, BY
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY.

The Land of Frozen Suns.

Made in U. S. A.



Contents


  · CHAPTER I—THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE
  · CHAPTER II—BY WAY OF THE “NEW MOON”
  · CHAPTER III—WHICH SHOWS THAT THE WORM DOES NOT ALWAYS TURN
  · CHAPTER IV—A FORTHRIGHT FIGHTING-MAN
  · CHAPTER V—THE RELATIVE MERITS OF THE FRYING-PAN AND THE FIRE
  · CHAPTER VI—SLOWFOOT GEORGE
  · CHAPTER VII—THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL
  · CHAPTER VIII—BY WAYS THAT WERE DARK
  · CHAPTER IX—MR. MONTELL
  · CHAPTER X—“THERE’S MONEY IN IT”
  · CHAPTER XI—A TRICK OF THE “TRADE.”
  · CHAPTER XII—THE FIRST MOVE
  · CHAPTER XIII—A FORETASTE OF STRONG MEASURES
  · CHAPTER XIV—INTEREST ON A DEBT
  · CHAPTER XV—STRANGERS TWAIN
  · CHAPTER XVI—CLAWS UNSHEATHED
  · CHAPTER XVII—NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
  · CHAPTER XVIII—THE LONG ARM OF THE COMPANY
  · CHAPTER XIX—THE STRENGTH OF MEN—AND THEIR WEAKNESS



CHAPTER I—THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE


Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to hell
being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to
the effect that there’s always a plentiful supply of material for that
much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have
done so. And so did my people before me. My father’s intentions were
good, but he didn’t live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn’t
fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking
chances,—well, I can’t say just how things would have panned out. I’m
not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our
allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are
powerless to modify. Oh, no! It’s highly probable, however, that if my
father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial
pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely
have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the
chapter—lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to
chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because
I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is
the tree inclined; a man can’t sit down and twiddle his thumbs and
refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The
heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.

As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of
circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place
where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always
have felt, though, that I’d missed something, for I was ushered into
this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South.
Sumner _here_ hadn’t developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was
on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and ’dobe buildings,
_of long-horned cattle_, of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men
who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape
there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and
there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and
stretches of greasewood—as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break
the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a
pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me
was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of
cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking
over its quicksands—except in time of storm; then it raged.

So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called
St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical
arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things
with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a
roomy, old-fashioned house I cried because my mother would not let me go
out to the corral and play.

“There are no corrals in a city, dear,” she explained—and I cried the
harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out
to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a
gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately
about.

Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but
mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of
strong men, and she hated it. I didn’t know till I was nearly grown that
she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money
for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern
family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married
Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the
men of her family had done—doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The
life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said—and I was
to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the struggling
years. Poor mother mine—her son was the son of his father, I’m afraid.
But Sumner _pere_ made good on his promise when the Sumner herds
fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through school,
with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the horizon.

So my childish memories of the great open, that lies naked to the
sun-glare and the chilling breath of the _northers_ year on year, grew
fainter and more like something of which I had dreamed. Dad would come
home occasionally, stay a day or two, perhaps a week, sometimes even a
month; but my mother never went west of the Mississippi—nor did I. I
often plagued them to let me go to the ranch during vacation, but they
evidently considered it best to keep me away from the round-ups and
horse-breaking and such, till I was old enough to see that there was
another side to the life besides the sunshiny, carefree one that makes
an irresistible appeal to a youngster.

And then, just a week after my twentieth birthday, my dad, slow-voiced,
easy-going old Jack Sumner rode his horse into the smiling Red and
drowned under the eyes of twenty men.

I was sitting on our front steps grouching about the heat when the
messenger brushed by me with the telegram in his hand. Mother signed for
it, and he ran down the steps whistling, and went about his business.
There was no sound within. I had no hint of trouble, till a maid
screamed. Then, I rushed in. Mother was drooping over the arm of a
Morris chair, and the bit of yellow paper lay on the rug where it had
fluttered from her hand. I carried her to a couch, and called a doctor.
But he could do nothing. Her heart was weak, he said, and might have
stopped any time; the shock had merely hastened her end.

I’m going to pass lightly over the week that followed. I was just a kid,
remember, and I took it pretty hard. It was my first speaking
acquaintance with death. A few of my mother’s people came, and when it
was over with I went to Virginia with an uncle, a kindly, absent-minded,
middle-aged bachelor. But I couldn’t settle down. For a week or ten days
I fidgeted about the sleepy Southern village, and then I bade my uncle
an abrupt good-bye and started for St. Louis. Little as I knew of
business and legal matters I was aware that now the Sumner herds and
ranches were mine, and I had a hankering to know where I stood. Except
that there was a ranch and cattle in Texas I knew nothing of my father’s
business. It didn’t even occur to me, at first, that I was a minor and
consequently devoid of power to transact any business of importance. I
knew that certain property was rightfully mine, and that was all.

Once in St. Louis, however, I began to get the proper focus on my
material interests. It occurred to me that Sumner _pere_ had done more
or less business with a certain bank, a private concern engineered by
two ultra-conservative citizens named Bolton and Kerr. I hunted them up,
thinking that they would likely be able to tell me just what I needed to
know. And it happened that by luck I came in the nick of time. A clerk
took in my card, and returned immediately for me. I found the senior
member, wrapping the bit of pasteboard around his forefinger when I was
ushered in. We shook hands, and he motioned to a chair. I asked for
information, and I got it, straight from the shoulder. Bolton was very
economical in the use of words.

“Yes, I knew your father well. There is a sum of money to his account in
the bank. He died intestate,” he told me bluntly. “In view of a
communication I have just received, you will have little to do with any
property until you are of age. The estate is now in the hands of an
administrator—appointed by a Texas court. The court will probably order
that you be allowed a certain monthly sum until your majority.”

“I see,” said I thoughtfully; I hadn’t considered that phase of it,
although in a hazy way I knew something of the regular procedure. “Will
our place here be managed by this administrator?”

“Very likely,” Bolton returned. “He has served us with a court order for
the estate funds now in our hands. But you are legally entitled to the
use and occupancy of the family residence until such time as the estate
is appraised and the inventory returned. After that the administrator
has discretionary power; he can make any disposition of the property,
meanwhile making provision for your support.”

“It seems to me,” I hazarded, “that some relative should have been
appointed.”

“Exactly,” Bolton nodded. “They made no move, though. And this Texas
person acted at once: I dare say it’s all right. However, you’re a
minor. Better have some responsible person appointed your guardian. Then
if there’s any mismanagement, you can take court action to have it
remedied. Frankly, I don’t like the look of this haste to administer.
May be all right; may be all wrong.”

“See here,” I burst out impulsively, for I had taken a sudden liking to
this short-spoken individual who talked to me with one foot on a desk
and a half-smoked cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth, “what’s the
matter with you becoming my guardian? None of my people seem to have
thought of it. I’m sure we’d get along all right. It would be a mere
matter of form, anyway.”

He smiled. My naive way of saddling myself upon him, along with a lot of
possible responsibilities was doubtless amusing to a hard-headed
financier like Bolton. I saw nothing out of the way in such an
arrangement at the time. It struck me as a splendid idea, in fact. But
he made allowance for my juvenile point of view. Shifting his cigar to
the other corner of his mouth he surveyed me critically for a few
seconds, crinkling his black brows thoughtfully.

“I’ll do it,” he finally assented. “The position ought to be a sinecure.
Run in to-morrow morning at ten-thirty, and we’ll step around to the
courthouse and have the thing legally executed. You’re staying at the
old place, I suppose?”

“I’m going to,” I replied. “I haven’t been at the house; I came straight
here from the train.”

“Well, run along, son,” he said good-naturedly. “I’d take you home to my
family, only I don’t happen to possess one. I live at the club—the
Arion—mostly.”

“Oh, by the way,” he called to me as I neared the door. “How are you off
for funds?”

“To tell the truth,” I owned, rather shamefacedly, “I’m getting in
pretty low water. I think I’ve some change at home, but I’m not sure.
Dad never gave me a regular allowance; he’d just send me a check now and
then, and let it go at that. I’m afraid I’m a pretty good spender.”

“You’ll have to reform, young man,” he warned, mock-seriously. “Here”—he
dug a fifty dollar bill out of his pocket-book—“that’ll keep you going
for a while. I’ll keep you in pocket money till this administrator
allows you a monthly sum for maintenance. Don’t forget the time, now.
Ten-thirty, sharp. Ta ta.” And he hustled me out of the office in the
midst of my thanks. I was thankful, too, for I’d put it mildly when I
told him that I was getting near the rocks. I was on them. I’d paid my
last cent for a meal on the train that morning. And while I did feel
tolerably sure of finding some loose silver in the pockets of my
clothing at home, I knew it would not amount to more than four or five
dollars. Oh, I was an improvident youth, all right. The necessity for
being careful with money never struck me as being a matter of
importance; I’d never had to do stunts in economy, that was the trouble.

From the bank I went straight home. We hadn’t kept a very pretentious
establishment, even though Sumner _pere_ had gone on increasing his pile
all through the years since we’d moved to the city. A cook and a
house-maid, a colored coachman and a gardener—the four of them had been
with us for years, and old Adam was waiting by the steps for me when I
came up the walk, his shiny black face beaming welcome. I had to go to
the stable and look over the horses, and tell Adam that everything was
fine, before the old duffer would rest.

In the house everything was as I’d left it. All that evening I moped
around the big, low-ceiled living-room. There was little comfort in the
place; it was too lonely. The hours dragged by on leaden feet. I
couldn’t get over expecting to see mother come trailing quietly down the
wide stairway, or dad walk in the front door packing a battered old grip
and greeting me with his slow smile. I know it was silly, but the
feeling drove me out of the house and down town, where there was a crush
of humans, and the glitter of street lights and the noise of traffic.
There I met a chum or two, and subsequent proceedings tore a jagged hole
in Bolton’s fifty dollar bill before I landed home in the little hours.
Even then I couldn’t sleep in that still, old house.

The long night came to an end, as nights have a habit of doing, and
breakfast time brought with it the postman. The mail was mostly papers
and other uninteresting junk, but one missive, postmarked Amarillo,
Texas, and addressed to myself I opened eagerly. It was from the
administrator, as I had surmised.

Most of the communication was taken up with an explanation of how he
came to jump into the breach so quickly. He had been, it seemed, a close
friend of my father’s. He knew that Jack Sumner had a son who was not
yet of age, and who, even if he were, knew little or nothing about
stock. Things needed looking after, he said; my father’s sudden death
had left the business without a responsible head, and the ranch foreman
and the range boss were bucking each other. Things were going to the
devil generally, so he felt called upon to step into the breach, seeing
that none of the Sumner family showed up to protect their interests. I
wouldn’t be under any obligation to him, he frankly explained, for as
administrator he would be paid for what he was doing. He also stated
that if I felt that my affairs would be more capably managed in the
hands of someone whom I knew better he would cheerfully turn over
control of the estate without any tiresome litigation. And he concluded
his letter with an urgent invitation to come down to headquarters and
see the wheels go round for myself. He signed himself in a big heavy
hand, Jake Howey, and the signature gave me an impression of a bluff,
hard-riding cowman—picturesque and thoroughly Western. If I had been
born a girl I expect my disposition would have been termed romantic.
Anyway, Mr. Jake Howey’s letter made a hit with me.

When I went to keep my appointment with Bolton later in the forenoon I
took the letter with me. He glanced over it, and tucked it back in the
envelope.

“I don’t much believe in long distance judgment of men,” he declared,
“but I’d be willing to take a chance on this Texas person. I should say
you can expect a square deal from him—if this missive represents his
true personality.”

“That’s the way it struck me, too,” I confessed. “I think I’d like to go
down there for a while.”

“Yes? What about school?” he put in.

“Well, I suppose it’s necessary for me to go through college,” I
admitted. “Dad intended me to. I was to begin this coming school
year—September, isn’t it? But that’s nearly three months away. I would
like to see that Red River ranch. I was born there, you know.”

“You’ll have to cut your eye-teeth in the business sometime,” he mused.
“You’ll be less likely to get into mischief there than you will in town.
Yes, I daresay you might as well take the trip. But no funking school
this fall, mind. I’ve known youngsters to go to the cattle country and
stick there. Your father did.”

“I won’t,” I promised, “even if I want to stay, I’ll be ready to dig in
when September comes.”

“You’d better.” He laughed at my earnestness. “Or I’ll be down there
after you. When do you propose to start?”

“As soon as I can.” Having paved the way to go, I wanted, boy-fashion,
to be on the way at once.

“Any idea how to get there?” he queried; as if he had his doubts about
the development of my bump of location.

But I had him there.

“Oh, yes. Dad used to take the train through Little Rock to Fort Worth,
and on up into the Panhandle from there. Sometimes he took a steamer
from here to Memphis. I think I’d like the river trip best.”

“All right,” he decided. “You shall go, my boy, just as soon as you can
get ready. Now we’ll see about this guardianship matter.”

We saw about it in such wise that two days later I was the happy
possessor of a ticket to Amarillo and a well-lined pocket-book. I had
dinner with Bolton, and bade him good-bye quite cheerfully, for I felt a
good deal as Columbus must have done when he turned the prow of his
caravel away from Spanish shores. After leaving Bolton I went home after
a grip I’d forgotten. The river boat on which I’d taken passage was due
to leave at midnight.

And that midnight departure was what started one Bob Sumner up the
Trouble Trail. It isn’t known by that name; it doesn’t show on any map
that ever I saw; but the man who doesn’t have to travel it some time in
his career—well, he’s in luck. Or perhaps one should reason by the
reverse process. I daresay it all depends on the point of view.



CHAPTER II—BY WAY OF THE “NEW MOON”


Lights by the thousand speckled the night-enshrouded water-front when I
reached the slip where my boat lay. On the huge roofed-in wharf
freight-handlers swarmed like bees. The rumble of hand trucks and the
tramp of feet rose to the great beams overhead and echoed back in a
steady drone. Lamps fluttered on vibrating walls. Men moved in haste,
throwing long shadows ahead and behind them. Boxes, bales, barrels,
sacked stuff vanished swiftly down three separate inclines to the lower
deck of the _Memphis Girl_, and from the depths of this
freight-swallowing monster came the raucous gabble, freely garnished
with profanity, of the toiling stevedores.

Out from under that vast sounding board of a roof the noise at once
diminished in volume, and I passed through the heart of the dust and
babel and gained the cabin deck of the _Memphis_. A steward looked over
my ticket and guided me to the berth I had reserved. It was then half
past nine; still two hours and a half to the time of departure. I took a
look around the upper deck. Quite a number of passengers were already
aboard. Some were gone to bed; others were grouped in the aft saloon.
One or two poker games had started, and little groups were looking on.
But of them all I knew not a soul. Youth hungers for companionship, and
I was no exception to my kind. It may be a truism to say that nowhere
can one be so completely alone as in a crowd; but the singularity of it
never came home to me until that night. But we are always learning the
old things and esteeming them new. I roamed about the _Memphis_, wishing
I had stayed up town till the last minute. It had been my plan to go
down and turn in; the ceremony of casting off was not one that
interested me greatly. But now the whim was gone; a spirit of unrest, an
impatience to be off, drove sleep from my mind. If you have ever known
the dreary monotony of waiting for train or steamer to start when your
whole being craves the restfulness of motion you will not wonder that I
made one more round of the deck and saloons and then left the _Memphis_
to roam aimlessly past the serried wharves that faced the stream.

I don’t recollect just how far I wandered. If the place had been strange
to me I should likely have been more circumspect in my prowling. As it
was, my only concern was to be at the S.S. Company’s wharf by midnight,
and midnight was yet afar. So I poked along, stopping now and then to
hang over a railing and peer across the dark sweep of the Mississippi
toward the Illinois shore. Between, the lights of divers craft twinkled
like fireflies, and tootings of major and minor keys with varying volume
of sound went wailing through the night.

A big passenger packet, hailing from up-river, swept into view. Ablaze
from her bow to the churning stern wheel she bore down like a floating
villa strung with yellow gems. A band blared “Dixie” from somewhere
amidships. I was young enough to have some degree of enthusiasm for such
spectacles, and I turned onto a long half-lighted wharf and walked to
its outermost tip to get a better view of the puffing river monster with
its thousand gleaming eyes.

Until she came abreast and passed, I stood there watching. In a careless
way I became aware of two men strolling out on the wharf; in fact, I had
passed them near the entrance gate. I remember that the swell from the
big packet was beginning to slap against the wharf wall when one of them
edged over and asked me the time.

Like a simpleton I hauled out my watch to tell him. It did not occur to
me that there might be any purpose behind the question. The river-front
in St. Louis was not a place where one could safely exhibit signs of
affluence in the way of cash or jewelry—and I knew it. I hadn’t grown up
in a city without knowing some of its ways. No doubt it looked like an
easy game, out there on the end of a deserted wharf.

My watch was a plain hunting-case affair, with a fob. Without an inkling
of what was to come I turned toward the dim light as I sprung the case
open. In that instant the fellow struck the watch out of my grasp with
one hand, and smashed me full on the jaw with the other—a vicious,
pugilistic punch. I went down. Curiously, I didn’t lose consciousness;
and the blow gave little pain. But it paralyzed my motor nerves for a
few seconds, gave me a queer, helpless feeling in my legs and arms, such
as one has in a nightmare. It passed though, and the pair of them were
just going through my pockets with a celerity that bespoke much practice
when I recovered sufficiently to jab my fist into a face that was bent
close to mine—at the same time driving both heels against the shins of
the other fellow with what force I could muster.

This instinctive outbreak rather surprised them, I think. Anyway, they
gave ground. Only for a moment, however. I made one valiant effort to
gain my feet, and they were on me like twin wolves. Kicking, striking,
struggling like primal beasts we three lurched this way and that on the
brink of the wharf. A hundred yards away people were hurrying by, and if
I’d had sense enough to realize that a shout was my best weapon I could
easily have routed the thugs. But I was too frightened to think.

And in a very short time sheer weight of numbers decided the issue. One
of them got a strangle hold about my neck. The other clasped me
fervently around the waist. Thus they dragged me down. For one brief
instant I rested on the hard planking, my head in a whirl, their weight
like a mountain on my heaving chest. Then, with a quick shove they
thrust me over the edge of the wharf.

Undertaken voluntarily, a twenty-foot dive is no great matter, but it is
a horse of quite another color to be chucked into space and fall that
distance like a bag of meal. I struck the water feet first, as it
happened, and came to the top spluttering, half-strangled, but otherwise
none the worse. Right quickly I found that I’d merely exchanged one
antagonist for another. The current set strongly out from the wharf, and
it cost me many a stroke to get back to it, and then I saw that I was no
better off. Contrary to the usual thing the piles offered no avenue of
escape, for they were planked up, a smooth wooden wall that I could not
possibly climb. I felt my way toward shore, but the out-sweeping current
was too strong. So I hooked my fingers in a tiny crack and proceeded to
shed what clothing still burdened me. Of my coat only a fragmentary
portion remained. It had been ripped up the back in the fracas above,
and the side containing my ticket and most of my money had been torn
clear off me. There was little left save the sleeves. My shoes and shirt
and trousers I cast upon the waters with little thought of their return;
and then, clad in a suit of thin underclothes I struck out for the next
pier below, thanking my stars that I was a fair swimmer.

But I could not make it. The channel of the Mississippi threw the full
head of a powerful current against the St. Louis side at that particular
point; it struck the wharf-lined bank and swerved out again with the
strength of an ocean tide, and I was in the out-going curve of it. The
next wharf was not for me nor yet its fellow beyond. Steadily I was
carried into mid-stream. Shouting for help across the black space that
lay between me and the wharves soon exhausted what wind and strength I
did not use up in a footless attempt to swim against the current. I
stopped yelling then; it seemed to be sink or swim, and I began to
conserve my energies a bit. Slipping along in plain view of myriad
lights, hearing the fiendish screaming of steamer whistles, seeing the
moving bulk of them dimly in the night, I felt in no immediate
danger—not half as much alarm disturbed the soul of me as when the
fingers of those night-hawks were clawing at my throat. I knew I could
keep afloat an indefinite length of time, and some craft or other, I
reasoned, would pick me up if I failed to make shore.

By and by I rapped my hand smartly against some hard object as I cleft
the water, and gripping it I found myself the richer by a four-foot
stick of cordwood on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This served to bear
me up without any exertion on my part, and gave me that much better
chance to buck the current. I was now well out from the wharves, and
straining my eyes for passing boats.

Far down the river the piercing shriek of a siren split a momentary
silence that had fallen on the stream. A drumming noise was borne up to
me on a fitful night breeze. From behind the black loom of a jutting
wharf a steamer appeared, and came throbbing upstream. Now she was
almost on me, the heart-like pulse of her engines and the thresh of her
great sternwheel deadening all the other sounds which that vast river
surface caught up and bandied back and forth.

Remorselessly the current bore me into her path. At first I had strained
every nerve to get in her way, but as the black hull with funnels
belching smoke and deck-lights riding high drew near I remembered that
if I missed a hold on her side I stood a fair chance of being sucked
into the flailing paddles. When that filtered into my cranium I backed
water in hot haste; but I had gone too far, and her speed was too great.
In another minute I was pawing at the slippery bulge of her water-line,
and striving to lift my voice above the chug of the engines as she slid
by.

The wash from her swung me away and drew me back again, and just as the
nearing thresh of her broad-paddled wheel struck a chill of fear into my
quaking heart my hands fouled in a trailing line and I laid hold of it
more tightly than ever drowning man clutched the proverbial straw.

It was a small line, and the strain of towing me was great, but it held.
In the tiers of cabins above my head lights flicked out one by one.
Again and again I called, bellowing upward with the regularity of a fog
signal. No answer; no inquiring face peered over the rail. The docks
slid by. God only knows how long I dangled at the end of that bit of
twisted fiber. The glow-worm lamps of St. Louis twinkled distantly on
the left, rapidly falling astern. The thin line wrapped about my wrist
numbed it to the elbow; I changed hands from time to time, in peril of
being cast adrift. Fervently I wished for my bit of driftwood. The
on-rushing demon to which I clung offered less hope of succor.

In a little while longer I should have cast loose from sheer inability
to hold on. The strain on my arms was exhausting, and the least shift
soused me under water, such was the speed. How I should have fared then,
I do not know. But in the nick of time an answering hail came from above
and when I had established the fact that a human being was clinging
alongside, a cluster of heads and a lantern or two appeared at the rail
and a rope ladder came wriggling down.

Cramped and sore and weary as I was I climbed thankfully aboard. A knot
of passengers surrounded an officer whom I took to be the mate. A
deckhand or two stood by, eyeing me curiously as I heaved myself on
deck. The mate held up his lantern and took a good look at me.

“You look some the worse for wear, bucko,” he volunteered indifferently.
“How long you been hangin’ onto us?”

I began to explain, but I daresay my appearance hardly lent an air of
truth to my words; he cut me short with an incredulous shrug of his
shoulders.

“Tell that t’ the captain or the purser,” he interrupted sharply. “Bilk,
you steer him t’ the pilot house. I’ll be there in a minute.”

He turned on his heel, and Bilk motioned me to follow. As we passed
forward I wondered on what sort of craft I had landed, whither bound,
and how good my chance was of getting back to St. Louis and making a
fresh start. The first of these queries I voiced to Bilk.

“She’s the _New Moon_,” he growled. “Through freight t’ Bismark, Cow
Island, and Fort Benton. Stop? Naw, she don’t stop fer nothin’ only
wood.”



CHAPTER III—WHICH SHOWS THAT THE WORM DOES NOT ALWAYS TURN


The door of the pilot-house swung open and the captain himself stepped
out as Bilk reached for the knob. The eyes of this river autocrat fell
inquiringly on me. I daresay I was not a prepossessing figure in the
dull glimmer of a deck lamp.

“What the devil’s this?” he demanded.

“Feller picked up alongside us, hangin’ on by an unstowed line, sir.”
Bilk explained.

“Huh!” the captain grunted.

“See here, sir,” I began. “I’m much obliged for being picked up. And
I’ll be much more obliged if you’ll put me in the way of getting into
some clothes and landing as soon as possible. I was to have taken the
_Memphis Girl_ down-river to-night. Mr. Bolton, of the Bolton and Kerr
bank will make it all right with you.”

The captain guffawed coarsely in my face. “God bless me, that’s all
right. Hey, Tupper,”—to the mate, who came up while I was
speaking—“here’s a lad with a black eye, a skinned nose, and no clothes
on, who wants us to put about—and his banker will make it all right.
Ha—ha—ha!” And he laughed till my cheeks burned.

“I don’t ask anything of you only to get ashore, first stopping-place,”
I spluttered, trembling with anger; his patent disbelief of my statement
was hard to swallow. “I’m not to blame for getting robbed and tumbled
into the river, and I don’t want my people to think I’ve been drowned.”

“There’s the shore,” he jerked his thumb backward significantly. “Swim
for it, if the deck o’ the _Moon_ don’t suit you.”

That silenced me for the time. I knew I could never make shore, weary as
I was. The inhospitable atmosphere was better than the unquiet bosom of
the Mississippi. I had no stomach for further natatory stunts that
night. And I knew that it depended on the good-will of this grouchy
individual as to when and where I should set foot on land. He squinted
calculatingly at me for a second or two, then addressed the mate.

“Take ’im below, Tupper,” he said. “Dig ’im up some jeans an’ a pair o’
shoes, an’ let ’im roost somewhere forrad. We can use ’im, I reckon.”

“Look here,” I remonstrated anxiously; he was overlooking my voice in
the matter in a way that didn’t suit me at all. “I want to know when I’m
going to get a chance to go back to St. Louis? You don’t seem to
understand the fix I’m in.”

“Got passage-money about you?” he asked coolly.

“Why, of course not,” I replied. “A fellow doesn’t usually carry money
in his underclothes.”

“He don’t, hey?” He stepped nearer to me and suddenly thrust a hairy
fist under my nose. “Who the hell are you, t’ howl about gettin’ ashore?
You look t’ me like a man that’s broke jail or somethin’ o’ the kind. As
tough a lookin’ citizen as you are ought t’ be damn thankful for a
chance t’ climb aboard. You’ll earn your keep while you’re on the
_Moon_—an’ no questions asked. See? Take him along, Tupper. Kick his
ribs in, if he makes a roar. Get forrad, there.”

That was all the satisfaction I got out of Captain Speer; and truth to
tell I followed the mate with proper meekness. I knew enough of the
river-boat way to avoid open clashing with sternwheel folk. Deep-water
men paint lurid pictures of hell-ships, but I have my doubts, from what
I’ve seen and heard, of any wind-jammer that ever sailed the seven seas
being worse that some of the flat-bottomed craft that bucked the
Missouri and Mississippi in the year of our Lord eighteen eighty-one.

The mate, a sullen, red-whiskered brute, hustled me down ’tween decks,
rummaged in a locker and brought forth a frayed suit of cotton overalls,
and a pair of brogans two sizes too large for my feet—and they are not
small by any means.

“Get into them, if you feel the need o’ clothes,” he growled. “You camp
on that pile o’ sacks an’ stay there till you’re wanted.”

Much as I resented his overbearing speech and manner I didn’t think it
good policy to row with him just then. My face ached from the punching
it had already received; physical weariness, bruises, the strangeness
and palpable belligerence that confronted me on the _Moon_, all served
to cow me, that had never been a fighting-man, nor thrown among the
breed. My knowledge of the genus river-rat was sufficient to tell me
that the mate would rather enjoy carrying out the captain’s order in
regard to my ribs. I wanted none of his game at that time and place. So
I donned the overalls and kept my mouth closed.

He wasted no more time on me, and when he was gone I settled myself
philosophically on the sack-pile, wondering how long it would be till
the Moon would make a landing. The wisest plan seemed to consist of
dodging trouble while aboard, and stepping ashore at the first tie-up.
Otherwise, I judged myself slated to enact the role of roustabout at the
pleasure of the rude gentleman in command.

The night was warm; my wet underclothing not uncomfortable. Curled in an
easy posture on the folded sacks I fell asleep, undisturbed by the
monotonous beat of the _Moon’s_ mechanical heart. The blast of her
whistle, long-drawn, a demoniac, ear-splitting cross between a scream
and a bellow, wakened me; and while I sat up, rubbing my sleepy eyes and
wondering how long I’d slept, the boorish mate yelled from a gangway.

“Here you. Come along—an’ be quick about it.”

When I sensed the fact that he was directing his remarks at me, my first
impulse was to lay hold of something and heave it at his bewhiskered
face. But upon second thought I refrained, and ascended resentfully to
the upper deck, grinding my teeth at the broad back of him as I went. A
half dozen other men, roustabouts I judged from their general
unkemptness, were gathered amidships by the rail. Off in the east day
was just breaking; from which I gathered that I had slept seven hours or
more. The speed of the _Moon_ slackened perceptibly. Out of the grayness
ahead a slip loomed ghostly in the dawn, tier on tier of cordwood
stacked on the rude wharf; upreared on rows of piling, it seems to my
juvenile fancy like a monster centipede creeping out to us over the
smooth water.

Somewhere in the depths of the _Moon_ a bell tinkled. Immediately the
great paddle reversed, churning the river surface into dirty foam, and
we began to sidle against the pier-end. Fore and aft, lines were run out
and made fast by a dim figure that flitted from behind the woodricks.
The mate growled an order, and a gangplank joined the _Moon’s_ deck to
the wharf. Down this we filed, his Sorrel Whiskers glanced over one
shoulder at me.

At once my grimy companions, Bilk among the number, fell upon the pile
of wood. For a moment I stood undecided—then made to walk boldly past
the mate. Back of the wharf I saw the land, a sloping rise dotted with
farmhouses, take form in the growing light; and I was for St. Louis
whether or no. But Tupper forestalled me. I did not get past him. He
seemed to be paying little attention, yet when I came abreast of him,
heart somewhat a-flutter he lurched and struck out—with marvellous
quickness for a stodgy-built man. There was no escaping the swing of his
fist. I was knocked down before I knew it, for the second time in twelve
hours. Satisfaction gleamed in his small, blue eyes. He stepped back,
and when I got to my feet, something dazed and almost desperate, he was
facing me with a goodly billet in one hand.

“Dig in there, blast yuh!” he roared. “Grab a stick an’ down below with
it, or I’ll fix yuh good an’ plenty, yuh——”

The fierceness of him, the futility of pitting myself against a club,
much less his ponderous fists, quelled me once more. I hoisted a length
of cordwood upon my shoulder and passed aboard. Another trip I made, and
some of the murderous rage that seethed inside me must have shown upon
my countenance; for Bilk lagged, and, edging near as we trod the gangway
together, muttered a word of advice.

“Fergit it, kid,” he warned. “Don’t go agin’ him. He’s a killer—he’s got
more’n one man’s scalp a’ready. An’ it’s the calaboose for you if yuh do
lay him out. See?”

Bilk was right. I was aware that while falling short of mutiny on the
high seas, a good smash at Mr. Tupper would land me in jail right
speedily—providing the captain and the other mate left enough of me to
lock up—and seeing that St. Louis and my friends were already far
astern, I might find myself in a worse pickle than aboard the _Moon_.
This, coupled with a keen sense of shame for blows received and not yet
returned, was galling. But cowardly or not, just as you choose, I could
not cope with sluggers of that heavy calibre, and I knew it. So,
temporarily, I subsided, and sullenly became a satellite of the _New
Moon_.

The empty space behind the boilers, and a good share of the lower deck
space was duly filled with wood; the _Moon_ got under way again, and
then I had a breathing spell, which I spent turning over in my mind
certain plans that suggested a way out of the difficulty. Going to
Montana, when my destination was Texas, was not to my liking, and the
manner of my going I liked least of all. While I pondered Bilk drew
near.

“First trip on a sternwheeler, huh?” he asked, in a not unfriendly tone.

“Yes—like this,” I answered, and he grinned understandingly.

“I should have jumped and made a swim for it,” I mourned. That had not
occurred to me while we were tied up at the wood-wharf; in fact, my
thinking was none too coherent about that time—Tupper’s fist had jarred
me from head to heel.

“He’d likely ’a’ plugged yuh quick’s yuh hit the water,” Bilk observed
indifferently. “He’s noway backward about usin’ a pistol, if he takes a
notion.”

“Do you mean to say they’d dare shoot a man for quitting the steamer?” I
uttered incredulously.

“Sure.” Bilk’s positive answer was distressingly matter of fact.

With exceeding bitterness I aired my opinion of such a state of affairs.
Bilk merely shrugged his shoulders.

“They’re short-handed, that’s why they froze t’ you,” he explained.
“She’ll lose time every wood-loadin’ if there ain’t men enough to pack
it aboard. Then the freight’s slow, the passengers kick, an’ the owners
pry up hell with the captain. Lord, was yuh never rung in like this
before? It’s nothin’ t’ bein’ shanghaied onto a wind-jammer that’s due
round the Horn—months of it yuh get then, an’ it’s tough farin’, too.
You ain’t got no call t’roar on this. We’ll be in Benton in ten days or
so. What’s that amount to?”

“It amounts to quite a lot with me,” I responded. “I’m not going to
Benton if I can help it. I’ll fool that red-whiskered bully yet.”

“Don’t let him catch yuh at it, kid,” Bilk observed. “He’ll give yuh
worse’n ten days’ steam-boatin’ if yuh mix with him.”

But I did go to Benton, in spite of my intention to the contrary. The
_Moon_, as Bilk had told me, was a through freight, a fast boat,
passengers and cargo billed direct to the head of navigation, and
carrying mail for but one or two places between. Towns along the
Missouri were few and far apart those days, once north of Sioux City,
and for none did the _Moon_ slow up. Wood-slips were her only landing;
since food for the hungry monster that droned in the bowels of the ship
was a prime necessity. For the next three days Tupper, and Bailey, the
second mate, gave me no chance to quit my involuntary servitude. Their
fists I avoided by submission. When we had progressed that far up-river
I ceased to look for opportunity to take French leave, reasoning that I
would have more trouble retracing my steps through that thinly settled
land than if I stuck to the _Moon_ and made the round trip; besides
this, my anger at the dirty treatment had settled to cold malevolence. I
wanted to stay with the _Moon_, to be forced to stay with her—for I had
promised to make the captain and the mate dance to sad music once we
tied to a St. Louis dock and I could get the ear of my guardian. That
prospect was my only joy for many dolorous days.

Meantime I unwillingly carried wood, slushed decks, and performed such
other tasks as were gruffly allotted me; always under a protest which I
dared not voice. I suppose one would eventually become accustomed to
being cursed every time one turned around, but it never failed to set me
plotting reprisals; I can easily understand the psychology of a
mutineer, I think. Once or twice I had it in mind to make some sort of
appeal to one of the passengers—a prosperous-looking individual who,
Bilk informed me, was a St. Louis fur merchant, and whom I thought might
possibly know my father. But the sleek one transfixed me with such a
palpably contemptuous air when I was in the act of approaching him that
I hadn’t the heart to face a rebuff. A sternwheel deckhand is not an
attractive person, as a rule, and I suppose I looked the part,
aggravated considerably by my discolored optic and bruised face. My
failure to get speech with one of the elect, and being scowled at as if
I were a mangy dog into the bargain, didn’t tend to make me feel kindly
toward the well-fed, well-clothed mortals who lounged on the after deck
smoking Havana cigars. Of the hide man I took particular note, hoping to
meet him some time in the future, when I’d settled with Tupper, Speer
_et al_, and tell him what a damned snob he was. There was a woman or
two aboard, but they stuck to their cabins and concerned me not—until a
day when I was fool enough to show a trace of the soreness that always
bubbled within.

I do not know why I tackled the captain. I did not want wages, for Bilk
had made it clear to me that if I signed the steamer’s roll I thereby
precluded the possibility of hauling the _Moon’s_ commander over the
coals for refusing to set me ashore and keeping me in practical peonage,
and I would not have missed making it warm for that coarse ruffian for
half the cattle my dad had left me. I dare say it was a flickering up of
the smoldering fires of hostility. Neither Tupper nor Speer ever came
close to me that I did not have to fight down an impulse to club them
with whatever was nearest my hand. And this day I unthinkingly baited
Captain Speer, much as I feared the weight of his ready fists. I was
coiling a rope just aft of the wheel-house, when the captain paced along
the deck, and turned a cold eye upon me. I dropped the rope.

“Say,” I asked bluntly, and perhaps more belligerently than was wise,
“do I get paid wages for the work I’m doing?”

“Hey? Get paid?” he growled. Then he lifted up his voice and swore: “By
God, you pay for the grub you eat and the clothes you got on an’ we’ll
talk about wages. You—you double-dyed, gilt-edged,
son-of-a-feather-duster!”

This is not a literal transcription of Captain Speer’s expletives, but
it will have to serve. His rendering was of the sort frowned upon in
polite literature, being altogether unprintable. Never did the captain
sacrifice force to elegancy of expression. I have heard it said, and the
statement is indubitably true, that he could swear louder and faster and
longer than any two men between Benton and New Orleans. With the full
tide of his reviling upon me, he lurched forward, his big-knuckled
fingers reaching for my throat. I turned to dart around the wheel-house;
Tupper, grinning maliciously, showed up from that quarter. And when I
swung about to go the other way I tripped and Speer nailed me before I
could dodge again. Like a cat pawing a helpless mouse, he slammed me
against a deck-house wall, and I should doubtless have had my head well
worked over but for a timely interruption.

Aft from the wheel-house a promenade deck ran over the cabin roofs,
whereon the passengers lounged when they cared to sun themselves. The
captain, the mate, and myself were on the narrow deck below. From just
over our heads came the voice of feminine disapproval; at which Captain
Speer let go my throat, and Tupper paused with his foot drawn back to
kick me.

“You’re a pretty pair of brutes, indeed you are!”

The girl, a small serious-faced thing, her brown hair standing out in
wind-blown wisps from under a peaked cap, leaned over the rail and flung
down the words hotly, stamping one small foot to lend emphasis to her
observation.

“You may be typical ship’s officers,” she went on scornfully, “but you
are certainly not _men_.”

The two of them stood abashed, like pickpockets taken in the act, and a
man by the girl’s side put in a word.

“Miss Montell,” he drawled. “You shouldn’t interfere with the pastimes
of our worthy skipper and mate. Let the good work go on.”

“Shame on you, Mr. Barreau!” she flashed, drawing away from him.

The man paid no heed to her quick retort, but himself leaned a bit
forward and spoke directly to the captain.

“Go to it, Captain Speer,” he said indifferently—that is, his manner of
speech was well simulated indifference; but I, staring up at him, saw
the storm-clouds gathering in his dark eyes. “Go ahead. Beat the boy’s
face to a jelly. Kick in a few ribs for good measure. Make a thorough
job of it. You see, I know something of the river-boat way. But when you
are done with _that_, Messrs. Speer and Tupper, you shall have some
little entertainment at my expense, I promise you.”

There was a menace in the inflection.

“By the Lord, sir, I’m master on this vessel,” Captain Speer at length
found his tongue. “If you don’t like this, come down and take a hand.”

“Now speaks the doughty mariner,” Barreau laughed mockingly. “I shall
take a hand without troubling to come down, believe me. Colonel Colt
shall arbitrate for us. If _that_ is to your liking I am at your
service, Captain Speer.”

“Another cowardly blow,” cried the girl, her dainty face flushing, “and
my father shall see that you captain no more boats for the Benton and
St. Louis Company—you barbarian. I promise you that for penalty,
whatever Mr. Barreau sees fit to do.”

Whether the threat against his position carried weight, or if he simply
had no hankering for an encountering with the cool individual on the
upper deck, I do not know; but, at any rate, Captain Speer saw fit to
sheath his claws at this juncture.

“Git t’ hell out o’ here, you,” he grunted, under his breath. And I made
haste to “git.”

Looking back, I saw Tupper and Speer striding aft. Above, the girl stood
by the rail, tucking in the flying locks with graceful movements of her
hands. Barreau was staring after the retreating pair, smiling
sardonically over a cigarette.

Later, I learned from Bilk that Miss Montell was the fur-merchant’s
daughter, and straightway I forgave the portly one any grievance I held
against him. But from none of the crew could I learn aught of Barreau.
Nor did I see him again, except at ship-length. Like the girl, he kept
close to his cabin and the passengers’ saloon—terra incognita to such
lowly ones as I. I was grateful, even at a distance, for between them
they had saved me a thumping—a thumping which I had reason to believe
was merely postponed.

The _Moon_ was now well into Dakota. Steadily she forged up the turbid
river, thrumming past Pierre, and, farther on, Standing Rock
reservation. At Bismark we made a brief stop. Then we turned The Great
Bend and plunged into the Bad Lands. Through this gashed and distorted
country the _Moon_ plowed along an ever-narrowing channel. From her deck
I had my first glimpse of the buffalo, already doomed to extinction.
Wild cattle and deer scuttled back up the fearful slopes at our
approach, or vanished into the yawning canyons. Unaccustomed to that
altitude, I marveled at the clarity of the atmosphere, the wonderful
stillness of the land. The high banks that shut us in slanted away like
paint-daubed walls, what of the vari-colored strata. The ridges back of
them were twisted and notched by ancient geologic contortions, washed by
countless rains and bleached by unnumbered centuries of sun—a strange
jumble of earth and rocks and stunted trees; a place to breed
superstitious fears, and warp the soul of a man with loneliness.

In time the _Moon_ left this monstrosity of landscape behind, emerging
upon a more wholesome land. Grassy bottoms spread on either side the
river, and the upper levels ran back in a vast unbroken sweep, the true
prairie. And presently we swept around a bend into view of a cluster of
houses lining the north shore, and the _Moon’s_ whistle outdid all
previous efforts in the way of ungodly sound. Twenty minutes later she
was rubbing softly against a low wharf, her passengers were disembarked,
and the back-breaking task of unloading cargo began.



CHAPTER IV—A FORTHRIGHT FIGHTING-MAN


In due time the foodstuffs and other goods were unloaded, and the _Moon_
began to take on her return cargo of buffalo hides and sundry bundles of
furs, the harvest of the past winter’s hunting and the spring trade. Had
it been left to our loud-mouthed captain there would have been no
cessation of labor until the last pelt was stowed; he would have worked
us twenty-four hours to the day. But Benton was not St. Louis, and the
men who loaded ship were of a different calibre from the stevedores at
the River City. A certain number of hours would they work, and no
longer, though the _Moon_ rotted at her slip. So we of the regular crew
had a breathing spell as sundown approached. And the first spare time at
my command I used to write a letter to Bolton, detailing my
misadventures. This I posted, so that in case anything kept me from
returning on the _Moon_, he would at least know whither I had gone and
how I had fared.

It took two days to unload. The evening of the third day Bilk and I
stole away from the boat and went uptown. There was not much of it, to
be sure, but what little there was lacked nothing in the way of life and
color. One could see any sort of costume, from sober broadcloth and fine
linen to the rainbow garb of a blanket Indian. Even the long-haired
frontiersman sacred to fiction was represented by a specimen or two.
Altogether it was a motley, high-spirited crowd that we mixed with that
night. Of the quieter residential portion of Benton I saw nothing, that
time. My way, guided thereto by Bilk, was down the main street, where
lights shone and glasses clinked merrily; into divers places where
ancient pianos tinkled dance music. Drink and dance and gamble, that was
the night life of the town. Wherever we went, wherever any man went, up
and down the length of that one garish street, he could get a run for
his money, if he had money to spend. In every saloon and dance hall the
knights of farobank and draw poker held tourney on the field of green
cloth. It was all very new and strange and fascinating to me.

Bilk stood treat in one of the saloons, and after we had emptied our
glasses we stepped across the room to where a knot of men were watching
an unkempt individual buck a roulette wheel with twenty-dollar gold
pieces in lieu of chips. He had a dirty felt hat on the table before
him, the crown of it half full of gold and silver, and he was scattering
the double eagles two and three on a number. It was heavy play, I
thought, but the dealer spun the little white ball and called the number
and color in a bored sort of manner. The buffalo-runner lost half a
dozen bets, and then all at once he caught the double O with three
twenty-dollar coins resting on it. I gasped. Twenty-one hundred dollars
in fifteen seconds! When the dealer passed over the stacks of gold, the
unkempt one opened his mouth for the first time.

“How much’ll yuh turn for?” he asked.

The dealer jerked his thumb upward. “We’ll take the roof off,” he
answered carelessly, “if yuh want to play ’em that high.”

The buffalo-runner grinned and deliberately set about placing handfuls
of coin here and there on the board. And while I stood there wholly
engrossed, eagerly watching the ivory ball in its circular race, some
one grabbed me by the shoulders and hurled me unceremoniously out the
door. Once outside and free of that powerful grip, I turned and beheld
Tupper the red-whiskered, very drunk and very angry, flourishing a
pistol and shouting vile epithets at me.

“Git back t’ the _Moon_, yuh —— son of a sea-cook! I’ll jerk an arm off
yuh an’ beat yuh t’ death with the bloody end of it, if yuh show up here
again. Scoot!”

Naturally, I “scooted,” Mr. Tupper meanwhile emphasizing his threats by
sending a bullet or two skyward. I wondered, at the time, why no peace
officer appeared to put a quietus on this manifestation of exuberance,
but later in the game I learned that in frontier towns the popping of a
pistol was regarded as one of the accessories of a properly joyful mood,
men handled their guns to make a noise, a la the small boy with a bunch
of holiday firecrackers. One could burn powder with impunity, so long as
he had due care for innocent bystanders.

Of Bilk I saw no more, for a while. Thinking that since Tupper’s
hostility had been directed at me, Bilk might have concluded to keep out
of it, and see Benton by himself, I went on to the boat and curled up on
a bale of buffalo hides, to sit a while in the moonlight and the
pleasant night air before bedding down in the vile hole where we of the
roustabout fraternity were permitted to rest o’ nights. An hour or so I
sat there, and about the time I began to think of turning in, a figure
came slouching up the wharf and aboard. The glare of a deck light showed
me that it was Bilk. I called to him, and when he came a little nearer I
saw further that he, too, had met with rough usage; for his face was
bruised and his lips cut and swollen.

“Aw, that dam’ mate!” he said, in answer to my questioning. “He gits on
a razoo like this every once in a while. Yuh was lucky he just throwed
yuh out. The son of a gun nailed me after that an’ like t’ beat m’ head
off. He’s tearin’ drunk an’ plumb on the fight. Chances is he’ll come
down here before mornin’ an’ want t’ lick the captain, the cook, an’ the
whole blame crew.”

“Somebody ought to take an axe to him,” I suggested bitterly.

“Yuh betche. That’s what he needs,” Bilk agreed. “I’ve heard tell about
him gettin’ on these fightin’ drunks, but this here’s the first time he
ever got t’ me. Yuh wait. I’ll git him some uh these times for this.”
And Bilk went below, muttering dark threats.

I followed shortly, and rolled in. There was no disturbance during the
night, and when we stood by for the loading after breakfast Tupper was
on hand, a trifle surlier than usual, more or less red about the eyes,
but otherwise showing no signs of his carouse. All that day we labored.
Again at eventide part of the crew sallied uptown. Before ten o’clock
all of them were back, one or two badly damaged about the face, and one
and all filled with tales of the mate’s pugnacious mood.

“He sez, by the great horn spoon, he’ll bust the head of ary
hide-slingin’ wharf-rat that sticks his nose up the main street. He
wants the whole town t’ himself, the blamed hog!” one indignantly
declared; and from what I’d seen of Tupper I could very well believe
that he would have it to himself so far as the crew of the _Moon_ was
concerned.

The next morning found Mr. Tupper still on deck. Evidently a steady diet
of strong whisky and rough-and-tumble fighting agreed with his peculiar
constitution. That night we were all but done; two hours’ work in the
morning would put the _Moon_ in shape for the down-river journey. And
when evening fell I took a notion to walk up and down the streets of
Benton once more. It may have been that the prospect of getting to St.
Louis in the near future made me desire to flaunt my independence in the
face of the mate. Anyway, without stopping to make a critical analysis
of motives, I slipped away from the _Moon_ when dark closed in. The
engineer came aboard a minute before I left, and I heard him call to his
assistant that Tupper was a sheet and a half in the wind, and still
wearing his fighting-clothes. But I took no thought of turning back.

Right up the main street I marched, venturing into one saloon after
another without mishap. I felt quite elated, like a small boy playing
“hookey” from school. And when, in the course of my prowling about, I
ran into a half dozen hilarious cowpunchers I clean forgot Mr. Tupper
and the unkind things he had promised to do to me.

The camp of these cattlemen, I gathered from their talk, was on the
divide that loomed to the north of Benton, and after the manner of their
kind they were “taking in the town” for the first time in many weeks.
Wherefore, they were thirsty and noisy, and insistent that everybody
should drink and be joyful. To one of them, a youngster near my own age,
slim, sinewy, picturesque in his hair-faced chaps and high-heeled boots,
I talked a little, but it was a hit-and-miss conversation, by reason of
the general uproar, and the rapidity with which drinks came. I was all
for information, and in his free-and-easy way he shed beams of light
upon my black ignorance of range affairs. But alas! a discordant element
burst rudely in upon our talk-_fiesta_. Tupper stalked in from the
street, and chance decreed that his roving, belligerent eye should
single me out of the crowd. I was leaning against a disreputable
billiard table, at the time, and straight for me he came, not saying a
word, but squinting up his little, pig eyes in a manner that boded ill.

I didn’t move. Though my heart flopped like a new-landed trout, I
couldn’t quite bring myself to slink away. Beaten and bluffed and cowed
as I had been for the past two weeks, I hadn’t quite lost the power to
resent, and though I shrank from the weight of Tupper’s ungodly fists I
shrank more from absolute flight. Something of the atmosphere of the
ranges had crept into me that evening. I did not know what I was about
to do, except that I was not going to run away from any red-whiskered
brute from St. Louis or any other section of the globe.

He came up close to me, stopped, and regarded me a moment, as if amazed
to see me standing there and making no move to go. And then with a quick
hunch of his shoulders he swung a dirty fist for my jaw. But that time I
fooled Mr. Tupper by sidestepping; I was watching him, and he was a bit
oversure. Again he struck out, first with one hand and then the other.
This time one of the blows landed, glancingly. His red, ugly countenance
lurching toward me, his whisky-sodden breath in my face was more than I
could stand; and when that vicious swing grazed my chin as I backed
away, I ducked under his arm and smashed him on his reviling mouth.

It almost paid me for all the abuse I’d taken off him, that one good
blow. The backward roll of his head, the quick spurt of blood where my
knuckles split his lip, sent a quiver of joy over me. Had he been of the
bigness of a house and equipped with two pair of fists I would gladly
have fought him after that one punch. It showed me that I could hurt
him. It gave me a hungry craving for more. I wanted to beat his ugly
little eyes, his squat, round-nostriled nose, and his whisky-guzzling
mouth into indistinguishable pulp.

But it was new business to me, and so instead of keeping at him hammer
and tongs till he was down and out, I waited for him to rush me again.
Wherein I made a sad mistake. If I had battered him down then and
there—if—if! At any rate, he did come with a rush, and he came fortified
with a wide knowledge of fist tactics to protect him from another such
blow as I had dealt him. He fought me halfway across the room, and had
me bleeding like a stuck pig before I connected with him again. But
eventually one of my wild swings slipped through his guard, and jolted
his head backward; the little bloodshot eyes of him blinked with the jar
of it. And again I made a mistake. Instead of standing off and hammering
him with clean straight punches, I rushed to close quarters. Half crazed
with pain and anger I stepped in, swinging short right and left blows
for his wabbling head, and so came within the sweep of his great arms.

He clinched, and in his grip I was next thing to helpless. One thing
only could I do, and that was to butt him in the face with my head—which
kindly office I performed to the best of my ability, until he jammed me
hard against the billiard table and bent me backward till I felt my
bones crack. And then with his thumb he deliberately set about gouging
out one of my eyes.

I can feel it yet, the fierce pain and the horrible fear that overtook
me when he jabbed at my eye-ball. I don’t know how I broke his hold. I
only recollect that, half-blinded, hot searing pangs shooting along my
optic nerve, I found myself free of him. And as I backed away from his
outstretched paws my hand, sweeping along the billiard table, met and
closed upon a hard, round object. With all the strength that was in me I
flung it straight at his head. He went to the floor with a neat,
circular depression in his forehead, just over the left eye.

There was a hush in the saloon. One of the cattlemen stooped over him.

“_Sangre de Cristo!_” he laughed. “A billiard ball sure beats a
six-shooter for quick action. I’ll bet he was dead when he hit the
floor.”



CHAPTER V—THE RELATIVE MERITS OF THE FRYING-PAN AND THE FIRE


They crowded close, a little ring of curious faces, about me and the
dead man on the floor, and as a babel of talk uprose a tall, lean man
pushed his way into the circle, Captain Speer of the _Moon_ at his
heels.

“I guess I’ll have to take you in just for luck,” the stranger said to
me. “I’m town marshal. This killin’ business has got t’ stop.”

He took me by the arm, and as he did so the cowpuncher who had looked
down at Tupper stepped in between us, breaking the marshal’s hold.

“Not this time, Bax,” he said softly. “Play fair or keep out uh the
game. Yuh stay mighty close in your hole when a gun-fighter hits the
town, and I’ll be damned if you build up your reputation by arrestin’ a
kid. This red-muzzler came in huntin’ trouble, and he found it. It was
on the square, and yuh ain’t goin’ to put nobody in your stinkin’
calaboose—not to-night. You and me don’t hitch on _that_ proposition.”

For a second or two it seemed as if there might be another clash. Behind
the two a space cleared at the first words, and I noticed more than one
cowpuncher hitch his gun-belt forward. For myself, I was too dazed to
realize the exact turn of affairs, and I cared less. Tupper, at least,
would trouble me no more, and for that I was truly glad. But there was
no mix-up, nor even a harsh word. The marshal weakened. If he had
intended to take me he changed his mind after a brief glance at the
faces of the men who were watching him with silent intentness.

“If that’s the way yuh feel about it, all right,” he said—with an
indifference that his flushed face belied. He turned on his heel and
walked out, Captain Speer following.

“Yuh bet it’s all right,” the cowpuncher flung after him derisively.

Then to me: “Throw a jolt uh Bourbon into yuh, kid, and you’ll feel
better. Yuh made a good fight. But let me tell yuh somethin’. Go heeled.
And when one uh these rough-necked fist-fighters jumps yuh, ventilate
him. Show your claws a time or two, and these would-be bad actors’ll
leave yuh strictly alone. Say, Mr. Bar-slave let’s have one _pronto_.”

Three or four of them picked up the carcass of the _Moon’s_ mate and
lugged it unceremoniously out to a rear room, and then the crowd lined
up at the bar, the play at the wheel went on, the men at the faro-table
who had turned on their stools to watch the fight again began to place
their bets. Life ran too full and strong there to be long disturbed by
the passing of any man.

My self-appointed champion—who, I now discovered, was just drunk enough
to welcome disturbance in any form whatsoever—and the young fellow with
whom I had been speaking before the row, wiped the blood off my face and
doctored the eye that Tupper had come near gouging from its socket. And
while they were thus ministering to me another stockhand clanked in from
the street.

“Say, Matt, yuh sure stirred up somethin’,” he announced. “This the kid
that got action on the St. Louis jasper? Well, there’s goin’ to be a
healthy ruction round here over that, let me tell yuh. Bax is red-eyed
over yuh runnin’ a whizzer on him, and he’s collectin’ a posse to take
both of yuh in. Don’t yuh reckon we better drift for camp, Matt?”

Matt smiled and beckoned to some of the others. “Not by a long shot!” he
drawled. “Whenever old Ed Bax runs me out uh town, it’ll be in the
good-by wagon. I’m goin’ to see that this kid gets a square deal. If Bax
or anybody else wants me let ’em come and get me. Will the rest uh you
fellows stand pat?”

In varying stages of hilarity they crowded about him and profanely
assured him that they would turn Benton inside out and shake the pockets
if he but said the word. In the midst of their chatter the man who had
brought news of the marshal’s action drew closer and lowered his voice.

“Look here, Matt,” he argued, “you’re runnin’ the outfit and you’re a
friend of mine and all that sort of thing, and yuh know that all of
us’ll back any sort of play yuh make. But it looks to me like we can do
better’n to pull off a big fight. I ain’t plumb chicken-hearted, but Bax
is goin’ to come down on us with a bunch uh tin-horn gamblers to help
him out, and if this kid’s in sight he’s goin’ to try and take him. Yuh
sabe? He’s got to make some kind of a bluff at it, or every pilgrim that
comes along’ll run over him. So it’s a cinch that there’ll be more or
less gun-play, and the Circle’ll be shy a man or two when it’s over.”

“They ain’t got the nerve, Dick,” Matt declared confidently.

“It don’t take much nerve to start anything like that,” Dick replied.
“Somebody’ll reach for his gun, and it’ll be off. Now, Bax ain’t goin’
to jump _you_—he’s afraid to. If the kid’s with yuh he’s got to. I move
we stake this kid to a hoss, and let him drift. That lets _him_ out. And
if Bax wants to have it out with yuh on general principles, why, we’ll
see it through.”

“Dick’s right,” one of them put in. “The kid’s got to hit the trail,
anyhow, and he might as well do it right away quick. That’s the main
thing, ain’t it. We started in to help him out, and if we can do it
peaceful, we’ll live longer. Bax won’t tackle us unless he just has to.”

“Yuh got me on the run,” Matt frowned. “I’d just as soon dehorn this Bax
party to-night as any other time. But I see where the kid better move
out, all right. You pilot him, Wall, and catch up one uh them extra
hosses, and stake him to that saddle Musky left—I’ll fix it with old
Musk when he comes back. He can ride my hoss to camp.”

It was all arranged offhand in less time than I have taken to tell of
it, and I was hustled out to where a row of cow-ponies patiently awaited
the pleasure of their hard-riding masters. For aught these sons of the
plains knew I was a purely worthless bit of human driftwood. But I don’t
think they gave a thought to the matter. There was only one thing to be
done, in their estimation, and they proceeded to do it without
consulting me or doing very much talking about it themselves. So very
shortly I found myself straddle of the Circle foreman’s horse and
jogging out of Benton. Beside me, young Wall rode silently until we
reached the top of the long hill that slopes to the town. Then he shook
his horse into a lope, and broke into cheerful whistling.

I, however, was far short of the whistling mood. The thing I should have
done I was afraid to do. Ordinarily, my instinct would have been to face
the music. I was unrepentant for the part I had played in the extinction
of Tupper. Nor would I, if I had calmly weighed the chances for and
against, have felt any fear of consequences before the law. But my
experience with the law, in those days, was a void. That which we do not
understand we usually fear, and that night I was stricken with a swift
fear of the law. I had killed, and there was a penalty. My spirit
revolted at the thought of a jail. Likewise, the quick action of those
Circle cowpunchers made a deep impression on me. If incarceration was so
to be avoided that they were willing to back their deeds with gunpowder,
I wanted no phase of incarceration in my experience. Better the open, an
unknown country, and whatever might befall therein, than to lie in
Benton “calaboose”—which, to my disturbed mind, was a synonym for a
place of vague horrors.

I thought of standing my ground, of taking chances on Bax the marshal
and the Benton jail, until the _Moon_ could reach St. Louis and apprise
Bolton of my need—and then I shuddered at the thought that the thing
might be settled beyond interference before he could make the long river
journey. I had heard and read more or less of hasty trials in the West;
I had killed a man in what seemed to me a barbarous fashion; I did not
know what the authorities, self-constituted or otherwise, might do to
me—and I hadn’t the nerve to stay and find out. If they should hang me,
thought I, I shall be a long time dead. Flight, under these
circumstances, made the strongest appeal to my excited imagination.

Such was the chaotic state of my ideas when Wall pulled up his horse,
and I saw the white glimmer of tents close at hand.

“Night-hawk’s got the bunch over here, I think,” said he. “Seems like I
hear the bells. Anyhow, you stay here and I’ll get yuh a _caballo_ that
can drift.”

He trotted off, leaving me standing by the clear-cut outline of a wagon.
Away off in the semi-dark—for the moon was now risen—I heard a sudden
scurry of hoofs, an accentuated jangling of two or three small bells.
Presently Wall came loping back leading a blaze-faced sorrel horse.

From under the forward end of the wagon he dragged a saddle, a bridle
and a saddle-blanket.

“There,” he said, “there’s a good rig, barrin’ spurs—which yuh won’t
need much. And a good hoss to put it on. Go to it.”

The stock saddle, with its high horn and deep seat, was not so different
from what I’d been used to—except as to weight. The double-cinch
apparatus bothered me a little, but when Wall explained the uses of the
latigo and the manner of its tying, I got my horse saddled properly—the
small imps of uneasy haste spurring me on. Then I swung up to try the
stirrups, and found that I had a restive brute under me. He plunged once
or twice, but I kept his head in the air, and finally straightened him
out. Wall nodded approval.

“I wasn’t dead sure yuh could ride him,” he owned. “But I see you’ve got
him in your sack, and you’ll find him there when it comes to gettin’
over the ground.”

“I’m all ready now, I think,” said I.

“Wait a minute,” Wall laughed. “Don’t rush off. Bax wouldn’t come into
the Circle camp after yuh to-night for two farms in Iowa. Chances are
he’s busy right now figuring a way to get a dead safe whack at Matt
Dunn. Come on over to the cook-tent and get some grub to tie on your
saddle. You’ll need it.”

By the light of a candle he ransacked the grub boxes on the tail end of
the cook-wagon. A loaf of bread, some fresh-made biscuits, and a big
piece of boiled beef, together with a trifle of pepper and salt this
light-hearted, capable youngster wrapped in a bit of burlap and tied
behind the cantle of my saddle. And while he munched a piece of beef
himself, he gave me explicit directions as to my course.

“Once yuh get over into the MacLeod country,” he concluded, “you’ll be
all right. Nobody’ll care a cuss who yuh are nor where yuh come from, so
long as yuh behave yourself. This red hoss hasn’t got the Circle brand,
though he belongs to the outfit, so they won’t ask no fool questions
about him. Yuh ought to pick up a job with some uh them Canadian layouts
pretty easy.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” he exclaimed, when I was again about to mount, and
he ran over to an outspread canvas-covered bed. He fumbled among the
tumbled quilts a moment and came back to me carrying a broad
cartridge-belt, on which a bone-handled Colt swung in its leathern
scabbard.

“I pretty near forgot this,” he chuckled. “Yuh ain’t heeled, and Lord
knows yuh need to be at this stage uh the game. Say, how are yuh off for
coin?”

“Man alive!” I cried—and I meant it, “you’ve done more for me now than I
can repay in a thousand years. I don’t need money.”

“Oh, yes, yuh do,” he returned, unruffled. “A dollar or two’ll come
mighty handy when yuh hit MacLeod, or wherever yuh land. I ain’t goin’
to make yuh rich. Here, and good luck to yuh.”

He pressed a ten-dollar gold piece upon me. Then we shook hands as
brothers at parting, and I rode out of the Circle camp on a
high-stepping horse, with the Big Dipper and the North Star to guide me
to the Canada line.



CHAPTER VI—SLOWFOOT GEORGE


I retain some vivid impressions of that night ride. A mile or two from
the Circle tents I crossed the Teton River, then just receding from the
June rise, and near swimming deep. After that I came out upon a great
spread of bench-land, dotted with silent prairie-dog towns. Here and
there a lone butte rose pinnacle-like out of the flatness. In all my
short life I had never known what it was to be beyond sound of a human
voice, to be utterly alone. That night was my first taste of it, and to
my unaccustomed ears the patter of my horse’s hoofs seemed to be echoing
up from a sounding-board, and the jingle of the bit chains rang like a
bell, so profound was the quiet. I know of nothing that compares with
the plains for pure loneliness, unless it be the deserted streets of a
city at four in the morning—or the hushed, ghostly woods of the North,
which I was yet to know. Each hollow into which I dipped reeked of
mysterious possibilities. Every moon-bathed rise of land gave me a vague
feeling that something sinister, some incomprehensible evil, lay in wait
upon the farther side. Whatever of superstition lay dormant in my
make-up was all agog that night; my environment was having its will of
me. I know now that my nerves were all a-jangle. But what would you? The
dark brings its subtle, threatening atmosphere to bear on braver men
than I. For aught I knew there might be a price on my head. Certainly I
was a fugitive, and flight breeds groundless, unreasoning fears.

Bearing a little west of the North Star, I kept the red horse at a
steady jog, and when the night was far spent and my bones aching from
the ride I came to another river—the Marias—which Wall had told me I
must cross. Following his directions, a half-hour’s journey upstream
brought me upon a trail; a few wagon-tracks that I near overlooked. This
led to a ford, or what may once have been a ford. It no longer merited
the term, for I got well soaked in the deep, swift stream. Red carried
me through, however, and when I gained the farther bank of the Marias
Valley a faint reddish glow was creeping up in the east. In a little
while it was broad day.

Then I halted for the first time. My mettlesome steed I picketed
carefully, ate a little of the biscuits and boiled beef, and lay down to
sleep in a grassy hollow, too tired to care whether Bax was hard on my
trail or not. The sunlight had given me a fresh access of courage, I
think—that and the heady air of those crisp morning hours. My
difficulties began to take on some of the aspects of an adventure. Once
in the Territories, with none to hound me, I could apprise Bolton and he
would forward money to get me home. That was all I needed. And if I
could not manage to eke out a living in the meantime I was not the son
of my father. I fell asleep with a wistful eye on three blue spires that
broke the smooth sweep of the skyline to the northward—the Sweet Grass
Hills, touching on the Canadian boundary, if I remembered rightly what
Wall had said.

The hot noon sun beating on my unprotected face roused me at last. It
was near midday. I had no liking for further moonlight travel, so I
saddled up and rode on, thinking to get somewhere near the Hills by
dusk, and camp there for the night. I was now over my first fear of
being followed; but, oh, my hearers, I was stiff and sore! A forty or
fifty mile jaunt is not much to a seasoned rider—but I lacked seasoning;
however, I was due to get it.

A little before sundown I rode into the long shadow of West Butte, in
rare good humor with myself despite the ache in my legs, for by grace of
my good red horse I had covered a wonderful stretch that afternoon, and
my nag was yet stepping out lightly. On either hand loomed the rugged
pyramids of the Sweet Grass—which in truth are not hills at all, but
three boulder-strewn, pine-clad mountains rising abruptly out of a
rolling plain. The breaks of Milk River, in its over-the-border curve,
showed plainly in the distance. I was nearing the City of Refuge.

There in that shadow-darkened notch between the lofty pinnacles I came
to a new fork in the Trouble Trail. I did not know it then, but later I
could not gainsay the fact. And the mile-post that directed my uncertain
steps was merely a strain of the devil in the blaze-faced sorrel I
bestrode. Had he been of a less turbulent spirit I doubt much if I
should ever have fallen in with Slowfoot George.

It happened very simply. Ambling along with eyes for little but the wild
land that surrounded, with reins held carelessly in lax fingers, I was
an easy victim. As before remarked, I can put forward no better
explanation than a streak of “cussedness” in my red mount. Suffice it to
relate, that all at once I found my steed performing a series of
diabolic evolutions, and in some mysterious manner he and I parted
company in a final burst of rapid-fire contortions. I have since heard
and read much of the Western horse and his unique method of unseating a
rider, but never yet have I seen justice done the subject. Nor shall I
descant long on such an unpleasant theme. Let me simply record the fact
that I came to earth ungracefully, with a jarring shock, much as an
importunate suitor might be presumed to descend the front steps of his
inamorata’s home, when assisted therefrom by the paternal toe. And when
I sat up, a freshly-bruised and crestfallen youth, it was to behold Red
clattering over a little hillock, head up, stirrups swinging wide. He
seemed in hot haste. Like a fool I had knotted the reins together for
easier holding; with them looped upon his neck he felt as much at
liberty as though stripped clean of riding-gear.

It looked like a dubious prospect. Upon second thought I decided that it
could easily have been worse. A broken leg, say, would have been a
choice complication. My bones, however, remained intact. So I sought
about in the grass for the pistol that had been jolted from its place
during the upheaval, and when I found it betook myself upon the way my
erratic nag had gone.

It was no difficult matter for me to arrive at the conclusion that I was
in a fair way to go into the Northwest afoot—should I be lucky enough to
arrive at all. Red seemed to have gone into hiding. At least, he
remained unseen, though I ascended divers little eminences and stared my
hardest, realizing something of the hopelessness of my quest even while
I stared. That Sweet Grass country is monstrously deceptive to the
unsophisticated. Overlooking it from a little height one thinks he sees
immense areas of gently undulating plain; and he sees truly. But when he
comes to traverse this smooth sea of land that ripples away to a far
skyline, it is a horse of another color, I assure you. He has not taken
thought of what tricks the clear air and the great spaces have played
with his perspective. The difference between looking over fifty miles of
grassland and crossing the same is the difference between viewing a
stretch of salt water from a convenient point ashore and being out in a
two-oared skiff bucking the sway-backed rollers that heave up from the
sea.

So with the plains: that portion of which I speak. Distance smoothed its
native ruggedness, glossed over its facial wrinkles, so to say. The
illusion became at once apparent when one moved toward any given point.
The negligible creases developed into deep coulees, the gentle
undulations proved long sharp-pitched divides. Creeks, flood-worn
serpentine water-courses, surprised one in unexpected places.

I had not noticed these things particularly while I rode. Now, as I
tramped across country, persuading myself that over each succeeding hill
I should find my light-footed sorrel horse meekly awaiting me, it seemed
that I was always either climbing up or sliding down. I found myself
deep in an abstract problem as I plodded—trying to strike a balance
between the illusory level effect and stern topographical realities.
Presently I gave that up, and came back to concrete facts. Whereupon,
being very tired and stiff from a longer ride than I had ever taken
before, and correspondingly ill-tempered, I damned the red horse for
bucking me off and myself for permitting any beast of the field to serve
me so, and then sat down upon the peak of a low hill to reflect where
and how I should come by my supper.

A smart breeze frolicked up from that quarter where the disappearing sun
cast a bloodshot haze over a few tumbled clouds. This, I daresay,
muffled sounds behind me to some extent. At any rate, I was startled out
of my cogitations by a voice close by—a drawly utterance which evoked a
sudden vision of a girl with wind-raveled hair, and a lean, dark-faced
man leaning over a deck railing on the _Moon_.

“Magnificent outlook, isn’t it?”

Notwithstanding the surprise of finding him at my elbow in such
unexpected fashion, I faced about with tolerable calmness. That
intuitive flash had been no false harbinger, for it was Barreau sure
enough. The angular visage of him was not to be confounded with that of
any casual stranger, even though his habiliments were no longer
broadcloth and its concomitants of linen and polished shoes. Instead, a
gray Stetson topped his head, and he was gloved and booted like a
cowboy. Lest it be thought that his plight was twin to my own, I will
say that he looked down upon me from the back of a horse as black as
midnight, a long-geared brute with a curved neck and a rolling eye. Best
of all, at the end of a lariat Barreau held my own red horse.

“That,” said I, “depends on how you look at it. I’ll admit that the
outlook is fine—since you have brought me back my runaway horse.”

“I meant _that_,” he nodded to the glowing horizon. “But I daresay a man
gets little pleasure out of a red sky when he is set afoot in a
horseless land. It will pay you, my friend, to keep your horse between
your legs hereafter.”

“He threw me,” I confessed. “Where did you catch him? And how did you
find me?”

“I thought he had slipped his pack, by the tied-up reins,” said Barreau.
“As for catching him and finding you, that was an easy matter. He ran
fairly into me, and I had only to look about for a man walking.”

“Well,” I returned, taking my sorrel by the rope, “I’m properly grateful
for your help. And I have another matter to thank you for, if I am not
badly mistaken.”

He made a slight gesture of deprecation. “Never mind that,” said he. His
attitude was no encouragement to profuse thanks, if I had contemplated
such.

I turned then to inspect my saddle, and found fresh cause for
perplexity. By some means my supply of bread and beef had been shaken
from its fastening. The bit of sack hung slack in the strings, but the
food was gone. He looked down inquiringly, at my exclamation.

“More of my luck,” said I, and explained.

“Might I ask,” said he, after a moment of thoughtful scrutiny, “where
you are bound for?”

“It’s no secret,” I replied. “I’m for the MacLeod country; over the
line.”

“Then you may as well ride with me this evening,” he invited. “It is
only a few miles to the Sanders ranch; you will be that much farther on
your way. I can vouch for their hospitality.”

I hesitated, for obvious reasons. He smiled, as if he read my mind. And
all in a breath I yielded to some subtle confidence-compelling quality
of the man, and blurted out my story; the killing of Tupper, that is,
and how the Circle men had aided me.

“I guessed at something of the sort,” he remarked. “You are new at the
game, and you bear the ear-marks of a man on the dodge. We are a rowdy
lot out here sometimes, and we can’t always settle our disputes by word
of mouth; so that I think you will find most of us inclined to look
lightly on what seems to you a serious affair indeed. Tupper had it in
store for him; Speer too, for all of that, and many another brute on
those river craft. You haven’t much to worry about. Very likely Benton
has forgotten the thing by now—unless Bax and Matt Dunn’s men locked
horns over it. Of course there is the chance that the Benton and St.
Louis Company may hound you for killing one of their officers. But
there’s no fear of their coming to Sanders’ after you—not to-night; and
to-morrow, and all the other to-morrows, you can take things as they
come. That’s the best philosophy for the plains.”

He swung a half-mile to the east, and picked up a pack-horse he had left
when he took after my mount. Thereafter we loped north in the falling
dusk, Barreau riding mute after his long speech, and I, perforce,
following his example. At length we drew up at the ranch, a vague huddle
of low buildings set in the bend of a creek. Barreau appeared to be
quite familiar with the place. Even in the gloom he went straight to the
bars of a small, round corral. In this we tied our horses, throwing them
hay from a new-made stack close by. Then he led the way to a lighted
cabin.

Barreau pushed open the door and walked in without ceremony. Two men
were in the room; one lying upon a bunk, the other sitting with his
spurred heels on the corner of a table. Each of them looked up at my
companion, and both in one breath declared:

“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Slowfoot!”

After that there was more or less desultory talk, mostly impersonal—no
questions pertinent to myself troubled the tongues of either man. One
built a fire and cooked us a hot supper. The other made down a bed in
one corner of the cabin, and upon this, at the close of the meal Barreau
and I lay down to rest.

A jolt in the ribs and the flash of a light in my eyes brought me to a
sitting posture later in the night. Sleep-heavy, what of the strenuous
events that had gone before, it took me a full half-minute to get my
bearings. And then I saw that three men in scarlet jackets held the two
Sanders under their guns, while Barreau stood backed against the cabin
wall with his hands held above his head. Even so it seemed to me that he
was regarding the whole proceeding with a distinct curl to his lip.

“Come alive now, old chap, and don’t cut up rusty—it won’t do a bit o’
good,” one of these oddly dressed strangers was admonishing; and it
dawned upon me that I, too, was included in the threatening sweep of
their firearms. “Get into your clothes, old chap.”

It is astonishing—afterward—how much and how quickly one can reflect in
a few fleeting seconds. A multitude of ideas swarmed in my brain. Plans
to resist, to escape, half formed and were as instantaneously discarded.
Among the jumble it occurred to me that I could scarcely be wanted for
that Benton affair—my capture could scarcely be the cause of such a
display. No, thought I, there must be more to it than that. Otherwise,
Barreau and the two Sanders would not have been meddled with. Of course,
I did not come to this conclusion of deliberate thought; it was more of
an impression, perhaps I should say intuition, and yet I seemed to have
viewed the odd circumstance from every angle in the brief time it took
me to lay hold of my clothes. The queer sardonic expression lingered
about Barreau’s lips all the while I dressed.

Presently I was clothed. Then the red-coated men mustered the four of us
outside, by the light of a lantern. And two of them stood by the doorway
and snapped a pair of handcuffs about the wrists of each of us as we
passed out.

“Now,” said one of them, “you Sanders chaps know what horses you’d care
to ride, and what stock Slowfoot George has here. So one of you can come
to the stable wi’ me and saddle up.”

He took the youngest man, and went trailing him up in the uncertain
light till both of them were utterly gone. After something of a wait
they appeared, leading Barreau’s horse and mine and two others. In the
interim I had had time to count noses. There was a man apiece for the
four of us, and one off behind the cabin holding the raiders’
saddlestock. We stood there like so many pieces of uncouth statuary, no
one seeming to have any inclination for talk, until the saddled horses
came up. Then both the Sanders found their tongues in behalf of me.

“Look a-here, sergeant,” said the one, “yuh ain’t got any business over
here, and yuh know it. Even if yuh did, this kid don’t belong in the
crowd. You’re after us and yuh got us, but you’ve no call to meddle with
him.”

“That’s right,” his brother put in. “I don’t know him from Adam. He just
drifted in and camped overnight at the ranch.”

“I say y’know, that’s a bit strong,” the sergeant returned. “‘Birds of a
feather,’ y’know. I shan’t take any chances. You’re too hard a lot,
Sanders; you and your friend Slowfoot George.”

Thus he left no room for argument; and in a few minutes the four of us
were in the saddle and on the move, a Mounted Policeman jogging at the
elbow of each man.

At the end of half an hour’s progress, as we crossed a fairly level
stretch of plain, we came to a little cairn of rocks; and when we had
passed it the sergeant pulled up his horse and faced about. The moon was
up, and the earth and the cairn and even our features stood out clear in
the silvery glow.

“John Sanders, Walter Sanders, George Brown alias Slowfoot George, and
one John Doe, in the Queen’s name I arrest you,” he addressed us
perfunctorily.

A trooper snickered, and Barreau laughed out loud.

“Routine—routine and red tape, even in this rotten deal,” I heard
Slowfoot murmur, when his laugh hushed. And on the other side of me Walt
Sanders raised in his stirrups and cried hotly:

“You dirty dogs! Some day I’ll make yuh damned sorry yuh didn’t keep
your own side of the line to-night.”

Of this the sergeant took no notice. He shook his horse into a trot, and
prisoners and guard elbow to elbow, we moved on.



CHAPTER VII—THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL


“Destiny lurks in obscure places and emerges therefrom to seize upon us
unawares.”

Barreau launched this epigrammatic sentence in the profound quiet of a
cell in the MacLeod guardhouse. For that is the pass we came to: a six
by eight housing of stout planks for the pair of us, food of indifferent
quality in none too generous rations, and the keen eye of an armed guard
in the background. For two days we had brooded in this cage, like any
common felons.

Of the intervening time there is nothing worthy of chronicling. During
the time it took Sergeant Hubbel and his troopers to bring us in we
rode, ate, slept, and rode again, and little else befell. If Barreau and
the two Sanders worried over the outcome, if they indulged any thought
of escape, or laid plans to that end, they kept these things to
themselves. I perforce, did likewise. Altogether, we were a company of
few words. And one evening, when dusk was closing in, the journey ended,
and we lay down to sleep with barred doors and windows between us and
other men.

Little as we spoke I gathered stray odds and ends of the affair, and
pieced them as best I could. Most of it came from the troopers. After
all, the thing was simple enough. At that time the sale of liquor was
strictly prohibited in the Canadian Territories, and naturally whisky
was at a premium. Thus the Sanders ranch, lying just across the American
line, furnished an ideal base of operations for men inclined to gather
in the shekels of the thirsty. Proof of the traffic in contraband whisky
lay ready for use, at least so the Policemen had it—but they could never
catch the wily Sanders brothers on the right side of the boundary. So
with a fine disregard for all but the object to be gained, they violated
an international technicality. The result justified the raid; that is,
from the Mounted Police point of view. My arrest followed logically,
from the company I was in. Barreau’s connection, however, was a little
beyond me. “Slowfoot George,” as they called him, came in for cautious
handling. Not once were his wrists free of the steel bands till the
guardhouse door closed upon him. From this, and certain pointed remarks
that I failed to catch in their entirety, I conceived the idea that he
was wanted for worse than whisky-running. But like the other two,
Barreau neither denied nor affirmed. Once the sergeant tried to draw him
out and the curl of his lip and a caustic word or two cut short the
Policeman’s effort.

Our “apartment” was singularly free from furniture. A wide plank ranged
on either side, and a few not overclean quilts served for a bed. There
was no room for more in that vile box. I had managed to get paper and a
pen from the guard, and was curled up on my plank setting forth in a
letter to Bolton all the unbelievable things that had occurred, when
Barreau uttered his observation anent the workings of Destiny. Something
in the way he spoke caused me to look up, and I saw that he was looking
fixedly out into the guard-room through the grated opening in our cell
door. There was none too much light, but with what there was I made out
a paleness of face and a compression of his lips that were strangely at
odds with his general bearing.

“What now?” I asked, wondering at the sudden change in him.

“Something I had hoped to be spared,” he said under his breath; more to
himself than to me. Then he turned his eyes from the little window, drew
up his knees till his fingers locked before them, and so sat hunched
against the wall. Wholly absorbed in my letter-writing I had heard
nothing out of the common. Now I distinguished voices, the deep tones of
a man and following that the clear treble of a woman. During a brief
interval of quiet she laughed, and after that I heard footsteps coming
toward the row, out of which our cell faced.

Presently the shadow of them darkened the little window in our door. The
red coat of the guard passed. Barreau shifted uneasily. I, too, leaned
forward listening to the light footfall drawing near, for I had a vivid
recollection of that voice—or one that was its twin. It did not seem
strange that she should be there; Benton is not so far from MacLeod in
that land of great distances. And my recollection was not at fault. An
instant later her small, elfish face bent to the opening and she peered
in on us—as one who views caged beasts of the jungle.

But there was none of the human fear of wild things in her attitude.

“So,” she said coolly, tucking a lock of hair under the same ridiculous
little cap she had worn on the _Moon_, “this is how the Northwest would
have you, is it, Mr. Bar—Mr. Brown. Alas! ‘To what base uses we do
return.’ I cannot say you have my sympathy.”

“If that is the least cruel thing you can say,” Barreau flung back at
her, putting his feet on the floor and resting his hands on the edge of
his seat, “I thank you. But my trail is my own, and I have never yet
asked you to follow in my stumbling footsteps.”

She colored at that, and from where I sat I could see the Police guard
lift his eyebrows inquiringly. But she had other shafts at hand.

“I grant you that,” she replied quickly. “But it is a shock, when one
conceives a man to be something of a _gentleman_; to have some remnant
of the code honorable—then, pah! to find his name a by-word on the
frontier. A murderer! Even descended to common theft and dealings in
contraband whisky. You have a savory record in these parts, I find. How
nicely this chamber fits you, Mr.—ah—what is the euphonious title?
Slowfoot George. Ah, yes. Why the Slowfoot? By the tale of your
successful elusion of the law I should imagine you exceeding fleet of
foot.”

It seemed to me unwomanly and uncalled for, that bitter, scornful
speech; even granting the truth of it, which had not been established in
my mind. But it had a tonic effect on Barreau. The hurt look faded from
his face. His lips parted in the odd, half-scornful, half-amused smile
that was always lurking about his mouth. He did not at once reply. When
he did it was only a crisp sentence or two.

“Let us be done with this,” he said. “There is neither pleasure nor
profit in exchanging insults.”

“Indeed,” she thrust back, “there can be no exchange of insults between
us. Could aught _you_ say insult any honest man or woman? But so be it.
I came merely to convince my eyes that my ears heard truly. It may
tickle your depraved vanity to know that MacLeod is buzzing with your
exploits and capture.”

“That concerns me little,” Barreau returned indifferently.

“Ditto,” she averred, “except that I am right glad to find you stripped
of your sheep’s clothing, little as I expected such a revelation
concerning one who passed for a gentleman. And to think that I might
never have found you out, if my father had permitted me to return from
Benton.”

“Permitted?” Barreau laid inquiring inflection on the word.

“What is it to——” she cut in sharply.

“Your father,” he interrupted deliberately, “is a despicable scoundrel;
a liar and a cheat of the first water.”

“Oh—oh!” she gasped. “This—from _you_.”

“I said, ‘let us be done with this,’ a moment ago,” he reminded her.

She drew back as if he had struck at her, flushing, her under lip
quivering—more from anger than any other emotion, I think. Almost at
once she leaned forward again, glaring straight at Barreau.

“It would be of a piece with your past deeds,” she cried, “if you should
break this flimsy jail and butcher my father and myself while we slept.
Oh, one could expect anything from such as you!” And then she was gone,
the guard striding heavy-footed after her. A puzzled expression crept
over Barreau’s face, blotting out the ironic smile.

“It was a dirty trick of me to speak so,” he muttered, after a little.
“But my God, a man can’t always play the Stoic under the lash. However—I
daresay——” He went off into a profound study, resting his chin in the
palms of his hands. I kept my peace, making aimless marks with my pen.
It was an odd turn of affairs.

“Bob, what did I say about Destiny awhile ago?” he raised his head and
addressed me suddenly. “I will take it back. I am going to take Destiny
by the nape of the neck. Being grilled on the seat of the scornful is
little to my liking. It was a bit of ill-luck that you fell in with me.
I seem to be in a bad boat.”

“Ill-luck for which of us?” I asked. It was the first time he had
sounded the personal note—aside from the evening we were landed in
MacLeod, when he comforted me with the assurance that at the worst I
would spend no more than a few days in the guardhouse.

“For you, of course,” he replied seriously. “My sins are upon my own
head. But it was unfortunate that I should have led you to Sanders’
place the very night picked for a raid. They can have nothing against
you, though; and they’ll let you out fast enough when it comes to a
hearing. Nor, for that matter, are they likely to hang me,
notwithstanding the ugly things folk say. However, I have work to do
which I cannot do lying here. Hence I perceive that I must get out of
here. And I may need your help.”

“How are you going to manage that?” I inquired, gazing with some
astonishment at this man who spoke so coolly and confidently of getting
out of prison. “These walls seem pretty solid, and you can hardly dig
through them with a lone pen-nib. That’s the only implement I see at
hand. And I expect the guard will be after that before I get my letter
done.”

“I don’t know how the thing will be done,” he declared, “but I am surely
going to get out of here pretty _pronto_, as the cowmen have it.”

He settled back and took to staring at the ceiling. I, presently, became
immersed in my letter to Bolton. When it was done I thrust a hand
through the bars of my cell and wig-wagged the Policeman—they were
good-natured souls for the most part, tolerant of their prisoners, and
it broke the grinding monotony to exchange a few words with one under
almost any pretext. Barreau was chary of speech, and the Sanders
brothers were penned beyond my sight. Sheer monotonous silence, I
imagine, would drive even peace-loving men to revolt and commit
desperate deeds when they are cooped within four walls with nothing but
their thoughts for company.

When he came I observed that the guard had been changed since Miss
Montell’s visit. The new man was a lean, sour-faced trooper. To my
surprise he took my letter and then stood peeping in past me to where
Barreau lay on his bunk. After a few seconds he walked away, smiling
queerly. In a minute or so he was back again, taking another squint.
This time Barreau turned over facing the door, and when the trooper
continued his promenade past our cell he got up and stood before the
barred window, completely shutting off my outlook. I could not see, but
I could hear. And by the sound of his booted feet the guard passed and
repassed several times.

After a little he tired of this, it seemed, for I heard him stalking
away to the front of the guardhouse, and immediately thereafter the
creak of a chair as he sat down. Then Barreau sat down on his bunk
again.

“Try this, kid,” he said, and tossed a package of tobacco and cigarette
papers to me. I fell upon the forbidden luxury like a starving man upon
food. He rolled himself one out of material in his hand, and in the
midst of my puffing changed to my side of the cell—it was but a scant
three feet to move—and sat down between me and the door.

“Fate smiles at last,” he whispered. “Blackie passed me in a little
tobacco. And—see, here in my hand.”

I glanced down at what he was snuggling down out of sight between us, a
heavy-bladed knife, a tiny saw, not more than six inches in length, and
a piece of notepaper marked with what my reason told me must be a ground
plan of the very place we were in.

“The tools of my deliverance,” said Barreau in an undertone. “I am for
the blue sky and the sun and the clean, wide prairies once more.”



CHAPTER VIII—BY WAYS THAT WERE DARK


Looking back I marvel at the ridiculous ease with which the thing was
accomplished. Still more do I marvel at my own part in it. Brought up as
I had been, shielded from the ill winds of existence, taught the
perfunctory, conventional standards of behavior that suffice for those
whose lives are lived according to a little-varying plan, I should have
shrunk from further infraction of the law. Indeed it is no more than
could have been expected had I refused absolutely to lend myself to
Barreau’s desperate plan. Conscious that I had done no wrong I might
have been moved to veto an enterprise that imperiled me, to protest
against his drawing me further into his own troublous coil. But I did
nothing of the sort. It did not occur to me. My point of view was no
longer that of the son of a St. Louis gentleman. And the transition was
so complete, so radical, and withal, so much the growth of the past
three weeks, that I was unaware of the change.

I know of no clearer illustration of the power of environment.
Indubitably I should have looked askance at a man who tacitly admitted
himself more or less of a criminal, making no defense, no denial. The
traditions of my class should have kept me aloof, conscious of my own
clean hands. This, I repeat, was what might have been expected of me:
Put to me as an abstract proposition, I would have been very positive of
where I should stand.

But without being conscious of any deviation from my previous concepts
of right and wrong, I found myself all agog to help Slowfoot George
escape. For myself, there was no question of flight. That, we agreed
upon, at the outset. I could gain nothing by putting myself at odds with
Canadian law, for the law itself would free me in its meteing out of
justice. But with him it was different; he admitted the fact. And even
so I found myself making nothing of the admission. He conformed to none
of my vague ideas of the criminal type. In aiding him to be free I
seemed to be freeing myself by proxy, as it were; and how badly I
desired to be quit of the strange tangle that enmeshed me, none but
myself can quite appreciate.

After all, so far as my help was concerned it consisted largely of what
Barreau dryly termed, “moral support.” I acquiesced in the necessity. I
stood on the lookout for interruptions. He did the work.

While he cut with his knife a hole in the floor, so that the point of
the little saw could enter, I stood by the window listening for the
footsteps that would herald a guard’s approach. He worked rapidly, yet
in no apparent haste. He had that faculty of straining every nerve at
what he was about, without seeming to do so; there was no waste energy,
no fluster. And the cutting and sawing speedily bore fruit. So
noiselessly and deftly did he work that in less than half an hour he had
sawn a hole in the floor large enough to admit his body; and the dank
smell of earth long hidden from sunlight struck me when I bent down to
look. Then with a caution that I should watch closely and tap on the
floor with my heel if any of the guard came poking around the cells, he
wriggled through the opening and disappeared.

I leaned against the wall, breathing a bit faster. The hole was cut in a
corner, to the right of the cell door. From the outside it could
scarcely be noticed. But I had wit enough to know that if a trooper
glanced in and missed Barreau the hole would be discovered fast enough.
Which would involve me in the attempt; and I was aware that
jail-breakers fare ill if they are caught. But no one moved in the
guardhouse, save now and then a prisoner shuffling about in his cell.
Occasionally I could hear the low murmur of their voices—it was a small
place and filled to its capacity—else Barreau and I would not have been
penned together.

After an interminable period he came quietly out from under the floor,
and carefully fitted in their places the planks he had cut. One had to
look closely to see a mark, after he had brushed into the cracks some
dust from the floor. Barreau’s eyes twinkled when he sat down on his
bunk and rolled himself a cigarette.

“Everything just as it should be,” he told me. “Nothing to do but root
away a little dirt from the bottom log of the outside wall. I could walk
out, a free man, in five minutes. There will be a fine fuss and feathers
to-night. They have never had a jail delivery here, you know. Lord, it’s
easy though, when one has the tools.”

“There’ll be a hot chase,” I suggested. “Will you stand much chance.”

“That depends on how much of a start I get,” he said grimly. “I think I
can fool them. If not—well——”

He relapsed into silence. Someone clanked into the guard-room, and
Barreau snuffed out his cigarette with one swift movement. In a second
or two the trooper went out again. We could see him by flattening our
faces against the bars, and when he was gone Blackie sat alone, his feet
cocked up on a chair.

“That reminds me,” Barreau spoke so that his words were audible to me
alone. “Blackie’s a good fellow, and I must keep his skirts clear. He
will be on guard till about eight this evening. Eight—nine—ten o’clock.
At ten it should be as dark as it will get. I’ll drift then. Some other
fellow will be on guard when you give the alarm.”

It was then mid-afternoon. At half-past five two prisoners were set to
arranging a long table by the palings that separated the cells from the
guard-room proper. With a trooper at their heels they lugged from the
Police kitchen two great pots, one of weak soup, the other containing a
liquid that passed for tea. A platter of sliced bread and another of
meat scraps completed the meal. Then the rest of us were turned out to
eat; sixteen men who had fallen afoul of the law munching and drinking,
with furtive glances at each other.

And while we ate a trooper made the round of the cells, giving each
tumbled heap of quilts a tentative shake, peering into the half-dark
corners. That also was part of the routine, perfunctory, as a general
thing, but occasionally developing into keen-eyed search. It was the
rule to confiscate tobacco or any small articles a prisoner might manage
to smuggle in, if he failed of its concealment.

But the faint traces of Barreau’s floor-cutting escaped his eye, and the
tobacco was in our pockets. The knife and saw Barreau had slipped within
his boot-leg. Personal search was the one thing we had to fear. And it
passed us by. The guards—four of them during the meal hour—contented
themselves with routine inspection, and when the table was swept clean
of food we were herded back to our cells. For once I was glad to be
locked up; knowing that though dark would bring a trooper past our cell
every half hour, to peer in on us through the barred opening, there was
little chance of his unlocking the door.

We lay on our bunks, silent, smoking a cigarette when the guard was safe
in front. The smell of tobacco smoke could not betray our possession of
it, for the guardhouse reeked with the troopers’ pipes. We had only to
conceal the actual material.

Thus eight o’clock came, and brought with it a change of guard. Blackie
no longer sat in front with his feet cocked up on a chair, or taking
turns with his fellows at peering through cell doors. Nine passed—by the
guardhouse clock—and ten dragged by at last. On the stroke of the hour a
guard tramped past our cell, on to the others, and back to his seat in
front. When he was settled Barreau slid lightly from his bunk. The short
pieces of flooring he pried from the hole in the floor. Then he reached
a hand to me and shook mine in a grip that almost bruised.

“Good-bye, Bob,” he whispered. “I’ll meet you in St. Louis next year,
unless my star sets. And I will have a pretty story for your ears, then.
Give me an hour, if you can. So-long.”

His feet were in the opening as he spoke, and a second later the black
square of it was yawning emptily. I put the planks over the hole, and
got me back to my bunk. I was glad to see him go, and yet, knowing that
he would come back no more save in irons, I missed him. I felt utterly
alone and forsaken, lying there simulating sleep—with every nerve in my
body on tip-toe.

It was a rule of the guardhouse that a prisoner must lie with his feet
to the door, so that his head could be seen by the passing guard. Just
opposite our door a lamp was bracketed on the wall. What light it gave
shone through the bars directly on our faces while we slept. Rules or no
rules, a man would shade his face with his arm or a corner of the quilt,
when the lamp-glare struck in his eyes. And Barreau, perhaps with that
very emergency in mind, had slept with his hat pulled over his face.
None of the guards had voiced objection. They could see him easily
enough. Now, this very practice made it possible for him to fool them
with a trick that is as old as prison-breaking itself. Skillfully he had
arranged the covers to give the outline of a body, and his hat he left
tilted over the place where his head had rested. The simplicity of the
thing, I dare say, is what made it a success. At least it fulfilled its
purpose that night.

Here a prisoner snored, and there another turned on his bunk with faint
scrapings against the wall. Out in front the Policemen conversed in
lowered tones. I could hear every sound in the building, it seemed; the
movements of sleeping men, the scurrying of a rat, the crackle of a
match when one of the guards lit his pipe. But I did not hear that for
which my ears were strained, and I was thankful.

Twice a trooper made the round, seeing nothing amiss—although I imagined
the thump of my heart echoed into the corridor when he looked in on me
and let his glance travel over the place where Slowfoot George should
have been—but was not.

It was nearing the time for his return, and I sat up, nerving myself to
give the alarm. For to clear me of complicity and the penalty thereof,
Barreau had instructed me to apprise them after an hour. I was to tell
them that he was armed, and so compelled me to keep silent while he
worked. And I was to say that he had but gone. There would be nothing
but his foot-prints, and by those they could not reckon the time of his
flight.

As I sat there waiting for the guard and steeling myself to lie boldly,
shamelessly, for Barreau’s sake and my own, my gaze rested speculatively
on the pieces of flooring I had laid over the hole. I intended to kick
them aside as I rushed to the window and gabbled my tale to the guard.
But I did not rush to the window nor did I gabble to the guard, for I
saw the pieces of plank slide softly apart and a hand came through the
opening thus made—a hand that waved imperative warning for me to lie
down. The guard passed as I drew the cover over me. He barely glanced
in. Before the squeak of his chair out in front told of his settling
down, I was up on elbow, staring.

Again the planks slid apart, this time clear of the hole. In the same
moment something took shape in the black square, something that rose
quickly till I could see that it was the head and shoulders of a man. I
sat mute, startled, filled with wonder and some dismay. The dull light
touching his features showed me Barreau, dirt-stained, sweatdrops on his
forehead, beckoning to me. I leaned to catch his whisper.

“I came back for you, kid,” he breathed. “You’re slated for trouble. The
cabin of the _Moon’s_ purser was robbed the night you left, and it’s
laid to you. There’s a deputy from Benton here after you. You’ll get a
hard deal. Better chance it with me.”

“Robbery,” I muttered. “Good God, what next?”

“Extradition—and a hard fight to clear yourself. Weeks, maybe months, in
the calaboose. Come on with me. You’ll get home sooner, I’ll promise you
that.”

“I’ve a mind to go you,” I declared bitterly. “I seem doomed to be an
Ishmael.”

“Hurry, then,” he admonished, “or we’ll be nabbed in the act. Slip in
here quietly and crawl after me. Just as you are. Bring your shoes in
your hand.”

Thus, willy-nilly, I found myself in the black, dank space between the
floor and the ground. The blackness and musty smell endured no more than
a few seconds. The passage to the outer wall was shorter than I had
thought. Presently I followed Barreau through a tight hole, and stood
erect in the gloom of a cloudy night—a night well fitted for desperate
deeds.

“Give me your hand,” said Barreau, when I had put on my brogans.

The dark might have been made to order for our purpose. I could barely
see Barreau at my elbow. His hand was a needed aid. Together we moved
softly away from the guardhouse, and, once clear of it, ran like hunted
things. Looking back over my shoulder once, I saw the guardhouse lights,
pale yellow squares set in solid ebony. The rest of the post lay
unlighted, hidden away in the dark.

I do not know whither Barreau led me, but at length, almost winded from
the long run, he brought up against some sort of deserted building. A
vague blur resolved into two horses, when we laid hands upon it. Barreau
jerked loose the fastening ropes. And as my fingers closed on the reins
of one, a carbine popped away in our rear, then another, and a third.
Hard on that came the shrilling of a bugle.

“Up with you,” Barreau commanded. “They’ve found our hole. Stick close
to me. If they do run us down, we must take our medicine; we cannot
fight the men in red with such odds against us. But I think they’ll look
long and sorrowfully ere they come upon us, a night like this,” he
finished with a short laugh.

Side by side, two dim figures in the murk, we loped away. Barreau kept a
steady unhurried gait. We passed a building or two, dipped into a
hollow, splashed through what may have been a river or a pond, for all I
could tell, and presently came out upon level plain. Behind us MacLeod’s
few lights twinkled like the scattered embers of a campfire. Soon these
also dwindled to nothing, and the shadowless gloom of the prairies
surrounded us. Keenly as I listened, I caught no sound of following
hoofs. And Barreau seemed to think himself tolerably safe, for he began
to talk in his natural tone as we galloped into the night.

“If the Police overhaul us now,” he asserted confidently, “it will be
only because of a lucky guess at the direction we have taken. They are
more than likely to think we have gone south. And if they don’t beat us
to the Red Flats we can snap our fingers at them for many a moon. Are
you itching with curiosity, Bob?”

“Not altogether itching,” I replied truthfully enough. “I’m too glad to
be out of that iron-barred box, to be worrying much over the why of
things. Just so the program doesn’t call for another spell in some
guardhouse, I’ll be satisfied. I’m putting a good deal of faith in what
you said about eventually getting to St. Louis.”

“Cultivating the philosophical attitude already, eh?” he returned.
“You’re progressing. To be perfectly frank, there is little chance of
our seeing either the inside or outside of a guardhouse again. The
redcoats fight shy of the country we are bound for.”

“Where is that?” I asked quickly.

“I knew you were wondering,” he laughed. “Unconsciously you are
bristling with question marks. Natural enough, too. But all in good
time, Bob. To-night we have food and clothing, another horse or two and
arms to get. If previous calculations haven’t been upset, these things
will be forthcoming and we shall go on our way—if not rejoicing, at
least well-provided against the wilderness. And then if you still choose
to paddle in my canoe, I’ll go into details.”

“That’s fair enough,” I answered. “There’s just one thing—that _Moon_
robbery business. How came you to know a deputy sheriff was after me?”

“Simply enough,” he returned. “When I got out I had to sneak around and
find a man from whom I could get a horse—I have a friend or two there,
luckily. And he told me. The Circle men gave you away when they were
told you had stolen money from the boat. The deputy had just ridden in.
He was a mouthy brute, and noised his business about.”

“It beats the devil,” I declared. “Ever since those two thugs tackled me
on the St. Louis water front I seem to have been going from bad to
worse; stepping from one hot stone to another still hotter.”

“I’ve done it myself,” he said laconically. “But they will have to catch
their hare before they can cook it; and it takes more than accusation to
make a man a thief.”

With this he relapsed into silence. There was a sort of finality in his
way of speaking that headed me off from asking more questions. I busied
myself digesting what he had told me. Occasionally, as we rode, he
drawled a remark; a few words about the country we traversed, or our
mounts, or a bull-train he hoped to overtake. Between whiles I
speculated on what mysterious link connected him with the girl who had
come to the guardhouse in MacLeod. The rancor of her speech had fixed
itself irrevocably on my memory. What lay behind their bitter stabbing
at each other I could not say. Nor was it anything that should have
concerned me. I had my own besetments. I knew not whither I was going,
nor why—except to escape trial for a crime I had not committed. There
were many points upon which I desired light, things that puzzled me. All
in all, as I put aside the disturbing influences of flight I did, as
Barreau had said, fairly bristle with interrogations.

Once in the night we halted on a small creek for the best part of an
hour, letting our horses graze. Only then did I become aware that
Barreau rode without a saddle.

“No man ever quitted a Mounted Police guardhouse without help from the
outside,” he replied, when I spoke of this. “And the man who took a
chance on letting me have two horses had only one saddle to spare. I can
ride easier on a blanket than you. It is only for another hour or two at
most. See—we are just come to the trail.”

I could distinguish no trail at first. He followed it easily, and after
a time I began to get glimpses of deep-worn ruts. Barreau struck a
faster pace. Two hours of silent riding brought us into the bed of a
fair-sized creek, and when he had turned a bend or two of its course, a
light blinked ahead. In another minute we brought up against a group of
wagons. Barreau rode straight to the tent, through the canvas walls of
which glowed the light. There he dismounted and tied his horse,
whispering to me to follow suit. Then I followed him into the tent.

A man lay stretched on a camp-cot at one end, the blankets drawn over
his head. Him Barreau shook rudely out of his slumber, and when he sat
up with a growl of protest I found myself face to face with Montell, the
portly fur merchant who had come up-river on the _Moon_.



CHAPTER IX—MR. MONTELL


“Oho, it’s you George,” Montell purred—that sounds exaggerated, but I
cannot otherwise describe his manner of speaking. He made an odd figure
sitting up in bed, with his fat, purple face surmounting a flannel
shirt, and a red, knitted cap on his head.

“So you made it, eh? Who’s this with you, George?”

“None of your damned business!” Barreau snapped. He stood back a little
from the bed, looking down at Montell. By the glint in his eyes he was
angry. “You needn’t concern yourself about any man who travels with me.”

“Tut, tut, George,” the other pacified, “that’s all right; that’s all
right. You’re mighty touchy to-night. I did the best I could for you,
I’m sure.”

“The best you could! You did that—though not in the way you would have
me believe.” Barreau’s voice stung like a whip-lash. “You double-faced
Mammon-worshipper, if it would mend matters I would gladly jerk you out
of your bunk and stamp your swinish features into the earth. Do you
think you can pull the wool over my eyes? For two pins I’d break with
you right now.”

Montell did not at once reply. He sat a few seconds, softly rubbing the
palm of one pudgy hand over the back of its fellow.

“Now, what’s the use of that sort of talk, George?” he finally said,
quite unperturbed. “We can’t afford to quarrel. We got too——”

“I can,” Barreau interrupted.

“No, no, George, you’re mistaken there. We got to stick together,” he
declared. “Hang it! you had bad luck. But you shouldn’t blame me for
them misfortunes.”

“I don’t—altogether,” Barreau cut in again. “But you took advantage of
my mischance, to help along a little scheme that you’ve been nursing
some time. I had a glimpse of your hand in MacLeod. You have done the
mischief. Why should I trouble myself further in your affairs, unless it
be to call you to account for the dirty trick you have played?”

“Oho, I see now,” Montell nodded understandingly. “I didn’t catch what
you were driving at. But you’re wrong, dead wrong, George. Why, I tried
every way to send Jessie back from Benton. Yes, sir, tried every way.
You’ve no idea how wilful that girl is.” He spread his fat hands
deprecatingly. “She’d come to MacLeod, spite of hell ’n’ high water. _I_
couldn’t stop her. And with every Tom, Dick ’n’ Harry talkin’ about you,
and them dodgers stuck up every place, and you really in the
guardhouse—why, you see how it was. No way to keep it dark. But it’s not
as bad as you think. Of course she’s kinda excited—but, pshaw! When you
see her again she won’t think of it. You’re dead wrong, George, when you
blame me. Yes, sir. Wouldn’t I have kept it quiet if I could? You know
it, George. I got somethin’ at stake, too.”

“You have that,” Barreau returned grimly, “and you had better keep that
fact in mind. But don’t ask me to believe such rot as your not being
able to prevent her from making such a radical change of plan. However,
the milk is spilt; the crying part will come later. I’ll keep to my part
of the bargain. Does everything stand as originally laid out?”

Montell nodded. “There’s no call to change,” he said, and again the
purring, satisfied note crept into his voice.

“I want another good horse, a saddle, a pack layout, and grub for a
month,” Barreau enumerated. “Rout Steve up—you know where he sleeps—and
have him get those things. We need guns, too. Where is my box?”

“It’s on the tail end of the first wagon outside. Steve’s sleepin’ just
beyond. Couldn’t you just as well wake him, George?”

“No, I’ve other things to do,” Barreau refused bluntly. “Bestir your fat
carcass, and set him to work. The night air won’t hurt you. We have no
time to waste. For all I know a troop of Police may be on us before we
can get started again.”

Montell grunted some unintelligible protest, but nevertheless, heaved
his flesh-burdened body up from the cot. He gathered about him a
much-worn dressing gown, and, thrusting his feet into a pair of
slippers, left the tent.

“Now, let us see about clothes,” Barreau said to me, and I followed him
to the wagon-end.

He climbed up on the hind wheel. After a second or two of fumbling he
upended a flat steamer trunk. I held it while he leaped to the ground,
and between us we carried it into the tent.

“The Police have my key—much good may it do them,” he remarked, and
pried open the lid with a hatchet that lay near by. He threw a few
articles carelessly aside.

“Peel off those roustabout garments,” he said to me. “Here is something
better. Lucky we’re about of a size.”

He gave me a blue flannel shirt to begin with, and when I had discarded
the soiled rags I wore and put on the clean one, he held out to me a
coat and trousers of some dark cloth, a pair of riding boots similar to
those on his own feet, and clean socks. Other clothing he hauled from
the trunk and laid in a pile by itself. Lastly he brought forth a new
felt hat.

“Does this fit you?” He stood up and set it on my head. “Fine. No, I’ll
get a hat from Steve before we start,” he silenced my protest. We had
both ridden bareheaded.

Montell returned while I was getting into the welcome change of apparel.

“Steve’s gettin’ you what you need, George,” he informed. “There’s a new
tarpaulin by the bed you can use for your pack. Steve’ll get you
blankets. Go softly. I’m none too sure of all these bull-whackers I
got.”

Barreau went on spreading his clothes in a flat heap as if he had not
heard. Presently he closed the trunk. Getting to his feet he glanced
about.

“Oh, yes,” he said curtly, as if he had but recollected something. “I
want some of that port you’ve been guzzling. Dig it up.”

“Certainly, George, certainly,” Montell’s face broadened in an
ingratiating smile, though Barreau’s tone was as contemptuously
insulting as it could well be. He reached under the box upon which the
candle stood and brought out a bottle. Barreau took it, held it up to
the light, then laid it by his clothing without a word; Montell watching
him with a speculative air, meanwhile.

“That’s fine stuff, George,” he said tentatively. “Fine stuff. I ain’t
got but a little.”

“Damn you, don’t talk to me!” Barreau whirled on him. “I’m sick of the
whole business, and I want none of your smooth palaver, nor whining
about what I do.”

The older man’s florid face took on a deeper tint. One of his fat hands
suddenly drew into a fist. Barreau had penetrated his hide, in some way
that I could not quite understand. And I imagine there would have been
some sort of explosion on the spot, but for the timely diversion of a
man’s head parting the door-flaps.

“Them hosses is ready,” he briefly announced. And Barreau turned his
back on Mr. Montell forthwith. I did likewise.

For all I did I might as well have stayed in the tent. Barreau and Steve
went silently about saddling one horse and lashing a pack-tree on
another. In the dull light from the tent I could barely make shift to
see, but they seemed to know every strap and tying-place, and the thing
was quickly done. Last of all, they folded Barreau’s clothing and two or
three pairs of heavy blankets in the tarpaulin, and bound the roll on
top of the food-supply. Then Barreau stepped once more within the tent.

What he said to Montell did not reach my ears. At any rate, it was
brief. Watching his shadow on the canvas wall I saw him turn to come
out, saw him stop and bend over something near the flaps. He
straightened up with a sharp exclamation, and this time I heard
distinctly what he said.

“By the Lord, you have been fool enough to let her come farther even!
Oh, you miserable——” His words ran into a blur of sound.

Montell raised in his cot again. I could see the bulk of him outlined
against the farther side.

“Now, see here, George,” he burst out irritably. “This is goin’ too far.
Between you and Jessie I’ve had a heap of trouble this trip. And my
patience has got limits. Yes, sir. It’s got limits! I’m doin’ the best I
can, and you got to do the same. You go to backin’ old man Montell into
a corner, and the fur’ll fly. You act like you was a schoolboy, and I’d
took your cap away.”

I don’t think that Barreau made any reply to this. If he did the words
were softly spoken, and he was not the man to speak softly, considering
the mood he was in just then. He was out of the tent almost before
Montell had finished.

“Steve,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way as he laid hold of his stirrup
(I was already mounted), “let me have your hat. I lost mine in the
shuffle.”

Without comment Steve took the hat from his head and handed it up to
him. “So-long,” he grunted laconically.

“So-long, Steve,” said Barreau.

The candle in Montell’s tent blinked out with the words. Barreau caught
up the lead-rope of our pack-pony, and then, as silently as we had come,
we rode away.



CHAPTER X—“THERE’S MONEY IN IT”


A brisk wind sprang up ere we were well clear of the Montell camp. In
half an hour it was blowing a gale. Overhead the clouds ripped apart in
the lash of the wind, and a belated moon peered tentatively through the
torn places. It lighted the way, so that we could see sudden dips in the
prairie, buffalo-wallows and such abrupt depressions, before we reached
them. With the lifting of the solid black that had walled us in Barreau
set a faster pace.

“It will soon be day,” he broke a long silence, “and though I am loth to
overtax our mounts, we must reach the Blood Flats. If we are being
followed, they will scarcely think to look for us there. And I know of
no other place in this bald country where our picketed horses would not
stand out like the nose on a man’s face. How it blows!”

It did. So that speech was next to impossible, even had we been inclined
to talk. The wind struck us quartering and muffled a shout to
inconsequent syllables. But beyond those few words Barreau kept mute,
leaning forward in his stirrups at a steady lope. We must have covered
near twenty miles before the eastern skyline gave a hint of dawn. With
that Barreau pulled his horse down to a walk.

“Well,” he said lightly, “we made it easily enough. Now for a bit of a
climb. It will be awkward if a bunch of unfriendly Stonies have taken
possession of the one spot that will serve us. But that’s hardly
thinkable. Are you tired, Bob?”

I was, and freely owned it. He swung sharply aside while I was speaking,
and in a few minutes an odd-shaped butte loomed ahead. It upreared out
of the flat country like a huge wart. The bald slope of it lay
weather-worn, rain-scarred, naked of vegetation, but on its crest
tangled patches of cherry brush and sally-willows made a ragged
silhouette against the sky. The east blazed like the forefront of a
prairie fire when we reached the top. Then it became plain to me why
Barreau had sought the place. The scrub growth stood dense as a giant’s
beard, but here and there enfolding little meadows of bunchgrass, and
winding in and out through these Barreau finally drew up by a
rush-fringed pool that proved to be a spring.

“Water, wood, and grass,” said he as his heels struck the earth, “and
all securely screened from passers-by. Now we can eat and rest in peace.
Let us get a fire built and boil a pot of coffee before it gets so light
that the smoke will betray us.”

The horses we picketed in one of the little glades. Shut in by the
brush, they could graze unseen. Then we cooked and ate breakfast,
hurrying to blot out the fire, for dawn came winging swiftly across the
plains.

“Come over and take a look from the brow of the hill,” Barreau proposed,
when we were done.

Wearily I followed him. I could have stretched myself in the soft grass
and slept with a will; every bone and muscle in my body protested
against further movement, and I was sluggish with a full stomach. But
Barreau showed no sign of fatigue, and a measure of pride in my powers
of endurance kept me from open complaint.

It was worth a pang or two, after all. He led the way to the southern
tip of the plateau; no great distance—from edge to edge the tableland
was no more than three hundred yards across. But it overlooked the Blood
Flats from a great height, four hundred feet or more, I judged. Barreau
sat down beside a choke-cherry clump, and rolled himself a cigarette.
Ten paces beyond, the butte fell away sheer to the waste levels below.

“There is nothing that I have ever seen just like this,” he murmured.
“And it is never twice alike. Watch that rise take fire from the sun.
And the mountains over yonder; square-shouldered giants, tricked out in
royal purple.”

The sun slid clear of the skyline, and a long shaft of light brushed
over the unreckoned miles of grassland till it fell caressingly on our
butte. Hollows and tiny threads of creeks nursed deep, black shadows
that shrank and vanished as the sun-rays sought them out. Away beyond,
to the west, the snow-tipped Rockies stood boldly out in their robe of
misty blue. And as the yellow glare bathed the sea of land that ringed
the lone pinnacle I saw why the Flats were so named.

Impassive, desolate, vast in its sweep, the plain took on a weird look
at the sun’s kiss. Barren of tree or shrub so far as the eye could
reach, naked even of shriveled blades of grass, when the last, least
shadow was gone it spread before us like a painted floor; red to its
outermost edges, a sullen dried-blood red. A strange colored soil, as if
it were a huge bed of dull-glowing coals.

“Blood Flats! There is no incongruity in the name,” Barreau vouchsafed.
“This is almost beautiful. Yet I have seen the sun strike it of a
morning—and felt a foolish, oppressive dread. Just after a rain, I
remember, once. Then it lay like a lake of blood. The light played on
pools here and there, pools that glowed like great rubies. Fancy it!
Ninety miles square of that blood-stained earth. A monster shambles, it
has often seemed to me. It breeds strange thoughts when one faces it
alone. Or take it on a day of lowering clouds. Then it almost voices a
threat of evil. It is so void of life, so malevolent in its stillness.
The psychology of environment is a curious thing. How is it that mere
inanimate earth, a great magnitude of space, a certain color scheme, can
affect a man so? Sometimes I wonder if we inherit past experiences from
our primitive ancestors along with the color of our eyes or the cast of
our features. Our surroundings work upon our emotions as the temperature
affects a thermometer, and we cannot tell why. Even the hard-headed
bull-whackers hate this stretch of country.”

He made himself another cigarette, and sat quiet for a time, staring off
across the red waste.

“We may as well go back to camp,” he said, rising abruptly. “There is no
sign of men, mounted, afoot, or otherwise, that I can see.”

Back by our saddles and pack layout, Barreau divided the blankets and
showed me how to fold mine to make the most of them. Thankfully I bedded
myself in a shaded place, but he, before following my example, unslung
from his saddle the rifle he had procured of Montell. He looked it over,
snapped the lever forward and back, slid another cartridge or two into
the magazine. This done, he laid it by his blankets.

“I grudge the Police my two good nags, and my Winchester,” he remarked,
as he drew off his boots. “What extra weapons Montell had were stowed in
a wagon, and I had no time to hunt for them. So we will have to make
shift with one rifle—for a while, at least. For that matter, unless we
run foul of some young bucks prowling for a scalp, one gun will serve as
well as two. If you elect to take a different trail, the best I can give
you will be an ancient derringer and a scant number of cartridges. But I
am inclined to think we will not part company, yet a while.”

He sat upon his blankets, regarding me with a measuring air; and I, from
my comfortable position, answered drowsily:

“I have a full stomach, a clear conscience, and a tired body; and I am
going to sleep right now, if I never travel another trail.”

He laughed softly. Whether he said anything further, I do not know. I
was too near worn out to care. My last, faint impression was of him
sitting cross-legged on his blankets, emitting sporadic puffs of smoke,
and looking at me with his black brows drawn together. And the next
thing I remember was a tang of wood-smoke in my nostrils. I sat up and
stared about, puzzled at first, for I had slept like a dead man.
Twilight wrapped the butte. Barreau was bent over a small fire, cooking
supper.

“Oh,” he said, looking around, “you’ve come alive, at last. I was about
to wake you. The chuck’s ready.”

I washed in the trickle of water that ran away from the spring, and felt
like a new man. As to eating, I was little short of ravenous. Never had
food made such an appeal to my senses. When the meal was over Barreau
settled back against his saddle.

“There will be a moon somewhere near midnight,” he declared. “We’ll move
then. After to-night we can travel without cover of the dark. Meantime,
lend me your ears, Robertus. Let us see where we stand.”

“Fire away,” I replied. “I am pretty much in the dark—in more ways than
one.”

“Exactly,” he responded. “And I imagine you have little taste for
walking blindfolded. So we will spread our hands on the board. First,
let us look a few facts cold-bloodedly in the eye. Here are two of us
practically outlawed. I—well, it should be obvious to you that I am a
very much-wanted man in these parts. My capture—especially now—would be
the biggest feather any Policeman could stick in his cap. There are
others who would cheerfully shoot me in the back for what it would bring
them. Hence, the sooner I get out of this part of the country, the
better I will be suited. You have killed a man for a starter. That——”

“But I had to,” I broke in. “It was forced on me. You know it was.
There’s a limit to what a man can stand.”

“I know all that,” he replied quietly. “I’m not sitting in judgment on
you, Bob. I’m merely setting forth what has happened, and how we are
affected thereby. Tupper got no more than he deserved, and he did not
get it soon enough—from my point of view. But, as I said, you killed a
man, and the killing has taken on a different color in the minds of
others, since you are also accused of theft.”

“Do you believe that infernal lie?” I interrupted again. It galled me to
hear him enumerate those ugly details in that calm, deliberate manner.

“It makes little difference what _I_ believe,” he answered patiently.
“If it is any comfort to you, I can hardly conceive of you plundering
the _Moon’s_ cabin. But voicing our individual beliefs is beside the
point. Certain things are laid to us. Certain penalties are sure as the
rising and setting of the sun, if either of us is caught and convicted.
And”—he pinched his eyebrows together until little creases ran up and
down his forehead, but his voice was cold, matter of fact—“if we were
clean-handed as a babe unborn, we have forever damned ourselves before
Canadian courts, by breaking jail. You see where we are? Forgetting
these other things that we may or may not have done, of this one crime
we are guilty. We can’t dodge it, if we are taken. It is a felony in
itself.”

“If I were a free agent,” he went on, after a momentary pause, “I would
have made no attempt to escape; or having escaped, I would quit this
damned country by the shortest route. But I can’t. I have got into a
game that I must play to a finish. Further, I have given my word to do
certain work, and in the doing of it I am bucking elements that I cannot
always cope with alone. I need help. I want some one whom I can trust
absolutely if he gives his word; a man I can depend upon to stick by me
in a pinch. That,” he turned his gaze squarely on me, “is principally
why I took long chances to get you out of the guardhouse, last night. It
seemed to me I could help myself best by helping you. I will be frank.
My motive was not purely altruistic. Men’s motives seldom are.”

“You flatter me,” I commented bitterly. “Considering that I have shown
myself more or less weak-kneed every time I’ve got in a tight place,
your remark about some one who would stick by you in a pinch savors of
irony. I hardly see how you could put absolute faith in me, when I have
so little faith in myself. Besides, I do not know what your program
calls for. I don’t seem to have the faculty of holding my own in a rough
game; nor the right sort of nerve—if I have any. My instinct seems to be
to give ground until I’m cornered. I’d rather be at peace with the
world. I don’t like war of the personal sort.”

“Nor does any man, any normal man,” he responded soberly. “But there are
times, as you have seen, when we cannot escape it. So far as your
capacity for holding your own is concerned, let me be judge of that. I
know men more or less well—by bitter experience. Under certain
conditions I could probably guess what you would do, better than
yourself. You may be sure I wouldn’t ask you to accept certain risks and
hardships with me if I thought a yellow streak tinged your make-up. So
we will not argue along that line.

“What I need your help in is a legitimate enterprise; clean enough of
itself—though I have acquired a dirty reputation in the way of it. I’ll
give you a few details, and you can judge for yourself. Four years ago
chance sent me north to a Hudson’s Bay post on the Saskatchewan. From
there I drifted farther—to the Great Slave Lake country, almost. I’ve
known more or less of the fur trade all my life. My father was in it.
And so I was quick to see how the Hudson’s Bay Company holds the North
trade in the hollow of its hand. It was a revelation to me, Bob.
Fortunes gravitate to their posts by the simplest process in the world.
They barter a worthless muzzle-loading gun and a handful of powder and
ball for a hundredfold its worth in pelts. From one year’s end to
another, yes, from generation to generation, the tribes have been kept
in debt to the Company. They make a scanty living from the Company, and
the Company builds colossal fortunes out of them. You and I would call
it robbery. To the Company it is merely ‘trade.’

“Ever since the granting of its charter, close on two centuries ago, the
Company has lorded it over the North, barring out the free trader,
guarding jealously against competition. Only the Northwest Fur Company
ever held its own with the Hudson’s Bay, and the two combined when the
Northwest established itself. The others, lone traders, partnerships,
the Company fought and intimidated till they withdrew. Technically, it
is a free country, has been since ’69, but north of the Saskatchewan the
Company still holds forth in the ancient manner, making its own law,
recognizing no higher authority than itself. It is a big country, the
North, and the Canadian government has its hands full in the east and
south. A white man takes his own risks north of latitude 54.

“All this I knew very well. But like many another purse-broken man, I
wanted a fling at the trade. I saw that a man could get in touch with
the tribes, give them fair exchange for their furs—give them treble the
Hudson’s Bay rate of barter—and still make a fortune. I needed the
fortune, Bob; I am still on the trail of it. But I had too little
capital to play a lone hand. So I hied me to St. Louis and broached the
scheme to Montell. I have known him all my life. He also is an old hand
in the trade. He had the capital I lacked.”

Barreau stopped for a minute, digging at the earth with his heel. The
fire had dwindled to a few coals. I could not see his face. But his
voice had changed, a note of resentment had crept into it, when he began
again.

“Montell jumped at the plan. Later I learned things that led me to
believe he was near the end of his rope, financially, at the time. So my
scheme was in the nature of a Godsend to him. I had a little money, and
every dollar I could raise I put in. It was to be an equal partnership:
my knowledge of the country and the conditions to offset his extra
capital.

“The first year we made expenses, and a little over. But we were getting
known among the Indian hunters, convincing them that we would treat them
better than the Hudson’s Bay. Secure in their established grip on the
tribes, the Company passed us up. The second year we made money. Then
the Company woke up and fought us tooth and nail. Not openly; that is
not their way. They fought us, nevertheless. There were reprisals. The
brunt of it fell on me. They seemed to guess that with my teeth drawn
their fight was won. So they carried the war systematically into the
open country. Our jail-breaking last night took its inception in that
struggle for and against a monopoly.

“This year, if things do not go awry, we stand to clear more than a
hundred thousand dollars. And it will be the last. No individual trader
can break lances with the Company on its own ground. They are lords of
the North beyond gainsaying. At the best we can but take a slice and
leave the loaf to them. Next spring sees the last of our trading. This
fall there will be fierce work to do, tramping here and there, issuing
guns and powder and foodstuffs, bargaining with the hunters for the
winter’s take of pelts. A hundred lodges have promised to trade with us
this season, and an Indian rarely breaks his word, once given in good
faith. We will get others, in spite of the Company runners. But we must
be on the alert; we cannot sit in our posts and wait for these things to
come about of themselves. And that brings me to the point.

“If I had only the Hudson’s Bay Company to contend with, I would have
little fear for the outcome. With them it is largely a question of
strategy. If there is any violence it will come from some zealot in
their service, and we can hold our own against such. But Montell is an
eel. He looms more threatening than the Company. In these three years I
have had no accounting with him. I have done the dirty work, while he
holed up at the post, or looked after the St. Louis end. I have more
than once come near tripping him up in petty tricks. Secretly he hates
me, for at bottom he is an arrogant old freebooter. And for all his
grovelling last night, he is a dangerous man. By one means and another I
know that he has made up his mind to put me in the lurch once this
winter’s trade is turned. Without me, he can do little in the way of
getting furs. Otherwise, I would be cooling my heels in MacLeod
guardhouse yet. You may have guessed that he was the spirit which moved
Blackie to pass in the knife and saw.

“But once full arrangements are made, and the pelts begin to come in
with spring, why, then—I don’t know what he will do, how he will
engineer his plan to eliminate my interest in the profits. He has some
card up his sleeve. Half of everything is mine, but I have nothing to
show it. There is nothing between us but his word! and that, I have
learned at last, is a thing he can twist to suit the occasion. He has
begun shaping things to suit himself on this trip. He cut a bit of the
ground from under my feet back there in MacLeod. I’ll pay him for that,
though; and he knows it. The finishing touch will come this winter, or
in the spring. He hates me, just as he hates any man whom he cannot lead
by the nose, and he will move like the old fox he is. There’s money in
it—for him. And money and power are Simon Montell’s twin gods.

“Between these cross-fires, I will have my hands more than full. I can
only be in one place at a time. There is not a man with the bull-train,
or among the few that remain in the North, but is under Montell’s thumb.
Most of them could not understand if I told them. The thing is too
subtle for their simple, direct minds. For that reason, I sought for
some one I could trust to keep a clear eye open, and his ears cocked;
for whatever Montell does he will do by stealth. That evening we fell in
together at the foot of the Sweet Grass I was headed for the Sanders
ranch, thinking to get Walt to come North with me. He would have enjoyed
this sort of thing. You know how we fared that night. And you can see
why, when the Police raid put him beyond my helping, I turned to you. I
had you in mind all the while we lay in the guardhouse, but I hesitated
to drag you into it, until I learned of the robbery charged to you. Then
I went back for you, judging that of the two evils you would choose the
one I offered.

“That is the way of it, Bob. If you help me play the game this winter,
you accomplish two things with tolerable certitude. You will be safe
from the Police and those Benton idiots; and you will get to St. Louis
in the spring. Montell himself will see to that, when he learns who you
are. He knew your father slightly, and he has all of a guttersnipe’s
snobbish adulation of wealth and family. So you are doubly safe. On the
other hand, if you are minded to work out your own salvation I will
share with you what I have, set you in the right direction, and wish you
good luck. Don’t be hasty about deciding. Think the thing over.”

But I had already made up my mind. How much the lure of a strange land
and stirring things to be done bore upon my decision I cannot say. How
much, at the moment, George Barreau’s personality dominated me I cannot
quite compute. Individual psychology has never been a study of mine, but
I know that there is no course of reasoning, no mental action, no
emotion, that has not its psychic factors. Whatever these were in my
case, I lost sight of them. I think that what influenced me most was his
way of putting it man to man, so to speak. Unconsciously that restored
to me, in a measure, the self-respect I had nearly lost in those brutal
days on the _Moon_, and the skulking and imprisonment which followed.
Here was a man before whom I had seen other strong men cringe asking me
in a straightforward way for help. I had no wish to refuse; I felt a
thrill at the opportunity. For the time I forgot that Montell’s daughter
had called him a thief and a murderer, and he had not denied. I took him
at his face value, as he took me, and we shook hands on the bargain, and
cemented it further with the bottle of port so unwillingly relinquished
by Montell.

“I’m with you,” said I, “till the last dog is hung. But if I weaken in a
pinch, don’t say you weren’t forewarned.”

He laughed.

“Don’t underestimate yourself. A man doesn’t need to be overloaded with
nerve to play a man’s part in this world. In fact, the fellow who hunts
trouble for the sake of showing off his nerve, is generally some damned
fool with a yellow streak in him that he’s deadly afraid some one may
uncover. After all,” he reflected, “there may be nothing more to cope
with than the dreary monotony of snowbound days, and nights when the
frost bites to the bone. Your part will merely be to keep tab on Mr.
Simon Montell when I am not about. He’s afraid of me. If he can’t attain
his purpose by underhand methods, he may consider the risk of open
hostility too great. But that we cannot foresee. Our problem, now, is to
reach the Sicannie River as soon as we can. There we need never fear
meeting a scarlet jacket. It stands us in hand to be shy of those
gentlemen, for some time to come.”

“Amen to that,” I responded sincerely.

We lay back in the shadows, smoking, speaking a few words now and then,
till the moon came peeping up from below the horizon, shedding its pale
light on the strange, red sweep of the Blood Flats. Then we saddled and
packed and bore away from the lone butte, holding a course slightly west
of the North Star.



CHAPTER XI—A TRICK OF THE “TRADE.”


A certain consecutive number of days—weeks, to be more exact—ensued, of
which there is little to relate, save that we travelled steadily
northward, seeing no human except from afar. Once or twice we came in
sight of Hudson’s Bay posts, but these Barreau was careful to avoid. It
was not the season when Indians were abroad in the forests, he told me
when I wondered that in all that vast land not a single lodge appeared.
They were gathered in summer villages by the trading posts. Hence we
crossed few fresh trails, and bespoke no man, white or red, in the four
weeks of our journey.

Before the end of it I was hardened to the saddle; and to many other
things. Twice we swam great rivers, the North Saskatchewan, and farther
on the Peace—to say nothing of lesser streams that were both deep and
swift. Our food supply dwindled to flour and tea. But with game on every
hand we suffered no hardship in that respect. The getting of meat
Barreau left to me. Strangely enough, after one or two virulent attacks
of “buck fever,” when the rifle barrel wabbled in a most unseemly manner
and the bullet therefrom flew disgracefully wide of the mark, I got into
the way of bringing down whatever I shot at. Between my eye and the
rifle sights and the shoulder of a deer some mysterious, rapid process
of alignment seemed invariably to take place.

“Why not?” Barreau contended, when I remarked upon this sudden attaining
to marksmanship. “There are the sights. Your eyes are clear and your arm
steady as a rock. That’s all there is to good shooting; that and a
little experience in judging distance. Some men handle guns all their
lives, and never make a decent shot other than by accident. Whenever you
run across such an individual you can be sure there is some defect in
his vision, or he lacks muscular control over his weapon.”

That trip taught me many things besides holding a rifle true; how to
build a campfire in wet weather and dry; little labor-saving tricks of
the axe; the name and nature of this timber and that; the cooking of
plain food; a subtle sense of direction—fundamental trail-wisdom that I
was wholly ignorant of, but which a man must know if he would cope with
the wilderness of wood and plain. I profited as much by noting how he
did these things, as by direct instruction. Nor does a man forget easily
the lessons he is taught in the school of necessity.

With Peace River behind us we edged nearer to the base of the mountains,
passing through a stretch of country alive with caribou and deer.
Bear—monsters, by the track they left—frightened our picketed horses of
a night. The moist earth bordering every pond and spring was marked with
hoof and claw. The shyer fur-bearing animals, Barreau told me,
surrounded us unseen. Barring a thickly wooded plateau south of the
Peace we passed through no forest oppressively dense. Our way led over
ridges and swales, timbered, to be sure, but opening out here and there
into pleasant grassy parks. Once or twice forbidding areas of dead and
down trees turned us aside. Again, a vast swamp enforced a detour. But I
cannot recall any feature of marked unpleasantness—except the one thing
that no man who crosses the North Saskatchewan can escape—the flies.

Mosquitoes of all sizes, equipped with the keenest tools for their
nefarious business, green-headed bulldog flies that plagued our horses
beyond endurance, black gnats, flying ants, and other winged pests
assailed us day and night in hungry swarms. Some day that particular
portion of the Northwest will be a rich field for entomologists and
manufacturers of mosquito netting.

We held our own with the buzzing hosts, however, and when our flour sack
had nearly reached a stage of ultimate limpness, and our tea was reduced
to a tiny package in one corner of the shrunken pack, we rode out of a
long belt of quivering poplars and drew up on the brow of a sharp pitch
that fell away to the Sicannie River.

“What in the name of the devil has been to the fore here?” Barreau
exclaimed. He slid over in his saddle, staring at the scene below.

Down on the flat, just back from the river bank, I made out a clutter of
small log buildings enclosed within a stockade. In the center of the
enclosure a half-dozen men busied themselves about the gaunt walls of a
larger building. Logs and poles strewed the ground about its four sides.
The ring of axe-blades on timber came floating up to us. I saw nothing
amiss.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing that matters greatly,” Barreau replied. “Only that ruin you see
was a fine upstanding storehouse when I left here in the early spring.
It seems to be undergoing a process of regeneration, for which I cannot
account. Likewise, I see no trace of a stable which stood at the west
end of the stockade. There are no men missing, by my count, so I dare
say no great thing has happened. Anyway, this is the end of our trail
for a while. We may as well get down there. I am a bit curious to know
the meaning of this.”

Presently we were dismounting within the stockade. And as we greeted the
men who stopped their work to hail us, it was plain what form of
disaster had overtaken the Montell establishment. The standing walls of
sixteen-inch logs were smoke-blackened and scorched by fire. The inside
was gutted to the floor-joists; the roof gone. A pile of charred poles
and timbers laid to one side testified mutely to cause and effect.

“Well, Ben,” Barreau addressed one man who came forward. “How did it
happen?”

“She burned, that’s all. ’N’ the stable, too,” Ben made laconic answer.
He drew a plug of tobacco from his hip pocket, looked it over with a
speculative eye, bit off a piece, and returned it to the pocket. As he
masticated the piece contemplatively, Barreau watched him with a
whimsical smile. “Yes, sir,” he went on, “she took fire in the night,
with the boys sleepin’ in the doghouse, an’ me in the front part uh the
store. It started to rain pretty tol’able hard, or I reckon there
wouldn’t be nothin’ left but a pile uh ashes.”

“In the night, eh?” Barreau repeated thoughtfully. The three of us
walked around the building and peered in through a charred doorway.

“Quite so,” Barreau continued. “Save anything? There wasn’t much to
save, I know.”

“Most all the stuff,” Ben replied. “Injun name uh Tall Trees drifted in
day after yuh all left. He traded out most everythin’ we could spare.
An’ the pelts was easy to get out. Some grub was burned. Not much,
though. We got plenty left.”

“A very nasty thing, fire,” Barreau commented. “How do you think it
started, Ben?”

“I ain’t thinkin’,” said Ben. “I _know_.”

“The deuce you do!” Neither Barreau’s tone nor face bespoke more than
the mildest surprise. “Had a big fire going, I suppose, and a live coal
flew out. Eh?”

“Nary coal,” Ben declared. “Some feller climbed the stockade, cut open
one uh them deer-skin winders, touched a match to a bucket uh oil an’
gunpowder, boosted it through the window—an’ there yuh are. That there’s
no dream, let me tell yuh.”

“And then went on his way rejoicing,” Barreau suggested.

“I reckon he did, all right,” Ben owned, looking rather downcast at the
thought. “I never got to see nothin’ but his tracks. If I’d seen _him_
he wouldn’t ’a’ done much rejoicin’.”

“I dare say,” Barreau laughed. “Meantime the joke is on the party of the
first part, it seems to me. Logs are plenty. You have ample time to put
on a roof and lay some sort of floor. It would be a different matter if
we should be burned out after our goods arrive; but this is a cheap
lesson. I see you have put up a good stock of hay. That’s fortunate, for
they are bringing more stock than we figured on. Altogether, Ben, you
haven’t done so badly. Now, hustle us some decent grub—it’s near noon,
and this boy and I have been living on straight meat for some time.”

Thus, we were once more fairly at our ease; the bugaboo of arrest and
subsequent lying in jail seemed a remote contingency. The confidence
born of successful escape stilled any misgivings I might have had as to
the future.

We lay at the post doing naught but eat and sleep and watch the long
storehouse creep higher log by log, till the skeleton of a roof took
form above the blackened walls. At night the eight of us would sprawl
around a fire in the open, talking of everything under the sun,
sometimes playing with a soiled and tattered pack of cards that these
exiles cherished as their dearest possession. If we were in hostile
territory no hint of apprehension cropped out in our intercourse; except
as one or another referred casually to incidents past—now a fragmentary
sentence which hinted of sharp action, or a joking allusion to the “H.
B. C.” It was all in the day’s work with them. But I noticed that each
night one man stood guard, pacing from corner to corner of the stockade,
a rifle slung in the crook of his arm.

Two weeks of this slipped by. Then one morning Barreau sat up on his bed
and looked over to where I humped on my blankets, rubbing the sleep from
my eyes.

“Bob,” he announced, “it is high time we bestirred ourselves once more.”
After which he got quickly into his clothes, and went rummaging in a box
by his bed—we had a little cabin to ourselves. His search bore fruit in
the shape of moccasins, a bundle of them.

“Here,” he tossed a pair to me. “You’ll find these better than riding
boots. This time we go afoot.”

Later, when breakfast was eaten, he made up a shoulder-pack for himself,
and showed me how to prepare its fellow. Only actual necessaries found
place therein. Extra moccasins, a few pounds of flour, a little packet
of tea, pepper and salt, a tin plate and cup; these were laid upon a
pair of heavy blankets, and tightly rolled in a square of thin canvas. A
broad band of soft buckskin ran from the upper corners of the pack over
one’s forehead. A loop slipped over each shoulder, leaving the hands
free. I was astonished at the ease with which I could walk under this
forty-pound burden. From among the post stores Barreau had long since
armed me with a rifle that was twin to his own. Between us we carried a
hundred cartridges. A butcher knife and a small hatchet apiece fitted us
for all emergencies. Thus equipped we set out, bearing away up the
Sicannie toward the grim range of peaks that cut the skyline into ragged
notches.

Ten miles upstream Barreau located the cluster of lodges he sought as
our first objective point—the summer camp of Two Wolves and his band.
There for two nights and a day we lingered, sitting in comical gravity
for hours at a time in the lodge of the chief. The upshot of this
lengthy council was that Two Wolves’ son girded a pack on his broad
shoulders and joined us when we left the camp.

Thereafter I lost count of the days. Possibly, if the need arose, I
could detail the camps we made, the streams we crossed, the huge circle
we swung upon, the crossing and doubling back upon our own trail; but
there is no need. Suffice it to say that we did these things. It was no
pleasure jaunt that we three went upon. Crow Feathers was a man of iron
in the matter of covering ground.

He knew the haunt of every tribe and offshoot of a tribe, every petty
chief’s following, and every family group in the North, it seemed to me.
If he did not lead us to them all, he at least tried. The smoky smell of
an Indian lodge became as familiar to my nostrils as the odor of food.
And in every camp, over the peace pipe, Barreau talked “trade,” with
Crow Feathers to vouch for him. Barreau spoke the tongue like a native,
but there were lodges wherein neither Cree nor French _patois_ was
spoken or understood, and, when we encountered such, the wisdom of Crow
Feathers smoothed the way. He used the sign language in all its
bewildering variety. I, myself, picked up words and phrases here and
there, comprehended a few of the simpler signs, but Crow Feathers
lingers with me as a past master in wordless communication with his
race. Barreau, even, used to wonder at the astonishing amount of
information Crow Feathers could impart with a few languid motions of his
hands. He made a right able interpreter.

Insensibly the days shortened. I recollect with what surprise I wakened
one morning to find hoar frost thick on my blanket, and a scum of ice
fringing the little creek beside which we slept. Hard on that I observed
the turning of the leaves, the red and yellow tints of autumn. And about
this time Crow Feathers left us; took up his pack one day at noon, shook
hands solemnly with each of us, and a moment later was lost in the
still, far-spreading woods. Three days after that Barreau and I, in the
midst of a thinly timbered belt of land, came suddenly upon a clear-cut
trail. Even my limited experience told me that it was made by man-guided
animals.

“The chumps,” Barreau drawled. “They are ten miles out of their way. I
didn’t expect to hit their trail till to-morrow. Well, they should be at
the post now. We may as well follow them in.”

“How is it,” I voiced a thing that puzzled me, “that there are no wagon
tracks? Are you sure this is Montell’s outfit?”

“No other,” he answered. “For many reasons. By the mule tracks, for one.
You, of course, could not see them in the dark, but there was a mule
herd with the bull-train. Loaded wagons are too hard to handle in this
woods country. We have always used pack-mules this side of the Peace.”

“Oh,” said I, and, my mystery solved, I forbore further inquiry. We
tramped along the trail in silence. Then, all at once, he flung out an
abrupt question. Curiously enough, the thing he spoke of had just
drifted into my mind.

“Remember those two Hudson’s Bay men, Bob?”

I remembered them very well; two taciturn, buckskin-garbed men, who came
to an Indian camp while we were there talking trade. They greeted us
civilly enough, slept in the next lodge overnight, and left us a clear
field in the morning. But before they took to the trail they drew
Barreau aside and the three of them sat upon a fallen tree and conversed
thus for an hour.

“Why, yes,” I replied. “What of them?”

“I didn’t tell you, did I, that they were Company agents with a proposal
to buy out _my_ interest in the house of Montell,” he said. “Now, that
amused me at the time. But the confounded thing has stuck in my mind,
and lately I’ve been thinking—in fact, I’ve wondered if——”

He broke off as abruptly as he had begun. I was walking abreast of him,
and I could see that he was engrossed with some problem; the mental
groping in his tone was duplicated in the expression on his face.

“What?” I blurted.

“Oh, just an idea that popped into my mind,” he parried carelessly.
“I’ll tell you by and by.”

“To be perfectly honest,” I challenged, on the impulse of the moment, “I
don’t think you trust me very much, after all.”

“You’re mistaken there,” he said slowly. “You are the one man in all
this country whom I would trust. But I am not going to burden you with
mere theories of possible trouble. Wait till I am sure.”

With this I was forced to content myself. In a mild way I resented his
secretiveness, even while I recognized his right to tell me as much or
as little as he chose. Thus a certain diffidence crept into my attitude,
perhaps. If it was obvious, it made no difference to Barreau. In the two
days it took us to reach the post, I do not think he spoke a dozen
sentences. He followed the trail of the packtrain, wholly absorbed in
thought. Only when the stockade-enclosed group of buildings huddled
below us, casting long shadows across the flat, did his self-absorption
cease. We had halted for a moment on the bank above the river, not far
from where I had first seen the Sicannie. The sun rested on the jagged
mountain range to the west, and the river caught its slanting beams till
it lay below us like cloth of gold, a glittering yellow gash in the
somber woods. Barreau’s hand fell lightly on my shoulder.

“Lord! I’ve been a cheerful companion of late,” he said, as if it had
but occurred to him. And some intangible quality of comradeship in the
words, or perhaps his way of saying them, put me at ease once more.

We stood a little longer, and the sun dipped behind the mountains,
robbing the Sicannie of its yellow gleam, casting a sudden grayness over
the North. Then we hitched our lean packs anew, and went down the hill.



CHAPTER XII—THE FIRST MOVE


Montell himself, burdened with a troubled air, met us at the gate of the
stockade.

“Well, you’re back, eh?” he greeted Barreau. “I been wishin’ you’d show
up. At the same time I’d just as soon you’d stay away. Now, don’t get
huffy, George. You ain’t got any idee what I’ve had to contend with.
Jessie’s here.”

Barreau looked at him with unchanging expression.

“Well,” he observed presently, “what of it?”

“What of it?” Montell echoed. “Jehosophat! Ain’t you got no imagination,
George? That MacLeod deal has turned her against you somethin’ terrible.
She heard all that stuff about you, an’ wouldn’t rest till she made sure
’twas really you. She’d raise old Ned if——”

“She found out that her highly respectable parent was associated in
business with a notorious character like Slowfoot George,” Barreau cut
in sneeringly. “You’re rather transparent, Montell. You don’t need to
beat about the bush with me. I know what you are driving at. I’ve lost
caste with her, which suits you exactly. You are her affectionate
father, an honorable, clean-handed man. Hence you will not touch pitch
lest she deem you defiled. Very good. But you had better take a hint
from me and bestir yourself to get her south of the Peace before winter
breaks. This is no place for a woman.”

“Sure, sure,” Montell seemed no whit taken aback, “that’s what I been
aimin’ to do. I don’t know what the mischief got into her to come up
here, anyhow. She was supposed to turn back the next day after we left
MacLeod—I told you that the night you come to our camp, but you was too
blame busy abusin’ me to listen, I guess. Then she stood me off another
day or two. By that time I couldn’t leave the outfit, and she wouldn’t
go back unless I did. Darn it, Jessie’s gettin’ to be too many for me.
She’s stubborn as a mule an’ got a temper like—like—well, when she gets
on the fight I got to stand from under, that’s all. There’ll be war if
she finds out you’re the big chief here. Say, George, can’t you play
like you just happened in?”

“No,” Barreau refused flatly. “I will not lie to her if both our necks
depended on it. For that matter, the explanation is simple. Why not tell
her the truth yourself?”

Montell looked at him curiously. Of a sudden the set of his heavy,
florid face seemed to become a trifle defiant, aggressive.

“There’s no use standin’ here arguin’,” he said shortly. “Come on to the
store. Let’s get an understandin’ of this thing.”

He led the way. Within, as well as without, the rebuilt storehouse was
transformed. A great clutter of goods in bales and sacks and small boxes
filled it nearly to overflowing. Shelves lined the walls. On each side a
rude counter ran the length of the building. Here and there a semblance
of orderly arrangement was beginning to show. A fire crackled on the
open hearth at one end. An upended box, littered with bills of
merchandise and a ledger or two, stood against the wall. By this rude
desk Montell sat him down on a stool. He turned a look of inquiry on me,
but Barreau forestalled his question.

“This is Bob Sumner,” he made known perfunctorily. “The son of that
Texas cattleman who owned the Toreante place on Rose Hill. I believe you
knew him slightly. Sumner will winter with us. You need not stutter over
talking before him.”

“I don’t stutter over talkin’ before anybody, far as I’m concerned. It’s
_your_ funeral,” Montell retorted. Then he turned to me.

“So you’re John Sumner’s boy, eh?” He sized me up with new interest. I
dare say he was wondering how I came to be in Barreau’s company on the
very night of his breaking jail. “Yes, sir, I did know your father. Did
business with him a time or two. Mighty fine man. Seems to me I heard he
died last spring. Left quite a large estate, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” I answered briefly to both questions. It was not a subject I
cared to discuss just then.

“Too bad, too bad,” he commiserated—but whether the sympathy he forced
into his tone was for the death of my father, or for me, I did not
know—nor care very much. It sounded like one of those convenient
platitudes that become a habit with people. He focused his attention on
Barreau, however, immediately after this.

“Now, George,” he said, “suppose we have a word in private, eh?”

“This suits me; I’m getting hardened to publicity,” Barreau drawled.
“You want an understanding, you said. I’m agreeable. I remarked that it
might be well to try telling the truth if explanations are demanded.”

An exasperated expression crossed Montell’s face.

“Now, see here, be reasonable,” he grunted. “That there guardhouse
business settled you. If you’d kept shy of that, there’d be a chance.
But there ain’t. You could swear to things on a stack of Bibles—and she
wouldn’t believe a word. You know as well as I do that she’s got all
them old-fashioned idees about a gentleman’s honor that her mother’s
folks has. You know you _did_ kill them two fellers on High River, an’
run off them Hudson’s Bay work-bulls. You didn’t have to do _that_. You
can’t explain _them_ things to _her_; nor bein’ in jail. That there’s a
black mark she can’t overlook. You wasn’t smooth enough, George.”

“You are astonishingly frank, I must say.” Barreau leaned forward,
smiling sardonically, a sneering, unpleasant smile. “Why? Would you mind
explaining why you would refuse to vouch for the truth of my story if I
tell her absolute facts? What have you up your sleeve?”

“Nothin’,” Montell growled. “Only I ain’t goin’ to have you force my
hand. I ain’t goin’ to get into no fuss with my own daughter. Besides,
as I said, some of them things can’t be explained to her—she couldn’t
understand. Once she found out what a hell of a time’s been goin’ on in
this fur business, and that this winter’s liable to breed more trouble,
why she’d be sure to take a notion to stick here by me. An’ I won’t
expose _her_ to whatever might come up, for nobody’s reputation.”

“Wise old owl!” Barreau sneered. “What need for this sudden access of
caution? Do you think I can’t——”

He broke off short at the slam of a door on the farther side of the
storehouse. A feminine voice called, “Oh, papa!”

Montell sprang to his feet, muttering an expletive to himself, but he
did not at once reply. In the stillness the sound of light footfalls
threading the maze of piled goods echoed softly among the heavy beams
above. It was dusk outside by then, and within that scantily windowed
place it was quite dark, beyond a red circle cast from the open
fireplace. And as the girl stepped into the edge of its glow Montell
struck a match and touched it to a three-pronged candlestick on the box
by his seat. She stifled an exclamation at sight of us. Then, with a
scornful twist to her dainty mouth, she bowed in mock courtesy.

“Gentlemen,” she murmured, an ironic emphasis on the term, “your
presence is unexpected. I cannot say I esteem it an honor.”

Then she turned to her father.

“Papa,” she observed interrogatively, “I have always known you were a
hospitable soul, but I never dreamed a house of yours would ever prove
shelter for an outlawed cutthroat. Upon my word, if I were a man I
should be tempted to collect the bounty on this human wolf. There is a
bounty. See?”

She fumbled in a pocket of the short, fur-edged jacket she wore, and
presently drew forth a folded paper.

“Yes, surely there is a bounty,” she went on maliciously, holding the
paper broadside to the sputtering candles. “Not a great one, to be sure,
but more than he is worth. Five hundred dollars for the body, dead or
alive, of George Brown, alias Slowfoot George. Height, weight, color of
eyes, certain marks and scars—to a dot. Also an appalling list of
crimes. Have you no shred or atom of a decent impulse left”—she
addressed Barreau directly, her tone level, stingingly
contemptuous—“that you persist in thrusting yourself upon people after
they have seen the sheep’s clothing stripped from your degenerate
shoulders?”

Barreau met her gaze squarely and answered her in her own tone.

“I am here,” he said, “because I choose to be here. Montell _pere_ can
tell you why.”

“Now, now Jessie,” Montell cut in pacifically. “This ain’t St. Louis. If
George is in trouble, I don’t know as any one has a better right to help
him than me. You don’t want to be always ridin’ that high hoss of yours.
This country ain’t peopled with little tin gods, as I’ve told you many a
time. You’d better go back to the house. I’ll be there pretty quick.”

“Indeed, I imagine I could hardly be in worse company,” she declared.
“So I will quit it, forthwith. It was not of my seeking. Better keep an
eye on your goods, papa.”

With that she was gone, leaving the three of us staring at each other,
Montell a bit apprehensive, it seemed to me. Barreau was first to find
his voice.

“I would advise you to get your trail outfit in readiness to-night,” he
told Montell bluntly, “and start south in the morning. Otherwise I will
give no guarantee of peace and good will in this camp. I can’t stand
much of that sort of thing.”

Montell seemed to consider this. If he felt any uneasiness over the
implied threat he maintained an undisturbed front. Hunched on the stool
like a great toad, one fat hand on each knee, his puffy eyelids blinking
with automatic regularity, he regarded Barreau in thoughtful silence.

“I guess that’s the proper card,” he uttered at last. “I can make it
back, all right, if it does come bad weather. I got to get her home,
that’s sure. You can kinda keep out of sight till we get started, can’t
you, George?”

“That’s as it happens,” Barreau returned indifferently. “Meantime, have
you grub-staked any of these hunters? Are the Indians beginning to come
in?”

Montell nodded. “Quite a few. Two or three camps up the river, the boys
say. Some of ’em wouldn’t make no deal till you showed up. Don’t you let
none of ’em have too big a debt, George.”

Barreau shrugged his shoulders at this last caution. He sat staring into
the fire, his lean, dark face touched with its red glow. Then abruptly
he got up and opened the door.

“It’s dark, Bob,” he said to me. “Let us go to the cabin.” And without
another word to Montell he left the store, I following.

It was just dark enough so that we could distinguish the outline of the
post buildings, and the black, surrounding wall of the stockade. The
burned stable had been rebuilt during our absence. Within it horses
sneezed and coughed over their fodder. On the flat beyond the post I
could hear the night-herder whistle as he rode around the grazing mules.
From this window and that, lights shone mistily through the
scraped-and-dried deer-skin that served for glass. And at the far end of
the stockade a group of men chattered noisily about a roaring fire. Yet
the lights and sounds, the buildings of men and the men themselves
seemed inconsequential, insignificant, proportioned to their
surroundings like the cheeping of a small frog at the bottom of a deep
well. The close-wrapping wilderness, with its atmosphere of inexorable
solitude, enfolded us with silence infinitely more disturbing than any
clamor. It may have been my mood, that night, but it seemed a drear and
lonely land; the bigness of the North, its power, the implacable,
elemental forces, had never taken definite form before. Now, all at
once, I saw them, and I did not like the sight.

We did not make our way straight to the cabin. Barreau had no mind to go
hungry. He stopped at the mess-house and bade the cook send our supper
to us, when it was ready. Then we went to the cabin, flung our lean
packs in a corner, built a fire, and sat by it smoking till a voluble
Frenchman brought the warm food.

Again Barreau had fallen into wordless brooding. For the hour or more
that passed after we had eaten he lay on his bed staring at the
pole-and-dirt roof. He was still stretched thus, an unlighted cigarette
between his lips, when I took off my clothes and laid me down to sleep.
And when at daybreak I wakened and sat up sleepily, Barreau’s bedding
was neatly smoothed out on the bunk. His smoking material, which had
lain on the table, was gone; likewise his rifle, cartridge-belt, and the
pack-rigging he had cast aside the evening before. It seemed that Mr.
Barreau must have gone a-journeying.

I opened the door and looked about me. Here and there men busied
themselves at sundry occupations. The sun had but cleared the tree-tops,
and on flat and hillsides deep black shadows still nestled. My roving
eyes finally settled on one of these blots of shade, and presently I saw
four figures, mounted, two of them leading extra horses, ascending the
south bank. Looking more closely I observed that one was a woman. Mr.
Montell, I decided, was taking time by the forelock. I stood with hands
jammed in my trousers pockets, wishing that I, too, were homeward bound,
wondering if Bolton had got either of my letters, and if he had made any
attempt to trace me—and a lot of other footless speculation.



CHAPTER XIII—A FORETASTE OF STRONG MEASURES


Thus thrown upon my own resources, I betook myself to the roomy cabin
where the cook reigned supreme. Thence, with breakfast disposed of, to
the store. I found there a small, bewhiskered man bowed over a ledger,
and a dozen husky packers stowing goods on the shelves. The clerical
person gazed at me over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles in a
colorless, uninterested sort of way. I took him to be the bookkeeping
machine of the concern, and such proved to be the case. And when I asked
for “George,” prudently refraining from mention of surnames he told me
primly that “Mr. Barreau” had gone up the river, leaving word that I was
to make myself at home in the meantime. Having delivered himself of this
message, he resumed his task. So I continued my round of the post until
I located old Ben Wise. What between chatting with Ben, and sundry games
of seven-up with one or two of the others whom I knew, and long spells
of sitting alone in the cabin smoking over the fire, I managed to murder
time for three days. At the end of which period Barreau returned.

He did not come alone, but at the head of a veritable flotilla of
birch-bark canoes, laden with a picturesque mixture of Indians, squaws,
round-faced pappooses, sharp-nosed dogs, and the household goods
pertaining to these. By the appearance of things I inferred that he had
been out to jog up the natives who had signified willingness to trade
with the house of Montell. They beached the canoes, and pitched their
lodges along the river bank, a little way from the stockade. In the two
hours of daylight following the arrival of the vanguard other little
parties came slipping quietly around the curve of the Sicannie, pitched
their camps, and set about cooking food. The flat was speckled with
twinkling dots of fire when dark vanquished the long twilight.

Barreau was tired, and had little to tell. I had come by a new deck of
cards through favor of the colorless Mr. Cullen, and we played a silent
game or two of euchre that night before turning in. By dawn we had
breakfasted and were at the store, and the copper-skinned men of the
lodges began to come in and cast their eyes upon such things as they
desired.

All forenoon I watched this silent outfitting of the hunters, saw this
one and that stand wrapped to the ears in his gaudy blanket, seeming not
to see or to be conscious of aught that transpired. Then of a sudden he
would point abruptly to a certain article, a trap or two, maybe, a caddy
of tea, a flask of powder, and emit a guttural sound that Barreau
interpreted to Cullen, who would solemnly make an entry in his notebook.
When the red brother had reached his trading limit, his squaw took the
burden of his purchases on her back, and he strode forth wrapped in a
dignity even more striking than his blanket, she following meekly at his
heels.

“How do you manage to keep track of them all?” I asked Barreau, as we
sat at dinner. “Suppose these Indians that you outfit now don’t show up
again? Can you trust them so absolutely? For my part I can hardly tell
one from another.”

“You’d find out that they have distinct individual characteristics,”
Barreau replied, “if you were with them long. I know most of these
fellows well enough to pick them out of a crowd. In fact, a good many of
them won’t trade except with me—which is one strong hold I have over my
slippery partner. And so far as trusting them, an Indian’s word is good
as gold. For every dollar’s worth of stuff we let them have this fall
they’ll bring ten dollars’ worth of pelts next spring—unless it is an
extraordinary winter. Anyway, we don’t stand to lose a great deal on
what we trust them for. Where we will make money will be in the spring
trade. They’ll have plenty of furs left after their debt is paid, and
they’ll want guns and more powder, flour and tea for the summer,
tobacco, and clothes and gew-gaws for the women and pappooses. If the
winter is normal we’re going to have a big trade; bigger even than I
thought. I wouldn’t mind,” he concluded, with a short laugh, “if Montell
had to go clear to Benton, and got snowed in there. That would eliminate
one dangerous factor. But that’s too much to hope for.”

“It’s a long trip,” I reflected. “He can’t get to the Missouri in time
to send his daughter down on the last boat, even. The river will freeze
any day now. Benton would be a dreary place for her to stay alone, I
should think. He may stay there with her.”

“Not likely,” Barreau contended. “As it happens, she knows one or two
rather nice families who are wintering at Benton, and she’ll be apt to
stay with them. He has been altogether too keen to have his finger in
this winter’s pie—when it wasn’t needed there. No, the old fox has
something up his sleeve—something that he’s been leading up to ever
since we left Benton. He’ll be back, if he has to come on his hands and
knees.”

Barreau was right. Montell did come back, and the date of his return was
only something more than forty-eight hours from the time of that
conversation. We were stretched upon our respective bunks, I listening
to Barreau’s talk of long-dead traders who had undertaken to buck the
Hudson’s Bay Company, when some one tapped on the door; and at Barreau’s
laconic “come in,” who but Montell himself should enter! He shut the
door carefully behind him, and waddled to a seat. Barreau raised on one
elbow.

“You!” he said sharply. “Back here already? What has happened now?”

Montell took off his hat and threw it petulantly on the floor. The
expression on his face was sour as curdled milk.

“We couldn’t make it, that’s all,” he growled. “I guess the H. B. C.’s
gettin’ busy all at once. Anyhow, we got headed off.”

“How?” Barreau demanded.

Montell flung out his hands expressively.

“Easiest way in the world,” he sputtered wrathfully. “Some feller with a
good eye just trailed us up, and killed off our stock—shot ’em one by
one. Finally we was afoot. So we turned back. Couldn’t walk clear to
MacLeod. Damn ’em, anyway!”

“No one hurt?” Barreau asked quietly.

“Barrin’ blistered feet—no,” Montell snapped.

His gaze involuntarily travelled to his own broad, shapeless feet, and a
smile flickered across Barreau’s countenance. There was a momentary
lull.

“What are you going to do now?” Barreau inquired next.

“I’m goin’ to take eight men, by God! and a string of mules, and hit it
in the mornin’,” Montell exploded. “I ain’t goin’ to have that girl
winter here, if I know it. And I ain’t goin’ to be headed off from
nothin’ by the Hudson Bay or any other damned outfit. I’ll show them
bushwhackin’ parties a trick or two. They’ll find old Montell ain’t so
slow. I just come over here to let you know I was back, George, so’s you
wouldn’t be gettin’ into the foreground to-morrow mornin’ when we’re
fixin’ to start. You might just as well be accommodatin’.”

“Oh, to be sure. As a favor from one gentleman to another,” Barreau
observed sarcastically. “Anything to oblige. But if I were you I should
not try it again—not till you can take the outfit lock, stock, and
barrel. You may find it only a waste of mules, if not worse. Evidently
the Company is minded to pen the lot of us here, and teach us a lesson.”

“Just so the girl’s out of it,” Montell muttered defiantly, “they got my
permission to go ahead with their teachin’. We’ve held our own for quite
a spell. But I got to get her clear. So I’m goin’ to tackle it again.”

“Very well,” Barreau said indifferently. “But you had better take a few
pair of snowshoes. You may need them.”

“Maybe so,” Montell returned. “But I bet I get a scalp or two if they go
to settin’ us afoot _this_ trip.” And he gathered up his hat and left
the cabin.

Barreau lay back on his bed a long time without remark. Then he said
aloud, apropos of nothing in particular:

“I shouldn’t be surprised if that was the way of it.”

I looked over at him, and catching my interrogative gaze, he went on.

“I’ve simply been doing a bit of inductive reasoning. Taking things as
they are in this country what more natural than that the Hudson’s Bay
Company should have become alarmed lest we grow to a formidable
competitor, and have simply made up their minds that we must be ousted,
by hook or by crook. They have a way of keeping posted, you know. I
shouldn’t be surprised if one or two of the men on our payroll were
Company spotters. Here is Montell and his daughter, and myself. They
might reason that by driving him back and intimidating him, forcing him
to winter here, and then harassing us in every conceivable way till
spring, they may make us glad to quit. For instance, they could try to
kill off our stock and poison our dogs. And if there was a chance to
burn us out, why that would be the finishing touch. I shouldn’t be
surprised if that is their scheme. And then along in the winter they
might even go so far as to have the Mounted Police pull one chestnut out
of the fire for them, by revealing my whereabouts.”

“How does it come,” I asked, in some surprise, “that they haven’t done
that before, if they know that George Barreau, the fur-trader, is
Slowfoot George of the MacLeod country?”

“For the very good reason that they want no Mounted Policemen in this
neck of the woods,” he said decidedly. “They don’t want to establish a
precedent. They have lorded it in the North for generations, and so long
as they continue to do so the Canadian government will permit it. Once
the Police begin to come here, the Company authority is at an end. Also
their monopoly—for a Mounted Police post up here would mean open
country, and a swarm of free traders. Of course, what I said, is mere
theory, but I might be on the right track. If I am, we may look for
merry times here this winter, and you and I may have to take to the deep
snows before spring.”

“Suppose—while we’re theorizing,” I ventured, “that Montell had an idea
he could get along without you—if he wants to settle your chances of
sharing in the profits, as you think—why mightn’t he give the Police a
quiet hint, if he gets through?”

“I can very well imagine him doing that,” Barreau responded
thoughtfully. “But he can’t make it go without me; at least, not just
yet. And I do not think he will get through, for all his determination.”

I kept Barreau’s prophecy in mind. Days of busy outfitting slipped by; I
kept no track of the hunters who indebted themselves to the post, but
they came and went by scores. The days merged into a week. At the end of
it a black ruck of clouds came scudding out of the west. Thick and
lowering they gathered over head, and one day at noon, while Barreau and
I stood in the doorway of the store, watching a great multitude of damp
snowflakes come eddying down through the still air, Montell, his
daughter, and the eight men, came plodding afoot to the gate of the
stockade.



CHAPTER XIV—INTEREST ON A DEBT


They filed past the store, a weary looking squad, Montell’s fat jowl
drawn into sullen lines, the men not wholly free of a certain furtive
bearing. Observing them I could very well enter into their feelings. My
brief experience between Benton and MacLeod had taught me something of
the fear that stalks at the elbow of a hunted man. The girl looked up at
Barreau and me, and for the first time there was no curl to her lip, no
scornful gleam in her eyes. Only a momentary flash of interest. Then the
listless, impersonal expression came back to her face. She walked at her
father’s elbow like one utterly worn out. The men branched off to the
bunkhouse. Montell and his daughter went straight to their cabin.

“I think he is beginning to have a profound respect for the Company,”
Barreau told me that night as we sat over our fire. “They have set him
thinking. It seems that none of his men could get so much as a glimpse
of a moccasin track. Still, their saddle horses and pack-mules were
systematically shot down, until they were afoot again. After that they
were not molested. He knows that his whole party could as easily have
been put out of the way. That seems to have put the fear of God into the
lot of them. They can’t understand the object. I don’t, myself,
altogether. But I could hazard a close guess, I think.”

All that night and the next day the big snowflakes came gyrating down.
The temperature remained the same, just short of freezing, and a dead
calm lay over the land. Then it faired gradually. With the clearing sky
the feathery snowfall melted and disappeared. Upon its passing the night
frosts took on a keener edge. Little vagrant gusts of wind went
frolicking through the open spaces in the woods, fluttering the dry,
fallen leaves into tiny heaps and scattering them again. Sometimes of a
night these same whisperings of the North rattled the bare limbs of the
cottonwoods and birch till the miles of forest seemed to voice a
protesting murmur. Steadily the cold grew, and the sun rode lower on its
diurnal passage. Save the pine and spruce and scattered cedars the great
woods shivered in their nakedness, lacking the white robe which the
North dons at such season. And presently that came also, with the
deep-throated whoop of a north-east gale to herald its coming. In one
night the Sicannie froze from bank to bank; at daybreak the wind drove
curling streamers of loose snow across its glassy surface, to pile in
frosty windows at the foot of the south slope.

During this period we of the post settled into a routine of minor tasks.
There were fires to keep against the cold. From dawn to dusk, somewhere
within the stockade or on the timbered hill above, the clink of an
axeblade on frosty wood rang like a bell. That, and water for cooking,
and caring for the stock now housed in the long stable, kept time from
hanging heavy on the hands of the men. Barreau and I gravitated between
our cabin and the store.

Montell sulked for a week after that last failure to reach the south.
Then he emerged from his shell of silence, and became ponderously
genial, talkative—a metamorphosis which Barreau regarded with frank
contempt. He spoke to Montell no oftener than was necessary, and when he
did speak his tongue was barbed. Openly and unequivocally he despised
and distrusted his flesh-burdened partner, and he made no effort to hide
the fact. For the most part Montell took his sneering unmoved, or
grinned pacifically, but there were times when his red face went purple
and his puffy eyelids would droop till the pupils glinted through mere
slits, like a cat about to pounce. Then it would be Barreau’s turn to
smile, in his slow ironic way.

Of the girl, who kept close to the cabin she and her father shared, no
word ever passed between the two. Nor did she meet Barreau or myself
face to face for a matter of three weeks. Our sight of each was from a
distance, and from that distance, with a blanket coat to her heels and a
fur cap pulled over her ears, it was hard to distinguish her from one of
the few half-breed women who had followed their men into the North. In
what way Montell accounted for our presence, I did not know, nor how he
explained Barreau’s assured position about the post. It may be that she
did not notice this incongruity on the part of a supposed fugitive; it
may be that Montell was a plausible liar. At any rate, upon the few
occasions when we three came near enough to recognize each other, she
appeared calmly indifferent. Barreau and I ate in the big cookhouse with
the rest of the men. Montell and his daughter had their meals served in
the cabin. So we—at least I will speak for myself, for Barreau
maintained a stony front and absolute silence on the subject—were saved
the embarrassment of meeting three times daily.

Montell himself became very friendly toward me. Bit by bit he drew from
me the story of my wanderings, and shook his head over it, assuring me
that Missouri river sternwheel men were a hard lot. Once he became
reminiscent and spoke of his dead wife and her people with a poorly
concealed pride in the alliance. His palpable satisfaction amused me. It
seemed odd that a man of his rugged type, a hard-headed business
buccaneer, should have that fatuous overestimation of wealth and
so-called “blood.” But he had it to the n’th degree. I dare say it was
his one weak spot. She was a Charbonne, of the old New Orleans
Charbonnes, originally a Hugenot family, but for the last generation or
two of St. Louis, he told me; and in the telling he shed his natural
carelessness of speech, and spoke in the stilted, exactly-phrased
English in which he might have addressed the aristocratic parent of his
bride. I knew more or less of the St. Louis Charbonnes myself, and I
wondered that I had never heard of Montell or his daughter. Barreau
smiled when I spoke of this later.

“That’s Montell all over,” he drawled. “Marrying a Charbonne stands out
as one of the big things he has accomplished. He can’t help boasting of
it now and then. I imagine that if he were dying in a snowbank that
thought would cheer him in his last hour. He regards it as a distinct
achievement. He was a big, perfectly-formed, good-looking brute when he
met her, and from all I know it was a case of two strong natures
brushing aside all obstacles. I’ve heard that the Charbonnes were
furious over what they considered the rankest sort of mesalliance—but
they were married, and so far as I know she never discovered his very
obvious clay feet. She died in child-birth—the second child. The family
has kept up a desultory intercourse with him for the girl’s sake. They
recognize her as their own blood, and tolerate him on that account.”

A day or two after this Barreau rigged up a dog-team and left the post,
bound for a point down the river, where they had established two
Frenchmen with some trading goods, on the chance of getting into touch
with some few lodges that hunted in that territory. He took one man, and
I tramped a few miles with them, for the sake of the snowshoe practice
of which I was sadly in need. It looked easy to go stalking over the
drifts on those webbed ovals, but it was trying work for a novice I
discovered at my first attempt. There was a certain free, swinging
stride, which I had yet to master. So it happened that I did not return
to the post until that chill hour between sundown and dark.

I was aware that the fire in our cabin was long dead, and the room
corresponding in temperature to an ice-box, but I was in no mood for the
ultra-friendly conversation Montell had been favoring me with of late.
For which reason I eschewed the blaze that I knew was crackling on the
store hearth and made straight for my own quarters.

The day’s work was at an end. Besides myself not a soul moved within the
frosty area of the stockade. The doors of every building were shut tight
against the sharp-toothed cold. This I noted almost mechanically. I was
beginning to develop the woodsman’s faculty of observing detail, without
conscious purpose. With my mind busy about the prospect of getting a
fire started in the shortest possible space of time my gaze for a moment
rested on the Montell cabin, as I stopped at my own door. At that
instant Jessie Montell stepped outside, a shawl thrown over her head,
carrying in one hand some object covered with a white cloth.

The dogs must have been lying at the end of the cabin. The slam of the
door had barely sounded when she was confronted by one wolf-like brute.
He faced her boldly, his nose pointed inquisitively toward the thing she
carried. She made a threatening gesture and spoke sharply to him,
whereat the husky retreated a foot or two—and was instantly reinforced
by half a dozen of his fellows. The girl lifted her hand a little higher
and berated them, her clear voice reproaching them for their lack of
manners. And then of a sudden one cock-eared brute sprang at the thing
she carried. He missed, and one of the others had a try. She gave
ground, holding above her head what I now saw was a plate; and
immediately the snarling pack was snapping at her skirts and she was cut
off from the door. I could hear the click of their white fangs as I ran.
She backed against the wall, scolding them in a voice that betrayed some
alarm.

I reached her on the double-quick, when I saw that the dogs meant
mischief. The short-tempered devils turned on me in a body with the
first blow I struck. One after the other I knocked galley-west and
crooked with the barrel of my rifle, and shortly emerged victorious from
the melee, but with my leggings ripped in divers places and the left
sleeve of my _parka_ slit as if with a knife. From this last the blood
streamed forth merrily, flowing down over my mitten and dripping redly
on the trampled snow. Prior to that my experience of vicious dogs had
been with those which grabbed and held on. The slashing wolfish snap of
the husky was new to me. I stood looking at my gashed arm in some
astonishment.

“Why, they’ve bitten you,” the girl exclaimed, with a sharp intake of
her breath. “Let me see?”

She spread apart the opening in my buckskin sleeve and frowned at sight
of the torn flesh, meanwhile balancing on her other hand the plate of
meat that had caused the onslaught. Most women, I found time to reflect,
would have dropped it at the first intention, but she had clung to it as
a miser clings to his gold.

“Come in and let me tie that up,” she commanded peremptorily, and flung
open the door, giving me little chance to debate whether I would or no.
And I followed her in, as much through a sudden desire to see a little
more of this very capable and impulsive young lady, as to have the sharp
sting of the wound allayed.

She brought water in a basin, a sponge, and a piece of clean linen which
she speedily reduced to strips; and after helping me remove the _parka_
proceeded to dress the gash in my forearm with deft tenderness. During
this ministering to my need we were both silent. When it was done she
tilted her head on one side and surveyed her handiwork, for all the
world like a small bird perched on a limb and looking down. This
fanciful notion struck me as rather absurd, and the more I thought of it
the more absurd it seemed, till I found myself smiling broadly. Likening
Jessie Montell to a saucy bird was, in a way, a very far-fetched
comparison. She was distinctly unbirdlike—apart from that trick of
tipping her head sidewise and gazing speculatively at whatsoever
interested her.

“I’m really and truly sorry I got you into such a scrape,” she
apologized sweetly. “I suppose I should have thrown the meat to those
ferocious things. But dear me, I’d toiled so over it, getting it thawed
and fixed for papa’s supper, that I hated to see it literally go to the
dogs. You mustn’t let the cold get into that cut. You’ll have a nasty
sore if you do.”

“Oh, I’ll see that the cold doesn’t have a chance at it,” I assured her.
“And you don’t need to feel guilty on my account. I’d rather it was my
arm than yours. I’m only too glad to pay a little interest on my debt.”

She looked puzzled for a second.

“Oh,” she said then, “you mean that time on the _Moon_. There’s no debt
to me. Those ruffians would have paid little heed to me. Mr. Barreau——”

She colored and broke off abruptly, with an impatient gesture.

“Papa has been telling me about you,” she changed the subject. “Another
St. Louis unfortunate”—smilingly—“aren’t you. As the Scotch say, I feel
‘verra weel acquentit.’ Your mother and my aunt Lois were more or less
intimate. So that I know you by proxy, in a way.”

I don’t recollect just what reply I made. If she were trying to put me
at my ease she made a woeful mess of it the very next minute, for she
demanded to know, with embarrassing directness:

“Why in the world didn’t you stand your ground at Benton? Whatever
possessed you to cross the line?”

“Well, you see—I—it was——” and there I halted lamely. I couldn’t discuss
the ethics of my flight with this self-sufficient young woman. My
grounds for self-justification in that particular instance, were rather
untenable. I couldn’t explain the psychology of the thing to her, when I
couldn’t quite grasp it myself. I couldn’t honestly admit that I had
refused to stay and face the consequences of Tupper’s sudden end at my
hands because I was overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t believe that myself.
Even if I had believed it, I would have been ashamed to admit frankly to
that gray-eyed girl that I had run away because I was afraid. It had
been a peculiar situation for me, one that I could hardly attempt to
make clear to her. With Barreau it had been different. He seemed to
understand, to divine how and why I did such and such a thing at such a
time and place, with but a meager explanation from me. Certain effects
invariably led him intuitively to first causes.

Moreover, with her I seemed to be put upon the defensive. I found myself
reflecting on what she would do in such a case, and instantly deciding
that Miss Jessie Montell would defy the devil and all his works if she
thought herself in the right. In addition thereto I felt that she was
unconsciously appraising me and classing me as a weakling; and that,
added to my own half-formed conviction that in time of trial I was
likely to prove so, made me a most uncomfortable individual for a few
moments. Montell’s entrance saved me from a rather unwelcome situation.
There is no knowing how deep a tangle I should have got myself into—she
was so uncompromisingly direct. Montell, however, opened the door at the
crucial period, and she turned to him with a recital of the huskies’
outbreak, lighting a cluster of candles as she talked.

“If you don’t shut up those ferocious brutes, or feed them a little
oftener,” she concluded, “they’ll devour somebody one of these days, and
there won’t be so much as a moccasin left to tell the tale.” At which
extravagant forecast we all three laughed, and I felt myself equal to
the occasion once more.

The upshot of this dog episode was that I stayed to supper with them,
and went to my own cabin rather late in the evening.



CHAPTER XV—STRANGERS TWAIN


My arm was somewhat swollen, and it throbbed like an ulcerated tooth,
when I got up the following morning, but I made shift to build a fire.
When the icy chill was banished from the room, I dressed, and was
getting what comfort I could out of a smoke when Montell knocked at my
door, bringing a cold gust of air when he entered.

“Oho,” said he, “stirrin’ round, eh? This ain’t much like home, is it?
How’s the arm?”

I told him briefly, having little inclination to enlarge on that
theme—the pain was sufficient without the aggravation of discussing it.

“Uh-huh,” he grunted. “Now you just come along to the shack and have
Jess fix it up again. She’s pretty near as good as a doctor. And seein’
she’s partly responsible, it’s no more’n fair. There ain’t no use you
makin’ a hermit of yourself.”

I attempted to dodge this invitation, which seemed to savor of command.
Montell’s semi-jocoseness rather jarred on me. For one thing his
heartiness didn’t quite ring true. Possibly I misjudged him. He could
have had no particular motive for posing on my account. But I got the
impression that his solicitude was of the lip rather than of the heart.
While I had passed a very pleasant evening with them, I did not
contemplate making myself at home in the Montell cabin, by any means. I
had a vague feeling that it involved disloyalty to Barreau. Montell,
however, was quite insistent, and as I had no forthright reason for
being churlish I ended by going with him.

He made a great fuss at helping me off with my coat, and while he
hovered over me in his ponderous way Miss Montell came out of the other
room. She nodded to me and smiled a greeting, whereupon he, busying
himself with hanging my coat and hat upon a peg, plunged into a jesting
account of my reluctance to leave my own fireside, relating with much
detail what he said and what I said, and how I owed it to my arm to have
it well cared for, and so on—till I wearied of his gabble. I don’t think
she listened half the time. She moved about the room, getting a basin
and warm water and other first, or perhaps I should say second, aids to
the injured. And she washed and bandaged afresh the laceration, with an
impersonal absorption in the task that I half resented.

When she had finished, breakfast, hot from the cookhouse, was brought by
one of the “breed” women, and Miss Montell seated herself at the table
and airily waved her father and myself to places on her right and left.

That was how I came to break bread with them a second time, and it was
not the last by any means. In the ensuing five or six days I wore a
distinct path between my cabin and theirs. Montell made it a point to
descend upon me at some hour of the day, and, after all, I was not so
loth. I am constrained to admit that Jessie Montell was the one bright
spot in those dreary, monotonous days. With Barreau gone, I was a lonely
mortal indeed. Those evenings at Montell’s passed away many a
leaden-footed hour. After that first time Jessie never challenged me in
that imperious, judicial manner, anent my Benton escapade. We spoke of
it, to be sure, but in terms dispassionate, uncritical. When Montell was
about, he and I played cribbage. When she and I were alone, we talked.
We discovered a similar taste in books, a mutual acquaintance or two in
St. Louis. And we gravely discussed the prospects of getting home in the
spring. Naturally, she was a rabid partisan, hating the Hudson’s Bay
Company with outspoken frankness. Moreover, she spoke confidently of her
father’s power to beat them at their own game, notwithstanding the
strong hand shown by the Company so shortly before. Of Barreau’s part in
the war for pelts, she seemed profoundly ignorant. His name never passed
her lips.

Once the swelling left my arm the torn place healed rapidly. So that by
the end of a week I felt no inconvenience, and it was beyond need of any
treatment save a simple bandage to protect it from the rubbing of my
sleeve. Then I bethought me of my neglected snowshoeing, and sallied
forth on the track of that free, effortless stride which had so far
eluded me. At the gate of the stockade I turned back, on the impulse of
the moment, and went to the Montell cabin to ask Jessie if she were a
snowshoe expert or wished to become one.

“Thank Heaven for a chance to see the outside of this stockade wall once
more,” she cried, in mock fervor. “Will I go snowshoeing? Yea, and
verily. I detest being mewed up, and I don’t like to wander off alone.
This big desolate country is so forbidding. Yes, I’ve snowshoed a
little—one winter in the Wisconsin woods.”

She had more of a mastery over the webbed boots of the North than I, it
shortly transpired. We went up the river a mile or two, crossed it, and
climbed to the top of a bald point that immediately appealed to us as an
ideal coasting-place. We were in something of a light-hearted mood,
anyway, and like a pair of children on a holiday amused ourselves by
sliding down and climbing back to slide down again. Thus we passed two
or three hours, at imminent risk of frozen cheeks and noses, for it was
bitterly cold, so cold that the snow crunched beneath our feet like
powdered rosin. And when we wearied of that we went trailing home over
glistening flats that lay between us and the post. Down on the bare
bottomlands of the Sicannie a tenuous frost-haze hung in the air. Back
from the valley edges the great woods stood in frozen ranks, branches
heavy-freighted with the latest fall of snow. To the west towered the
mountain range, robed in ermine now instead of summer purple; huge,
ragged crests, flashing in the heatless sun.

“What insignificant creatures we are, after all,” the girl stopped
suddenly and looked back at the white peaks, and to the north and south
where the somber woodland stood like twin walls. “For a true sense of
his own importance in the universe one has only to face—this.” She
nodded toward the surrounding forest, and the Rockies crouching against
the far skyline. “It is so big—and so silent. It gives me a feeling of
being pitted against a gigantic, remorseless power—a something
indefinable, and yet terrible in its strength. Power—when I can
understand it—fascinates me. But this makes me shrink. Sometimes I
actually feel afraid. They say that men compelled to stay up here alone
often go mad. I hardly wonder. I don’t think I like the North.”

“So you feel that way,” I rejoined. “So do I, at times.”

She assented soberly.

“Perhaps we are blessed or cursed, whichever it may be, with too much
imagination; and give it overfree rein.”

“No,” I returned, blundering on in an attempt to voice that which I had
often felt, but could never express. “There is an atmosphere, a
something about these immense spaces that sits hard on the nerves. We
don’t have to imagine these things; they’re here. It seems to me that
any wilderness untamed must have that same effect; it overawes one. And
man hasn’t tamed this yet. The North is master—and we feel it.”

We plodded a few yards farther.

“The North is master—and we feel it,” she repeated presently. “I resent
that. I shouldn’t care,” she murmured thoughtfully, “to be wholly at the
mercy of the North. It reminds me of the sea, cold and gray and
pitiless.” And she fell into a silent reflective mood as we trudged
along to the post.

Just at the gate of the stockade we met two men—two tall men burdened
with shoulder-packs. I knew the face of every man in the pay of Montell,
but these were not of his following. Yet somewhere, sometime, I had seen
them; my memory insisted upon this. But where or when, I could not
instantly recall.

They passed within a few feet of me, their _parka_ hoods drawn close
about their cheeks. I had only their profiles to spur my recollection.
But that sufficed. I stood watching them bear away to the north, and as
mechanically I shuffled the cards of memory a picture flashed out clear
as the ace of spades in a diamond suit. The two men were those who had
come to the camp of Three Wolves early in the fall, the same who had sat
upon the log with Barreau that morning and made overtures for peaceful
capitulation. Once I had placed them, my interest flagged. I turned and
entered the stockade. Jessie had kept on to the store. Montell was
standing on the stoop, as I reached the building, his hands thrust deep
in the pockets of his fur coat. By the fixity of his gaze as I turned
the corner I guessed that he was watching the two men. A backward glance
showed them just vanishing into the belt of spruce that ran to the brow
of the hill.

“Well,” I greeted, “you’ve had callers to break the monotony, I see.”

“That’s what,” he replied. “Queer fish, too. Wouldn’t stay no time at
all. Claimed to be free traders like ourselves, and wanted to know if we
minded ’em tryin’ to pick up a few pelts around here in the spring. Got
a stock of goods, they said, somewhere between here and the Peace.”

I pricked up my ears at that. Someone had fibbed properly. And when it
was on the tip of my tongue to say that they were Hudson’s Bay men, I
refrained. That information would keep, I reflected. The more I thought
of it the less I cared to make any assertions. The men had done no harm
apparently. If they had lied to Montell he was probably shrewd enough to
know why. If Montell were lying to me, he likely had good reasons. I
dropped the matter forthwith. It was for Barreau to speculate upon, when
he returned.

So I went into the store and warmed myself, and, after Jessie went home,
spent the rest of the afternoon playing pinochle with Ben Wise. But the
sight of those men in buckskin had jarred me out of the peaceful routine
of thought that the quiet weeks had bred. I was once more brought up
against the game of cross-purposes that Barreau and Montell were
playing, and the Hudson’s Bay Company again loomed as a factor. I
wondered if anything had befallen Barreau. He had told me he would be
back in four days—the time had doubled. Ben brought me up standing in
the midst of these reflections. He threw down his cards in disgust.

“I quit yuh,” he growled. “By gosh, I want to play cards when I play,
an’ do my dreamin’ in bed.” So we put up the deck, and I went to my
cabin and built a fire.

The cheery warmth of the cabin, after the exertion of snowshoeing, and
sitting there in a state of mental passivity, soon begot drowsiness. I
piled wood on the fire, and stretched myself on the bunk. And the next
minute, it seemed, I was being shaken out of my sleep—but I opened my
eyes to candle light, and Barreau standing over me, smiling.

“Come out of the trance, old snoozer,” he laughed cheerfully. “I’ve just
got in. Suppose we go and eat before the cook shuts up shop.”

“Amen to that,” I replied.

I put fresh wood on the fire, which had sunk to a few dull embers, while
Barreau busied himself with the wash-basin and comb. Stripped of the
_parka_ that had cast confusing shadows on his features I saw that he
had suffered attack from the frost. A patch of blackening skin stood
over each cheek-bone.

“I see you got bitten, too,” I remarked—and went on to tell him of my
clash with the huskies.

“I had worse than husky dogs to contend with,” he returned in a matter
of fact way. “Our two Frenchmen, the cabin and everything in it, has
been spirited away. I went on a scouting trip, thinking I might get
track of something. I’ve laid out every night since I left here. Hull
fared even worse than I; he may lose some of his toes.”

“And you found——” I started to ask.

“Nothing,” he replied carelessly. “I don’t think the men came to any
harm. But it’s one more item on the debit side.”

Over in the mess-house we had the long room to ourselves, except for the
cook pottering over his fire. And in the midst of the meal I bethought
me to tell Barreau of the two strangers, and Montell’s account of their
mission. He laid down his knife and fork and listened intently.

“Free traders, eh?” he drawled. “Not so bad for Montell, that—or has the
Company taken a fresh tack, I wonder? They knew I was away. I had a
feeling that we were being watched, and so had Hull. Quite an engrossing
little three-cornered game, isn’t it, Bob?”

We left the cookhouse without referring to this again. A light shone
dully through the store window nearest us, and we walked toward our
cabin, and just short of the door Barreau turned aside.

“I may as well go and tell him that the brothers Grau have gone over to
the enemy,” he said to me. “Come along, Bob, and see him squirm. He
always does when he is stabbed in such a vital point as the purse.
That’s a veritable heel of Achilles with him.”

Montell was alone. He stood with his back to the fire, legs spread
apart, hands clasped behind him. He looked very well satisfied with
himself. His little eyes surveyed us placidly from under the blinking,
puffy lids.

“Well, George, you’re back, eh?” he observed. “How’s everything below?”

“Very well, I dare say,” Barreau answered, during the process of making
a cigarette, “from the other fellow’s point of view.”

Montell’s eyelids drew a little nearer together.

“How’s that?” he inquired, in his mildest manner.

And Barreau, when he had found a box to his liking and seated himself on
it beside the fire, proceeded to tell him very much as he had told me.
The two of them eyed each other a few seconds. Then Montell bit the end
off the cigar he had tucked in one corner of his thick-lipped mouth and
spat it viciously into the fireplace.

“God damn ’em!” he snarled. But whether the Company or the two Frenchmen
he did not specify—perhaps both. Barreau laughed softly.

“Don’t let your angry passions rise,” he sneered. “Temper always induces
apoplexy in fat people. A man of your beefy tendency should be very
careful.”

Montell’s heavy jowl quivered slightly, and his jaws clamped together.
Aside from that he kept an impassive front. With that last shot Barreau
turned his gaze to the fire, and as Montell stood staring intently
before him there was an interval of silence. In the hush a scuffling
sound arose in the rear of the store.

“Them darned rats,” Montell muttered.

He cocked his head aside and stood in a listening attitude, I, watching
him unobtrusively, saw his glance flit furtively from me to Barreau and
then to a table standing just back from the hearth. For the first time I
noticed then that a rifle lay upon it, the general direction of the
muzzle toward Barreau. Again he looked swiftly from me to George, and
then stared straight away into the black shadows that shrouded the far
end of the long room. Once more the rustling and scraping sounds could
be heard.

“Them darned rats,” he repeated. “They’ll eat us out before spring.”

He left the fire and stole softly back among the shadows, whence
presently came the noise of something being thrown, followed by
Montell’s voice cursing the rats.

Barreau had not once turned his head. But I had watched Mr. Simon
Montell as much because his actions interested me as because I expected
anything to happen. And I distinctly saw the rifle shift its position
when he passed the table end; as if he had accidentally brushed against
the projecting stock. Accidentally or otherwise, the muzzle then pointed
straight at Barreau. I have a deep-rooted aversion to seeing the
business end of a gun directed at a man unless such is the intention of
the man behind it. Loaded or empty, my father taught me, never point a
gun at anybody unless you mean to hurt him. And so I reached over and
gave the rifle a hitch that pointed it toward the opposite wall, just as
Montell returned from his rat hunting.

“By thunder, I’d oughto took that to ’em,” he declared—as if he had but
noticed the rifle.

He placed himself before the fire again. In a minute or so came the
subdued rustling of the rats. Montell winked at me, picked up the
Winchester, cocked it, and went tip-toeing toward the rear. Barreau came
out of his study at the click of the hammer. He flashed a quick glance
after Montell. Then quietly he moved his box backward till his body,
when he seated himself, was no longer clearly outlined in the firelight.

The rat activities ceased. After a time Montell came poking back again,
carrying the rifle in his right hand. As he reached the end of the
table, so close to me that I could have touched him, and within six feet
of Barreau, he stumbled, pitched sharply forward, and the report of the
gun made my heart leap.

With the forward lurch of Montell’s body Barreau cast himself backward
like an uncoiled spring, and fell full length, thus escaping the bullet.
He made no attempt to rise, simply rolled over on his side. For an
instant a pistol glinted in his hand, and his thin lips were drawn back
from his white, even teeth. As quickly as he had drawn it he thrust the
six-shooter back out of sight. The habitual unruffled expression came
back to his face as Montell got upon his feet, leaving the rifle upon
the floor. Barreau sat up then.

“By the great horn spoon,” Montell stammered. “I—I oughto be kicked. By
gosh, I thought that hammer was down. Darn me for a careless fool,
runnin’ round with a loaded gun and stumblin’ over a little piece of
wood. I’d no idee I was so blamed clumsy. I guess I’m gettin’ old all
right.”

Barreau laughed, a cold-blooded unmirthful sound. He got up from his
sitting posture, laid hold of the rifle, and stood it against the wall
beside him. Then he sat down on his box, and felt with his fingers till
he located the bullet hole. It was embedded in the log, on a level with
his breast.

“Clumsy?” Barreau said, in a voice nearly devoid of inflection. “Well,
yes; it was rather clumsy.”

Montell was facing the light now. Barreau got up from his box again, and
Montell took a step backward. Thus for a half-minute the two faced each
other silently, gray eye pitting itself against cold, steel-blue.
Montell weakened under that direct contemptuous glare. His glance sought
me in a furtive way, and the fat, pudgy hands of him began to fidget.

“Don’t do it again, Montell,” Barreau said slowly, and his tone was like
a slap in the face.

Then he sat down upon the box and rolled himself another cigarette.



CHAPTER XVI—CLAWS UNSHEATHED


The heavy log walls must have muffled the shot completely, for, contrary
to my expectations, no inquiring faces came poking in the door. In pure
defiance, I believe, Barreau kept his place by the fire, smoking
placidly till it wore on to ten o’clock. Then Montell, pursing up his
lips, put on his overcoat and left without a word. Shortly after that
Cullen came in, followed by Ben Wise. They slept in the store, one at
each end. At their entrance Barreau drew the _parka_ hood about his ears
and we took our departure.

The fire was down to a single charred stick, but the chill had not yet
laid hold of the air within, and we made ready for bed before the
numbing fingers of the frost made free with our persons. I stretched
myself on my bunk and wrapped the blankets and a rabbit-skin robe about
me, but Barreau sat on the edge of his bed, staring into the candle
flame as if he sought therein the answer to a riddle.

“If those Company men made the same proposition to Montell,” he broke
out suddenly, “that they made to me, it is ten to one that Montell
stands ready to deliver the goods. That would account for the baldness
of that play to-night.”

“You think he did mean it, then?” I had so far given Montell the benefit
of the doubt, despite a growing conviction that he had stumbled
purposely.

“Why, of course; that’s obvious, isn’t it?” Barreau declared. “You know
he did. Else why did you move that gun after he’d very artfully
contrived to point it my way?”

“So you were watching him, after all?” said I.

“I always watch him,” he answered drily.

“I feel sure that he sees—or thinks he sees—the way clear, once I’m
attended to,” Barreau continued. “I’ve been looking for this very thing.
It came to me that day we struck the pack-trail. You remember? I started
to tell you, and changed my mind.”

I nodded. The incident was quite fresh in my memory—my juvenile egotism
had received a bump on that very occasion.

“It struck me with a sort of premonitory force, as I stood there looking
at those mule tracks,” he went on, “that if the Company offered him the
same terms they did me he would jump at it. They offered me forty
thousand dollars to get out of the game, to give them a bill of sale of
my interest—_and they would take care of my partner_. You see? Now I’m
satisfied they wouldn’t incorporate that last clause in any offer to
Montell. I’m not boasting when I say that from the beginning I’ve been
the thorn in the Company’s flesh. Every time they’ve locked horns with
me, I’ve come out on top. They might offer him forty thousand, but he’d
have to guarantee them against me. And I think that performance to-night
is a sample of how he will try to clear the way.”

“To put it baldly,” I said. “You think he’ll kill you out of hand—if he
gets a chance to do it in a way that won’t prove a boomerang?”

“Exactly,” Barreau observed.

“Then,” I suggested, and even as the words were on my tongue I stood
amazed at the ruthless streak they seemed to uncover, “why not catch him
at it—and do the killing yourself. There’s no law here to restrain
_him_, apparently. Be your own law—if you know you’re _right_.”

“I can’t.” Barreau muttered. “Not that my conscience would ever trouble
me. He’s protected in a way he doesn’t dream of. And he’s too wary of me
to lay himself liable. If anything happens it will be an accident; you
know how it would have been to-night. You, sitting right there, could
not have declared it otherwise, no matter what your private opinion
might have been. He has pretty well calculated the chances. No, Mr.
Montell is not going to put himself in any position where I’d be clearly
justified in snuffing him out.”

For a minute or so he sat silent, frowning at the candle on the table
between my bunk and his.

“How he would bait me,” he went on presently, “if he knew that killing
him is the one thing I desire to avoid, at any cost! I hope it doesn’t
come to that. It would be only just, but I have no wish to mete out
justice to him. His miserable life is safe from me, for her sake—no,
I’ll be honest: for my own. I want him to live, till I can force him to
tell her a few truths that she will never believe except from his own
lips. I was a seven times fool for not doing that long before we reached
Benton. I could have forestalled all this. But I didn’t suspect he was
tolling her on—for a purpose.”

He stopped again. It was not the first time that Barreau had touched
upon that theme, and always his tongue had been stricken with a
semi-paralysis just short of complete revelation. In a general way it
was plain enough to me, from the verbal collisions between himself and
Montell on that same subject. And though I was humanly curious enough to
want the particulars at first hand, I made no effort to draw forth his
story. Hence I was surprised when he took up the thread of the
conversation where he had left off.

“One reads of these peculiar situations in books,” he rested his chin in
the palms of his hands and stared abstractedly at me, “but they are
seldom encountered in everyday living. I dare say the world is full of
women, good women, beautiful, brilliant women, that I might have won.
Yet I must fall victim to an insane craving for an elfin-faced,
hot-tempered sprite who will have none of me. Six or seven years ago she
was a big-eyed school-girl, with a mop of unruly hair. Then all at once,
she grew up, and—and I’ve been the captive of her bow and spear ever
since. Love—the old, primal instinct to mate! It’s a brutal force, Bob,
when it focuses all a man’s being on one particular woman. I never told
her, but I’m sure she knew; I know she did. And she—well, a man never
can tell what a woman thinks or feels or will do or say, or whether she
means what she says when she says it. I don’t know. But I’ve thought
that she did care—only she wouldn’t admit it until I made her. She’s the
type that wouldn’t give herself to even the man she loved without a
struggle. And I’m just savage enough to be glad of that. I’ve only been
waiting till this spring and the end of this fur deal, so that we would
have the wherewith to live, before I cornered her and fought it out.

“But I’ve waited too long, I’m afraid. You see, Montell has always been
against me; that is, he has secretly been cutting the ground from under
my feet since he learned that I wanted _her_. The old fool looks into
his own heart and seeing perfect bliss in an alliance with ‘blood’ and
‘money,’ straightway determines that these two will insure her future
happiness—oh, I can read him, like an open book. He’d move the heavens
to bring about what he’d term ‘a good match.’

“As it happens I can compare pedigrees with the best of them—Good Lord!”
he broke off and laughed ironically. “That’s sickening; but I’m trying
to make the thing clear. Naive recital this, I must say. Well, anyway, I
measured up to the standard of breeding, but fell wofully short on the
financial requirements. And, somehow, foxy Simon grew afraid that I was
in a fair way to upset his cherished plans for Jess. This was after we’d
gone in together on this fur business. He had always acted rather
guardedly about Jessie and myself, but I had him there; so long as she
went out, I could meet her socially, and he could not prevent. Then a
year ago last summer the Hudson’s Bay undertook to run me out of this
country. That bred the trouble on High River, and after that I was
really outlawed. I expect he began at once to figure how he could turn
that to his advantage—regarding me as a dishtowel that he could wring
dry and throw aside. He has nursed a direct, personal grudge since the
first season. Naturally, he wanted to dominate everything, and I
wouldn’t let him. He thought himself the biggest toad in the puddle, and
it angered him when he found himself outsplashed. He made mistakes. I
corrected them, and held him down at every turn; I had to. It was a
ticklish job, and I made him move according to my judgment. Which was a
very bitter sort of medicine for a man of Montell’s domineering stamp.
So he was not long in developing a rancorous dislike of me, which seems
to have thrived on concealment.

“Where I made the grand mistake was in letting him keep her from knowing
that we were partners in this business. Without giving the matter a
second thought I had kept our business strictly to myself. He hinted
that others might follow our lead, and at first we had visions of making
terms with the Hudson’s Bay and building up a permanent trade here.
After two or three years of this I didn’t think it well to plunge into
explanations last spring. I made a mistake there, however; the mistake,
I should say. Jessie had gone out a good deal the last two winters, both
in St. Louis and New Orleans, and she was becoming quite a belle. For
all that, I think—oh, well, it doesn’t matter what I think. To make a
long story short, a day or two before the _Moon_ went upstream she told
me that she was going as far as Benton with her father. I, of course had
to rise to the occasion, be very properly surprised and inform her that
I, too, contemplated a trip on that same steamer. And I straightway
hunted Montell up and tried to have him dissuade her from the journey.

“I didn’t fathom the purport of it, even then—although I knew that he
would welcome any chance to put me wrong in her eyes. It was too late, I
felt, to volunteer any details concerning my part in her father’s
business up North. So I contented myself with his assurance and her
statement, that she would see him as far as Benton and then return on
the _Moon_.

“You see, I could easily imagine what would be her opinion of me, if she
learned all the unsavory details with which the Northwest has been
pleased to embellish the record of Slowfoot George. She has such a
profound scorn for anything verging on dishonesty, and according to the
sources of her information I’ve got some very shady things laid at my
door. I can’t be anything but a moral degenerate, in her eyes. Oh, he
engineered it skilfully. If I had only waited at Benton till the
bull-train was ready to start!

“You know how her returning panned out. I believe now, that he intended
from the first that she should go on to MacLeod. I’d come to the
conclusion that he would knife me on the business end, and that was why
I wanted Walt Sanders with me. But it didn’t occur to me that his plans
were so far-reaching. That unfortunate Police raid delivered me into his
hands at the psychological moment I was like a cornered rat that day she
came to the guardhouse and peered in on us through the cell door. I
couldn’t help lashing back when she was so frankly contemptuous. I could
see so clearly how he had managed it. And having accomplished his
purpose he saw to it that escape was made easy, for he still needed me
up here. Mind you, it would have been pretty much the same if I had not
been taken by the Police. He would have seen that she was well posted
before she left MacLeod.

“The rest you have seen for yourself. She spoiled his plan a little,
perhaps, by coming all the way once she had started. That wasn’t his
fault; he didn’t want her to come here, especially after I picked up one
of her combs that night we came to the camp, and threatened him if he
didn’t send her home. She _is_ wilful. And the only way he could have
kept her from coming to the Sicannie would have been to go back himself.

“If our presence here has puzzled her you may be sure he has made
satisfactory explanations. I am only biding my time. If I can hold him
down and stand off the Hudson’s Bay till the furs come in, I can win out
so far as the money end is concerned. And if I am to lose her, by God
he’ll pay for it! She shall know the truth if I have to choke it out of
him one word at a time.”

“It looks like a big contract,” I sympathized.

He made a gesture that might have meant anything, but did not reply.
Presently he reached for his tobacco. When his cigarette was lighted he
blew out the candle. By the glowing red tip I could follow his movements
as he settled himself and drew the bedding about him. “Oh, Bob,” he
addressed me after a long interval.

“What is it?” I answered.

“If that old hound and I should get mixed up, you keep out of it.
Somebody will have to see that Jess gets out of this God-forsaken
country. You’re woods-wise enough to manage that now.”

“Why, of course I’d do that,” I replied. It was a startling prospect he
held forth. “But I hope nothing like that happens.”

“Anything might happen,” he returned. “We’re sitting on a powder-keg. I
can’t guarantee that it won’t blow up. Montell is a bull-headed brute,
and so am I. If he should throw a slug into me, I’d probably live long
enough to return the favor.”

Then, after a pause: “I’ve been running on like an old woman. That rifle
business to-night jarred me like the devil. Maybe a decent night’s rest
will scatter these pessimistic ideas. Here goes, Robert; good-night.”

With which he turned his face to the wall, and did, I verily believe, go
at once to sleep. And he was still asleep, his head resting on one
doubled-up arm, when I got up and lighted the candle at seven in the
morning. My slumbers had been beset by disturbing visions of violent
deeds, the by-product of what I had seen and heard that evening;
Barreau, by his cheerful aspect on arising, had banished his troubles
while he slept.

The day dawned, clear and cold and very still. It passed, and another
followed, and still others, till I lost track of their number in the
frost-ridden cycle of time. Montell’s momentous stumble grew to be a dim
incident of the past; sometimes I was constrained to wonder if, after
all, he had done that with malice aforethought. Upon divers occasions I
met and talked with Jessie, but I did not go to the house again, until
Barreau hinted, one day, that unless I continued the intimacy I had
accidentally begun, Montell would think I suspected him, that I was
taking Barreau’s side.

“There is no use in your making an enemy of him,” he said.

“Well,” I replied, “I must say I don’t altogether like his fatherly
manner. He makes me uncomfortable.”

“Nevertheless,” Barreau declared, “he has taken a fancy to you. He’s
human. And seeing it’s not your fight, you’d better not break off short
on that account. Better not antagonize him. It’s different with me; I
have no choice.”

Influenced more or less by Barreau’s suggestion, I suppose, I found
myself giving assent that very afternoon when Montell asked me to the
cabin for supper and a session at cribbage. Over the meal and the
subsequent card-game he was so genial, so very much like other big
easy-going men that I had known, I could scarcely credit him as
cold-bloodedly scheming to defraud and, if necessary, murder another
man. Somehow, without any logical reason, I had always associated fat
men, especially big, fat men, with the utmost good-nature, with a sort
of rugged straightforward uprightness that frowned on anything that
savored of unfair advantage. I could not quite fathom Mr. Simon
Montell—nor George Barreau, either, so far as that goes.

Shortly after that, at the close of an exceeding bitter day, an Indian
came striding down the Sicannie to the post. When the guard at the big
gate let him in his first word was for the “White Chief,” as Barreau was
known among the men of the lodges. Ben Wise came shouting this at the
door of our cabin, and we followed Ben to the store. The Indian shook
hands with Barreau. Then he drew his blanket coat closer about him and
delivered himself of a few short guttural sentences. Barreau stood
looking rather thoughtful when the copper-skinned one had finished. He
asked a few questions in the native tongue, receiving answers as brief.
And after another period of consideration he turned to me.

“Crow Feathers is sick,” he said. “Pneumonia, I should judge, by this
fellow’s description of the symptoms. The chances are good that he’ll be
dead by the time I get there—if he isn’t already. The medicine man can’t
help him, so old Three Wolves has sent for me, out of his sublime faith
in my ability to do anything. I can’t help him, but I’ll have to go, as
a matter of policy. Do you want to come along, Bob? It won’t be a long
jaunt, and it will give you some real snowshoe practice.”

I embraced the opportunity without giving him a chance to reconsider
which he showed signs of doing later in the evening. Curiously enough
Montell also attempted to dissuade me from the trip.

“What’s the use?” he argued. “You’ll likely get your fingers or your
feet frozen. It’s a blamed poor time of the year to go trapesin’ around
the country. You better stay here where there’s houses and fires.”

The cold and other disagreeable elements didn’t look formidable enough
to deter me, however; I wanted something to break the monotony. A trip
to Three Wolves’ camp in mid-winter appealed very strongly to me, and I
turned a deaf ear to Montell’s advice, and held Barreau strictly to the
proposal which he evinced a desire to withdraw.

That evening we got the dog harness ready, and rigged up a toboggan for
the trail, loading it with food, bedding, and a small, light tent. Two
hours before daybreak we started. There was a moon, and the land spread
away boldly under the silver flood, like a great, ghostly study in black
and white.

All that day our Indian led us up the Sicannie. There was no need to use
our snowshoes or to “break” trail, for we kept to the ice, and its
covering of snow was packed smooth and hard as a macadam roadway. By
grace of an early start and steady jogging we traversed a distance that
was really a two days’ journey, and at dusk the lodges of Three Wolves’
band loomed in the edge of a spruce grove. Then our Indian shook hands
with Barreau and me, and swung off to the right.

“He says his lodge is over there in a draw,” Barreau told me, when I
asked the reason for that.

The dogs of the camp greeted us with shrill yapping, and two or three
Indians came out. They scattered the yelping huskies with swiftly thrown
pieces of firewood, and greeted Barreau gravely. After a mutual exchange
of words Barreau vented a sharp exclamation.

“The devil!” he said, and followed this by stripping the harness from
the dogs.

“What now?” I asked, as I bent over the leader’s collar.

“You’ll see in a minute,” he answered briefly, and there was an angry
ring in his voice.

The dogs freed and the toboggan turned on its side, he led the way to a
lodge pointed out by one of the hunters. A head protruded. It was
withdrawn as we approached, and some one within called out in Cree. And
when we had inserted ourselves through the circular opening I echoed
Barreau’s exclamation. For sitting beside the fire which burned
cheerfully in the center, was Crow Feathers himself, smoking his pipe
like a man in the best of health. Nor was there any suggestion of
illness in the voice he lifted up at our entrance. Barreau fired a
question or two at him, and a look of mild interest overspread Crow
Feathers’ aquiline face as he answered.

“It was a plant all the way through,” Barreau declared, sitting down and
slipping off his mitts. “Three Wolves sent no message to me. Crow
Feathers never was sick in his life.”

“I wonder who’s responsible?” said I. “Do Indians ever play practical
jokes?”

He shrugged his shoulders at the suggestion. Crow Feathers’ squaw pushed
a pot of boiled venison before us, and some bannock, and we fell upon
that in earnest. Not till we had finished and were fumbling for tobacco
_did_ Barreau refer to our wild-goose chase again.

“I’d like to have speech with that red gentleman who led us up here,” he
said grimly. “It may be that Mr. Montell has unsheathed his claws in
earnest. If he has, I’ll clip them, and clip them short.”



CHAPTER XVII—NINE POINTS OF THE LAW


A perceptible wind from out the east blew squarely in our teeth all the
way down the Sicannie. Slight as it was, a man could no more face it
steadily than he could hold his nostrils to sulphur fumes blown from a
funnel. All day it held us back from our best speed. Time and again we
were forced to halt in the lee of a wooded point, where with threshing
of arms we drove the sluggish blood back into our numbing finger-tips.
Twice the frost struck its fangs into my cheeks, despite the strap of
rabbit fur that covered my face between eyes and mouth. Barreau rubbed
the whitened places with snow till the returning blood stung like a
searing iron. Twice I performed a like office for him. So it came that
night had fallen when we lifted up our voices at the gate of the
stockade. And while we waited for it to open, our dogs whining at the
snarl of their fellows inside, some one in the glimmer behind us hailed
the post in French. A minute later the frosty creak of snowshoes sounded
near and a figure came striding on our track. As he reached us the gate
swung open. A group of men stood just within. One held a lantern so that
the light fell upon our faces—and, incidentally, their own. They were
strangers, to the last man. Barreau ripped out an oath. For a second we
surveyed each other. Then one of the men spoke to him who had come up
with us:

“Is there aught afoot?” he asked, with a marked Scotch accent.

“Not that I have seen, Donald,” the other replied.

“Then,” said the first, speaking to Barreau, “come ye in an’ put by your
dogs. Dinna stand there as if ye looked for harm.”

“I am very sure there will be no harm done us,” Barreau drawled, unmoved
in the face of this strange turn of affairs. “But I am of two minds
about coming in.”

The Scot shrugged his shoulders. “That’s as ye like,” he observed. “’Tis
not for me tae compel ye. ’Tis merely the factor’s word that if ye came,
he desired speech wi’ ye. Ye will find him noo at the store.”

Barreau considered this a moment. “Lead the way then, old Bannockburn,”
he said lightly, “we will take our dog-team with us.”

“Keep an eye to the rear, Bob,” he muttered to me. “This may be a trap.
But we’ve got to chance it to find out how things stand.”

I nodded acquiescence to this; for I myself craved to know how the thing
had been brought to pass.

The group of men scattered. Save the Scot with the lantern, not one was
in sight when Barreau halted the dogs and turned the toboggan on its
side by the front of the store. Our lantern-bearer opened the door and
stepped inside, motioning us to enter. My eyes swept the long room for
sign of violent deeds. But there were none. The goods lay in their
orderly arrangement upon the shelves. The same up-piled boxes and bales
threw huge shadows to the far end. There was no change save in the men
who stood by the fire. Instead of Montell warming his coat-tails before
the crackling blaze, a thin-faced man stood up before the fire; a tall
man, overtopping Barreau and myself by a good four inches. He bowed
courteously, looking us over with keen eyes that were black as the long
mustache-end he turned over and over on his forefinger. A thatch of hair
white as the drifts that hid the frozen earth outside covered his head.
He might have been the colonel of a crack cavalry regiment—a leader of
fighting men. His voice, when he spoke, bore a trace of the Gaul.

“Gentlemen,” he greeted, “it is a very cold night outside. Come up to
the fire.”

He pushed a stool and a box forward with his foot and turned to a small,
swarthy individual who had so far hovered in the background.

“Leave us now, Dufour,” he said. “And you, Donald, come again in a half
hour.” “_Oui, M’sieu._” Dufour gathered up his coat and departed
obediently, the Scot following.

As nonchalantly as if he were in the house of a friend Barreau drew his
box up to the fire and sat down; thrust the parka hood back from his
face and held his hands out to the blaze. But I noticed that he laid the
rifle across his knees, and taking my cue from this I did the same when
I sat down. A faint smile flitted across the tall man’s features. He
also drew a seat up to the fire on the opposite side of the hearth so
that he faced us.

“It is to Mr. Barreau I speak, is it not?” he inquired politely.

“It is,” Barreau acknowledged. “And you, I take it, are Factor Le Noir
of King Charles’ House.”

“The Black Factor, as they call me—yes,” he smiled. “I am glad to have
met you, Mr. Barreau. You are a hardy man.”

“I did not come seeking compliments,” Barreau returned curtly. “Why are
you here—you and your _voyageurs_, making free with another man’s house?
And what have you done with Simon Montell and his daughter? and the
forty-odd men that were here two days ago?”

“One thing at a time,” Le Noir answered imperturbably. “Is it possible
that you do not know of the arrangement which was made?”

“It is obvious that there was an arrangement,” Barreau snorted. “What I
would know is the manner of its carrying out.”

“To be brief, then,” the other said, speaking very slowly and
distinctly, as if he measured out his words, “for a consideration Simon
Montell has abandoned the field. While my Company permits no competitor
in the trade, according to our charter, yet sometimes it is cheaper to
buy than to fight.”

Barreau’s shoulders stiffened. “Your charter is a dead letter,” he
declared. “You know it as well as I. That, however, is beside the point.
You have made terms with Montell—but you have made none with me.”

“Possession is nine points of the law,” Le Noir returned tranquilly.
“Having bought we will now fight, if it be necessary. One does not pay
twice for the same goods. Be wise, and seek redress from—well, if the
fat man has tricked you, make _him_ pay.”

“Suppose I choose instead to make the Company pay,” Barreau drawled.
“What if I come to you with a hundred well-armed red men at my back?”

“Ah, it is of that I wished to speak with you,” the Black Factor crossed
his legs and emphasized his remarks with a waggling forefinger. “Of that
very thing. I know that you are not easily turned aside, but this
time—listen. To-night, here within these stockade walls, there are four
redcoat men from MacLeod. They have come seeking”—he paused
significantly—“you can guess whom they seek. Now, if, when you leave
here, your tracks should point to the Indian camps of the west—why, then
the redcoats shall be shown it. And I will send twenty men to help them.
But if you take the south trail these four will return empty-handed.”

Barreau sat a minute or two pondering this. “You win,” he said at
length. “I am not the man to beat my fists on a stone. Give us flour and
tea—and your word as a gentleman that the Police shall not be put on our
track—and we quit the Sicannie.”

“You shall have the tea and the flour,” Le Noir agreed. “There are the
shelves. Take what you want. I give my word for the Police. I would beg
of you to stay to-night, but these government men have sharp ears and
eyes. Should they get a hint—I cannot put a blanket over the mouths of
my men——” he spread his hands as if to indicate that anything might
happen.

Throughout our brief stay Barreau’s thinly veiled vigilance did not once
relax. The supplies he selected I carried to the door while he stood
back watching me with his rifle slung in the hollow of his arm. If this
wary attitude irked Le Noir he passed it by. To me it seemed that
Barreau momentarily expected some overt act.

Eventually we had the food, a hundred pounds of flour, a square tin of
tea, a little coffee, some salt and pepper and half a dozen extra pairs
of moccasins lashed on the toboggan. Then he stirred up the surly dogs
and we went crunching over the harsh snow to the stockade wall attended
by Donald and his lantern, and the Factor himself swathed to the heels
in a great coat of beaver.

At the drawing of the bar and the inward swing of the great gate,
Barreau put a final question to Le Noir. “Tell me, if it is not
betraying a confidence,” he said ironically, “how much Montell’s
flitting cost the Company?”

“It is no secret,” the Factor replied. “Sixty thousand dollars in good
Bank of Montreal notes. A fair price.”

“A fair price indeed,” Barreau laughed “Good-night, M’sieu the Black.”

The gate creaked to its close behind us as the dogs humped against the
collars. A hundred yards, and the glimmering night enfolded us; the
stockade became a vague blur in the hazy white.

Barreau swung sharp to the west. This course he held for ten minutes or
more. Then down to the river, across it and up to the south flat. Here
he turned again and curtly bidding me drive the dogs, tramped on ahead
peering down at the unbroken snow as he went. We plodded thus till we
were once more abreast of the stockade. For a moment I lost sight of
Barreau; then he called to me and I came up with him standing with his
back to the cutting wind that still thrust from out the east like a
red-hot spear.

He took the dog-whip from me without a word, swinging the leaders
southward. In the uncertain light I could see no mark in the snow. But
under my webbed shoes there was an uneven feeling, as if it were
trampled. We bore straight across the flat and angled up a long hill,
and on the crest of it plunged into the gloomy aisles of the forest.
Once among the spruce, Barreau halted the near-winded dogs for a
breathing spell.

“We will go a few miles and make camp for the night,” he said. “This is
Montell’s trail.”

“The more miles the better,” I rejoined. “I’m tired, but I have no wish
to hobnob with the Policemen.”

“Faugh!” he burst out. “There are no Policemen. That was as much a bluff
as my hundred well-armed Indians. Le Noir is a poser. Do you think I’d
ever have gotten outside that stockade if there had been a redcoat at
his call? Oh, no! That would have been the very chance for him—one that
he would have been slow to overlook. I know him. He’s well named the
Black Factor. His heart is as black as his whiskers and the truth is not
in him—when a lie can make or save a dollar for his god—which is the
Company. We have not quite done with him yet, I imagine. Hup there, you
huskies—the trail is long and we are two days behind!”



CHAPTER XVIII—THE LONG ARM OF THE COMPANY


The fourth day out, at a noon camp by a spring that still defied the
frost, Barreau straightened up suddenly from his stooping over the
frying-pan.

“Listen,” he said.

His ears were but little keener than mine, for even as he spoke I caught
a sound that was becoming familiar from daily hearing: the soft _pluff_,
_pluff_ of snowshoes. In the thick woods, where no sweeping winds could
swirl it here and there and pile it in hard smooth banks, the snow was
spread evenly, a loose, three-foot layer, as yet uncrusted. Upon this
the foot of man gave but little sound, even where there was a semblance
of trail. So that almost in the instant that we heard and turned our
heads we could see those who came toward us. Three men and two
women—facing back upon the trail we followed.

The men I recognized at once. One was Cullen, the bookkeeping automaton;
the other two were half-breed packers. They halted at sight of us, and
from their actions I believe they would have turned tail if Barreau had
not called to them. Then they came up to the fire.

“Where now?” Barreau demanded.

“We go back on ze pos’, M’sieu,” one of the breeds declared.

“What of the others?” Barreau asked sharply. “And why do you turn back?”

“Because Ah’m not weesh for follow ze fat trader an’ die een som’
snowbank, me,” the breed retorted sullenly. “M’sieu Barreau knows zat ze
Companie has taken ze pos’, eh?”

“I do,” Barreau answered. “Go on.”

“Ze Black Factor hees say to heem, ‘w’y not you stay teel ze spreeng,’
but M’sieu Montell hees not stay, an’ hees mak talk for us to com’ wees
heem on ze sout’ trail. Eet don’ mak no diff’rence to me, jus’ so Ah’m
geet pay, so Ah’m tak ze ol’ woman an’ com’ long. Montell hees heet ’er
up lak hell. Ever’ seeng she’s all right. Zen las’ night som’body hees
mak sneak on ze camp an’ poison ze dog—ever’ las’ one—an’ hees steal
som’ of ze grub, too. Zees morneeng w’en Jacques Larue an’ me am start
out for foller dees feller’s track, hees lay for us an’ tak shot at us.
Firs’ pop hees heet Larue—keel heem dead, jus’ lak snap ze feenger. Ah’m
not go on after zat. MacLeod she’s too dam’ far for mak ze treep wit’ no
dog for pull ze outfeet. Not me. Ah’m gon’ back on ze pos’. Ze Companie
hees geev me chance for mak leeveeng. For why som’body hees poison ze
dog an’ bushwhack us Ah don’ can say; but Ah know for sure Montell hees
dam’ crazee for try to go on.”

“You, too, eh, Cullen?” Barreau observed. “Oh, you are certainly brave
men.”

“He was a fool to start,” Cullen bristled; the first time I had ever
seen a flash of spirit from the man of figures, “and I am not fool
enough to follow him when it is plain that he is deliberately matching
himself against something bigger than he is. There was no reason for
starting on such a hard trip. The Hudson’s Bay men did us no harm. The
factor did advise him to stay there till spring opened—I heard him,
myself. But he was bound to be gone. Whoever is dogging him means
business, and I have no wish to die in a snowbank—as Jean puts it.”

“How was the taking of the post managed?” Barreau asked him next.

Cullen shook his head. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “It was just at
daylight of the morning you left for Three Wolves camp. Somebody yelled,
and I ran out of the cookhouse where I sat eating breakfast. The yard
was full of Company men. And when I got to the store why there was
Montell making terms with the Company chief; a tall, black-mustached
man. We started within an hour of that. Montell seemed in great haste.
He is determined to go on. I felt sorry for Miss Montell. I tried to
show him the madness of attempting to walk several hundred miles with
only what supplies we could carry on our shoulders. _He_ wouldn’t turn
back, though.”

“For a very good reason,” Barreau commented. “Which a man who knew as
much of our affairs as you did, Cullen, should have guessed. Well, be on
your way. Doubtless the Black Factor will welcome your coming.”

The three men had laid down the shoulder-packs with which they were
burdened. They re-slung them, and passed on with furtive sidelong
glances; the women followed, dragging a lightly loaded toboggan.

“Rats _will_ quit a doomed ship,” Barreau remarked. Then he resumed his
turning of the meat that sizzled in the pan.

“We will soon come up with them,” he said, when we had eaten and were
putting the dogs to the toboggan again. “They cannot make time from
their morning camp.”

The beaten track was an advantage. Now, since the returning party had
added a final touch to it, we laid aside our snowshoes and followed in
the wake of the dogs, half the time at a jogging trot. In little more
than an hour of this we came to the place where Montell had lost his
dogs—and his followers. The huskies lay about the trodden campground,
stiff in the snow. Scattered around the cleared circles where the tents
had stood overnight were dishes, articles of food, bedding. Montell had
discarded all but absolute essentials. A toboggan and its useless
dog-harness stood upended, against a tree.

“So much for loss of motive power,” Barreau said grimly. “It is a pity
to leave all this, but we are loaded to the limit now. If we should lose
our dogs——” he left the sentence unfinished.

And so we passed by the abandoned goods and followed on the trail that
led beyond. There is a marked difference between the path beaten through
snow by seven persons with three full dog-teams, and that made by one
man and a slight girl, dragging a toboggan by hand. Barreau took to his
snowshoes again, and strode ahead. I kept the dogs crowding close on his
heels. It was the time of year when, in that latitude, the hours of
daylight numbered less than five. Thus it was but a brief span from noon
to night. And nearing the gray hour of twilight he checked the straining
huskies and myself with a gesture. Out of the woods ahead uprose the
faint squeal of a toboggan-bottom sliding over the frosty snow.
Barreau’s eyebrows drew together under his hood.

“It’s a hundred to one that there will be fireworks the moment I’m
recognized,” he muttered finally. “But I can see no other way. Come on.”

A hundred yards farther I caught my first glimpse of the two figures,
Montell’s huge body bent forward as he tugged at his load. Barreau
increased his speed. We were up with them in a half minute more. Montell
whirled with a growl half alarm, half defiance. He threw up the rifle in
his hands. But Barreau was too quick for him, and the weapon was
wrenched out of his grasp before he could use it. With an inarticulate
bellow Montell shook himself free of the shoulder-rope by which he drew
the toboggan and threw himself bodily upon Barreau, striking, pawing,
blaspheming terribly. Strangely enough Jessie made no move, nor even
cried out at the sight. She stood like one fascinated by that brute
spectacle. It did not endure for long. The great bulk of Montell bore
Barreau backward, but only for a moment. He ducked a wild swing that had
power enough behind it to have broken his neck, came up under Montell’s
clutching arms and struck him once under the chin—a lifting blow, with
all the force of his muscular body centered therein. It staggered the
big man. And as I stepped forward, meditating interference, Barreau
jammed him backward over our loaded toboggan, and held him there
helpless.

He pinned him thus for a second; then suddenly released him. Montell
stood up, a thin stream of blood trickling from one nostril. He glowered
sullenly, but the ferocious gleam of passion had died out of his eyes.

“Get a fire built,” Barreau ordered, “and a tent pitched. We shall camp
here to-night. Make no more wild breaks like that, unless you want to be
overtaken with sudden death. When we are warm I have something to say to
you.”

Twilight merged into gray night, and the red blaze of the fire we built
glowed on the surrounding trees and the canvas of the tent. A pot of
melted snow bubbled and shed steam. Close by it a piece of moose-flesh
thawed in the heat. Jessie, still mute, sat on a piece of canvas I
spread for her, and held her hands to the flame.

“Now,” Barreau challenged Montell, “is a good time for explanations.
Only facts, no matter how they gall you, will serve. Speak up. First
begin at the beginning, and tell the truth—to her.” He motioned to
Jessie. She started slightly. A half dozen times I had noticed her
looking first at myself and then at Barreau, and there was wonder and
something else in her heavy-lashed eyes. Now she flashed a glance of
inquiry at her father. For a moment I thought she was about to speak.

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
hoarse 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 passion 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. Willy-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 passed 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 quantities 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 God 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 space 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 circumstance.

“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, snatched 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 passion. 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 damned 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.

I was lying beside the fire, Jessie rubbing my forehead with snow in
lieu of water, when I again became cognizant of my surroundings. Barreau
stood on the other side of the fire, putting on fresh wood.

“I’m sorry, sorry, Bob,” she whispered, and her eyes were moist. “But
you know I couldn’t stand by and see you—it would have been murder.”

I sat up at that. Across the top of my head a great welt was now risen.
My face, I could feel, was puffed and bruised. I looked at Barreau more
closely; his features were battered even worse than mine.

“Did you hit me with an axe, or was it a tree?” I asked peevishly. “That
is the way my head feels.”

“The rifle,” she stammered. “I—it was—I didn’t want to hurt you, Bob,
but the rifle was so heavy. I couldn’t make you stop any other way; you
wouldn’t listen to me, even.”

So that was the way of it! I got to my feet. Save a dull ache in my head
and the smarting of my bruised face, I felt equal to anything—and the
physical pain was as nothing to the hurt of my pride. To be felled by a
woman—the woman I loved—I did love her, and therein lay the hurt of her
action. I could hardly understand it, and yet—strange paradox—I did not
trouble myself to understand. My brain was in no condition for solving
problems of that sort. I was not concerned with the why; the fact was
enough.

If I had been the unformed boy who cowered before those two hairy-fisted
slave-drivers aboard the _New Moon_—but I was not; I never could be
again. The Trouble Trail had hardened more than my bone and sinew; and
the last seven days of it, the dreary plodding over unbroken wastes,
amid forbidding woods, utter silence, and cold bitter beyond Words, had
keyed me to a fearful pitch. There was a kink to my mental processes; I
saw things awry. In all the world there seemed to be none left but us
three; two men and a woman, and each of us desiring the woman so that we
were ready to fly at each other’s throats. Standing there by the fire I
could see how it would be, I thought. Unless the unseen enemy who
hovered about us cut it short with his rifle, we were foredoomed to
maddening weeks, perhaps months, of each other’s company. Though she had
jeered at him and flaunted her contempt for him at both MacLeod and the
post, Jessie had put by that hostile, bitter spirit. To me, it seemed as
if she were in deadly fear of Barreau. She shrank from him, both his
word and look. And I must stand like a buffer between. Weeks of
suspicion, of trifling, jealous actions, of simmering hate that would
bubble up in hot words and sudden blows; I did not like the prospect.

“I have a mind to settle it all, right here and now!”

I did not know until the words were out that I had spoken aloud. As a
spark falling in loose powder, so was the effect of that sentence upon a
spirit as turbulent and as sorely tried as his.

“Settle it then, settle it,” he rose to his feet and shouted at me.
“There is your gun behind you.”

I blurted an oath and reached for the rifle, and as my fingers closed
about it Jessie flung herself on me.

“No, no, _no_,” she screamed, “I won’t let you. Oh, oh, for God’s sake
be men, not murdering brutes. Think of me if you won’t think of your own
lives. Stop it, stop it! Put down those guns!”

She clung to me desperately, hampering my hands. He could have killed me
with ease. I could see him across the fire, waiting, his Winchester
half-raised, the fire-glow lighting up his face with its blazing eyes
and parted lips, teeth set tight together. And I could not free myself
of that clinging, crying girl. Not at once, without hurting her. Mad as
I was, I had no wish to do that. At length, however, I loosened her
clinging arms, and pushed her away. But she was quick as a steel trap.
She caught the barrel of my rifle as I swung it up, and before I could
break her frenzied grip the second time, a voice in the dark nearby
broke in upon us with startling clearness.

“Hello, folks, hello!”

The sound of feet in the crisp snow, the squeaking crunch of toboggans,
other voices; these things uprose at hand. I ceased to struggle with
Jessie. But only when a man stepped into the circle of firelight, with
others dimly outlined behind him, did she release her hold on my gun.
Barreau had already let the butt of his drop to his feet. He stood
looking from me to the stranger, his hands resting on the muzzle.

“How-de-do, everybody.”

The man stopped at the fire and looked us over. He was short, heavily
built. Under the close-drawn _parka_ hood we could see little of his
face. He was dressed after the fashion, the necessity rather, of the
North. His eyes suddenly became riveted on me.

“God bless my soul!” he exclaimed.

He reached into a pocket and took out a pair of glasses wrapped in a
silk handkerchief. The lenses he rubbed hastily with the silk, and stuck
them upon the bridge of his nose. I could hear him mumbling to himself.
A half dozen men edged up behind him.

“God bless me,” he repeated. “Without a doubt, it _is_ Bob Sumner.
Somewhat the worse for wear, but Bob, sure enough. Ha, you young dog,
I’ve had a merry chase after you. Don’t even know me, do you?”

He pushed back the hood of his _parka_. The voice had only puzzled me.
But I recognized that cheerful, rubicund countenance with its bushy
black eyebrows; and the thing that favored me most in my recollection
was a half-smoked, unlighted cigar tucked in one corner of his mouth. It
was my banker guardian, Bolton of St. Louis.

                                  ————

Wakening out of the first doze I had fallen into through that long night
I was constrained to rise and poke my head out of the tent in which I
slept to make sure that I had not dreamed it all. For the event savored
of a bolt from a clear sky. I could scarcely believe that only a few
hours back I had listened to the details of its accomplishment; how
Bolton had in the fullness of time received both my letters; how he had
traced me step by step from MacLeod north, and how he had only located
me on the Sicannie River, through the aid of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
He was on his way to the post. Our meeting was purely accidental. And so
on. From the tent I saw a lone sentinel plying the fire. I slipped on
the few clothes I had taken off, and sat down beside the cheery crackle
of the blaze, to meditate upon the miracle. I was sane enough to shudder
at what might have been, if Barreau and I had had a few minutes longer.

In an hour all the camp was awake. Bolton’s cook prepared breakfast, and
we ate by candle-light in a tent warmed by a sheet-iron stove. How one’s
point of view shuffles like the needle of a compass! A tent with a stove
in it, where one could be thoroughly comfortable, impressed me as the
pyramid-point of luxury.

After that there was the confusion of tearing up camp and loading a
half-dozen dog-teams. Jessie sat by the great fire that was kept up
outside, and her face was troubled. Barreau, I noticed, drew Bolton a
little way off, where the two of them stood talking earnestly together,
Bolton expostulating, Barreau urging. Directly after that I saw Barreau
with two of Bolton’s men to help him, load one of the dog-teams over
again. He led it to one side; his snowshoes lying on the load. Then he
came over to Jessie. Reaching within his _parka_ he drew forth the
package he had taken off Montell’s body, and held it out to her.

“Girl,” he said, and there was that in his voice which gave me a sudden
pang, and sent a flush of shame to my cheek, “here is your father’s
money. There is no need for me to take care of it now. Good-bye.”

She stared up at him, making no move to take the package, and so with a
little gesture he dropped it at her feet and turned away. And as he laid
hold of the dog-whip she sprang to her feet and ran after him.

“George, George!” If ever a cry sounded a note of pain, that did. It
made me wince. He whirled on his heel, and the dog-whip fell unheeded in
the snow.

“Oh, oh,” she panted, “I can’t take that. It isn’t mine. It’s
blood-money. And—and if you go by yourself, I shall go with you.”

“With me,” he held her by the shoulder, looking down into her upturned
face. Never before had I seen such a variety of expression on his
features, in so short a span of time, hope, tenderness, puzzlement, a
panorama of emotions. “I’m an outlaw. There’s a price on my head—you
know that. And you yourself have said—ah, I won’t repeat the things you
have said. You know—you knew you were stabbing me when——”

“I know, I know!” she cried. “I believed those things then. Oh, you
can’t tell how it hurt me to think that all the time you had been
playing a double part—fooling my father and myself. But now I _know_. I
know the whole wretched business; or at least enough to understand. I
got into his papers back there on the Sicannie. There were things that
amazed me—after that—I stormed at him till he told me the truth; part of
it. You don’t know how sorry I am for those horrible, unwomanly things I
said to you. How could I know? He lied so consistently—even at the last
he lied to me—told me that the Company men had taken the post by
surprise, that we were lucky to get away with our lives. I believed that
until I saw you find that money. Then I knew that he had sold you
out—his partner. I’ve been a little beast,” she sobbed, “and I’ve been
afraid to tell you. Oh, you don’t know how much I wanted to tell you;
but I was afraid. I’m not afraid now. If you are going to strike out
alone, I shall go, too.”

He bent and kissed her gravely.

“The Northwest is no place for me, Jess,” he said. “I cannot cross it in
the winter without being seen or trailed, and there is no getting out of
that jail-break, if I am caught. I must go over the mountains, and so to
the south, where there are no Police. You cannot come. Bolton, and—and
Bob will see you safe to St. Louis. If nothing happens I shall be there
in the spring.”

She laid her head against his breast and sobbed, wailing over him before
us all. I bit my lip at the sight, and putting my pride in my pocket
went over to them.

“Barreau,” I said, “I don’t, and probably never will, understand a
woman. You win, and I wish you luck. But unless you hold a grudge longer
than I do, there’s no need for you to play a lone hand. Let the dead
past bury its dead, and we will all go over the mountains together. I
have no wish to take a chance with the Police again, myself. You and
Bolton seem to forget that I’m just as deep in the mud as you are in the
mire.”

Barreau stood looking fixedly at me for a few seconds. Then he held out
his hand, and the old, humorous smile that had been absent from his face
for many a day once more wrinkled the corners of his mouth.

“Bob,” he said, “I reckon that you and I are hard men to beat—at any
game we play.”

                                  ————

That, to all intents and purposes, ends my story. We did cross the
mountains, and traverse the vast, silent slopes that fall away to the
blue Pacific. Bolton had gilded the palm of the Hudson’s Bay Company in
his search for me, and so they considerately dropped their feud with
Barreau—at least there was no more shooting of dogs, nor any effort to
recover the money that cost Montell his life. Or perhaps they judged it
unwise to meddle with a party like ours.

So, by wide detour, we came at last to St. Louis. There Barreau and
Jessie were married, and departed thence upon their honeymoon. When
their train had pulled out, I went with Bolton back to his office in the
bank. He seated himself in the very chair he had occupied the day I came
and saddled the burden of my affairs upon him. He cocked his feet up on
the desk, lighted a cigar and leaned back.

“Well, Robert,” he finally broke into my meditations, “how about this
school question? Have you decided where you’re going to try for a B. A.?
And when? What about it?”

“I can take up college any time,” I responded. “Just now—well, I’m going
to the ranch. A season in the cow camps will teach me something; and I
would like to run the business just as my father did. I don’t think I’ll
slip back so that I can’t take up study again. Anyway, the schools have
no monopoly of knowledge; there’s a wonderful lot of things, I’ve
discovered, that a fellow has to teach himself.”

He surveyed me in silence a few minutes, his cigar pointed rakishly
aloft, his eyes half shut. Then he took the weed between his thumb and
forefinger and delivered himself of this sapient observation:

“You’ll do, Bob. As a matter of fact, the North made a man of you.”

I made no answer to that. I could not help reflecting, a trifle
bitterly, that there were penalties attached to the attaining of
manhood—in my case, at least.

THE END.



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