Front matter (continued 4)

The fourth night he worked with his hunting-knife and his belt-ax, thinning down the slab and making it smooth. The fifth and the sixth nights he passed in the same way, and he ended the sixth night by heating the end of a small iron rod in the fire and burning the first three letters of Deane’s epitaph on the slab. For a time he was puzzled, wondering whether he should use the name Scottie or David. He decided on David.

He did not travel fast, for to him spring was the most beautiful of all seasons in the wilderness. It was underfoot and overhead now. The snow-floods were singing between the ridges and gathering in the hollows. The poplar buds were swollen almost to the bursting point, and the bakneesh vines were as red as blood with the glow of new life. Seventeen days after he left Churchill he came to the edge of the big Barren. For two days he swung westward, and early in the forenoon of the third looked out over the gray waste, dotted with moving caribou, over which he and Pelliter had raced ahead of the Eskimos with little Isobel. He went to the cabin first and entered. It was evident that no one had been there since he had left, On the bunk where Deane had died he found one of baby Isobel’s little mittens. He had wondered where she had lost it, and had made her a new one of lynx-skin on the way down to Couchée’s cabin. The tiny bed that he had made for her on the floor was as she had last slept in it, and in the part of a blanket that he had used as a pillow was still the imprint of her head. On the wall hung a pair of old trousers that Deane had worn. Billy looked at these things, standing silently, with his pack at his feet. There was something in the cabin that closed in about him and choked him, and he struggled to overcome it by whistling. His lips seemed thick. At last he turned and went to the grave.

The foxes had been there, and had dug a little about the sapling cross. There was no other change. During the remainder of the forenoon Billy cut down a heavier sapling and sunk the butt of it three feet into the half-frozen earth at the head of Deane’s grave. Then, with spikes he had brought with him, he nailed on the slab. He believed that no one would ever know what the words on that slab meant— no one except himself and the spirit of Scottie Deane. With the end of the heated rod he had burned into the wood:

DAVID DEANE

Died Feb. 27, 1908

BELOVED OF ISOBEL AND THE ONE

WHO WISHES HE COULD TAKE

YOUR PLACE AND GIVE

YOU BACK TO

HER

W. M. April 15, 1908

He did not stop when it was time for dinner, but carried rocks from a ridge a couple of hundred yards away, and built a cairn four feet high around the sapling, so that storm or wild animals could not knock it down. Then he began a search in the warmest and sunniest parts of the forest, where the green tips of plant life were beginning to reveal themselves. He found snowflowers, redglow, and bakneesh, and dug up root after root, and at last, peeping out from between two rocks, he found the arrowlike tip of a blue flower. The bakneesh roots he planted about the cairn, and the blue flower he planted by itself at the head of the grave.

It was long past midday when he returned to the cabin, and once more he was oppressed by the appalling loneliness of it. It was not as he had thought it would be. Deane’s spirit and companionship had seemed to be nearer to him beside his campfires and in the forest. He cooked a meal over the stove, but the snapping of the fire seemed strange and unnatural in the deserted room. Even the air he breathed was heavy with the oppression of death and broken hopes. He found it difficult to swallow the food he had cooked, though he had eaten nothing since morning. When he was done he looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. The northern sun had dropped behind the distant forests and was followed now by the thickening gloom of early evening. For a few moments Billy stood motionless outside the cabin. Behind him an owl hooted its lonely mating-song. Over his head a brush sparrow twittered. It was that hour, just between the end of day and the beginning of night, when the wilderness holds its breath and all is still. Billy clenched his hands and listened. He could not keep back the break that was in his breath. Something out there in the silence and the gathering darkness was calling him— calling him away from the cabin, away from the grave, and the gray, dead waste of the Barren. He turned back into the cabin and put his things into the pack. He took the little mitten to keep with his other treasures, and then he went out and closed the door behind him. He passed close to the grave and for the last time gazed upon the spot where Deane lay buried.

“Good-by, old man,” he whispered. Goodby—”

The owl hooted louder as he turned his face into the west. It made him shiver, and he hurried his steps into the unbroken wilderness that lay for hundreds of miles between him and the post at Fond du Lac.

XX

THE LETTER

Days and weeks and months of a loneliness which Billy had never known before followed after his pilgrimage to Deane’s grave. It was more than loneliness. He had known loneliness, the heartbreak and the longing of it, in the black and silent chaos of the arctic night; he had almost gone mad of it, and he had seen Pelliter nearly die for a glimpse of the sun and the sound of a voice. But this was different. It was something that ate deeper at his soul each day and each night that he lived. He had believed that thought of Isobel and his memories of her would make him happier, even though he never saw her again. But in this he was mistaken. The wilderness does not lend to forgetfulness, and each day her voice seemed nearer and more real to him, and she became more and more insistently a part of his thoughts. Never an hour of the day passed that he did not ask himself where she was. He hoped that she and the baby Isobel had returned to the old home in Montreal, where they would surely find friends and be cared for. And yet the dread was upon him that she had remained in the wilderness, that her love for Deane would keep her there, and that she would find a woman’s work at some post between the Height of Land and the Barrens. At times there possessed him an overwhelming desire to return to McTabb’s cabin and find where they had gone. But he fought against this desire as a man fights against death. He knew that once he surrendered himself to the temptation to be near her again he would lose much that he had won in his struggle during the days of plague in Couchée’s cabin.

So his feet carried him steadily westward, while the invisible hands tugged at him from behind. He did not go straight to Fond du Lac, but spent nearly three weeks with a trapper whom he ran across on the Pipestone River. It was June when he struck Fond du Lac, and he remained there a month. He had more than half expected to pass the winter there, but the factor at the post proved a disagreeable acquaintance, and he did not like the country. So early in July he set out deeper into the Athabasca country to the west, followed the northern shore of the big lake, and two months later came to Fort Chippewyan, near the mouth of the Slave River.

He struck Chippewyan at a fortunate time. A government geological and map-making party was just preparing to leave for the terra incognita between the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and the three men who had come up from Ottawa urged Billy to join them. He jumped at the opportunity, and remained with them until the party returned to the Mackenzie River by the way of Fort Providence five months later. He remained at Fort Providence until late spring, and then came down to Fort Wrigley, where he had several friends in the service. Fifteen months of wandering had had their effect upon him. He could no longer resist the call of the wanderlust. It urged him from place to place, and stronger and stronger grew in him the desire to return to his old country along the shores of the big Bay far to the west. He had partly planned to join the railroad builders on the new trans-continental in the mountains of British Columbia, but in August, instead of finding himself at Edmonton or Tête Jaune Cache, he was at Prince Albert, three hundred and fifty miles to the east. From this point he struck northward with a party of company men into the Lac La Ronge country, and in October swung eastward alone through the Sissipuk and Burntwood waterways to Nelson House. He continued northward after a week’s rest, and on the eighteenth of December the first of the two great storms which made the winter of 1909-10 one of the most tragic in the history of the far northern people overtook him thirty miles from York Factory. It took him five days to reach the post, where he was held up for several weeks. These were the first of those terrible weeks of famine and intense cold during which more than fifteen hundred people died in the north country. From the Barren Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late in January the temperature did not rise above forty degrees below zero, and remained for the most of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the wilderness reports of starvation and death came to the company’s posts. Trap lines could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose, caribou, and even the furred animals had buried themselves under the snow. Indians and half-breeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice at York Factory Billy saw mothers who brought dead babies in their arms. One day a white trapper came in with his dogs and sledge, and on the sledge, wrapped in a bearskin, was his wife, who had died fifty miles back in the forest.

During these terrible weeks Billy found it impossible to keep Isobel and the baby Isobel out of his mind night or day. The fear grew in him that somewhere in the wilderness they were suffering as others were suffering. So obsessed did he become with the thought that he had a terrible dream one night, and in that dream baby Isobel’s face appeared to him, a deathlike mask, white and cold and thinned by starvation. The vision decided him. He would go to Fort Churchill, and if McTabb had not been driven in he would go to his cabin, over on the Little Beaver, and learn what had become of Isobel and the little girl. A few days later, on the twenty-seventh day of January, there came a sudden rise in the temperature, and Billy prepared at once to take advantage of the change. A half-breed, on his way to Churchill, accompanied him, and they set out together the following morning. On the twentieth of February they arrived at Fort Churchill.

Billy went immediately to detachment headquarters. There had been several changes in two years, and there was only one of the old force to shake hands with him. His first inquiry was about McTabb and Isobel Deane. Neither was at Churchill, nor had been there since the arrival of the new officer in charge. But there was mail for Billy— three letters. There had been half a dozen others, but they were now following up his old trails somewhere out in the wilderness. These three had been returned recently from Fond du Lac. One was from Pelliter, the fourth he had written, he said, without an answer. The “kid” had come— a girl— and he wondered if Billy was dead. The second letter was from his Cobalt partner.

The third he turned over several times before he opened it. It did not look much like a letter. It was torn and ragged at the edges, and was so soiled and water-stained that the address on it was only partly legible. It had been to Fond du Lac, and from there it had followed him to Fort Chippewyan. He opened it and found that the writing inside was scarcely more legible than the inscription on the envelope. The last words were quite plain, and he gave a low cry when he found that it was from Rookie McTabb.

He went close to a window and tried to make out what McTabb had written. Here and there, where water had not obliterated the writing, he could make out a line or a few words. Nearly all was gone but the last paragraph, and when Billy came to this and read the first words of it his heart seemed all at once to die within him, and he could not see. Word by word he made out the rest after that, and when he was done he turned his stony face to the white whirl of the storm outside the window, his lips as dry as though he had passed through a fever.

A part of that last paragraph was unintelligible, but enough was left to tell him what had happened in the cabin down on the Little Beaver.

McTabb had written:

“We thought she was getting well... took sick again.... did everything... could. But it didn’t do any good,... died just five weeks to a day after you left. We buried her just behind the cabin. God... that kid... You don’t know how I got to love her, Billy.... give her up...”

McTabb had written a dozen lines after that, but all of them were a water-stained and unintelligible blur.

Billy crushed the letter in his hand. The new inspector wondered what terrible news he had received as he walked out into the blinding chaos of the storm.

XXI

THE FIGHTING SPARK

For ten minutes Billy buried himself blindly in the storm. He scarcely knew which direction he took, but at last he found himself in the shelter of the forest, and he was whispering Isobel’s name over and over again to himself.

“Dead— dead—” he moaned. “She is dead— dead—”

And then there rushed upon him, crushing back his deeper grief, a thought of the baby Isobel. She was still with McTabb down on the Little Beaver. In the blur of the storm he read again what he could make out of Rookie’s letter. Something in that last paragraph struck him with a deadly fear. “God... that kid... You, don’t know how I got to love her, Billy,... give her up...”

What did it mean? What had McTabb told him in that part of the letter that was gone?

The reaction came as he put the letter back into his pocket. He walked swiftly back to the inspector’s office.

“I’m going down to the Little Beaver. I’m going to start to-day,” he said. “Who is there in Churchill that I can get to go with me?”

Two hours later Billy was ready to start, with an Indian as a companion. Dogs could not be had for love or money, and they set out on snowshoes with two weeks’ supply of provisions, striking south and west. The remainder of that day and the next they traveled with but little rest. Each hour that passed added to Billy’s mad impatience to reach McTabb’s cabin.

With the morning of the third day began the second of those two terrible storms which swept over the northland in that winter of famine and death. In spite of the Indian’s advice to build a permanent camp until the temperature rose again Billy insisted on pushing ahead. The fifth night, in the wild Barren country west of the Etawney, his Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Billy investigated he found him half dead with a strange sickness. He made the Indian’s balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The temperature continued to fall, and the cold became intense. Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Billy knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game. Even the brush sparrows and snow-hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that be might take what food was left and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself. But the idea never got farther than a first thought. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible day. There was food for another twenty-four hours.

Billy packed it, together with his blankets and a few pieces of tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease. Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian’s balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth— the plague signal of the north.

Than he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that the one chance was to keep the wind at his back.

At the end of his first day’s struggle Billy built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber which was not much more than bush. He had observed that the timber and that every tree and bush he had passed since noon was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. He cooked and ate his last food the following day, and went on. The small timber turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly. All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a mouthful of foxbite, which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe. At night he made tea, but had nothing to eat. His hunger was acute and painful. It was torture the next day— the third— for the process of starvation is a rapid one in this country where only the fittest survive on from four to five meals a day. He camped, built a small bush-fire at night, and slept. He almost failed to rouse himself on the morning that followed, and when he staggered to his feet and felt the cutting sting of the storm still in his face and heard the swishing wail of it over the Barren he knew that at last the hour had come when he was standing face to face with the Almighty.

For some strange reason he was not frightened at the situation. He found that even over the level spaces he could scarce drag his snow-shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless— even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a sensation of intense cold; he almost felt that he could lie down in the drifted snow and sleep peacefully. He knew what it would be— a sleep without end, with the arctic foxes to pick his bones afterward— and so he resisted the temptation and forced himself onward. The storm still swept straight west from Hudson’s Bay, bringing with it endless volleys of snow, round and hard as fine shot, snow that had at first seemed to pierce his flesh and which swished past his feet as if trying to trip him and tossed itself in windrows and mountains in his path. If he could only find timber, shelter! That was what he worked for now. When he had last looked at his watch it was nine o’clock in the morning; now it was late in the afternoon. It might as well have been night. The storm had long since half blinded him. He could not see a dozen paces ahead. But the little life in him still reasoned bravely. It was a heroic spark of life, a fighting spark, and hard to put out. It told him that when he came to shelter he would at least feel it, and that he must fight until the last. The pack on his back held no significance and no weight for him. He might have traveled a mile or ten miles an hour and he would not have sensed the difference. Most men would have buried themselves in the snow and died in comfort, dreaming the pleasant dreams that come as a sort of recompense to the unfortunate who dies of starvation and cold. But the fighting spark commanded Billy to die upon his feet if he died at all. It was this spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to give him shelter from wind and snow. It burned a little more warmly then. It flared up and gave him new vision. And then, for the first time, he realized that it must be night. For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was gloom. His first thought was that it was a campfire miles and miles away. Then it drew nearer, until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window. He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to shout. But no sound fell from his swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of his snow-shoes. Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door, and plunged in.

What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table directly in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger man, and in this moment it struck Billy as strange that he should be clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As Billy came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for the dark glare in his sunken eyes. Billy smelled the odor of whisky; he smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently. And then the spark, the fighting spark in him, gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor. He heard a voice which came to him from a great distance, and which said, “Who the hell is this?” and then, after what seemed to be a long time, he heard that same voice say, “Pitch him back into the snow.”

After that he lost consciousness. But in that last moment between light and darkness he experienced a strange thrill that made him want to spring to his feet, for it seemed to him that he had recognized the voice that had said “Pitch him back into the snow.”

XXII

INTO THE SOUTH

A long time before he awoke Billy knew that he was not in the snow, and that hot stuff was running down his throat. When he opened his eyes there was no longer a light burning in the cabin. It was day. He felt strangely comfortable, but there was something in the cabin that stirred him from his rest. It was the odor of frying bacon. All of his hunger had come back. The joy of life, of anticipation, shone in his thin face as he pulled himself up. Another face— the bearded face— red-eyed, almost animal-like in its fierce questioning, bent over him.

“Where’s your grub, pardner?”

The question was like a stab. Billy did not hear his own voice as he explained.

“Got none!” The bearded man’s voice was like a bellow as he turned upon the others, “He’s got no grub!”

In that moment Billy choked back the cry on his lips. He knew the voice now— and the man. It was Bucky Smith! He half rose to his feet and then dropped back. Bucky had not recognized him. His own beard, shaggy hair, and pinched face had saved him from recognition. Fate had played his way.

“We’ll divvy up, Bucky,” came a weak voice. It was from the thin, white-faced man who had sat corpselike on the edge of his bunk the night before.

“Divvy hell!” growled the other. “It’s up to you— you ’n’ Sweedy. You’re to blame!”

You’re to blame!

The words struck upon Billy’s ears with a chill of horror. Starvation was in the cabin. He had fallen among animals instead of men. He saw the thin-faced man who had spoken for him sitting again on the edge of his bunk. Mutely he looked to the others to see who was Sweedy. He was the young man who had clutched the can of beans. It was he who was frying bacon over the sheet-iron stove.

“We’ll divvy, Henry and I,” he said. “I told you that last night.” He looked over at Billy. “Glad you’re better,” he greeted. “You see, you’ve struck us at a bad time. We’re on our last legs for grub. Our two Indians went out to hunt a week ago and never came back. They’re dead, or gone, and we’re as good as dead if the storm doesn’t let up pretty soon. You can have some of our grub— Henry’s and mine.”

It was a cold invitation, lacking warmth or sympathy, and Billy felt that even this man wished that he had died before he reached the cabin. But the man was human; he had at least not cast his voice with the one that had wanted to throw him back into the snow, and he tried to voice his gratitude and at the same time to hide his hunger. He saw that there were three thin slices of bacon in the frying-pan, and it struck him that it would be bad taste to reveal a starvation appetite in the face of such famine. Bucky was looking straight at him as he limped to his feet, and he was sure now that the man he had driven from the Service had not recognized him. He approached Sweedy.

“You saved my life,” he said, holding out a hand. “Will you shake?”

Sweedy shook hands limply.

“It’s hell,” he said, in a low voice. “We’d have had beans this morning if I hadn’t shook dice with him last night.” He nodded toward Bucky, who was cutting open the top of a can. “He won!”

“My God—” began Billy.

He didn’t finish. Sweedy turned the meat, and added:

“He won a square meal off me yesterday— a quarter of a pound of bacon. Day before that he won Henry’s last can of beans. He’s got his share under his blanket over there, and swears he’ll shoot any one who goes to monkeyin’ with his bed— so you’d better fight shy of it. Thompson— he isn’t up yet— chose the whisky for his share, so you’d better fight shy of him, too. Henry and I’ll divvy up with you.”

“Thanks,” said Billy, the one word choking him.

Henry came from his bunk, bent and wabbling. He looked like a dying man, and for the first time Billy noticed that his hair was gray. He was a little man, and his thin hands shook as he held them out over the stove and nodded to Billy. Bucky had opened his can, and approached the stove with a pan of water, coming in beside Billy without noticing him. He brought with him a foul odor of stale tobacco smoke and whisky. After he had put his water over the fire he turned to one of the bunks and with half a dozen coarse epithets roused Thompson, who sat up stupidly, still half drunk. Henry had gone to a small table, and Sweedy followed him with the bacon. Billy did not move. He forgot his hunger. His pulse was beating quickly. Sensations filled him which he had never known or imagined before. Was it possible that these were people of his own kind? Had a madness of some sort driven all human instincts from them? He saw Thompson’s red eyes fastened upon him, and he turned his face to escape their questioning, stupid leer. Bucky was turning out the can of beans he had won. Beyond him the door creaked, and Billy heard the wail of the storm. It came to him now as a friendly sort of sound.

“Better draw up, pardner,” he heard Sweedy say. “Here’s your share.”

One of the thin slices of bacon and a hard biscuit were waiting for him on a tin plate. He ate as ravenously as Henry and Sweedy, and drank a cup of hot tea. In two minutes the meal was over. It was terribly inadequate. The few mouthfuls of food stirred up all his craving, and he found it impossible to keep his eyes from Bucky Smith and his beans. Bucky was the only one who seemed well fed, and his horror increased when Henry bent over him and said, in a low whisper: “He didn’t get my beans fair. I had three aces and a pair, of deuces, an’ he took it on three fives and two sixes. When I objected he called me a liar an’ hit me. Them’s my beans, or Sweedy’s!” There was something almost like murder in the little man’s red eyes.

Billy remained silent. He did not care to talk or question. No one asked him who he was or whence he came, and he felt no inclination to know more of the men he had fallen among. Bucky finished, wiped his mouth with his hand, and looked across at Billy.

“How about going out with me to get some wood?” he demanded.

“I’m ready,” replied Billy.

For the first time he took notice of himself. He was lame and sickeningly weak, but apparently sound in other ways. The intense cold had not frozen his ears or feet. He put on his heavy moccasins, his thick coat and fur cap, and followed Bucky to the door. He was filled with a strange uneasiness. He was sure that his old enemy had not recognized him, and yet he felt that recognition might come at any moment. If Bucky recognized him— when they were out alone—

He was not afraid, but he shivered. He was too weak to put up a fight. He did not catch the ugly leer which Bucky turned upon Thompson. But Henry did, and his little eyes grew smaller and blacker. On snow-shoes the two men went out into the storm, Bucky carrying an ax. He led the way through the bit of thin timber, and across a wide open over which the storm swept so fiercely that their trail was covered behind them as they traveled. Billy figured that they had gone a quarter of a mile when they came to the edge of a ravine so steep that it was almost a precipice. For the first time Bucky touched him. He seized him by the arm, and in his voice there was an inhuman, taunting triumph.

“Didn’t think I knew you, did you, Billy?” he asked. “Well, I did, and I’ve just been waiting to get you out alone. Remember my promise, Billy? I’ve changed my mind since then. I ain’t going to kill you. It’s too risky. It’s safer to let you die— by yourself— as you’re goin’ to die to-day or to-night. If you come back to the cabin— I’ll shoot you!”

With a movement so quick that Billy had no chance to prepare himself for it Bucky sent him plunging headlong down the side of the ravine. The deep snow saved him in the long fall. For a few moments Billy lay stunned. Then he staggered to his feet and looked up. Bucky was gone. His first thought was to return to the cabin. He could easily find it and confront Bucky there before the others. And yet he did not move. His inclination to go back grew less and less, and after a brief hesitation he made up his mind to continue the struggle for life by himself. After all, his situation would not be much more desperate than that of the men he was leaving behind in the cabin. He buttoned himself up closely, saw that his snow-shoes were securely fastened, and climbed the opposite side of the ridge.

The timber thinned out again, and Billy struck out boldly into the low bush. As he went he wondered what would happen in the cabin. He believed that Henry, of the four, would not pull through alive, and that Bucky would come out best. It was not until the following summer that he learned the facts of Henry’s madness, and of the terrible manner in which he avenged himself on Bucky Smith by sticking a knife under the latter’s ribs.

Billy now found himself in a position to measure the amount of energy contained in a slice of bacon and a cold biscuit. It was not much. Long before noon his old weakness was upon him again. He found even greater difficulty in dragging his feet over the snow, and it seemed now as though all ambition had left him, and that even the fighting spark was becoming disheartened. He made up his mind to go on until the beginning of night, then he would stop, build a fire, and go to sleep in its warmth.

During the afternoon he passed out of the scrub into a rougher country. His progress was slower, but more comfortable, for at times he found himself protected from the wind. A gloom darker and more somber than that of the storm was falling about him when he came to what appeared to be the end of the Barren country. The earth dropped away from under his feet, and far below him, in a ravine shut out from wind and storm, he saw the black tops of thick spruce. He began to scramble downward. His eyes were no longer fit to judge distance or chance, and he slipped. He slipped a dozen times in the first five minutes, and then there came the time when he did not make a recovery, but plunged down the side of the mountain like a rock. He stopped with a terrific jar, and for the first time during the fall he wanted to cry out with pain. But the voice that he heard did not come from his own lips. It was another voice— and then two, three, many of them, it seemed to him. His dazed eyes caught glimpses of dark objects floundering in the deep snow about him, and just beyond these objects were four or five tall mounds of snow, like tents, arranged in a circle. He knew what they meant. He had fallen into an Indian camp. In his joy he tried to call out words of greeting, but he had no tongue. Then the floundering figures caught him up, and he was carried to the circle of snow mounds. The last that he knew was that warmth was entering his lungs.

It was a face that he first saw after that, a face that seemed to come to him slowly from out of night, approaching nearer and nearer until he knew that it was a girl’s face, with great, dark, strangely shining eyes. In these first moments of his returning consciousness the whimsical thought came to him that he was dying and the face was a part of a pleasant dream. If that were not so, he had fallen at last among friends. His eyes opened wider, he moved, and the face drew back. Movement stimulated returning life, and reason rehabilitated itself in great bounds. In a dozen flashes he went over all that had happened up to the point where he had fallen down the mountain and into the Cree camp. Straight above him he saw the funnel-like peak of a large birch wigwam, and beyond his feet he saw an opening in the birch-bark wall through which there drifted a blue film of smoke. He was in a wigwam. It was warm and exceedingly comfortable. Wondering if he was hurt, he moved. The movement drew a sharp exclamation of pain from him. It was the first real sound he had made, and in an instant the face was over him again. He saw it plainly this time, with its dark eyes and oval cheeks framed between two great braids of black hair. A hand touched his brow, cool and gentle, and a low voice soothed him in half a dozen musical words. The girl was a Cree.

At the sound of her voice an indian woman came up beside the girl, looked down at him for a moment, and then went to the door of the wigwam, speaking in a low voice to some one who was outside. When she returned a man followed in after her. He was old and bent, and his face was thin. His cheek-bones shone, so tightly was the skin drawn over them. Behind him came a younger man, as straight as a tree, with strong shoulders and a head set like a piece of bronze sculpture. This man carried in his hand a frozen fish, which he gave to the woman. As he gave it to her he spoke words in Cree which Billy understood.

“It is the last fish.”

For a moment a terrible hand gripped at Billy’s heart and almost stopped its beating. He saw the woman take the fish and cut it into two equal parts with a knife, and one of these parts she dropped into a pot of boiling water which hung over the stone fireplace built under the vent in the wall. They were dividing with him their last fish! He made an effort and sat up. The younger man came to him and put a bearskin at his back. He had picked up some of the patois of half-blood French and English.

“You seek,” he said, “you hurt— and hungry! You have eat soon.”

He motioned with his hand to the boiling pot. There was not a flicker of animation in his splendid face. There was something god-like in his immobility, something that was awesome in the way he moved and breathed. He sat in silence as the half of the last fish was brought by the girl; and not until Billy stopped eating, choked by the knowledge that he was taking life from these people, did he speak, and then it was to urge him to finish the fish. When he had done, Billy spoke to the Indian in Cree. Instantly the Indian reached over his hand, his face lighting up, and Billy gripped it hard. Mukoki told him what had happened. There had been a camp of twenty-two, and there were now fifteen. Seven had died— four men, two women, and one child. Each day during the great storm the men had gone out on their futile search for game, and every few days one of them had failed to return. Thus four had died. The dogs were eaten. Corn and fish were gone; there remained but a little flour, and this was for the women and the children. The men had eaten nothing but bark and roots for five days. And there seemed to be no hope. It was death to stray far from camp. That morning two men had set out for the nearest post, but Mukoki said calmly that they would never return.

That night and the next day and the terrible night and day that followed were filled with hours that Billy would never forget. He had sprained one hip badly in his fall, and could not rise from the cot Mukoki was often at his side, his face thinner, his eyes more lusterless. The second day, late in the afternoon, there came a low wailing grief from one of the tepees, a moaning sound that pitched itself to the key of the storm until it seemed to be a part of it. A child had died, and the mother was mourning. That night another of the camp huntsmen failed to return at dusk. But the next day there came at the same time the end of both storm and famine. With dawn the sun shone. And early in the day one of the hunters ran in from the forest nearly crazed with joy. He had ventured farther away than the others, and had found a moose-yard. He had killed two of the animals and brought with him meat for the first feast.

This last great storm of the winter of 1910 passed well into the “break-up” season, and, once the temperature began to rise, the change was swift. Within a week the snow was growing soft underfoot. Two days later Billy hobbled from his cot for the first time. And then, in the passing of a single day and night, the glory of the northern spring burst upon the wilderness. The sun rose warm and golden. From the sides of the mountains and in the valleys water poured forth in rippling, singing floods. The red bakneesh glowed on bared rocks. Moose-birds and jays and wood-thrushes flitted about the camp, and the air was filled with the fragrant smells of new life bursting from earth and tree and shrub.

With return of health and strength Billy’s impatience to reach McTabb’s cabin grew hourly. He would have set out before his hip was in condition to travel had not Mukoki kept him back. At last the day came when he bade his forest friends good-by and started into the south.

XXIII

AT THE END OF THE TRAIL

The long days and nights of inactivity which Billy had passed in the Indian camp had given him the opportunity to think more calmly of the tragedy which had come into his life, and with returning strength he had drawn himself partly out from the pit of hopelessness and despair into which he had fallen. Deane was dead. Isobel was dead. But the baby Isobel still lived; and in the hope of finding and claiming her for his own he built other dreams for himself out of the ashes of all that had gone for him. He believed that he would find McTabb at the cabin and he would find the child there. So confident had he been that Isobel would live that he had not told McTabb of the uncle who had driven her from the old home in Montreal. He was glad that he had kept this to himself, for there would not be much of a chance of Rookie having found the child’s relative. And he made up his mind that he would not give the little Isobel up. He would keep her for himself. He would return to civilization, for he would have her to live for. He would build a home for her, with a garden and dogs and birds and flowers. With his silver-claim money he had fifteen thousand dollars laid away, and she would never know what it meant to be poor. He would educate her and buy her a piano and she would have no end of pretty dresses and things to make her a lady. They would be together and inseparable always, and when she grew up he prayed deep down in his soul that she would be like the older Isobel, her mother.

His grief was deep. He knew that he could never forget, and that the old memories of the wilderness and of the woman he had loved would force themselves upon him, year after year, with their old pain. But these new thoughts and plans for the child made his grief less poignant.

It was late in the afternoon of a day that had been filled with sunlight and the warmth of spring that he came to the Little Beaver, a short distance above McTabb’s cabin. He almost ran from there to the clearing, and the sun was just sinking behind the forest in the west when he paused on the edge of the break in the forest and saw the cabin. It was from here that he had last seen little Isobel. The bush behind which he had concealed himself was less than a dozen paces away. He noticed this, and then he observed things which made his heart sink in a strange, cold way. A path had led into the forest at the point where he stood. Now it was almost obliterated by a tangle of last year’s weeds and plants. Rookie must have made a new path, he thought. And then, fearfully, he looked about the clearing and at the cabin. Everywhere there was the air of desolation. There was no smoke rising from the chimney. The door was closed. There were no evidences of life outside. Not the sound of a dog, of a laugh, or of a voice broke the dead stillness.

Scarcely breathing, Billy advanced, his heart choked more and more by the fear that gripped him. The door to the cabin was not barred. He opened it. There was nothing inside. The old stove was broken. The bare cots had not been used for months— perhaps for two years. As he took another step an ermine scampered away ahead of him. He heard the mouselike squeal of its young a moment later under the sapling floor. He went back to the door and stood in the open.

“My God!” he moaned.

He looked in the direction of Couchée’s cabin, where Isobel had died. Was there a chance there, he wondered? There was little hope, but he started quickly over the old trail. The gloom of evening fell swiftly about him. It was almost dark when he reached the other clearing. And again his voice broke in a groaning cry. There was no cabin here. McTabb had burned it after the passing of the plague. Where it had stood was now a black and charred mass, already partly covered by the verdure of the wilderness. Billy gripped his hands hard and walked back from it searchingly. A few steps away he found what McTabb had told him that he would find, a mound and a sapling cross. And then, in spite of all the fighting strength that was in him, he flung himself down upon Isobel’s grave, and a great, broken cry of grief burst from his lips.

When he raised his head a long time afterward the stars were shimmering in the sky. It was a wonderfully still night, and all that he could hear was the ripple and song of the spring floods in the Little Beaver. He rose silently to his feet and stood for a few moments as motionless as a statue over the grave. Then he turned and went back over the old trail, and from the edge of the clearing he looked back and whispered to himself and to her:

“I’ll come back for you, Isobel. I’ll come back.”

At McTabb’s cabin he had left his pack. He put the straps over his shoulder and started south again. There was but one move for him to make now. McTabb was known at Le Pas. He got his supplies and sold his furs there. Some one at Le Pas would know where he had gone with little Isobel.

Not until he was several miles distant from the scene of death and his own broken hopes did he spread out his blanket and lie down for the night. He was up and had breakfast at dawn. On the fourth day he came to the little wilderness outpost— the end of rail— on the Saskatchewan. Within an hour he discovered that Rookie McTabb had not been to Le Pas for nearly two years. No one had seen him with a child. That same night a construction train was leaving for Etomami, down on the main line, and Billy lost no time in making up his mind what he would do. He would go to Montreal. If little Isobel was not there she was still somewhere in the wilderness with McTabb. Then he would return, and he would find her if it took him a lifetime.

Days and nights of travel followed, and during those days and nights Billy prayed that he would not find her in Montreal. If by some chance McTabb had discovered her relatives, if Isobel had revealed her secret to him before she died, his last hope in life was gone. He did not think of wasting time in the purchase of new clothes. That would have meant the missing of a train. He still wore his wilderness outfit, even to his fur cap. As he traveled farther eastward people began to regard him curiously. He got the porter to shave off his beard. But his hair was long. His moccasins and German socks were ragged and torn, and there were rents in his caribou-skin coat and his heavy Hudson’s Bay sweater-shirt. The hardships he had gone through had left their lines in his face. There was something about him, outside of his strange attire, that made men look at him more than once. Women, more keenly observant than the men, saw the deep-seated grief in his eyes. As he approached Montreal he kept himself more and more aloof from the others.

When at last the train came to a stop at the big station in the heart of the city he walked through the gates and strode up the hill toward Mount Royal. It was an hour or more past noon, and he had eaten nothing since morning. But he had no thought of hunger. Twenty minutes later he was at the foot of the street on which Isobel had told him that she had lived. One by one he passed the old houses of brick and stone, sheltered behind their solid walls. There had been no change in the years since he had been there. Half-way up the hill to the base of the mountain he saw an old gardener trimming ivy about an ancient cannon near a driveway. He stopped and asked:

“Can you tell me where Geoffrey Renaud lives?”

The old gardener looked at him curiously for a moment without speaking. Then he said:

“Renaud? Geoffrey Renaud? That is his house up there behind the red-sandstone wall. Is it the house you want to see— or Renaud?”

“Both,” said Billy.

“Geoffrey Renaud has been dead for three years,” informed the gardener. “Are you a— relative?”

“No, no,” cried Billy, trying to keep his voice steady as he asked the next question. “There are others there. Who are they?”

The old man shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

“There is a little girl there— four— five years old, with golden hair—”

“She was playing in the garden when I came along a few moments ago,” replied the gardener. “I heard her— with the dog—”

Billy waited to hear no more. Thanking his informant, he walked swiftly up the hill to the red-sandstone wall. Before he came to the rusted iron gate he, too, heard a child’s laughter, and it set his heart beating wildly. It was just over the wall. In his eagerness he thrust the toe of his moccasined foot into a break in the stone and drew himself up. He looked down into a great garden, and a dozen steps away, close to a thick clump of shrubbery, he saw a child playing with a little puppy. The sun gleamed in her golden hair. He heard her joyous laughter; and then, for an instant, her face was turned toward him.

In that moment he forgot everything, and with a great, glad cry he drew himself up and sprang to the ground on the other side.

“Isobel— Isobel— my little Isobel!”

He was beside her, on his knees, with her in his hungry arms, and for a brief space the child was so frightened that she held her breath and stared at him without a sound.

“Don’t you know me— don’t you know me—” he almost sobbed. “Little Mystery— Isobel—”

He heard a sound, a strange, stifled cry, and he looked up. From behind the shrubbery there had come a woman, and she was staring at Billy MacVeigh with a face as white as chalk. He staggered to his feet, and he believed that at last he had gone mad. For it was the vision of Isobel Deane that he saw there, and her blue eyes were glowing at him as he had seen them for an instant that night a long time ago on the edge of the Barren. He could not speak. And then, as he staggered another step back toward the wall, he held out his ragged arms, without knowing what he was doing, and called her name as he had spoken it a hundred times at night beside his lonely campfires. Starvation, his injury, weeks of illness, and his almost superhuman struggle to reach McTabb’s cabin, and after that civilization, had consumed his last strength. For days he had lived on the reserve forces of a nervous energy that slipped away from him now, leaving him dizzy and swaying. He fought to overcome the weakness that seemed to have taken the last ounce of strength from his exhausted body, but in spite of his strongest efforts the sunlit garden suddenly darkened before his eyes. In that moment the vision became real, and as he turned toward the wall Isobel Deane called him by name; and in another moment she was at his side, clutching him almost fiercely by the arms and calling him by name over and over again. The weakness and dizziness passed from him in a moment, but in that space he seemed only to realize that he must get back— over the wall.

“I wouldn’t have come— but— I— I— thought you were— dead,” he said. “They told me— you were dead. I’m glad— glad— but I wouldn’t have come—”

She felt the weight of him for an instant on her arm. She knew the things that were in his face— starvation, pain, the signs of ravage left behind by fever. In these moments Billy did not see the wonderful look that had come into her own face or the wonderful glow in her eyes.

“It was Indian Joe’s mother who died,” he heard her say. “And since then we have been waiting— waiting— waiting— little Isobel and I. I went away north, to David’s grave, and I saw what you had done, and what you had burned into the wood. Some day, I knew, you’d come back to me. We’ve been waiting— for you—”

Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but Billy heard it; and all at once his dizziness was gone, and he saw the sunlight shining in Isobel’s bright hair and the look in her face and eyes.

“I’m sorry— sorry— so sorry I said what I did— about you— killing him,” she went on. “You remember— I said that if I got well—”

“Yes—”

“And you thought I meant that if I got well you should go away— and you promised— and kept your promise. But I couldn’t finish. It didn’t seem right— then. I wanted to tell you— out there— that I was sorry— and that if I got well you could come to me again— some day somewhere— and then—”

“Isobel!”

“And now— you may tell me again what you told me out on the Barren— a long time ago.”

“Isobel— Isobel—”

“You understand”— she spoke softly— “you understand, it cannot happen now— perhaps not for another year. But now”— she drew a little nearer— “you may kiss me,” she said. “And then you must kiss little Isobel. And we don’t want you to go very far away again. It’s lonely— terribly lonely all by ourselves in the city— and we’re glad you’ve come— so glad—”

Her voice broke to a sobbing whisper, and as Billy opened his great, ragged arms and caught her to him he heard that whisper again, saying, “We’re glad— glad— glad you’ve come back to us.”

“And I— may— stay?”

She raised her face, glorious in its welcome.

“If you want me— still.”

At last he believed. But he could not speak. He bent his face to hers, and for a moment they stood thus, while from behind the shrubbery came the sound of little Isobel’s joyous laughter.

THE END