The Law-bringers/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
"THE LONE PATROL"
"But assuredly you will be doing me the greatest of favours," said Père Melisand. "You come to me, figuratively speaking, as the men used to come to me at Rouen—with strange stories in their eyes and the smell of the salt sea-water in their hair. I have not seen the sea since I left France ten years ago. And you?"
"I saw salt water three months ago in Hudson Bay." Dick flung off his coat and looked round him. "You keep some relics of France with you still," he added. "I remember the original of that portrait at Versailles—and surely the chair below it is Louis Quinze?"
"Genuine. Yes. We have our fancies yet, though we change the skies over us. There is an incantation in these little things to one who remembers."
Dick turned to look at his host. Without the cassock and tonsure Père Melisand would have had nothing to knit him to this little Roman Catholic Mission at Vermilion on the Peace River. For he had the look of a man of the world in his eyes and the fluency of a scholar on his tongue, and he welcomed Dick to his poor quarters here just as he would have welcomed him to some old chateau in his native France, with no embarrassment at all in the contrast. Perhaps ten years had used him to it, although it had not sapped the polish of his manner. He smiled at Dick.
"I will ask Antoine to hasten dinner," he said. "You must be both cold and hungry. Travelling in a thaw is difficult work."
"Well, two of my dogs knocked up rather badly. Could I get more here?"
"Vital Jeudi might have one or two. We will see him in the morning. I wish we had some to spare at the Mission. But if there are any in Fort Vermilion be assured that you shall have them if possible."
Dick watched him go, idly wondering what power could bring such a man to waste himself among the breeds and Indians of this Canadian outpost. Religion seemed to him such a weak answer. For Dick looked on religion still as many men look on it, as a refuge when life has little left to offer. And Père Melisand's eyes told that such a reason was untrue here.
"But it may occasionally be a refuge when life has too much to offer," he told himself, and throughout the simple dinner he watched Père Melisand in that interpretation.
The man could talk. He showed deep and wise interest in many things, and more than once his eyes lit to a fire that accorded ill with the meek tonsure. He did not smoke; but he gave Dick a good cigar, and he brought out a bottle of wine which gave a rakish air of conviviality to the evening which appealed to Dick's humour. It was over the walnuts which Père Melisand cracked with an old-fashioned silver crackers that Dick broached the business which had brought him to Vermilion through the wet dangerous drifts where the early Chinooks blew warm, and Père Melisand leaned back, caressing his chin.
"Ah, that I cannot tell you," he said. "Soeur Narcisse and Soeur Madeleine came in while I was at Battle River. There was no girl answering to your description in Vermilion when I came back. She must have gone further."
"Then might I be allowed the honour of a few minutes' conversation with one of the ladies you mention?"
"Assuredly." Père Melisand's fine lips drew into a smile. "And why not?"
"If you have no reason I shall certainly not supply one," Dick smiled back. "It is very necessary for me to find her," he explained. "I'm a wanderer until I do."
"May I ask what she is wanted for?"
"Murder in the first degree. And—as an anti-climax—perjury."
"Ah!" Père Melisand shuddered. "Poor thing. And yours is a hard life, my friend, when it sends you out on such errands."
"A man must live—even, or shall I say, usually—at the expense of others. And if he cannot wipe out his own crimes he is surely doing well in assisting others to wipe out theirs."
Père Melisand shook his head, with the smile still lingering.
"Well there is always the untamed thing that runs clamouring through our blood. There will be the doer of crimes, and the executor of crimes so long as this old world lasts. And in the next we may have to sheet those very crimes home to the opposite shoulders and begin all over again. But do not speak of this to Soeur Narcisse in the morning. I think you shall see Soeur Narcisse."
"She is perhaps not young enough to be fluttered at the sight of—shall we say—divided skirts?" suggested Dick.
Père Melisand shook his head again.
"Be careful," he said. "I learnt well that a light tongue seldom means a light heart." He cracked another nut. "You deserved that, and you do not deserve to see Soeur Narcisse. But you shall see her. And speak to her of Ouchy if you can. She comes from Ouchy, and we French love our country."
"Which is, I imagine, the reason why you leave it. A thing denied has its value enhanced, and the wisdom of the French in matters of love is fully acknowledged all the world over."
Père Melisand laughed, settling his shoulders in the tall chair.
"Come," he said. "Tell me what you know about France. We will leave your opinions on love to explain themselves. And talk French. You never learnt your wisdom in any language but ours."
Dick's answering smile did not show in his eyes. Père Melisand guessed that there had been no smile there for long. That did not surprise him, for he knew much of the lives of the wandering men; but the pity on Dick's face when he saw Soeur Narcisse next morning did. The soft-eyed, shy young nun with the strange, delicate bloom which stirs a man's heart glowed with excitement when Dick's question called her eyes up to his face.
"Mais oui," she cried. "Is it that I could forget Andree? Why—that voyage was so much of delight—so much of the new."
Over her head the men smiled. This which was stagnation to the man who had lived was life itself to little Soeur Narcisse.
"Ah! She was si belle! Si grande! Et si triste. Elle me baise quand she say adieu. And moi, I was for her so sorry."
"Andree kissed you!" Dick was curiously upset at this, for he knew Andree's utter indifference to women.
"Then you can't tell me where she went?" he asked.
"To Chipewyan. But beyond that I do not know. There were many Indians on rafts. We begged of her—stay; be one of us. Mais elle n'en peut. Elle dit il y a le vent aux cheveux. I do not understand, moi. Perhap she jeter la plume au vent."
"Perhaps," said Dick. But he shivered a little. Would the death which he was bringing her ever so still Grange's Andree that she could not feel the wind of Life in her hair?
He looked at Père Melisand when the two went out to the sun again. "Didn't young Macrae of a Survey Party once try to carry off a nun from one of these places?" he asked. "You'd best look after Soeur Narcisse, sir. Men are men still. And she is meant to make some man happy."
"Because you have no religion you do not recognise your impiety," said Père Melisand composedly. "Existence means more than earthly happiness."
"My soul! D'you think I don't know that?" said Dick with a sudden flash. And through the long day's sleighing when the threatening squish of the packing mush-ice took the place of the clean burring hum of the runners, and the wind blew warm on his cheek, he remembered grimly what good cause he had to know it.
He dreaded this lone patrol as he never had dreaded one before. That night with Jennifer seemed to have slacked his physical and mental muscles. He had been knocked out in a fight for the thing he most wanted; knocked out completely, without a hope of return, and he could not forget it. There was no pride in him because he had not betrayed his work. A woman, a girl with shaking hands and the exhaustion of utter grief on her, had beaten him; had broken his will, and stripped his defiance from him, and sent him away. And he had gone. He could not discover why he had gone, and why he knew that he could not go back. He knew only that Jennifer's will was not equal to the steel of his will, and that therefore it was a power behind and beyond her which had struck at him through her. He had refused to acknowledge or obey that Power. But he had been forced to acknowledge it on Beverley Lake, and now he was forced to obey it. And this galled him and enraged him, and poisoned the call of the North in him, day by day.
Though near the verge of breaking, the ice held still when he drove into Chipewyan some days later. But the long, straight-laid street was dirty with trampled mush and noisy with much shouting of men and snapping of the long caribou-gut whips and the fighting of loosened dog packs. The fur-hunters of the North were bringing their winter's yield into the big Hudson Bay sheds at old Chipewyan, and there was no one in the settlement who did not know it. To-day the Hudson Bay Company was king of the North as it was in the golden days of its reign, nearly three hundred years ago. From out of unnumbered solitary places the trappers came to do honour to it; deep-eyed, alert men, with that hip-rolling walk which is born of the snow-shoe and those sudden spurts into ungoverned merriment which are in the blood of the French-Indian breed.
Dick left his team at the barracks and walked down to the Hudson Bay Store. Forsyth was away until the evening, and Dick was glad. He had no desire to answer all the questions which Forsyth would ask, although he had one arrow ready sharpened for the complacent Sergeant. Here were men from the Barren Grounds with their fierce little Eskimo teams pulling sleds piled with musk-ox and caribou-skins. Here was a hollow-cheeked Indian with his mangy mongrels staggering under the weight of a half-filled little sled of wolverine and mink and fox. A French-Canadian flogged his big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds past at a gallop; halted them with many screams and French curses, and sprang in among them with his dog-whip as the loafing pack of huskies, mongrels and malemutes fell on them in that close, grim welcome which means all the blood and death their masters will allow.
Dick watched the man in the midst of them with appreciative interest. He had all the spring and the verve and the diabolical absence of fear which belongs to the best class of trapper, and his rakish clothes, his earrings, and the gay trappings of his sled proclaimed him as one of the dandies of the North. He freed his team at last; unharnessed them, and let them go back to their battle.
"Que voulez-vous!" he said, shrugging his shoulders as he caught Dick's eye. "They will have it."
"There are more than the giddes will have it at times, eh?" said Dick.
"Dame," said the Frenchman, and laughed with his black eyes snapping. "It is a true word, that."
Outside the Store a team of Labrador dogs lay in the lines. They were motionless; but the prick of their ears and the occasional snarl baring the white teeth told their nature. Death was the one foe to whom the dogs of the Labrador consented to strike their flag. The office at the end of the Store was packed with men. The approaches to the sheds were a tangle of emptying sleds and quarrelling dogs; of Indians and breeds and Frenchmen, and an occasional whiter-skinned man of the South. Dick passed them by to the tepees already rising like a little forest along the outskirts. For many of the trappers yearly take their families to the woods and the home of those families is wherever the tepee rises.
It was here that Dick hoped to glean some information concerning Andree. If she had gone to Chipewyan with the Indians she had possibly gone to the woods with them too. He did not believe that she would come back to Chipewyan. The cunning of the forest was in her as it was in himself. But he might get a clue. He lifted the flap of the first tepee and looked in. It was dark after the glare of the sun, and a strong smell of musk from the musk-robes pervaded it. Something chuckled out of the dark as a child chuckles over the thing it plays with; and Dick went on his knee as his eyesight cleared and looked into the sunny eyes of a white baby rolling on the musk-ox robes. She was two years old, perhaps, and she snatched at his face with round dimpled hands, cooing and kicking her feet in delight. Indian rags were wrapped round her, and her yellow hair was cut across the forehead, Indian-fashion. Then the tepee-entrance was darkened by the broad bulk of an old breed woman, and Dick sat back on his heels and asked questions.
"Aha!" said the old breed. "She belong to Alphonse Michu. Him wife die and him go to the trapping and take the baby. I have her sometimes. And the other women they do have her sometimes. She quite pretty baby."
"Is Alphonse Michu here?"
The old breed nodded, and Dick went out, strangely moved. From something such as this had Grange's Andree come, and well enough he knew what it had made of her. He remembered Tempest's talk at Churchill about the responsibilities of the white man; but it was not that alone which sent him in search of Alphonse Michu. A great and overwhelming pity for helpless childhood and girlhood possessed him for the first time in his life, and he acted in obedience to it.
But he could do not anything at all with Alphonse Michu. The French Canadian loved his baby passionately, and perhaps, in his superstitious heart, he regarded her as a fetish. Dick's determined efforts brought the anger into his voice and his long pale face. But they could do no more, and he left the man with a prayer in his heart.
"The Lord send she doesn't turn out as pretty as Grange's Andree," he said.
On the slope to the barracks he overtook a breed with a husky team which hauled a heavily-laden sled. He stopped with that intuition which never failed him where faces and names were concerned.
"Why, Tommy Joseph," he said. "What are you taking your catch to the barracks for?"
"Wolves," said Tommy Joseph, raising his gaunt face for a moment. Dick glanced from the lean, dark man to the huskies where the blood of their wolf-progenitors still ran savagely. And he felt the same untamed pulse-throb in Tommy Joseph.
"Well, you ought to know all about 'em," he said. "And you've had good luck, I see. We're paying twenty dollars a pelt this year."
Tommy Joseph glanced up with quick fire in his eyes. "There is no good luck and no bad luck. It is fate," he said in French; and Dick suddenly remembered the story of Florestine.
"Well, perhaps you're right. Tommy, have you seen Grange's Andree lately? She came up to Chipewyan last fall."
"Laissez," said Tommy sharply, and kicked at his fidgeting dogs. "Was it Andree? Certainement. I did see her last in Grey Wolf. It is two years since."
He proceeded to fill his pipe with an indifference which proved his words lies to Dick. But Dick never showed his hand. He gave Tommy good-bye amiably and went to Forsyth. Forsyth had seen Andree, and, what was more unlikely, he remembered the circumstance perfectly and described it with much detail.
"That bunch went on towards the Rocher," he ended. "Rafting along the Slave to Resolution, I guess. I didn't take much stock of 'em."
Forsyth never took much stock of anything. Dick nodded. "All right. I'll try to make Resolution before the ice goes out. Might as well be hung up there as anywhere else," he said.
Dick stood long at his window that night, looking over the Lake, where through nearly three hundred years, had plied the little canoe-patrol between old Chipewyan and Montreal. A grim, lonely patrol, put through by those wild-hearted men, gay-eyed and daring, quick in murder, in love and laughter. They called to their descendant, those pioneers with their silken sashes and their slender, strong wrists whence the ruffles had been ripped away when Prince Rupert's gentlemen girded themselves for that first fight with Canada. They called across the treading years which had blotted out so much of romance, so much of horror, so much of gallant endurance, so much of gladness and passionate grief. And for long Dick listened, with fire smouldering in his eyes and his breath coming fast through his thin nostrils.
In the tepee camp arose suddenly the deep baying of hounds; the sharp yelps and strong-throated snarls which told where the still lawless spirits of the North gave battle. Shrill French screams and curses cut as suddenly into the noise, mingled with the hissing of the long caribou-whips. The roar died to a mutter of growling; to silence, and Dick went to bed, remembering the words of the breed-dandy, "They will have it," and half-envious of the giddes because he knew that within the hour they would have it again.
He crossed the Lake next morning with little Jack Lowndes' kisses on his lips, and still something of the hot vigour of those long-dead men possessing him. And this mood held with him merrily through the daily danger that threatened him. For the Chinook blew, day after day; and hour after hour the ice moaned and creaked, surrendering to its persistence. A policeman outside the barracks at Smith's Landing waved a hand to him as he swung past one evening, for he could travel now only in the frosty hours.
"Good luck to your hunting," he shouted; and then he too was gone, and only the soft sputtering of the mush ice on the runners broke the silence of the world.
All Dick's will was bent on reaching Fort Resolution before his hold-up came, and he did it, with the threat ever on his heels and the first great cannon-like reports and thundering groans of the bursting heavy mass to keep him awake on the second night after he reached the Lake.
It was from Resolution that the real tracking of Andree would begin. So far there had been the one road only for her; but on the Great Slave Lake there were so many trails, and he might have to draw a half-dozen covers before he marked her down. There was the Fullerton trail which he and Tempest had taken, with its medley of intersecting lakes. There was the trail direct north to the Great Bear Lake where long-dead Hudson Bay posts hold yet glamouring traditions of bullet-riddled palisades, and mahogany furniture; of the grim kings of the Company and the dare-devil men with bright handkerchiefs bound round their brows. There was the Coppermine River trail to the Dismal Lakes on the rim of the Arctic Ocean, or there was the great Mackenzie route to the Yukon and to Herschel Island. Dick weighed the chances of each with all cunning and knowledge. He believed that Andree would go down the Mackenzie; for, wild creature of the forest though she was, she had never loved loneliness nor the Indian. . Her ways had lain among the white men, and her vanity and love of excitement would keep them there. The ice was breaking on the Great Slave Lake when Dick reached it, and in a little while the birch canoes shot across the long blue run of it. Dick was to do much paddling there before he came upon the trail of Grange's Andree. He was to know well the mouse-grey evenings when the sea-birds and loons flew low, calling stridently. He was to see the prairies yellow as the snow passed and the pale feathers of birch and poplar blow against the indigo of the fir-forests. He was to seek the camp of many a breed and Indian along the shores, remembering past history, and making, in his dull khaki and his untiring determination, his small indelible share of the new.
Very familiar now were the names of those long-dead forts which Sir John Franklin had set up all across this wild land. Enterprise, Reliance, Providence, Confidence, Good Hope and Resolution. The courage of the bluff old sailor and his strong-hearted men rang in the words yet; beacon-lights for the men who come after them.
One night the smell of a spruce camp-fire called him into a bight where the thick trees came to the water-lip. A score of trappers lay round the fire with the fierce resinous glow of it in their faces, and Dick saw there that look of deep content which belongs only to the people of the North in their own stamping-grounds. He went ashore, and stayed the night there. And when he paddled back to Resolution he knew that Grange's Andree was flying from what he was bringing her to the great silence of the Mackenzie River.
Next day he packed his kit and followed her. He followed while the brief summer glowed to the full and faded; while the anemones and fragile snow-flowers gave place to fireweed that glowed in all the glory of a Scotch heather hill. Tall mauve asters swayed by the banks, and the shining ranks of the golden-rod lit up the hillsides where the black crows flapped low and heavily and the wild bird calls thrilled, thin and far, through the dry tang of the pine-forests. At Fort Simpson the barley in the Mission fields was swelling with the milk in it, and all the potatoes were in flower. Dick stayed here some days; seeing the Sisters of Charity working in the garden-patches, and questioning the many breeds and Indians who drift through the post from the Liard River and across to Lac la Marte. Here the Hudson Bay Store stood in the strongly-palisaded enclosure which had been common to all of old, and the hot sun warmed its weather-beaten flanks and struck colour from rock and sweeping prairie. Then the excitement of separating two drunken Hare Indians one night took him to the Hudson Bay factor with a question.
"Well, you know what it is," said the factor, and laughed. "Men will drink something. They make this abominable stuff themselves of hops and yeast and dried fruit and sugar. The smell nearly kills a chap dead. But it serves its purpose. You might let Macpherson know about it."
Dick assented. Two little detachments patrolled the whole of this Mackenzie River district as best they might, and they would infallibly bring the weight of law into Simpson some day before long.
The old stars were dying down the sky behind him now, and new ones rode in an unfamiliar sky. Already there was a riot of coloured leaves on the wild-rose bushes and the tall, slight saskatoons, and down by-ways the pea-vines were taking colour and fireweed leaves blazed red and orange. Near Fort Norman he met a canoe with a constable and a Hare Indian, paddling upstream with the sun in their eyes. Dick gave a greeting, and the Constable swung alongside.
"Come and tiffin with me," he said. "It's about time." And on the bank of the Mackenzie the two ate badly-cooked damper and tinned beans and freshly-caught fish with more appetite than they once had eaten in London hotels.
The Constable used the speech of Eton and Oxford, and he had never learnt his drill at Regina. But all his hard-bitten, genial face showed contentment, and Dick recognised him as one of those throw-backs to the restless days which bred Raleigh and Drake and so many more. He had caught his man near Fort Macpherson, and two thousand miles of lonely country and a desperate furtive Indian stood between him and civilisation. But he said good-bye to Dick with a hearty grip and laughing eyes.
"Good fortune to you," he said. "At what end of the earth will we meet next?"
At Little Fort Norman in the Great Bear Lake district there was no word of Andree. Dick did not expect it, and he turned from the English Mission house to his long, silent trail again with certainty growing in him. Andree was seeking the white life. If she had wanted to hide among the Indians she would not have come so far north as this. The creatures of the wild were all about him as he made his night-camps now. The short-necked moose thumping down on their knees to nibble grass in the open places; black bear snuffing down the hole of rabbit or musquash; wolves yowling on some edge of forest at the moon; marten, wolverine; fierce, tuft-eared lynx. He saw the spores of all and heard their cries. At the occasional Indian camps among the white birches and the deep spruces he went ashore, struggling in the little Chipewyan that he knew to make interpretation to these Slave and Dog-Rib Tribes.
Where the big Mission churches and schools, the trading-posts and log-houses of Fort Good Hope stood above its tall ramparts of clay banks, Dick sought the Hudson Bay factor. He slept that night between lavender-scented sheets with the memory of Grieg, played well by the factor's wife, in his ears. There had been silver on the table, too, and cut glass, and the rim of the Arctic Circle was fourteen miles away. Dick left Good Hope reluctantly. The two hundred odd miles separating him from the next post promised so much of that solitude which he was daily finding more terrible.
There was frost in the red mornings, and the yellow evenings when he reached Arctic Red River, and on the little lagoons, where the duck were gathering to take flight, ice crisped sometimes as he drove his canoe in among the reeds to shoot mallard or merganser for his supper. The days were shortening rapidly; but wild-flowers still bloomed among the grasses when he left the Mackenzie and turned op the Peel River to Fort Macpherson. Two days before he had found a drowned Indian caught in a snag and had towed him ashore and buried him. For a moment he had stood by the shallow grave scooped in the sand and stared down on the dead face before he covered it with an aching desire to know what was the use of it all; of all the short, sharp days of man's life that pass so swiftly; of all the long eternities of nothingness that come after.
His first evening at Macpherson gave him more comfort than he had known for many days. In Corporal Hensham's little warm private room, with the big black stove-pipe running through it, he smoked pipe after pipe among the pictures on the walls and the well-worn books on the shelves. Dumb-bells and Indian clubs filled the corners, for Hensham was an athletic and enthusiastic Canadian with all the energy of youth in him yet.
"I'm off on a mountain patrol the end of the week," he said; "but I can take you out to the Fishing Lakes to-morrow, and you'll likely get some information there. The Indians are thick around it, getting their fish out before the ice. They are principally Loucheux; a very decent lot, and I can let you have an interpreter. What's the girl like? Nearly white, you say."
Dick reached a sheet of brown, wrapping paper from under the table, and picked up a bit of chalk which Hensham had been using, to keep a quoit tally with.
"I'll try to give you some idea," he said; and rapidly roughed in the tall, breezy outline, the curve of the cheek and chin, and the carriage of the small curly head. It moved him more than he cared to allow as Grange's Andree sprang into life under his hand, and he tossed the sheet across to Hensham in sudden irritation.
"That is an amateur attempt," he said dryly. "Her Maker has done the thing rather better."
"Oh, I say!" Hensham was startled. "Why; she's a beauty. And you're a don at this kind of a thing all right. You'll let me have it for my gallery, won't you? Thanks. Seems a brutal thing to have to corral a girl like that. You must have known her pretty well, too."
"I have seen her several times. You have a young Grahame here, haven't you? I came down as far as Chipewyan with him two years ago."
"Oh, I say. Didn't you hear about that? We were all awfully cut up. He got lost last winter. Hunting a Loucheux who'd deserted his family, you know. And there was a blizzard, and—well, it was starvation, I guess, unless the wolves got him first. We came across his bones in the spring. They were stripped clean. There were a few lines in his pocket-book they hadn't touched that. "I've done my best," he said, and I guess he cashed in over trying to get down something about "Tell somebody something." we couldn't read that. I sent his dunnage out by the steamer for the Commissioner to forward back to his people. He came of good stock, you know. I've seen the photographs of his folk and his home in Scotland."
Dick remembered how sure he had been of the baronet father; and he guessed that the pocket-book would go into the family shrine along with perhaps a rutsy claymore worn at Flodden, or a sword broken under Montrose.
"Did he ever shoot a bear?" he asked suddenly.
"Why—was it Grahame or—yes, he did. The first winter he was here."
Dick's lips curved on his pipe-stem into a smile. He had not forgotten the lad's eager words on the Athabaska, and somehow he felt curiously pleased that young Grahame had shot his bear.
Hensham had a couple of gaily-ornamented birch canoes ready at day-break, with a Loucheux Indian of pronounced Japanese type squatted in the stern of each.
"We go up the Peel," he explained. "Then a little river lets us right into the Fishing Lakes. Jelly and Good Boy will get us up in no time. Smells good, this morning, doesn't it?"
The air was still and vital with the frost. Across the foot-hills and the white flanks of the Rockies sunlight dazzled, drawing sharp scents from distant clumps of aspen and tamarac and willow, all mixed with the pungent odours of spruce. In the swampy places over the river, and along the uplands duck were calling and wild geese clanging in their haste to be gone, and Dick's foot broke a stray yellow dandelion from its stem as he sprang into the canoe. Hansham pointed his cane at it.
"Look," he said. "In August, and a hundred miles within the Arctic Circle as the crow flies. What would English people think of that?"
"I've found wild-flowers in July two-fifty miles further on."
"At Herschel?" Hensham looked at him quickly. "You've been there, then? Why—I guess—you're the man who picked that Yankee absconder out of his own whaler there about five years, ago."
"Six. It is a great solace to some of us to find we can win fame so easily."
"I imagine it wasn't easily. You can't treat a Yank like anyone else. He mostly has his own opinions. These canoes are pretty decent, aren't they? The Indians won't use anything but birch bark. Our hardwood's good enough, too. Baskerville—he's H. B. factor here—he has a pair of birch bark snow-shoes over a hundred years old. Right and left spread of frame, you know. I want them the worst way, but he won't part for any money."
It was good to hear Hensham talk after the long silences filled with thoughts that hurt. And it was good to paddle smoothly with the strong stern-thrust to help, past banks of spruce and willow and scented Balm of Gilead where the coloured leaves dropped into the water. The frost had killed out the last flies and mosquitoes; but Hensham remembered them feelingly.
"An absolutely devilish pest they are," he said. "How did you get on?"
"Kept out in the stream all day, and made smudges at night. They were nothing to what I've known on the Hudson Bay side."
"Tell me about it. What's the hunting like there? We have the jumping deer here, you know. They're fine sport. And moose, of course, and sometimes musk-ox. But there's nothing much better than the jumping deer among the foothills. Grahame was crazy about them. Said they beat the Scotch deer-forests hollow."
Dick had no time for thought until they came in the darkening evening of the short fall day to the Fishing Lakes, raising the Indian camp-fires one by one as they swung round the loops of the river.
"Smell the fish?" said Hensham. "They don't leave things to the imagination any, do they? What say? Oh, well; they do get a few greyling and loche and others. But it's mostly white fish, of course. Jelly"—he turned to the Loucheux behind him—"drive in there where the camp seems biggest. They're sure to have some chiefs among them. And you go right ahead and ask what you want to know, Heriot. Jelly will put you through. And you can trust 'em as far as you can size 'em up. They're decent fellows. Never have any trouble with them. Christians, too. They all carry around Bibles in their own language."
"Do you call that a recommendation," said Dick, amused; and he stepped out, looking round him with all the keen delight of his artist blood.
Through the colourless evening the big camp-fires blazed strongly; shooting their light among the little dingy tepees and the spreading spruces and across the clearing to the lip of the grey low lake. In the clearings stood great scaffoldings of birch poles, gridironed over the top. In dark, half-seen knots by the lake stooped the Indian women, splitting the fish, and running a sharp-pointed stick through the tails, one after the other. Presently a shapeless figure detached itself from the bulk; crossed the bars of light that pricked out for a moment the high-cheeked copper-yellow face and the black stiff hair; crossed to a scaffold, and hung her armful of sticks in a row along the gridiron. Then noiselessly she turned and went back to her work.
The men had done their share when they drew the last nets to land an hour ago. They smoked now, lounging round the fires, and sucking the fish-bones of their supper. Through signs and Jelly's assistance Dick extracted information from several, and then Hensham came back from a heated conversation down by the Lake.
"The women have got to clean up all that before the frost gets into it," he remarked. "It'll be stiff as ramrods by morning. They've made a record haul, and that old sinner wants to charge me more than fifty cents a stick for the fish I'm getting from him. But he's not going to cut any ice off me. He won't let me have half what I want, either."
"They can't carry more than a certain amount themselves."
"Why—they don't go far for their hunting, you know. They cache a lot here and come back for it. Anyhow, they can punch holes in the ice and get some more if they're pushed. Got any news yet?"
"No. They're hunting up an Esquimaux who came up with fur from Herschel, and didn't go back with the others."
"Oh! Well, I wish you luck. Here he is. My word; they're pretty good chunks of fat, aren't they?"
The stocky broad-nosed little man could speak a little English. Dick possessed a few Esquimaux words and a very great deal of intuition, and in a little while he knew on which stage he was to play his first grim act with Grange's Andree. She had gone to the Arctic Ocean; down the mighty Mackenzie River where its many mouths open to salt water, and the Esquimaux pass in their kyaks and build their snow igloes.
"Now, what in the nation could have taken her there?" said Hensham.
"Whalers," said Dick briefly, and for a little while he would not speak again.
The Esquimaux had passed her in a birch canoe with an Indian behind her. But Dick knew that she would stay with neither Indian nor Esquimaux. If she had gone aboard a whaler which happened to winter this year at Herschel there was no escape for her. But if that whaler, Yankee, or Russian, or Norwegian, manned by English or the daring sailor-men of Labrador; if that whaler went home through those smoking seas of winter, Dick's chase had only just begun, and Grange's Andree might draw him at her heels for a year yet.
This knowledge roused in him again that hunting instinct which was seldom dulled for long. Sudden savage desire to run his quarry down rose above his pity and reluctance. He knocked his pipe out and stood up with a long breath.
"That is sure, then," he said. "And I must get into Herschel before the ice. Can you get me a breed to pilot me through the Mackenzie mouths, Hensham? Those currents are always changing."
"Why, certainly." A note in his voice brought Hensham to look at him curiously. "You're not wanting to start right away to-night, are you?" He laughed. "Leave it a day or two, anyway. By the way, I sent Anderson down with the mail after the boat came in. You'll meet him, and he can likely give you some information."
"Ah! Perhaps he can."
Dick fell silent, looking round on the amber and scarlet and the cold black of the night where the dark figures moved. The quiet, busy women brought that strange sense of home-life to this wild nature which no camp of men ever brings. Dick had noticed this very often before, and the fact struck him again, forcibly. A quiver of pain passed across his face before he turned to answer Hensham's next question. For he was remembering Jennifer sewing on the deck of the river-steamer down the Athabaska.