THE STRENGTH OF MENAND 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.