The Red Book Magazine/Volume 36/Number 3/The High Brotherhood

by George Tracy Marsh

THE
HIGH BROTHERHOOD

By GEORGE MARSH

FROM the shoulder of a scrub-covered bluff which overhung the valley, the half-breed watched the far flash of a setting-pole wielded by a canoe-man battling slowly up the swift wilderness river. The eyes of the breed narrowed, while the muscles of his lean face set hard as he followed the progress of the craft, marked solely by the play of sun light on the dripping pole.

So they were still on his track—these men who had hunted him through the northern summer from Lac St. Jean over the Height-of-Land and deep into the fastnesses of Rupert Land. For a fortnight back he had believed his pursuers distanced, for he knew he had set them a pace into the wide North which but few canoe-men had the endurance to follow. Lately he had been leisurely ascending the river, occasionally stopping to hunt and look over the country; and now, on this day, following his custom before making camp, he had climbed to a point commanding a view of the river behind him to discover to his surprise that the blood hounds of the law were still hard on his trail.

Jean Garnier stood as if hewn from the jack pine against which he leaned while the canoe labored in the quick water a mile downstream. That there was but one man poling, his trained eyes assured him; but what he could not as yet make out was whether the canoe carried a passenger.

However, that was a small matter; he was at the end of his tether; he would travel no farther. If he were to survive a winter in this country it was high time he built a shack and started smoking and drying a supply of fish and game. He had seen many game-signs in the valley, in fact had been gorging on moose-meat after a summer of semi-starvation and had intended to winter on the headwater lakes of the river. And now, here was this canoe!

Swiftly the half-breed had arrived at his decision. The coming night should decide whether he were to leave his bones in this lonely valley for the foxes and wolverines to snarl over, or shake off at last the relentless pursuit which for three months had driven him ever deeper into the trackless wilderness of the North.

More than once, in the past summer, he could have emptied a canoe of his enemies by a few well-aimed shots as he lay hidden on the shore; but Jean Garnier was not a cold-blooded assassin, even though the Government notices posted at Lac St. Jean branded him as murderer and outlaw. He had killed, but he had killed as any man in the North would have killed, in defense of his honor and his home. He had no regrets for the knife-thrust which had wiped out the man he found, on his return, had stolen the wife he had left on the Roberval when he went overseas as a soldier of the King. But with these unknown men whom the law had loosed on his trail he had no personal quarrel. To shoot them from ambush had not been to the taste of one who for three years had lived through the hell of German shell fire and gas in the Ypres salient.

So the half-breed had pushed on and on, past Mistassini and Nichikun and the half-mythical Fading Waters into the labyrinth of unknown lakes and streams of the Labrador watershed, trusting to wear out the pursuit by sheer stamina and speed. And for some time he had been convinced that the parties searching for him, hardened voyageurs though they were, used up on the trail, had turned back.

But he was wrong. The Montagnais hunters, whom he had passed two weeks before at the forks, must have met a canoe of Provincial police still seeking him, and betrayed the fact that he had taken the east branch.

Twice during the summer he had looked at his pursuers over the sights of his rifle, and held his fire. Now it was his life or theirs, for he was through. He would turn and have it out.

 

SHORTLY, as the canoe swung across-stream with the channel, Garnier saw that but one man stood between him and his freedom—the freedom, if game proved scarce, to face starvation through the long snows of the winter which would soon shut in with its withering cold.

The sun had reached the ridge west of the river when the half-breed left his point of observation and hurried down through the thick timber to his canoe cached back from the stream, to procure extra shells for his rifle. It would be simple enough to ambush this canoe-man, unaware of the nearness of his quarry. So pumping a shell from the magazine into the chamber of his thirty-thirty, he stole down along the river shore. In a thicket of alders he awaited the coming of the canoe.

Time passed, but to the straining ears of the outlaw there drifted no familiar click of a pole striking the stony bed of the stream. From his ambush he could see but a short distance below him; so crawling nearer the beach, he parted the alders and looked. Before him the river opened up for a quarter-mile. But the canoe was gone.

One of two things had happened: either his man had gone ashore below the bend to make an early camp, which was unlikely, or—something had aroused his suspicions.

The half-breed raked his memory to recall having dropped anything from his canoe, which, held up in an eddy or along shore, might have been noticed. He had always made camp back from the water, always obliterated his trail and fires, even in the last two weeks when he had fancied that the pack were no longer at his heels. At one time he had not made a fire for three days, so closely had the pursuit come to him among the islands of the great lake Mistassini.

His man could not be making camp so early; something had driven him ashore; but what?

Lifting his moccasined feet like a fox on the trail of a snowshoe rabbit, Garnier cut back from the river, then turned downstream. He had not traveled far when suddenly a sound from the direction of the river flattened him to the ground, ears straining, every nerve alive.

Shortly the noise was repeated. The lean face of the outlaw shaped a look of disgust. It was the unmistakable chuck of an ax. His caution was needless. His enemy was making camp.

Moving out to the river shore the half-breed saw, a hundred yards downstream on the opposite bank, the hunter of men calmy boiling his kettle. Close by, his canoe lay bottom up on the beach.

It was not a long shot, but the light was going fast. He would take no chances. In the night, when the policeman slept, he would return. It would be surer then.

Garnier back-tracked upriver to his canoe, got out some stone-hard bannock, a piece of moose haunch and his frying pan, and taking his ax, went deep into the forest. Then, because of the danger of the smoke being seen, he waited until dusk blanketed the valley before starting a fire. That night he might need all his strength, for his foe down-stream had already proved the stuff of which he was made by his very presence in that unmapped valley of Rupert Land. He alone had survived the heart-breaking pace up the white waters and over the blind portages from Mistassini to the Fading Waters, in which but few white men had ever wet a paddle. With such a foe Jean Garnier would take no chances. He would eat heartily and wait for the moon to set before dropping downstream to make an end of it.

Later on, deep in the night, a canoe crossed the river, and then, snubbed by a pole muffled with moose-hide, slid silently with the current, until at length it was turned in and left on the beach.

But not until the moon was smothered by an indigo ridge did the hunter begin the stalk. The river was low, so he chose the shore. The fretting of the swift current on stones and ledges alone marred the silence of the night. Noiseless as a lynx stalking ptarmigan, the half-breed made his way slowly down the shore, grasping his thirty-thirty in his right hand, with his left parting willows and alders where they grew close to the water. At times he entered the river and waded, to avoid making a noise in the “bush.”

At last he reached the strip of beach on which lay the upturned canoe. He crouched, listening to hear the snoring of the sleeper, before he stood up behind some willows. There, near the embers of a dying fire, lay his man. Close by a rifle rested against a spruce.

The half-breed marveled at the recklessness of this man who had thus made his camp in the open, seemingly regardless of the fact that he was hunting an outlaw who would not be taken alive.

Garnier raised his rifle and covered the blanketed form. There lay all that now stood in his way, helpless in his hands. Just a pressure of his finger, and he was a free man! He thought of the months of grueling toil and hardship he had undergone because of this man and his breed. Now the last of these wolves of police was out of the way.

But Jean Garnier did not crook his forefinger. Something of the instinct of the cat to play with the mouse caused him to lower his rifle. He wished to see the face of the man who had followed him six hundred miles, past the Chutes of the Fading Waters into the Labrador wastes.

Retracing his footsteps up the shore, he slowly worked around behind the camp. As he wormed his way through the thick scrub something broke the quiet of the deep night. For a moment the half-breed lay breathless. Again the sound was repeated. It was only the hoo-hoo of a gray owl hunting wood-mice in the forest across the river.

Garnier ground his teeth in disgust for not having shot his man when the chance offered. Now at any moment the owl might wake the sleeper. He must move fast. Swiftly the half-breed crawled to within a few feet of his man. The policeman slept on his back, half covered by his blanket, with the light from the stars full on his face.

Despite the stubble of beard, it was clearly the face of a young man, drawn lean with the hardships of the long trail. On one side, from cheek-bone to ear, the sleeper’s face was furrowed by a deep red scar. Death had once missed him by a hair.

The half-breed was so near now that he could have touched his man with the muzzle of his rifle. The night was not cold, and the shirt of the policeman lay open at the neck, exposing his bronzed throat. Garnier rose to his knees, thrusting his rifle before him, then changed his mind, and reaching back with his right hand, drew the knife in his belt. He would kill this man as he had killed the other who had made him an outlaw—as he had killed more than one enemy in that far land overseas.

He moved nearer the motionless form in front of him, and raising his right hand, gripping the knife, braced his knees for the thrust, every muscle tense as wire cable. But as he started to drive the lunge home, the eyes of Jean Garnier widened in amazement; his right arm relaxed, dropping to his side, while he stared at the neck of the one who slept so calmly on the lap of Death.

There, attached by a narrow ribbon to a small gold chain encircling the neck of the sleeping man, lay a Maltese cross of bronze.

The half-breed bent nearer to see more clearly in the dim starlight.

Yes, it was the Cross. Jean Garnier nodded his head, convinced.

He glanced at the knife in his right hand which, but for the glitter of gold in the starlight a moment before, would have been smeared with the blood of this man—this man who had done some great deed of bravery, to wear that bit of bronze there at his throat.

The left hand of Jean Garnier sought his own neck and drew from beneath the tattered shirt a duplicate of the cross at the sleeper’s throat. He also had once been numbered among the high brotherhood of the brave.

Slowly the shape by the dying fire faded before his eyes, and they looked upon another land, a treeless waste tortured by three years of ruthless war. It was night, and rocket, star-shell, and flare pulsed and glowed fitfully over a landscape of mud, crossed and recrossed by trench and wire, pockmarked by shell-hole and mine-crater.

Through an inferno of machine-gun and shell-fire, across the refuse and litter of the Land-of-No-Man, but the hell of all who entered it, the eyes of Jean Garnier beheld a lone figure moving slowly, carrying a burden on its back. At times it stopped for a space, to crouch in a shell-hole; then it continued, now crawling, now rising to stumble along with its load, until at last it was swallowed in the refuge of a Canadian trench.

The scene changed. A battalion of Canadian infantry was drawn up in line at a rest-camp in Flanders. Before the battalion six men stood stiff at attention. Facing them were a brigadier general, the colonel and the battalion adjutant. As the adjutant read a name from the paper in his hand, the general pinned something on the blouse of each soldier. Then the adjutant called:

“Jean Garnier!” and read from the paper: “For extraordinary heroism beyond the call of duty, in going back after a bombing raid and carrying his wounded commanding officer, through heavy shell and machine-gun fire to the Canadian lines—the Victoria Cross!”

Gradually the vision faded, and the outlaw’s eyes again rested on the cross at the sleeper’s neck, then fell to the bit of bronze he touched with his left hand.

Slowly he shook his head. This man, his enemy, also now had come out of that blood bath of Flanders wearing the bronze badge of bravery.

The knife went back to its sheath. Taking the policeman’s rifle, Garnier crept down to the canoe. There, with stones, he propped the rifle on the beach, pointing down river. Near the gun, on a strip of sand, which he ringed with stones, the outlaw scrawled with his knife these words:

 

You av cros
I av cros
You brav man
Go back.

 

In the sand near the words he etched the outline of the Victoria Cross. Then Jean Garnier returned to his canoe and crossed the river.

 

AT daybreak, Craig, of the Government police, rolled out of his blanket, started his fire, and, when he went to the river for water for his kettle, found strange moccasin tracks, his rifle, and the scrawl on the sand.

Craig read the scrawl, scratched his head, and instead of speedily getting out of range, calmly cooked and ate a slim breakfast, loaded his canoe, and poled out to midstream. There he did a strange thing.

Standing bareheaded, with his right hand raised to his forehead in the British salute, he faced each shore in turn, then he waked the silence of the valley with the wild yell which on many a bloody day had blanched the face of the enemy:

“Hi, Canadians!”

Turning, the policeman paddled down-stream.

At the same time, from the willows of the river shore a swart half-breed rose and stood like a spruce, with his right hand at his forehead, until the craft of the hunter disappeared from the sight of the one no longer hunted.