The Law-bringers/Chapter 20

by G. B. Lancaster

 

CHAPTER XX

"YOU MEAN TO DO IT?"

Across the bare rock of Herschel Island in the Arctic Ocean the wind from the Pole blew a gale. For to the whalers, Herschel was known familiarly as "the blow-hole," and through all the storm-bitten twelve miles of it neither tree nor shrub dared raise its head, though the long grasses waved over it in the summer and the wildflowers bloomed.

In the little settlement of white men and Esquimaux which crouched on the sand-pit round Pauline Cove every door was barred and every window made taut against the blast roaring down over the shoulder of the low hill behind. Out in the land-locked bay—the safest harbour all along the Coast—the riding-lights of four of the whaling-fleet swayed and shuddered, driven hard against their moorings, and three short miles away the black humps of the mainland mountains showed fitfully as the Northern Lights flickered up and fell back.

The low, strong log-and-skin huts of the Kogmollock tribe of Esquimaux on the island were dark blots only, like tortoises asleep. The store-houses of the whaling-companies were dark, and in the half-dozen log huts used by occasional officers of the whaling ships when they chose to live ashore, no life showed. Except for the riding-lights in the Bay and the glow from the windows of the Royal North-West Mounted Police Barracks, Herschel Island might well have been a dead thing, accursed and lonely between the frozen Pole and the naked shore. But the life-light of the daring men burned bright there; of the whalers who follow their strike by berg and floe through the teeth of the harsh salt wind and the smoky-spume that it brings, and of the Police of Canada, who plant their flag some four thousand miles north of its birth-place and sit down under it to dispense the law of God and of men with all the wit they may.

Dick turned from the window in Baxter's small private room and came back to warm his hands at the stove where the driftwood shone umber and sky-blue and salty purple. He had been at the Island a fortnight, and he had learned some of the things which he had come for. And his knowledge kept him awake at nights because, for the present, it condemned him to inertia. With Selkirk, one of the two constables under Baxter at the detachment, he had made a long and exhaustive trip east among the Esquimaux on Baillie Island and beyond it, and there he had heard a few stray facts about Grange's Andree. Two Esquimaux of the Nunatalmute tribe—the bold and honest hunters and trappers of the mainland—had brought her across Mackenzie Bay, and there she had joined a family party going east in one of the great deep-sea umiaks wherein the Esquimaux make their long voyages. Dick had come back to Herschel in disgust.

"She must have started just about the time the whalers went out," he said. "Were there any going back to San Francisco this year, and would they have taken her aboard supposing they were?"

"There's the 'Aida,' Captain Ormundsen. He's got his wife with him, and he was going out if he took whales. He had bad luck last year. And the 'Skagway' didn't intend winterin' again. Closely was master of her and a bad lot. He'd take Andree just to give us trouble. The 'Fanny' reckoned to go out, but she's back. Got no whales, and her master persuaded the men to try another season. They're losin' money, an' they'll keep on losin' it, I guess. Likely some of 'em will desert this winter, an' we'll have to hunt 'em. And then there's the 'Rocket.' She aimed to go out; but I guess Jack Scott'll bring her back. He's a Yank, and he'll stick at it till he has to hammer his way home through ice. If Andree went aboard the 'Rocket' there'll be rows. I remember her in Grey Wolf before your time. She had all the place by the ears then. A wild young devil she was, always. That's the only four as wintered here last year."

"Ah! And if Andree has gone out on any of those boats I've got half a continent to cover before I can get at her."

"Sure. And you likely haven't got her then."

Dick's laugh was curt. The fight in him was strongly roused by now, and he had small mercy left for Grange's Andree.

"A chap wrote su'thin' about 'There's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three,’" said Baxter. "I guess we have got 'em both up here at Sixty-nine. An' if anyone's wantin' them at Eighty, which is the Pole itself, ain't it, why—we'll bring 'em there right away. I reckon our jurisdiction runs that high anyhow. A feller can't get on the far side of British law in these parts."

Baxter's patrol reached some two hundred and fifty miles south, and as many hundreds east as he could go. Alaskan territory touched it on the west; but he had no. objection to including all the northern latitude there was. Dick smiled. This unemotional sanguine temperament was exactly the stuff needed for Herschel.

"What have you done with yourself these two years, Baxter?" he asked.

"Why—I reckon they ain't been so long as I thought. They are the patrols up to Macpherson and around to Kittigazuit, and I went a cruise on the 'Janet' last year, after whales. Saw a lot o' country and Esquimaux that were new, and got a lot o' new localities fixed in my head. I've been mapping them out in case they're ever wanted. We were over a hundred miles north of the magnetic pole that time, and I tell you right here that the discipline a good master can keep on a whaler isn't far short o' that on a man-o'-war. Then there's the shootin' in spring. Brayne and I had a solid week this year, and I guess we could have got thousands o' duck an' crane an' geese if we'd wanted. There's all the wood to haul from the mainland, for we can't get enough coal in by steamer. An' there are the customs to collect from the whalers, an' rows to kick up if they're caught givin' drink to the natives, or doin' any else that they shouldn't. An' once in a while we have a prisoner, though the Esquimaux don't give much trouble. There was the whaleboat I bought from off the Karnac last year, too. We stove her in on a rock, an' she took a lot o' tinkerin' to patch. An'—oh, well, I guess we keep busy oneway an' another."

Dick nodded. Baxter had had the wisdom to count the centre of the world from where his own feet stood instead of some three or four thousand miles to the southward. That stolid nature of his brought its own compensation. Two years of Herschel Island would have driven Dick insane.

"But you won't be sorry to be going out in the summer?" he asked.

"Why—I guess not." Baxter jerked his thumb at a photograph on the wall near the stove. "That's what's waitin' for me outside," he said.

Dick looked at the photograph with lazy interest. It showed a homely face of about average intelligence and amiability. But Baxter's voice was deep with an immense pride and reverence.

"Ah!" Dick said. "I shouldn't leave her too long, Sergeant, or you'll find some other fellow has run off with her."

"Not much." Baxter accepted the compliment with abashed delight. "Why, she says——" he thrust his hand into his tunic, drew it away again, and grinned all over his kindly weather-beaten face. "She'll wait," he said. "I'm not afraid o' losing my Miralma. Why, she writes every week, though she knows I only get mail twice a year. An' I writes lots to her. I tell her all the things I'm thinking about—and I do a lot o' thinking up here. Brayne and Selkirk, they're young fellows, an' they like riotin' around. I like thinkin'."

"What do you think about?" asked Dick curiously.

"Oh, everything. Whales, now. They live a thousand years, and they mate once only, for keeps."

"Dear me." Dick's half-closed eyes flickered open. "I'm afraid you couldn't teach man such constancy. He is civilised."

"Sometimes," said Baxter, ponderously. "I get to wonderin' if civilisation is all it's cracked up to be."

"Do you? Why, it has taught us how to evade the harm we do instead of getting caught every time."

"An' I don't know as that's a very good thing, either."

"Ah!" Dick's lids flickered again. "You are not a sophist, Sergeant."

"Why—I guess I'm not exactly certain what that is."

"Pray your gods you never may be. Have you any gods, though?"

"Well—I reckon I've been wonderin' that too. My Miralma says I've got to have hers. An' I don't know. Likely I have when I come to think of it. A man does a lot of thinkin' up here, an' she's maybe right. Wonderful what a woman can do wi' a man, now. I get to thinkin' that, too."

Dick glanced again at the woman on the wall. With that face and that name anything might be expected of Baxter's Miralma—anything except teaching a hard-bitten old campaigner like Baxter to get down on his stiff knees before her beliefs.

"It is wonderful," he assented. "But they corral us with other things besides religion, you know."

"If you think as she ever tried to get me——"

"No, no. I am sure it was mutual attraction. Like to like. I was thinking more of myself than of you just then."

Baxter grunted, contemplating the strong easy body flung back in the big chair that was made from a cut-down whale-oil barrel. Dick looked very well and vigorous. The hard work and the open air had given him the last hallmark of health, and if his indifference and cynicism were less carefully veiled than in earlier days Baxter was not the man to notice it.

Baxter stuffed some more wood into the stove, and shrugged his shoulders as the wind bellowed at the windows.

"Any whaler tryin' to get in to-night'll have to watch out," he said. "Was Selkirk bakin' when you were in the kitchen?"

"He was. And Brayne was splicing a shovel-handle. They're a handy pair."

"They have to be. Do you know what else I've been thinkin'? What my Miralma calls God is not mighty unlike what I call conscience."

"Really? Not the conscience you have to live with all the year round?"

"Why, now; I guess it's got to be. Conscience is a kind o' standard we got to measure up to whether we like it or not. I learned at school—an' it stuck, someway—that the first Edward of England made the yard-measure the length o' his own arm. And it stayed put at that. Well, the measure o' right is the standard o' Miralma's Cod's arm, I reckon. And that stays put. We can't monkey any over measurin' cloth. That's a set standard. It don't change because we want a bit o' give an' take sometimes. It stays put. And we can't monkey any with the standard of our conscience. A man knows right enough what he's got to measure up against. He's got the whole three feet of it inside of him."

"And supposing he has—what then?"

"Why—why; any ordinary decent man don't generally go doing what he knows he hadn't ought to do."

"How old are you, Baxter?"

"Forty-two, sir."

Occasionally Baxter forgot the rank which man makes in presence of the rank which birth makes. Dick looked at him through half-shut eyes.

"Seven years older than I am," he said, slowly. "You're a lucky man, Sergeant."

Baxter's eyes went back to the plain-faced woman on the wall.

"My! I reckon I know that," he said softly.

Dick sprang up impatiently, and went over to the window, staring out on the pale wild night where the lights fluttered. Even in the sheltered bay the sea heaved in great masses like ebony, and the wind brought the steady boom of its crashing on the outer rocks. A speck of light like a firefly showed once beyond the harbour mouth, showed again, and Dick spoke.

"Here's Jack Scott walking the 'Rocket' home, Baxter."

"What?" Baxter came hurriedly to his elbow. "Why, it is a boat, sure enough. And I guess it's Scott. There ain't too many men would try to make that passage to-night. Eh? She's a five-forty-ton steamer, twin propeller, is the 'Rocket,' and maybe she'll get in, and maybe she won't. If she catches one of those big seas on her she'll go down like a nail under a punch. But she likely had to come. The ice'd be chasing her off the grounds, and Scott won't fool around doing nothing."

Dick gave no answer. He was watching that light which flared skyward and sank and struggled up again like the fluctuating pulse of a sick man. It represented forty or more human lives, and one of those lives might be Grange's Andree. That thought quickened the desire for capture in him, and quickened his imagination also. Suppose Andree were aboard, how would she meet him? Once he had seen her afraid, and he did not want to see that again. He could not think of Andree as crying piteously for mercy. He would not think of it. Rather on this night of wild storm and flying spray could he think of her breasting it; laughing, with her curls blown out and her long coat wrapped round her. There were the same reckless elements in her as in himself. She would defy him; or she would fling herself on him in her all-forgetting love. But she would not cry to him for mercy. He dared not think of that.

He watched the light die and leap up again and pitch sideways with almost the intensity of belief that it was Andree herself battling her wild, lonely way out there against the storm. Baxter spoke again.

"I reckon it is the 'Rocket,' safe enough. See her clear that point? He's a cast-iron sailor, is Scott, and he'll bring her in straight as a bullet with destruction all around him. There's not another man in the fleet would dare it on a night like this. My! She's coming."

"Can I go aboard her with you in the morning, Sergeant?"

"Eh? Why—were you thinkin' he might have Andree? It's one chance in a hundred, Heriot."

"More than that. If she went out intending to board a boat she'd do it. And there'd not be more than three or four that didn't mean to winter. There is a good chance that she's on the 'Rocket.’"

"Well; it's possible. Anything is possible in this world, I guess. But I won't have you along, Heriot. Maybe I can get her ashore friendly-like. That would be better than doin' the thing in public, I reckon."

Dick glanced round. Such refinement in regard to Grange's Andree rather amused him.

"It would be the first time Andree ever objected to publicity," he said. "And you won't get her ashore, Sergeant. She'll guess you've something up your sleeve. If she's there, I must go as soon as you come back, for fear she gets off in some way."

Baxter nodded, and in silence the two watched the 'Rocket' beat near and nearer until she came to anchor at last, riding heavily against the white foam along the harbour jaws.

Then Dick went to bed. But he did not sleep well. A dozen times he woke to hear the thunder of the wind and the gurgling snores of Baxter in the other bed across the room. Once Selkirk came out of the room opposite and tried the front door where it shuddered and groaned under the smite of the wind, and many times he expected the storm-window to be driven in. Mingled with his uneasy dreams were the faces he knew best. Jennifer, now laughing, now crying, now turning from him. Tempest, stern and aloof, unbending even in his grave self-renunciation. Andree, warm-lipped and glowing with her love, reaching eager hands to him. He woke once with the strange breathless sensation of a kiss stinging his mouth and the blood galloping along his veins. Then he lay still, staring on the darkness, and thinking his bitter thoughts. Jennifer had sent him away. Tempest would not accept his friendship any more. Those two whom he loved had chosen to be nothing to him. It was only Andree who held him before pride or conscience or anything else. Only Andree who was ready to fling all she had and was into his hands if he would have taken it. And he had been cruel to her, mercilessly cruel. But her love had been a greater thing than that.

And then with a sudden stab came the thought: Was her love for him still the chief thing in her life? A chill of dread ran along his body to think that perhaps it was not. In the cold dark of midnight, when a man's will lies weakest, Dick knew that it would be real pain to know that Andree had ceased to love him. He was heart-sick with desire for Jennifer and for Tempest, and they had denied him what he wanted. They had been too cold, too pure for him; and in a savage revulsion of feeling the whole of him cried out for something which cared for him, for his own self, past all laws and creeds and scruples and calculations; something which would love him whether he were good or evil, whether he were cruel or kind; something which just gave, demanding none of those self-torturing struggles from him.

This mood held him doggedly through the next morning, when the grey bay tossed restlessly under the clear sky and Baxter went out in the whaleboat with Selkirk and a couple of Esquimaux to the 'Rocket.' Dick helped Brayne wash up and fill the stoves with wood. Then he put on the close-sewn fur coat bought from an old Kogmollock woman and went down to the shore.

The smite of the wind tingled his blood at once and reddened his eyes. He opened his chest to it, walking fast, and glancing round him with those keen eyes which missed so little.

Outside their low banked-up huts a few Esquimaux were moving with the fur-lined head-covering thrown back from their coarse black hair, tonsured like a monk's, and their good-natured flat greasy faces. They had gone into their winter clothes since he saw them last evening, for their outer coats had the long hair blowing in the wind. On the inner suit the hair was turned next the skin. In the store of the Pacific Steam Whaling Navigation Company some hands off one of the whalers were bringing out beams and joists and planed timber for the roofing-in of their vessel. Dick stopped a little while to watch them. Hard-sinewed men, the most of them, with their loose clothes flapping, and their untamed faces ruddy, and their bright eyes with that far-seeing wildness in them as though they listened still to the call of their lover at sea. They spoke little and sullenly, and he guessed them to be from the 'Fanny'; foremast hands who had " signed on bone," and who, because there were no whales and consequently no bone, were going deeper in debt to the steamer every day. Dick remembered Baxter's suspicion that some of them would try to desert. And, looking at them, he believed it.

In the harbour the boats still rocked and groaned at their hawsers with the tug of the after-swell. The 'Rocket' drew deeper than any other there; but she, like the rest, was bluff and broad of beam and flat of keel, so that the ice might lift her and not crush her in its mighty grip. Naked and mournful they looked with their bare poles stabbing the sky and their sheets singing in the wind. The white shaving of smoke from the 'Rocket's' stack showed that she had not chosen her winter quarters yet, and as Dick watched her, Baxter's boat dropped away from her side and drove shoreward with the men swinging low to the oars. Dick went down to the very lip of the water and looked. There was no woman in the boat. But that told nothing. It was not Baxter who was to take Grange's Andree from her stronghold.

The boat swung near, dipping deep in the restless swell. Baxter stepped out, answering the question in Dick's eyes.

"She's there," he said briefly. Then he took Dick a few steps aside. "She's there," he said again, and his voice was uneven. "Heriot, you never told me she'd turned out the lovely thing she is. I remember her thin and brown, and even then—Well, she's got them all crazy for her, of course. And they can't do anything with her, not a man of 'em. She goes around with a knife in her belt, and they dassent touch her. Have it into them like light, she would, and they know it. My! And that makes them the crazier. She is a beauty, and this is a bitter, cruel thing you've got to do, Heriot. A bitter cruel thing."

Dick smiled a little. He knew so well that wild animal indifference and temper and defiance in Andree. And she carried a knife, did she? Would she try to use it on him, or would she come to him as before, with her hands out and the gladness in her eyes?

"Jack Scott's clean off his head," said Baxter. "He wanted to take her out the worst way, but the ice caught him. I'll go along with you now, Heriot, for she'll be a handful of herself if she don't want to come, and I wouldn't answer for Scott the way he is. You've got your warrant, supposin' he wants to see it? It's his ship, you know. Well—get in. Push her off, Selkirk; we're goin' out to the 'Rocket' again."

"Does he know she's wanted?"

"No. You'll have to tell him that. Poor devil. I guess he's sorry he ever took her aboard. She's makin' him sweat for it. You watch out, Dick. One can raise out most fellows on a bluff, but a man in love is the devil to meddle with."

Dick knew this for a certainty when he peered in at the cabin door over Baxter's shoulder, and saw Scott with his elbows on the table, and his eyes on Andree where she sat on the transom under the port-hole. In the light of the deck he had stumbled among half-scraped bone, barrels and trying-out pots, flenching-knives and tubs of blubber. Here, in the gloom, the two men and the one girl at the table showed palely. And then Andree thrust her face forward at Baxter.

"You needn't have come back. I will not go ashore for any man," she cried.

"Won't you come for me, Andree?" said Dick, and stepped out of the dark. Andree sprang up with eyes dilated and colour suddenly struck from her cheeks. Dick heard the men move, but his eyes did not leave Andree. Did she know what he had come for? Did she know?"

"Dick!" she screamed sharply. "Dick!"

She put her foot on the transom and hurled herself across the table; tripping and stumbling among the cups and cutlery, laughing and crying in a breath.

Dick caught her reaching arms and lifted her down, holding her still.

"Steady," he said. "Steady, Andree."

But his own voice was not steady. Not at this moment could he forget what she, in her utter abandon, had come to him for.

Scott was round the end of the table now, with his square face distorted by passion.

"Take your hands off her," he said thickly. "Take them off, will you?"

The light in Andree's eyes had blurred Baxter for a moment. He wondered if Dick had known of this. He touched Scott on the shoulder.

"Be careful," he said quietly. "Don't you see his uniform?"

Dick had stooped his head down to Andree.

"Do you know what I've come for, Andree?" he asked.

"Oh, oui;" Andree shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "I suppose. Mais—I knew it would be you to find me. And it was you!"

She laughed in that light-hearted spirit which never let her see beyond the moment. And then Scott thrust Baxter aside. The intended hint had not reached him. He was swept beyond everything but his love and jealousy, and he put his hand on Andree's arm.

"Let her be," he said loudly. "She's my passenger aboard my ship, and I won't have her interfered with. Get away out of here. I'm an American citizen, and I don't care a cold cent for you or your uniform or that damned law of yours behind it! Get off my ship. Get away out of here!"

Dick half-turned, swinging Andree swiftly behind him.

"Leave him to me, Sergeant," he said; and Baxter understood. For many reasons—reasons which were beyond those which Baxter knew this was Dick's business only.

Scott's face was dead-white and his eyes were wild. He tried to pass Dick, but the policeman's solid bulk and superior height blocked him.

"What are you here for?" he shouted. "What do you want—you!"

"Would you like to know?" The smile on Dick's lips tightened. "Look at this then. No—you won't touch it."

Scott glanced over the warrant. He gave a deep groan, like a man struck in the chest, and he staggered as though he had been struck.

"You—you can't mean to do that?" he faltered. "You can't mean to do that?"

"Possibly my uniform and my law mean more than a cold cent to me," suggested Dick; and Scott looked straight at him.

"You devil!" he said.

The set smile was on Dick's face still. Keeling, the mate, came forward.

"What's he giving you, Cap'n?" he asked.

The question roused Scott again.

"Why didn't she tell me!" he cried. "Andree, Andree; why didn't you tell me! And I'd have taken you out if I'd lost half my catch over it. Ah—Andree!"

Again he tried to pass Dick, and could not. Keeling leaned back against the table with his hands in his pockets.

"Murder?" he asked of Baxter with uplifted brows. Baxter nodded, and Keeling laughed a little harsh laugh.

"Stewed in your own gravy, Cap'n," he said. "You wouldn't let me touch her, and now you've lost her yourself."

Dick looked at him with interest.

"I wish it was you I had to deal with, my man," he murmured. "Captain Scott, I apologise for my intrusion, but I have my duty to perform. I must remove the prisoner at once."

Scott straightened up and his white, rigid face was dangerous.

"We are two men to two," he said. "I don't care what uniform you wear, or what warrant you carry. You shall not have her. I'll call the whole ship out before I let you take her."

"I don't think that the gentleman behind you intends to endanger his life in a quarrel of this sort. You had better be wise, Captain Scott. There are always more where we come from, you know."

Scott glanced at Keeling and glanced away again. It was as Dick had said. The odds were three to one.

"Will you fight me for her?" he asked.

"I wish I could," said Dick sincerely. "You're a straight man, sir, and I'd be happy to oblige you. But it is against my orders, and you can only get yourself arrested if you interfere."

"You mean to take her—for this?"

"Yes."

"Does she know it?"

"Yes."

"But she——" He was silent a moment, thinking. Then he sprang straight at Dick. "She loves you," he cried. "She loves you, you blackguard, and you can do this to her!"

Dick met him as promptly, and the two men grappled. It was a short struggle, but a very sharp one. For though Dick was the taller and the heavier, Scott had courage and plenty of science. But it was the tumult of his own heart that played the traitor with him, and in a little he reeled back, clutching at the table with both hands, and shaking and giddy with the uneven breaths he drew. Keeling had watched with sullen pleasure in his eyes. He had more than one grudge against Scott. And Andree had watched in unabashed delight. She always gloried to see men flung off their balance for her, and she always rejoiced to see them fight. Scott found his breath at last.

"You—mean to do it?" he gased.

Dick pulled his tunic down and settled his belt.

"I do not change my mind," Captain Scott," he said.

"I am not a soft man," said Scott slowly. "But——" He lifted himself, fastening his eyes on Dick. "You speak of your duty," he said. "Your duty! A man's duty is to protect a woman, and not to hunt her down for death. I can't keep her. I can't fight the three of you. And I'll let you take her if she has to go because it will bring you worse luck than anything you've ever done in all your life. You'll never see Heaven, but maybe we'll meet in Hell and figure out the end of this. Let me speak to her."

Dick moved aside, and Scott held his hand out to Andree.

"Good-bye," he said. "I'd have saved you if you'd told me. Did you think you'd have shocked me? My girl, I love you the better for your pluck. Tell me that you never hated me, Andree."

Andree's cheeks were bright and her eyes dancing. She veiled them a moment with her long lashes, and looked up with the half-shy swiftness which had been fatal to so many before Scott's day.

"Mais non," she whispered. "I did like you. But I like Dick more better.

"You know what he is taking you for?"

Andree pulled her hand from Scott's, and slid it into Dick's.

"He is Dick," she said simply.

Scott looked keenly into the other man's face. Then he swung on his heel.

"Take her," he said. "I'd rather be Andree than yourself, and so would you. But you've got to be yourself, and I guess that's going to give you all you want before you're through."

He passed into his cabin, shut the door, and locked it. Dick and Baxter took Andree back to the barracks. But, an hour later, when Andree sat in Baxter's little room, mending a net and singing her soft French songs over it, Baxter saw Dick climbing the little slope that led up the wind-swept plateau beyond. It was dark when he came back, and the cool indifference of his manner was unchanged. But Baxter knew.

"That fellow is goin' to be tried-out—hard—before he's done wi' Grange's Andree," he told himself.

Day by day the long fierce billows of the Arctic bowed their old grey-bearded heads lower before the march of the ice. Day by day Dick fretted to be gone, and waited for the snow, and helped Baxter in his round of duties, and looked after Andree. She obeyed Dick implicitly, with a frank delight. But she was a torment to the other men, and Baxter said no more than he felt when he one night expressed a belief that Andree would probably knife Selkirk directly as she had done Ogilvie.

"Did she tell you she'd killed Ogilvie?" said Dick sharply.

"Sure. Last night. He cheeked her, she said, an' she wasn't goin' to stand it. Wonderful what she takes from you." He raised himself, looking keenly at Dick. "If one could give a chap a warnin'," he began.

"One can't." Dick's tone was final. "Selkirk tells me we'll all be on half-rations directly. Is that so?"

"Why—there are four boats in that didn't mean to winter. We'll have all we want of fish and seal-meat, o' course, but we're going to suffer in the groceries. And I've got to keep a reserve, you know. The kiddies would peter out in a week if we fed them with oil and meat only. They've got too accustomed to flour and sugar and tea now."

"I'm afraid I'll have to beg enough to carry me to Macpherson. I fancy we should get off in a couple of days, now. Yes. I'll be glad. Damned glad. I want to be doing something."

He went out with a restlessness which he rarely showed, and followed Andree down to Ek-ki-do's igloo, where she went daily to play with the children. It was not needful to put Andree under restraint. Her love for him was the chain which bound her fast, and he knew it. He had had reason to know it more acutely than ever during these past weeks.

Outside the earth-and-timber shaft Dick dropped on his knees, and crawled painfully through an odorous darkness into a tiny room where he could not stand upright and across to a larger one where Andree rolled with a couple of Kogmollock babies among the deerskin robes, on the little platform which ran round the walls. The very dim light came through a piece of transparent yellow seal-bladder stretched across a gap in the roof, and the whole place was hot and extremely rank with oil and fish-smells. But Andree was laughing in merry peals of joy among the babies, while the little fat mother sat on the floor stitching neatly at a deer-skin tunic.

"Hallo, Andree," said Dick, and stood up as Andree tumbled the chuckling bundles aside and pushed her curls back.

"Dick," she cried. "It is that I will have a deer-skin suit, moi. Je ne peux to mush in a skirt, and I will not. I will have a parka and all else—comme ça. Like to Mrs. Ek-ki-do. And we will have the seal-skin boots, my Dick, and I will chew them pour vous when that they do get too hard."

"You will what?"

"Chew them." Andree pointed to Mrs. Ek-ki-do. "She does chew her husband's boots tous les jours—all round the sole to keep them soft. And my teeth are all so good as hers."

"I know. You bit me once. I will see about the clothes, Andree, because I have been thinking that we will need something of the kind. And I'll chew my own boots if it's necessary, thank you. But I fancy it won't be. It is time to come back to barracks, Andree."

"But kiss this bébè the once. She is so dear," said Andree, and lifted the black-eyed, broad-faced little bundle with her strong young grace.

Dick's eyes contracted. Among children Grange's Andree was at her very sweetest—until she tired of them.

"Like a Japanese doll, isn't she?" he said. "Or one of Moosta's babies."

"Ah!" cried Andree in sharp passion. "Do not say to me of Moosta's babies."

She was out of the igloo and across the beach before Dick could follow her, and in the barrack-kitchen he found her quarrelling heatedly with Brayne. But that incident in Mrs. Ek-ki-do's igloo haunted him for some days. For many years he had tried to teach himself Nietszche's new commandment, "Be hard;" but, because of the irrationalism which he recognised, his strength there was always likely to be shaken at the unexpected call on it.

Ten days later came Dick's last night at Herschel, and he felt a curious and uneasy reluctance at leaving it. All the afternoon he had been on the wind-swept plateau with Brayne and Selkirk, sawing out the great blocks of ice from the fresh-water lake for storage in the ice-house until summer came, and his last sight of the dead white Polar sea from it had brought him down shivering with more than cold. For the first time he had a distinct dread of this long journey which was surely likely to be no worse than many which he had taken before.

By the stove in Baxter's little room Andree was putting floats on a small net with which she intended to catch fish in the Mackenzie. She sang as she worked, and her face was lit with anticipation. Dick knew that on himself only, the product of a refined civilisation, lay the horrors of that anticipation. Andree never attempted to realise a thing until she came to it, and seldom then. She would never have run from justice if the breed who had brought her word of something Ducane had once said had not urged it, for she had quite forgotten the fear which possessed her at the time of the trial. She forgot quickly as an animal does, and far more completely, because her eager ignorant mind always flung itself fully on the next new thing. This long mush through the half-dark of an Arctic winter, with only Dick beside her for the most part, would be something new and strange and altogether delightful.

 

"Bec-a-bec; et toi, et moi,"

 

she hummed. Then she glanced up.

"Je me sers votre couteau, Dick," she cried. "You no mind? Tres bien. I did myself out with it, too. Do you know what make happen to me with Maktuk this afternoon when we go to shoot seals round the blow-hole? It was so much cold, and the parka collar would not keep up round my face. And Maktuk he did make spit on the two sides and hold them togezzer. Dieu! They freeze like one dans un moment. And they had to hold me the fire over to melt me when I come back. I did laugh."

Baxter laughed also, going on with his careful setting-out of native births, deaths, and marriages; his tabulation of the tonnage, names of officers, and of boats in the Bay; his details of patrols, of the few white men hunting or prospecting along the Arctic, and of the state of health and contentment of the settlement. All these data were to go south with Dick, and also a little package of letters and native carvings for Baxter's Miralma.

"I guess they know a thing or two," he said. "And I guess reports are a mighty different thing to what they must ha' been at Herschel before the missionaries and us came along. Drinkin', an' all sorts o' rows with the whalers, an' no law or religion anywhere at all. And now those Kogmollocks hold their services among themselves regular, and every boat's crew has to be aboard by ten o'clock, and no drinkin' allowed. This sort o' thing's a satisfaction to man, I reckon."

"Exactly. And so is the knowledge that we ultimately convert the heathen by killing them out. There are about one hundred and twenty Kogmollocks now, aren't there? And much the same of Nunatalmutes? A few years ago there were four hundred Kogmollocks. Oh, we will convert them all right, Baxter, for that is the way in which we conquer our territories. We can't do much with the Arctic when we get it all to ourselves without a native left to it. But we will get it. That is the glory of Empire. And we can't do without Empire."

"But it is better for them to be converted——" began Baxter vaguely.

"Indubitably. Perhaps the Esquimaux consider measles and whooping cough rather drastic missionaries. But that it not our fault. We do our best. We have always said so. What time does Selkirk expect to start in the morning?"

Selkirk was taking the police dog-team up to Fort Macpherson for supplies, if any could be spared from there; and Dick, with his long strong sled and specially-picked line of huskies, expected to keep pace with him so far. For he was an expert musher, and Andree was unusually strong for a girl.

"D'rectly after breakfast. You ought to make Macpherson in ten or eleven sleeps, I guess. Likely you'll put in a day or two there?"

"Not longer than necessary to get loaded up again—unless Andree happens to be fagged at all."

He broke off, and both men looked at Grange's Andree where she sat on the Polar bear rug with the fire from the open stove dancing on her warm oval cheeks and her slender busy hands.

 

"Dans les prisons des Nantes,"

 

she sang, and Baxter's eyes caught Dick's for a moment. Then he went back to his work with his hard, wooden face reddening with pity.

And the pity was not altogether, nor even in chief, for Andree.