The Law-bringers/Chapter 7

by G. B. Lancaster

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CHAPTER VII

"THE RETURN OF OGILVIE"

"Such things should not be allowed," said Slicker hotly.

"Unfortunately," said Dick, and his voice was proportionately cool, "we have learnt to conduct society on the assumption that each human thing is a separate individual. And therefore, logic requires that we allow to each at least the outward rights of personal independence."

"But they have no right to use those rights against another."

"You know Mrs. Hotchkiss says that bruise was where she fell against a tree, Slicker?" reproved young Forbes.

"But she knows it isn't. And so do we."

Along Leigh's warm, shady verandah the older men glanced at each other in amusement. Dick looked down on the two boys spread luxuriously on the sunny grass.

"Whose rights are you encroaching on now, Slicker?" he asked.

"Oh, it's all rot!" Slicker sat up with a jerk. "Love and marriage just upset the preconceived plan of the whole cosmos."

"Especially marriage," murmured Dick; while the other men laughed, stinging Slicker into defence.

"We ought to have been all men or all women," he cried. "All men wouldn't bother to bully each other, and all women wouldn't bother to nag each other. There wouldn't be much love, and so there wouldn't be much sorrow. We'd just jig along each on our own."

"Sounds enticing," said Bond, the young factor of Revillons. "But there seem to be some fundamental objections to that plan, Slicker. The world has to go on, you know. Or, at least, we are under that impression. We may be over-estimating our value."

"Heaven help us if we are," said Dick. He looked at Slicker. "Who gave you leave to take Kant and Hegel and some other books out of my room?" he asked.

Slicker went scarlet. Several conditions in Grey Wolf had upset him lately; and he was seeking explanation for them, and, incidentally, for his own existence and that of everyone else.

"I found them," he muttered.

"I have just said so." Dick's smile was malicious. "Well, you've found your punishment pretty quick, too."

"But can't you do something with Hotchkiss?" said Bond. "I'm afraid he gives that poor little woman a bad time."

"Not unless she complains—or Leigh. Speak to Leigh. He's Hotchkiss' boss."

Dick yawned, and retired from the following discussion, lying back in his chair with his half-shut eyes on Slicker. And presently the boy rose, with a swing of defiance; walked down to the gate, and turned along the road.

Dick was half-smiling, for he understood the reason for this explosion so clearly. In these weeks Slicker had been watching the breaking-up of a home across the Lake. Where he could he battled for Jennifer against Ducane's growing drunkenness and demands; where he could not he went away, and, quite naturally, cursed the universe. Dick saw no reason to curse the universe. He had become to Jennifer that always-kindly, always-tactful friend whose vigorous interest and vitality cheered and strengthened her as nothing else could do. And she had become to him much more than he yet allowed himself to believe, although his nature was daily warning him. Jennifer, brave-eyed and unshaken in her wifehood, meant more to him than any woman had meant before, even as Tempest meant more than any other man had meant.

But he knew that he would probably let Tempest go to ruin without a finger lifted to save him, and he forsaw that he would more than probably pluck Jennifer out of her blind innocence into a knowledge which could not fail to hurt her. The man who desired a thing and yet dared not take it aroused Dick's amused contempt and curiosity all his days. For he looked at the race through the individual, unguessing that the glory of mankind is to look at the individaul through the race.

Presently Leigh's words drew him into the talk again.

"Dick, did you see that old fellow who came up with one of those bogus prospectuses last week? A baby-faced old buffer with a downy beard and not enough snap to curse with when he found he'd been done."

"Yes, I saw him. Ducane sent him on to me."

"Well? What are you going to do about it?" demanded Leigh.

"What do you expect us to do. Grey Wolf is not the first place to be boomed in this way, and it won't be the last. I once bought shares in a gold-mine that was three miles out at sea myself. Such things must happen, you know. We invite it when we will buy on paper."

"You call it a boom," said Bond. "It will kill the place."

"Not it. A German came up lately with scrip that showed a fine river-frontage—but unfortunately he found that he had to go into the river to get it. But he liked the land, and he bought that genuine frontage of Robison's near Pitcher Portage." He smiled gently. "Robison is advertising us quite a little bit, I think," he added.

He said it again to himself as he rode over to Ducane's for supper a little later. But this time he added Ducane's name, and under the wide dark tent of trees where sweet scents moved the birds answered him in cheerful, rollicking song. By the trail the yellow catkins of the pussy-willow were swaying, and Dick came with their pollen on him to the dining-room, where Ducane was working at a roll-top desk. Ducane swept the papers into a drawer and locked it instantly, and Dick followed the disappearance of the bunch of keys into his pocket with the eyes of desire. The handling of that bunch for such a little while might mean so much.

Throughout the meal Ducane was moody and irritable. He smoked a cigar between his mouthfuls, scattering the ash on the tablecloth. Jennifer's eyes caught Dick's, and she smiled bravely.

"Isn't he dreadful?" she said. "It is always a cigar or cigarettes. The kitten eats what she can, and my chipmunk thinks them invaluable for his next winter's store. But I still find the ends about everywhere."

"You always exaggerate so infernally," growled Ducane.

"If you came out of that cloud of smoke you'd call it by another name," said Dick. "Where is the chipmunk, Mrs. Ducane? I haven't seen him since he bit my finger, and I've been afraid to ask for fear he'd died of it. Do you remember Cowper's 'Mad Dog'? There the man recovered from the bite. But it killed the dog."

He continued to talk; lightly, casually, though he missed little of what Ducane did or said. This smoking at meal-times proved that Ducane's nerves were rapidly getting beyond self-control. And the furtive look in his eyes proved the same. The man was on the verge of a big coup or an utter breakdown. Either was equally likely to affect him in this way. But whichever it was Dick hoped that the matter would not be taken out of his own hands. The instinct of the chase was too strong in him. He knew that he could not let go now. Then he looked at Jennifer in the lamplight with all the daintiness of the carefully-arranged table about her, and the cynicism in his blood brought the faint smile to his eyes. Life did this kind of thing to him always. It never gave him the sweet without the bitter. But Jennifer was a woman only; neither stronger nor wiser than other women. And she was an unhappy one also.

In the sitting-room later Ducane was smoking cigarettes.

He smoked them rapidly, flinging them into the fire half-burnt out. And he walked through the room in restless irritation, tossing a word into the conversation now and again, and contradicting Dick rudely. Dick was well accustomed to this. Jennifer never asked anyone else to her home now, but she had ceased to mind Dick. Indeed, without understanding why, she found comfort in his presence.

In a tall, grey jar on the floor big branches of pussy-willow showed palely, scenting the room with spring. Ducane brushed once against them as he walked, and he turned, with a curse, kicking the jar over.

"That'll teach you to put your deuced rubbish about all over the shop," he said savagely. "Pick it up and take it away."

Jennifer stood up, flushing. This was worse than anything he had hitherto shown before Dick. She silenced Dick with a movement of her hand as he rose, and went forward. But Ducane had already entangled his feet in the branches. He stooped; wrenched them away from his ankles, and flung them in Jennifer's face.

"Do you want to make me fall and break my neck?" he stormed.

"Harry, dear——"

And then a quiet hand put Jennifer aside.

"Please go away for a few minutes, Mrs. Ducane," said Dick.

"Oh—you won't——?"

"I won't hurt him. But he might hurt you. Please go."

He held the door open, and Ducane lurched forward, inarticulate with fury. He had ceased to fear Dick for the moment. And he was a big man. Bigger and heavier than Dick. Jennifer stood on the threshold. She was half-dazed, but one little sharp thread of fear ran through her.

"Oh—I can't. He's not safe——"

"Not safe for me?" Dick smiled. "Don't be frightened," he said, and shut the door, facing Ducane with his back to it.

Jennifer stood outside it with her face white and set. She was glad, fiercely glad that a man should meet Ducane on the ground where she had bowed in submission so long. And she was burning with shame that it should be necessary. And she was thrilling with some unexplainable emotion which was more than anger, more than belief, more than pain. She could not analyse it; but she knew that from no other man would she have allowed this interference between herself and her husband.

Ducane's voice rose, loud and hectoring. She could not hear Dick. She did not want to hear him. She went down the passage to her own room and stood looking out on the calm night of stars. There was no love for Ducane left in her now, and at present she felt that there was no love for anyone or anything else in all the world.

Ducane was scattering curses through his incoherent wrath. His natural bullying temper had outleapt its bounds and he was nearly mad with fury. But the quiet, half-smiling man against the door cowed him. He kept his distance.

"How dare you interfere between me and my wife?" he foamed. "In a man's own house, too. I'll have you——"

"Do you really call yourself a man?" asked Dick politely.

"I—I——" Ducane became incoherent again. "You have no right, legal or otherwise, damn you——"

"I don't want any right other than my muscles." Dick came forward suddenly; close up to the stuttering, purple face. "Your word isn't worth much," he said. "But I have a fancy to make you give it to me. Will you control yourself more in future? You had better say yes. I give you a couple of minutes to think it over."

"I'll have you up for assault if you try to bully me."

"If you do I assure you I will endeavour to make it worth your while." Dick began to unbutton his tunic. "You prefer it this way then?" he asked.

"No! No!" Ducane backed away, unmanned by a sudden fear. "No. I know you could lick me."

"So do I. If I wasn't so absolutely sure perhaps I'd take a sporting try at it. Mr. Ducane, nerve-attacks like this don't come on a man without reach. Unless you want me to begin taking a professional interest in your affairs you had better learn to control yourself. Do you understand?"

He doubted the wisdom of this half-veiled threat. But he needed a weapon which would strike home. This did. Ducane reeled back against the wall, and his puffy face turned tallow-pale.

"There's nothing wrong with my private affairs," he gasped. "Nothing."

"Then it is heart or stomach, I suppose. You'd better see de Choiseaux. Shall I send him over in the morning?"

Ducane acquiesced sullenly. But it seemed to Dick that he snatched at this way of escape. Dick bade him good-night blandly.

"I'll come over with de Choiseaux," he said. "And I'll ask Mrs. Ducane to tell me how you've spent the night. You mustn't let those nerves get any more bold, you know."

He left Ducane groping with the hint behind this, and went down the passage to get his hat. In the open doorway Jennifer came to him, and under the pale starlight she looked very small and frail.

"Thank you," she said, almost inaudibly. "But I hope that it will never be necessary for you to do this any more."

He had to lighten that note of tragedy in her voice before he could think of anything else.

"Why, it was nothing," he said. "When a man gets a bad attack of nerves a few plain words from another man soon help to make him 'see things straight. I am going to bring de Choiseaux over in the morning. Ducane has consented to take a tonic. You'll see that he'll soon be all right again. But he'll have to knock off his smoking."

Both knew well that it was very much more than nothing. But she said only:

"How very kind you always are to me."

Dick looked down at her smiling. He was wondering if she would say this to him in the days that were coming.

"That virtue brings its own reward in this case," he said, and rode away into the night.

A week later Slicker tottered in at the barrack-gate, white-faced.

"Dick, I've found him," he gasped. "I've found Ogilvie."

Dick led him into the little office and shut the door.

"Where?" he said. "Take your time—and take this first."

Slicker swallowed a small nip from Dick's flask, and shuddered. "He's at the bottom of that coulée a couple of hundred yards from the Mission trail. I didn't go down, but I knew that coon coat of his. And the flies were buzzing. Ugh!"

"All right. Don't you worry about Ogilvie. He's been shut of his troubles these six months, lucky devil. Hold on till I get Kennedy and the buckboard. You must show us the place right now."

But among the close-set young poplars and the sweet-scented Balm of Gilead at the coulée-top Slicker backed away.

"I—I guess I'll stay with the team," he said, and the two policemen crashed down through the undergrowth together, with the drumming of woodpeckers in the hollow trees about them sounding like hammering on an empty coffin.

Sunk deep in the coulée-bottom was a bundle of rough fur; something that gleamed, as though scratched out by a questing coyote, and a boot turned upwards, with a white butterfly poised on its tip. In the hot air the buzzing of flies came up drowsily, suggesting sleep. But Ogilvie's sleep was six months long.

Dick stooped over the thing on the ground. For a little time he did not move. Then, with a strong jerk of his wrist, he pulled a knife from the joint of the neck and collar-bone and stood up, quenching Kennedy's exclamations.

"We have found Ogilvie's bones," he said. "That's all you know. Now help shift him out of this."

Four drove home where three drove out, and in the loose-box at the barrack-stable Ogilvie was laid, wrapped decently in a Hudson Bay blanket. Then Dick went up to his bedroom and washed and brushed himself, whistling softly the while. The hound-instinct was awake in him, whipping him on to the blood-trail, and already he had scented the two whom he must follow. If it were not Robison who had done this thing then it assuredly was Grange's Andree, and it behoved him to have those two suspects in his hands before the news of Ogilvie's return got loose in Grey Wolf. He had enforced present silence from Kennedy and Slicker. But he would not be able to keep it for long. He laughed, brushing the thick hair back from his sunburnt forehead, and settling his cap with a swagger.

"It's you and me for it first, I reckon, Grange's Andree," he said, and clattered cheerfully down the narrow stairs.

He felt relieved that Tempest would not be back from the Black Mile until the next night. The matter was entirely under his control, and he knew exactly what he was going to do as he walked down to Grange's where a Sabbath calm lay over everything, including the many dogs that slept in the dust round the door.

"I want to speak to Andree a moment," he said, leaning in through the back-parlour window; and Moosta, with unsteady babies reeling round her ample skirts, answered him.

"Suppose she go in canoe. She mak' fight avec Monsieur Lampard."

"Thank you," said Dick, and withdrew his head, and went down to the river.

"She can flirt with that little beast when she has Tempest!" he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "I know something about women," he said. "But I doubt Andree is rather too raw even for me."

Against the bank where the canoe widened to the lake he found Andree in her canoe. She held the overhanging willow-branches with one round arm from which the sleeve had fallen back. There was a bracelet of the dyed porcupine quills on it, and a belt of like make clipped her supple waist. She lay back idly, and her long slender feet were thrust out before her, cased in new moccasins gay with blue and magenta bead-work and silk. Dick smiled.

"Waiting for Monsieur Lampard to come back and make friends," he murmured.

Then he slid down the bank and stood beside her. Andree looked up with a pretty pretence at anger. Then she frowned. She had no reason to love Dick.

"What boy are you waiting for this evening, Andree?" asked Dick pleasantly, and stepped into the canoe.

"Not you," she said sharply, and drew her feet in.

"Ah, I'm sorry for that." Dick reached for the paddle and sent the canoe out into the stream. "Because you see, I've come. I want to speak to you rather particularly, Grange's Andree."

She looked up with suspicion at his suave voice. Dick nodded. His smile was almost bland.

"Why did you tell me that you didn't see Ogilvie that night in the Mission trail?" he asked softly.

"Ah!" she said, and half-sprang up. But Dick was too quick for her. He dropped the paddle, and thrust her back in the seat.

"You can't swim," he said. "And I'm not going to hurt you. Now, what time did you see Robison on that same night?"

"I did never see either," she said with a gasp.

"Did you see them both at the same time?"

"I did not see——"

"Were they both in the trail together when you saw them?"

"Nom de Dieu!" she burst out. "You devil!"

""Keep quiet. You near had us over. Both at once, was it?"

"I did never——"

"It was both at once then?"

This steady hammering was too much for her.

"Aha," she said, and Dick told her fear by her quickened breathing.

"Now," he said, persuasively, "you will tell me what else you saw, Andree."

"Diable!" she cried, and her voice rose in a scream. "I not see nothing. I not know. Oh—damn you, Dick."

"That matter has already been attended to, thank you. Now, what did you see?"

"I did see nothing."

Dick's hand slid round her wrist softly, and suggestively. "I think you know what it means if you keep on saying that," he said.

"Oh!" Andree shuddered, drawing her head in between her shoulders. Then suddenly she flung it up and looked at him defiantly.

"Est-ce que vous avez envie de moi to tell?" she demanded.

"You have guessed exactly right, Andree."

"Robison," she began. Then she put her hand out. "Take those eyes out of my eyes," she said. "Now—I will say. They did mak' fight. An Ogilvie he hit. An'—an' Robison take le couteau"—she dropped her face in her hands. "Non, non," she gasped. "Tais'-vous. Ah! Cette affaire! C'est affreux!"

Dick sat back, letting her go.

"I think that will do for now," he said. "You can tell the rest in court. Where is Robison?"

"He did go north with Ducane on Mercredi on Wednesday. I do not know——"

Dick smothered an oath. This was an unforeseen complication. And the man had four days' start.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Oui," said Andree sulkily.

On the night before Robison had left he had shown his increasing jealously against Tempest very plainly, and it had taken all her small amount of wit to quieten him. Andree had no more love for Tempest than for Robison. But it pleased her to have the men in the bar chaff her about him, and it pleased her to see the light leap into his eyes when she came near him.

Dick took up the paddle and drove the canoe in under the willows again.

"I am obliged to you for your graciousness, Andree," he said. "But I advise you not to shower it on any one else in this matter, or you may get yourself into trouble. And I wonder if any girl who had not Indian blood in her could have held her tongue for so long."

He went back through the streets, asking for Robison and Ducane, and confirming Andree's words. They had gone to catch the scows making north with the first spring freight for Fort Smith and Hay River and many a lonely outpost beside. Dick knew well the trail they must take. He knew the run of the river from Pelican Portage down, and he knew just as exactly his chances of catching the steamer which met the scows at Fort McMurray. An hour later he ran down to the bank on moccasined feet, and within ten minutes a little canoe shot out into the sunset, with Dick kneeling, eager-eyed and lithe-armed, in the bow, and Tommy Joseph in the stern.

Tommy had tracked up that river and sailed down it until he knew the lie of it by heart, and when night came the steady push of the paddles still ate up the miles. Once a bull-moose thrashed the undergrowth close by with his wide-branching horns, and far off the shy cow answered with a wild note; harsh, and strangely appealing. Silence dropped, and Dick knew that the huge animal was swinging his mighty bulk and heavy antlers through the woods as noiseless and as swift as a weasel.

It was hot on the river through the days that followed. And it was very lonely. Sometimes across an open sweep of red-top grass coyotes raised their high wild howling and shot from sight like yellow shadows. Sometimes loons rose from desolate marshes and flew into horizon with straight beaks wide open and strident cries that made crazy echoes. Sometimes a brown bear rocked along the rim of their night-camp with his silent shuffle, or the nasal whistle of a night-hawk on the trail of a bat came to them where they lay under the white moon. But the men spoke little, and in silence they thought their own thoughts, still-faced and quiet-eyed, in that reserve which the men of the back-trails know well.

Many times Dick thought of Robison; swarthy, stealthy, ready to die hard when his time came. Of Ducane who would crouch and cry when rounded up for his branding. Of Jennifer—and then his thoughts went no further, and all the great dead of whom the forest told were nothing to him. For the men who loved Canada haunt her silent places still; a ghostly, unforgotten company, grey with the thickening dust of time. Alexander Mackenzie, who broke out the white-man's flag where only the Indian's smoke-flag had blown; Franklin, thrusting his pincer-points down from the naked Pole; Bishop Bompas, that wide-hearted, dauntless "Apostle of the North"; James Robertson; George Munro Grant, and the men of a later day; Strathcona and Mount Stephen, who smote with steel and paved with iron and buckled up coast to coast.

And a thousand untold, and yet another thousand; men who died with shut teeth and fierce eyes on the Long Traverse; trappers whose sleeping places the grey wolf knows; freighters, Indians, Hudson Bay runners, men of the Mounted Police— Canada's lovers all, sowing their bones down the trails they blazed that other men might follow after.

All the world was full of summer, from the duck nesting in unknown pools to the reeling rim of the Arctic day, where the reindeer moss pushes green through the snow, and the bergs break out, and the whalers wake and the great seals put to sea. One early dawn, when the portages of Grand Rapid Island were passed, a sleepy breed in his tepee was waked to hear a burnt-skinned, sunk-eyed man in uniform which explained more than his words ask how long it was since the scows had passed the Rapids. His answers seemed jerked from him; and then the man sprang into a canoe, and struck out where the Athabaska ran red under the dawning. The breed grunted rubbing his eyes.

"By gar," he said. "Go roun' wit chip on hees shoulder, dat chap. Carcajou, heem."

Carcajou, the wolverine, was first made of all created things, and he alone has changed neither habit nor form since Kitche Manitou put him into the woods. Therefore Carcajou has knowledge of all his things behind those watchful eyes of his, and the breed on the bank was not the first man who had called Dick Carcajou in uneasy resentment.

Down this wide northern road uncounted men of many lands have gone to the Yukon gold; to the untapped mineral wealth of the hills; to the lip of the Arctic where the kit-fox breeds. Scores had never come back. But their ghostly march did not trouble Dick. Between the great wash of water and the hard naked sky all the past was shrivelled up. He had come with chafed limbs and stiff shoulders to get his man; and that instinct would not die, though the sunset flung mocking colour on drawn, set faces, and the moon saw two figures that crouched lower with humped shoulders as the weary paddles flashed in and flashed out.

Citrons and tender blues swamped the flats of Fort McMurray under daybreak when a man in earth-stained kharki walked drunkenly up the gangway of a little steamer where the bare-foot crew laboured among the hay-bales, boxes and myraid things that collect naturally when a river-steamer comes to anchor. Two hours later the captain, coming aboard, trod on that man where he stretched unlawfully into the passage-way. But he showed no surprise when Dick sat up and asked for a passage so far as she chose to go. Bessait listened in silence. Small curiosities do not fit with a thousand-mile landscape, and the talk of the great rivers make the human voice sound thin. Then he made reply in one grave nod and went on deck.

Dick proceeded with his toilet in a lazy content. Haste was over for the time, and at leisure he made his investigations.

The crew were as mixed a draft as Bessait usually carried. French breeds with the strength of ten; a remittance man gone sufficiently insane to cook junk and dried moose and tinned meats and fresh fish month in and month out for a clamorous multitude; a stoker with an unnecessary certificate, who was engineer and greaser and everything else; an Englishman with suggestive holes cut in his clothes corners as though some name had been blotted out; a few quiet, firm-lipped Canadians, Fraser's young son, and a delicate-limbed, fine-faced boy-student from McGill University, who did what he was told for the sake of learning life in his holidays.

Dick yawned and went aft among the carefully-stacked barrels, boxes, cases, bacon in sacks, harness, bales of clothes, seasoned timber, bags of sealed mail, and many things more which Bessait was taking north addressed to men whom the world "outside" had forgotten long since. On a bale sat a French priest with biretta and breviary. The stamp of an old-world monastery was raw on him, and Dick wondered idly what kind of work this man would make of life among the realities. Then he pushed open the door of the half-moon glass-sided saloon where a handful of men were playing poker at this nine of a summer and looked in.

Brodribb, the Hudson Bay factor from Fort Smith, saw him first, and gave welcome. Ducane twisted in his chair; went white, and gripped the table-edge. Robison made the cards in great hairy hands that did not shake, and Dick's heart approved him. For Robison would never lick the hand that lassooed him. He was too surely a son of the strong North for that.

Dick got his pipe out, and cast himself into the smoke-reek and talk. And the doings of these men of the naked lives unrolled in their idle speech. There was Caird of the Government Survey, grey-haired and keen-eyed and calm, going down for his twentieth year's measuring-off of the solitudes with gay young de Musset from Ottawa and the silent Lyons with the tragedy in his still face. There was a broad-barrelled German, prospecting for gold with an absolutely admirable outfit and an easy knowledge that he might forget the ways of white nations before he mixed with them again. There was a Revillons' "fur-pup" going North to a dim, slim branch of that great Company which has dared raise its head against the Hudson Bay, and a big, buoyant lad of the North-West Police called to the long lonely beats of Fort Macpherson. He would be a man when he came back, that fresh-faced boy, and the little "fur-pup" would have ceased to yelp when the cards of Life went against him.

Through the open door Dick heard Bessait shout down the tube to the other controller of the steamer's destinies.

"Kick her into it," he said. And then the shudder of life ran through the dead timber; the screw backed and squattered; swung out to the broad full stream, and the "Northern Light" laid her nose to the Pole and went to look for it. Among the cotton-woods a red handkerchief leapt up like a heart-flame, and Dick slid out of the door to make answer with his own. The red flag flew till the banks veered in, and Dick laughed, wondering if the girl in the cotton-woods knew. Then he ran up the steep ladder to the naked upper deck where the funnel roared and all the canvas surface lay at gaze to the open sky. And as his head lifted above the level his eyes met Jennifer's.

He stared, almost unbelieving. Then he reddened with anger. Was Ducane dragging his wife into these shady games which he was playing? What had he brought her up here for except as a blind? And if so what was he going to do—with her and with himself? The thoughts fled through his mind like lightning on a cloud. But they left their mark. Even with those brave, frightened eyes on his face; even with the realization that it was Jennifer, the woman he loved, the eager hunting instinct leapt up in him as he came forward.

Jennifer had dropped her work with an exclamation of fear. And that nailed his suspicions home to the wall of fact. Ducane was on special business—dangerous business; and she knew it.

"Oh—what have you come for?" she said.

"I would like to say that it was to see you. But I'm afraid I gave myself away just now." He sat down on the bench beside her. "You don't know how curious it seems to me—to see you here—with your work. Like the real essence of home-life among all us men."

Jennifer flushed, with her fear fading out under his look and his words. He was so familiar, so reliable, such a piece of home at this edge of all things new. It was impossible that he should give reason for fear. She smiled at him.

"I can generally adapt myself to my surroundings somehow," she said.

"You do very much more than that. You can adapt your surroundings to yourself."

"Indeed I can't. You, for instance. I wouldn't let you wear that leather loop round your head at the back. It roughs your hair up."

He took off his Stetson and contemplated the narrow strap.

"I can't wear hat-pins," he complained. "Besides, it's part of the equipment. Do you really think I'm a surrounding that couldn't be adapted?"

She glanced up, half-startled, half-puzzled at his earnest tone.

"Give me my work-bag, please," she said, evading the issue, and she took the little silken thing from his hands and sought for her scissors. "Where do you people of the outside edges get your chivalry from? I have never been so waited on in all my life. Antoine carried my grip into every cabin there is, and Louis Peaceful followed with the captain's sweet-grass mattress. Mrs. Carter and I could have had every blanket in the scows if we'd wanted them, and some one has been drawing us pails of water to wash with ever since we came aboard."

"Who is Mrs. Carter?" asked Dick idly. But he was watching her face.

"Wife of the missionary at Fort Resolution," Jennifer turned on him. "She sent her daughter out to school ten years ago, and now she has been to Moosejaw to see her married. It was the first time she had been out in eighteen years, and she is going back to perhaps eighteen more. It is not only you men who serve this great North-West of ours."

"And it is not only you women who know it."

"I know that it is better to work without being satisfied than to be satisfied without having worked. But—oh dear!—she is so good that she makes me feel horribly bad."

"Take me as a palliative, then. On that basis I ought to make you feel horribly good. And—do you think that I will possibly be able to exist in proximity with Mrs. Carter?"

Jennifer laughed. But she shivered. A sudden wind from the wing of the future had touched her, and the woman in her feared the unknown even as the girl in her reached out for it.

They talked in the new knowledge that had come to Jennifer through these days when she had watched the red sun sink and the long dusks darken the river, and had learnt the slang and the run of the river-work and dipped deep in the lives of the many men and the one woman about her. And then that flat-chested, grey-haired woman with the brave bright eyes interrupted them, and Dick went away to smoke and to think.

He had no intention to arrest Robison so long as more might be learned by leaving him free. What was to be learned he did not know yet. But he meant to watch; and Ducane knew it, and said so to Jennifer that night, taking her up to the very nose of the steamer, among the windlasses and the warping ropes with the silky water parting a few feet below and day yet hanging in the sunset colours. He hid his face against Jennifer's sleeve as he lay on the poop, turning to her as to an infinite well from which he could draw his courage.

"He's after us," he said. "I know he is. What else should he come for?"

"He says there is that defalcating Italian——"

"He says! Jenny, I'd back out of this if Robison would let me. I can't stand it. I can't stand it. But Robison won't lose money, and I'll lose my own if I can't put this through. But I'm afraid——"

Jennifer bit her lips.

"Then lose your own," she said. "Let us go out poor so long as we go honest. We can begin again."

"Don't be a little fool." Ducane sat up, pushing the damp hair back from his florid, handsome face. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips unsteady. "What the devil do you know about poverty and disgrace?" he said.

"You know that I don't let you swear to me, Harry."

Ducane moved impatiently.

"Unless Heriot can be squared there won't be much more from us in a little," he said. "Heriot has a long head and a short suit, and he knows how to play his game. I never knew a M. P. who could be squared yet; but you're pretty thick with him. If you could keep him dangling around you this trip, Jenny——"

Jennifer looked down that great pale gleam of water that led, link by link, to the Arctic Seas. Ducane was killing her innocent friendship by his coarse thoughts as he had killed so much else.

"And who is to guard Robison? He hasn't a wife," she said.

"Curse Robison." Ducane brought his head close. "I'll get ten years—and likely more—if Heriot catches me," he said.

"And so sure as there is a God you deserve it," said Jennifer.

Ducane sat up as though a cracker had exploded beneath him.

"You—you——" he sputtered. "Do you know that you are my wife?"

Jennifer turned her wide, dark eyes on him. The light was faint and warm in her hazy hair.

"Oh, Harry, will you never be a man?" she said sadly.

Ducane was silent. From the upper deck rolled the sound of singing, where the McGill student and Dick led the interminable chorus to each verse of each song that was sung.

 

"Come up; come up, come all the way up, come all the way up the river.
Come up; come up, come all the way up . . . come all the way up the river."

 

To Jennifer there was menace in that strong body of virile sound sweeping out to the lonely water and the still forests and naked cliffs. Was she, too, called to go all the way up the grey river of dread that broke at last to the Arctic Seas?

Ducane spoke sulkily:

"I guess it's all right for you," he said. "You don't go to prison."

Jennifer's spirit was there already.

"Oh," she said. "I can so well understand a man doing wrong. But to do wrong and be afraid all the time—where's the pleasure in that?"

Ducane did not chuckle as Dick would have done. His forehead was wet.

"Pleasure," he said. "Pleasure, good Lord!" He caught her hands. "You must save me, Jenny," he said. "I can't stand it, I can't. Remember I've always loved you, little girl——"

Jennifer jerked her hands free and stood up. She could not listen to the desecration of that word which had once meant so much to her. It seemed so long since she first knew that she never had loved Ducane. Those great things which she had thought to honour in him were never there. She was the supporter, not the supported; the mother and nurse, not the wife. She had lost, lost right through in this game of love which she had been playing, and the naked path of duty was hard for a young heart to follow.

Dick looked down and saw her, a slim, tense figure in the warm, dull light that wrapped her, and for a background the great naked steel breast of the river and the far faint sky. She looked so little and lonely; and the man at her feet was out of the picture, even as the man on the upper deck.

"I—will do what I can," said Jennifer. "It may not be much."

Then she turned from him and climbed the ladder to the upper deck, for she dared not be alone with herself just then.

The air on the upper deck was charged with life and laughter and talk, and a swift impulse of childish longing made Jennifer slide down with her head against Mrs. Carter's knee. Her own mother was very far off in Ontario, with half a continent of earth and more than a continent of knowledge between them; but the hard, rough hand that touched her forehead now and again was a mother's hand also, tender with love for an absent daughter.

The women did not speak. They sat on the surge of the man-talk that swept them this way and that through air that was strong with tobacco-smoke and that curious pride which falls on the Northmen when they speak of their own domain. For the North and the things of the North are the only world to the men bred in it. Brodribb himself had never seen the sea, and he did not want to. He had a thousand miles and a thousand added of good earth to his either hand, and the lakes he knew grew shells and seaweed and beat their wrinkled cliffs with combers from beyond horizon. And if the waters were fresh there were salt-beds and salt-springs for moose and bear and buffalo to find their comfort in.

Disconnectedly the talk ran round. Talk of the added bounty on timber wolves, bringing it to twenty dollars; of the wood-buffalo yet killed by them yearly, and Caird's belief that no bounty would induce the superstitious Indian to court ill-luck by slaying a timber-wolf before he went to the hunting. Talk of the "strong man" of the North who had just won home beyond all records by dragging a freighted scow unaided up the Pelican Rapids; of "Soft-wind-of-the-morning," the Indian girl at Great Slave Lake, who had so queered the finest trapper in her tribe that he sat without her father's lodge day and night, starving until his bones stood out for love of her; and of the increased tracking-wage and the price of silver and cross-fox skins.

Caird told of the prospectors in the tar-soaked sand along the Athabaska, who struck rock-salt in punching an oil-shaft, and later blew their whole plant to high heaven by building a mosquito-smudge over-near. Brodribb spoke of a bear-hunt when he went to break in three young dogs and lost two. But he came home with the pelt and a ripped-up arm where the white steel-hard claw had touched.

"I guess it wasn't exactly bear-baiting," he said. " The bear had a sporting chance. But my old rifle has never played dog on me yet."

Here the men fell on technicalities concerning the one weapon which means life on the trails; and Jennifer leaned her head back and looked in Mrs. Carter's eyes.

"You have had things happen to you, too?" she whispered, and the grey-haired woman smiled.

"Why," she said, "perhaps. Things like cooking supper for thirty children when it is pitch dark at quarter to four and you can't see the crowds of Indian women squatted about you cleaning the day's fish-catch, or the children who steal in to get warm by the stove, or the men who smoke and loaf and will leave the door open. And when you go to the cupboard you get your hand in a mouth or eyes, or you step on something, and don't know if it is a fish or a human or—or what. And the smell is indescribable, and you can feel the dirt; and the cold and the dark are real things that press on you and make you slow and cross and stupid. But it is worth while, you know. They love us."

"And love is a very, very great thing," said Ducane's young wife gravely.

A few mallard splashed in the reeds alongside; rose black against the primrose sky and flew north with harsh clamour. Dick leaned out and gave their call back, clear and true and far on the warm air. The flight wavered, wheeled, and came circling. Dick called again, and they dropped with sounding beat of wings; realized man, and fled in a terror that gave them no quarter. Brodribb looked at the man by the rail.

"I reckon you never starved wherever you were located," he said, and Dick looked on the twilight with eyes that dreamed still of the long northern sedges.

"But I always preferred life's luxuries," he said. "Those of which moose-nose and bear-tail are the equivalents."

"Give me caribou-tongue for luxury," said Caird, and his fine lined face was eager. "The tongue of a young caribou just before they separate in the ice-moon. There's no better feeding on earth."

"I ran across the female camp on the shores of some lake last winter," said Brodribb. "Thousands of 'em, pushing north to the sea, and their coats just prime. When is the Government sending a survey into that country, Caird? What say? Why, it was in west of Smith. A fine lake, and I named it Caribou, but I guess I won't find it any more unless I get hold of the Indians. It was on one of their stamping-grounds, all right. Tepee-poles everywhere in the snow."

Grahame, the big Mounted Police boy, sat forward with hands gripped between his knees. His eyes were alight for the cold white nights and the tepee-ribs by the frozen lake where the caribou roamed were to him the land where he would be.

"And a fellow could shoot them—and shoot bear!" he said.

Dick looked at him keenly. To the far-scattered posts whose positions are shown on the Police maps by little red flags come many grades of men for Canada's serving. Sons of earls, some; medical students, and clowns and lumber-jacks; men from all the regular armies of the earth; home-produced farmers, American broncho-busters, and everything in between. Hours ago Dick had placed Grahame as the younger son of some Scotch laird or baronet, and he guessed at the steady Scotch courage which the long winter patrols would not daunt.

"I've been held up half-a-day by caribou swimming Artillery Lake," said Caird. "It was a sheer black line of horns ruled across it, and they poured down over the crest of the hill like molasses out of a jug. We didn't dare bring our canoes near for fear of getting mixed up. So we paddled around and timed them. That bunch took exactly six hours and eighteen minutes to pass a given point. They weren't sloushing it any, either."

"Goo-od Lord," said young Grahame, and drew his breath in. "What a country! What a place to live in! Do you do everything on as big a scale as that?"

"I suppose that some of our men are the smallest things we have," said Dick dryly, and turned down the deck as Ducane came up the ladder. But young Grahame followed him.

"Excuse me," he said with the stately courtesy which made Dick put his choice in the baronet-father. "I hear that you know Fort Macpherson. Can you tell me anything about it, for I'm going there?"

Dick leaned on the rail. It had been nothing dishonourable which had brought this lad over-seas.

"You have come after adventure, I imagine," he said. "Well, you'll get it—if your idea of it happens to be the same as that of the Force. You will have to cut wood and haul it four or five miles—probably more. And the green fish for dog-feed usually has to come from Arctic Red River—about thirty-five miles. You'll go after that in the winter, through anything down to sixty or seventy below zero, instead of attending balls and Caledonian meetings. Some day you may shoot your bear or your moose to save your life—and may not save it then. There is the routine work, of course. And the patrols to Herschel Island—two-fifty miles each way. The Dawson patrols—considerably longer and harder; and perhaps another to Kittigazuit You'll have to chase the mountain Indians for deer-meat for yourselves, and the river ones for fish for dog-feed. The Peel hardly gives enough to last the summer." He smiled a little. "Have I frightened you?" he asked.

"Heavens!" said young Grahame. "It's like Fenimore Cooper and all the rest of 'em rolled into one. You've been through all that!"

"I have lived through it." Then Dick's face changed. "I wish you luck," he said. "I believe you are probably going to be a credit to us."

Grahame looked north to the faint stars that dipped to the waste of waters. Beyond them he was to find stars yet unseen, and his heart swelled high and hot in him. Scotland's sons have broken the trails of Canada through all the dim rusty centuries even as he himself would do. That kind of thing does not go into words, but there was something else which did.

"And I'll be able to shoot bear!" he said reverently.

For some days Dick kept eyes and ears ready for the clue which he sought. Then he discovered it—through Jennifer. He came along the upper deck to find her talking with Mrs. Carter, and there were some photographs spread on her knee. She looked up at Dick's step.

"I'm taking these up to show Mrs. Lowndes of the Hudson Bay," she said. "For I think they are some of the best Harry has. I hope he'll get as good this time. He has his big camera with him."

Dick put his pipe away and inspected the photographs. Among them were two of rolling prairie-land which were familiar. He had seen them in a pamphlet brought up by the German to whom Robison had sold his land. Shuffling a handful he managed to abstract one. And he did not feel ashamed of himself for doing so. Anyone who could dare fate as Ducane appeared to do deserved to have his challenge accepted. Presently Ducane and Robison came by. Ducane was more cheerful than usual, and he stopped graciously to be complimented on his work.

"Why, where did you get them, Jenny?" he said. "I never gave you all those."

"I found some plates in one of your drawers and printed these myself. And they are nearly as good as yours." She looked up at him saucily. "Wouldn't you think that was yours? And that? And that?"

Dick caught his breath as she held up the last. Had Ducane sufficient control? He had not. Blood suffused his eyes and skin instantly. He snatched it from her.

"What do you mean by meddling with my drawers?" he said fiercely. "By ——, if I find you touching my things again—here; give me those."

He swept the armful out of her lap and flung them overboard, and then Robison caught him by the arm and walked him off. And the suppressed fury on Robison's face was not a pleasant thing to see. Jennifer had courage. She looked at Mrs. Carter, and then she looked at Dick.

"I get just as cross when anyone pokes into my drawers," she said. "Harry hunted through them once for a necktie of his that I'd been wearing, and it took me a week to put them straight. I expect he's afraid of what he'll find when he gets back."

She laughed a little. But presently she got up and went away. Mrs. Carter turned to Dick.

"Does this kind of thing occur often?" she asked.

"Well—it varies according to circumstances," said Dick.

"Poor child," said the elder woman softly. "Poor, brave child."

Then she too got up and went away, leaving Dick alone on the upper deck, except for Bessait in the wheel-house. But Bessait lived in his own world up and down these hushed ways of men where no footprints are left on the trail, and his far-seeing gaze seldom homed to those about him. Dick shut the photograph into his pocket-book, lit his pipe again, and settled back to think in the manner Tempest knew so well; foot held over his knee by his hand; shoulders slightly stooped, and eyes dark and brooding.

He had enough now to warrant a search into Ducane's effects when he went back. His business at present was to see where those two went in Chipewyan; to whom they spoke, and what photographs they took. That he must do unseen. And then, when people began to rush Lake Athabaska land, it would go hard with him if he did not sheet the reason for it home to Ducane. Except that one photograph and Ducane's rages, which were not producible proof, he had nothing yet against Ducane which would stand in a law-court. Concerning Robison he knew much more. Link by link he went over in his mind the points which he did know.

Ducane had been supplying Robison with money lately; Dick had seen the cheques. Through Robison's assistance several breeds and one or two who had been supposed to be Indians had managed to prove themselves of sufficiently white extraction to receive scrip-land from Government. More than two of those grants had passed into Robison's hands publicly and been sold by him. The others probably belonged to him privately—or to Ducane. There was more drinking than formerly among the breeds—Dick believed he could account for that when he was ready. Trappers were getting in debt to the Hudsan Bay Company and leaving it to trade with Robison. Dick had discovered one occasion on which it was proved that Robison had paid twenty per cent. less than the Company gave. But the trapper was drunkenly happy about the matter, and a little later he gave up trapping and took scrip land. That had not yet passed to Robison—publicly.

Dick had had more than one conversation with the German who had settled on Robison's river-frontage, and he had found those conversations valuable.

"I enchoy you," said the fat German. "You have imatchination. When I egsblain to people that there is not the Canada Home-lot Egstention Company anywhere at all, they say 'Ridiggleous. We haf the papers, see.' I say that I did go to their address and what do I findt? A blace on the groundt floor and a blace on the top where is a dirdy man who baints eggs-chru-chia-ting bigdures. And in bedween was a nod so young a lady selling babies' foodt. No Canada Home-lot Egstention Gombany there. Would I nod haf id seen?"

Dick felt more than a legitimate interest in the dirty man. But he did not say so.

"Of course," he said. "Your only chance lies in finding out from this end. You say nothing, and I say nothing. But we observe. And presently we know."

"Egsactly," said the German with a long breath. "Ah, you the imachination haf, my friendt."

The German passed in review through Dick's mind. Then he summed up. To remove Robison that he might answer in some still cell for the passing of Ogilvie would cripple his own future operations very much. To arrest him on a charge of swindling the breeds out of their scrip-land might open up the whole affair. But Robison could hardly be tried for roguery after he had been condemned and hung for murder, and Dick dared not waive the knowledge which he had bullied out of Andree. He regretted that knowledge now. He wanted to make his big coup, and he did not yet see the way to do it. And then he heard Jennifer laugh in the saloon below, and it started him up on his feet to walk the deck with his face set and his eyes cruelly determined.

He could not leave this trail where the scent was so illusive and where his mind ran so sure and rapidly. He could not leave it, even for her. She would suffer for it presently, and so would he; and he would watch the struggles of both with a vivisecting eye because this great curious problem of life, swayed by emotion, and trapped by circumstance, and controlled by some undiscernible power had its grip on him and it would not let go. It possessed him, side by side, with his love, and it made his face grow cruel as he walked.

"She is better without him," he said. "And she'll love me in spite of this. By ——, she shall." Then his eyes narrowed, and he smiled slowly. "But it is more than possible that I'll pay heavily all the same," he added.

In the following days he told stories and sang songs and sketched sketches of the whole ship's company, until men talked apart of the suggestion of fear which he had flung into the bluff mask of Ducane's face, and the hint of tragedy in the soft features of the little "fur-pup." Jennifer spoke of this to Dick one evening when chance had left them alone on the upper deck with a breed at the wheel to hold the "Northern Light" on her clear course of scarlet where the dying sun lay bleeding.

"He wants it to send to his mother, poor little boy," she said. "Don't let him have it. You had no right to put that look in his face."

"I'm sorry. But I saw it. People say that I see too much, you know."

He smiled down at her with that hint of mockery which she saw seldom, and her lips quivered.

"If you have that power you will be held very responsible, some day," she said.

"I shall be very willing to meet my creditors. They have added much to the interest of life for me, and I hope they won't find me ungrateful. What do you think of the French Brother? The man who never speaks—even to you?"

"How can I think anything? At table he pokes me and points to what he wants, and he won't look at me. Oh——" She took the sketch Dick put into her hands. "How like him. But—I hadn't thought—yes; there is that look of repression and of exaltation about him somewhere. As if he had overcome greatly. But I never thought you would have seen that."

Dick took the sketch, pushing it back into his pocket.

"Why not?" he asked very quietly.

Jennifer looked away to the reedy banks where the wild ducks splashed. A faint grey knot of shacks and' tepees stood against a wedge of dark pine-forest on the shore, and across the pure shining mauve of the river a canoe shot out, breaking level silver lines that ridged each wave from bank to bank. The "Hya—he-e-e-e" cry of the paddler came sharply, and Dick stooped.

"Why not?" he said, and Jennifer looked up, half-laughing.

"Why—I have thought you were too materialistic," she said.

Dick glanced at her. Then he set his lips together; drew a piece of millboard from a skin-case in his breast- pocket and put it into her hands. He watched her while she looked at it. In all warm, delicate tints it stood out; a carefully, tenderly, finished portrait of herself, as unlike the bold, crude sketches which he made of men as Jennifer herself was unlike them. The wistful lips were there and the brave half-dread in the eyes. Jennifer dropped it and hid her face. She felt as though this man had looked on her naked soul.

"Oh-h," she said.

The breeze swept the funnel-flag of bright wood-sparks across them. Dick brushed a gleam from Jennifer's shouler, feeling her wince.

"No one else has seen it," he said.

"But—you have," said Jennifer, and her words were stifled.

"I could not help that, Jennifer," he said.

The name drew her eyes up to his. And she knew what they said and what hers answered as a man knows numbly the sentence of death when it is read out to him: knows it as a thing outside his control or comprehension; as a thing which is. She sprang up wildly, pushing her hands out.

"No!" she said with dry throat. "No! No!"

She ran past him and down the ladder, and Dick walked the little dusky deck for very long; quiet-footed, and forgetting his pipe, while the bells clanged off the hours and shunted them over, with all their prayers and passions, into eternity.

Once he stood still and laughed; half-angry, half-relieved. "It had to come, soon or late," he said. "But if I hadn't been a fool it would have been late. It was going to be bad enough to take the man before. It will be the very devil now."

He walked on slowly.

"But I've got to take him," he said. "I've cashed in every other mortal thing at the bank of my desires, but I'm damned if I'll let my brain go too. Ducane has got to justify me. And then I've got to justify myself—with Jennifer."

Down in the little bare cabin which she shared with Mrs. Carter, Jennifer lay headlong on the sweet-grass mattress, gripping the pillow close over her eyes. She was terrified to the quick by the fierce life of the knowledge which had broken on her, and with stiff lips and dizzy brain she tried to pray herself back into the old ignorance. But always the merciless What Is scattered her will and denied her help.

"God!" she cried. "Oh, God! Oh, God!"

And then she shivered, pressing the pillow with shaking hands against her eyes.

Once, long, long ago, in those days when Ducane meant Heaven to her, Tempest had called her a civilizing influence. She felt a smile twitch her lips mirthfully. A civilizing influence! She! She who knew the uncivilized elements of primal nature which are beyond all traditions, all help, all law. She who loved where she would have given her right arm not to have loved, and could not love where all her prayers and duty lay. She who had touched suddenly to the heart of those huge forces which sway the immortal soul, and who had to face them, giddy and alone, with all outward interpretation driven back from eyes and tongue. For a brief while Jennifer was a raw soul struggling with eternal problems back of the crusted beams of time and the torn tie-ribs of old earth. Mrs. Carter came in softly; asked for and accepted the woman's eternal excuse of a headache; undressed and climbed into the upper bunk. Jennifer lay still with her eyes on the dark now, and the steamer moved on with the strange hush of midnight around it.

The engine heart-beat stopped suddenly with a shudder like the coming of death. Men called; moccasined feet pattered the decks and the gang-plank ran out with complaining squeals. Jennifer slid off the bunk and looked from the unglassed eight-inch window. The boat lay along a tall, dark bank where the pines were jewelled on their tops by the stars. A flare glowed redly over the gang-plank and over a string of silent, stooping figures which trod up it slow and burdened and ran back swift and lightly. To Jennifer came the fancy that each man brought his burden of sins across the bridge of repentance and turned earthward to his work again, glad and forgiven.

She had seen river-steamers wooding-up many times before this. But the dark pines and the white face of the stacked timber; the red, uncertain flare and the silent bowed procession moving in moccasined stealthiness took the blank reality from it. And then she saw Dick, treading the plank with sure light feet; bare-armed where he gripped the rough wood; bare-throated where the black head rose beside it. He passed, with a flickering dark shadow behind him, and Jennifer crept back to the bunk because she dared not watch for that figure again.

But long after the flare died out; long after the steamer sheered into the stream, and the talk and tread of men in the alley-way ceased, and the smell of tobacco grew fainter, Jennifer stole back to the window, and saw the stars wheel their courses under the eye of the moon. There was no sleep for her where all the world was dreaming.

For a man may sweat his present devils out by savage work. But a woman must pray them out—or let them stay.