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The Maid of the Whispering Hills

by Vingie E. Roe · English · Gutenberg #5253 · 411,865 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Maid of the Whispering Hills

Author: Vingie E. Roe


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5253]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5253

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAID OF THE WHISPERING HILLS ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer








THE MAID OF THE WHISPERING HILLS


By Vingie E. Roe


Published January, 1912

     To
     My Mother
     Who Has Been My Constant Help

     My Father
     Who Was Proud Of Me

     And
     My Little Brother,
     These Two Long Asleep On The Hill At Carney--

     This Book Is Lovingly Inscribed
     V. E. R.


Contents

   I          The Venturers
   II         The Spring
   III        New Homes
   IV         The Stranger From Civilisation
   V          Nor'westers
   VI         Spring Trade
   VII        Forest News
   VIII       First Dawn
   IX         Gold Fire
   X          The Saskatoon
   XI         Leaven At Work
   XII        The Nakonkirhirinons
   XIII       “A Skin For A Skin”
    XIV        Fellow Captives
   XV         Long Trail
   XVI        Travel
   XVII       The Compelling Power
   XVIII      “I Am A Stone To Your Foot, Ma'amselle”
    XIX        The Hudson's Bay Brigade
   XX         The Wolf And The Caribou
   XXI        Tightened Screws
   XXII       “Choose, White Woman!”
    XXIII      The Painted Post
   XXIV       The Stone To The Foot Of Love
   XXV        Answered Prayers
   XXVI       Sanctuary
   XXVII      Return
   XXVIII     The Old Dream Once More
   XXIX       Bitter Aloes
   XXX        The Land Of The Whispering Hills




CHAPTER I THE VENTURERS

“Mercy!” shrieked little Francette, her red-rose face aghast, “he will
begin before I can bring the help!”

Like a flash of flame the maid in her crimson skirt shot up the main way
of Fort de Seviere to where the factory lay asleep in the warm spring
sun.

On its log step, pipe in mouth, young Anders McElroy leaned against the
jamb and looked smilingly out upon his settlement. Peace lay softly upon
it, from the waters of the small stream to the east where nine canoes
lay bottom up upon the pebbly shore, to the great dark wall of the
forest shouldering near on three sides. To him ran little Francette,
light on her moccasined feet as the wind in the tender pine-tops,
her eloquent small hands outstretched and clutching at his sleeve
audaciously.

None other in all the post would have dared as much, for this smiling
young man with the blue eyes was the Law at Fort de Seviere, factor of
the Company and governor of the handful of humanity lost in the vast
region of the Assiniboine. But to Francette he was Power and Help, and
she thought of naught else, as it is not likely she would have done even
at another time.

“Oh, M'sieu!” she cried, gasping from her run, “come at once beyond the
great gate! Bois DesCaut,--Oh, brute of the world!--whips that great
grey husky leader of his team, because it did but snap at his heel
beneath an idle prod! Hasten, M'sieu! He drags it, glaring, along the
shore to where lie those clubs brought for the kettles!”

In the dark eyes upraised to him there swam a mist of tears and the
heart of the little maid tore at her breast in anguish.

The smile slipped swiftly from the factor's face, leaving it grave.

“Where, little one?” he asked.

“Beyond the palisade. But hurry, M'sieu,--for the love of God!”

At the great gate in the eastern wall he paused and looked either way.
To the southward all was peaceful. An aged Indian of the Assiniboines
squatted at the water's edge mending the broken bottom of a skin canoe,
and two voyageurs, gay in the matter of sash and crimson cap, lay lazily
beneath a drowsing tree.

To the northward there flashed into McElroy's vision one of those
pictures a man sees but few times and never forgets, a picture startling
in its clear-cut strength.

Against the mellow background of the weather-beaten stockade that
surrounded the post there stood two figures, a man and a woman, and
between the two there crouched with snarling lips and flaming eyes a
huge grey dog.

Tall he was, that man, tall and broad of shoulder, but the head of the
woman, shining like blue-black satin in the morning sun, was level with
his brows.

She leaned a trifle forward and her eyes held fast to his
passion-flooded face. It was evident that she had but just reached the
spot from the fact that the club, arrested in its upward swing, still
was poised in the air.

They faced each other and the factor stopped in his tracks.

“Quick, M'sieu!” begged Francette at his side, but he put out a
commanding hand and ceased to breathe.

“Hold!” said the tall young woman at last, and her voice cut cold and
clear in the sun-filled morning. “No more! You have whipped the dog
enough.”

The red face of the trapper flamed into purple and his lips opened for
an oath. Quick as the heat lightning that flutters on the waters of
Winipigoos in the hot summers the cruel club came down. McElroy heard
its dull impact, and the husky crumpled like a broken reed.

With stern face the factor started forward, while the little maid
covered her pretty eyes and whimpered.

But quicker than his stride retribution leaped to meet DesCaut.

He saw the woman's arm shoot out and her strong hand, smooth and tawny
as finest tanned buckskin, double itself hard and leap in where the jaw
turns downward into the curve of the throat.

The stroke of a man it was, clean and sharp and well delivered, and
DesCaut, catching his heel on a buried stone's sharp jut, went backward
with his head in the young grass of the sloping shore.

For a moment she stood as it had left her, leaning forward, and there
was a shine of satisfaction in her eyes.

Then as the man essayed to rise there was a mighty laughter from the two
youths on the river bank and the spell was broken.

McElroy went forward.

“DesCaut,” he said sharply, and his words cut like the lash of the long
dog-whips, “you deserves death but you have been beaten by a woman. Go,
and boast of your strength. It is sufficient.”

DesCaut stood a moment swaying drunkenly with the force of passion
within him, his lips snarling back from his teeth and his eyes measuring
the factor unsteadily then he snatched off the little cap he wore and
hurled it at him.

Turning on his heel he swung down toward the gate and the two voyageurs
now standing and still laughing merrily.

One look at his bloodshot eyes sobered their mirth, and Pierre Garcon
reached involuntarily for the knife in his sash.

But Bois DesCaut, savage to silence, swung past them into the fort.

McElroy watched him until he disappeared, fearing he knew not what.

Then he faced the little scene again.

Down on her knees little Francette had lifted the heavy head with its
dull eyes and pitiful hanging tongue, lifted it to her breast, weeping
and smoothing the short ears deaf to her soft words, and sat rocking to
and fro in an ecstasy of grief. Beyond SHE stood, that tall woman, stood
silent and frowning, looking down upon the two, and the factor saw with
a strange thrill that the hand, yet doubled, was flecked with blood.

“Ma'amselle,” he said, “is of the new people who arrived last night from
Portage la Prairie?”

Then they were lifted for the first time to his face, those dark eyes
smouldering like banked fires, and he saw their marvellous beauty.

“Of a surety,” she said slowly, and there was a subtle tone in her
deep-throated voice that made the blood stir vaguely within the factor's
veins, “does M'sieu have so many strangers passing through his gates
that he is at loss to place each one?”

And with that word she turned deliberately away, walked down toward the
gate, and entered the stockade.

McElroy watched her go, until the last glint of her sober dress, plain
and clinging easily to the magnificent shoulders that swung slightly
with her free walk, had passed from view. And not alone he, for the two
voyageurs alike gazed after her, this new-comer from the farther ways of
civilisation who dared the brute DesCaut and struck like a man.

Then the factor bent above the little Francette.

“Sh!” he said gently, “little one, let go. The dog is dead, poor beast.
Come away.”

But the maid would not give up the battered body, and with the audacity
of her beauty and life-long spoiling, besought the young factor for
help.

“There is yet life, M'sieu. See! The breath lifts in his sides. Is there
naught to be done when one sleeps, so? He is so strong at the sledges
and he did not whimper,--no, not once,--when DesCaut was beating him to
death. Is there nothing, M'sieu?”

Very pretty she was in her pleading, the little Francette, with her
misty eyes and the frank tears on her cheeks; and McElroy went to the
river and filled his cap with water. This he poured into the open
jaws and sopped over the blood-clotted head, wetting the limp feet and
watching for the life she so bravely proclaimed.

And presently it was there, twitching a battered muscle; lifting the
side with its broken ribs, fluttering the lids over the fierce eyes; for
this was Loup, the fiercest husky this side of the Athabasca.

With pity McElroy gathered up the great dog, staggering under the load,
for it was that of a big-framed man, and entered the post, the little
maid at has side. Near the gate a running crowd met them, for the tale
had spread apace and wondering eyes looked on.

Down to the southern wall where lived the family of Francette they went,
and the factor laid Loup in the shade of the cabin.

“If he lives, little one, he shall be yours,” said he, “for he is worth
a tender hand. We'll try its power.”

And as he turned away he caught a glimpse of the tall stranger looking
at them from a distance.

Small it was and crowded, this little trading post of the great Hudson's
Bay Company in that year of 1796, and a goodly stream of beaver found
its way through it to the mighty outside world.

Squatted alone on the shores of the Assiniboine, shouldering back the
wilderness with the spirit of the conqueror, it faced the rising sun
with its square stockade, strong and well built, log by log, its great,
brass-studded gate in the eastern centre, its four bastions rising at
its corners.

Here was a little world of itself, a small community of voyageurs,
trappers, coureurs du bois, and all those that cast their lot in the
wild places.

Adventurers from the Old World often passed through it on their way
to the farther west, lured by the tales of dreamers who spoke of the
Northwest Passage and the world that opened beyond the setting
sun; renegades of the lakes and forest came for and found its ready
hospitality, and into it came at all seasons those Indians whose skill
and cunning accounted for so much of that great fur trade which made for
wealth in the distant cities beyond the eastern sea.

Too small for a council, it gave allegiance wholly to its factor,
young Anders McElroy, at whose right hand for sage advice and honest
friendship stood that most admirable of men, Edmonton Ridgar, chief
trader and anything else from accountant to armourer. Beneath them and
in good command were some thirty able men whose families lived in the
neat log cabins within the stockade.

With its back to the western wall there stood in the centre the factory
itself, a good log building of somewhat spacious size; its big room,
divided by a breast-high solid railing, with a small gate in the middle,
serving as office and general receiving-place. Beyond the railing, in
the smaller space toward the north, there stood the great wooden desk
of the factor, its massive book of accounts always open on its face, its
hand-made drawers filled with the documents of the Company. Here
McElroy was wont to take account of the furs brought in, to distribute
recompense, and to enforce the simple law. Attached to this room on
the south was the great store-room, packed with those articles of
merchandise most likely to seem of worth in savage eyes and brought,
with such infinite labour by canoe and portage, from those favoured
lower points whose waters admitted the yearly ships--namely, rifles and
ammunition, knives of all sorts, bolts of bright cloth and beads of
the colour of the rainbow, great iron kettles such as might hang most
fittingly above an open fire, and bright woven garments made by hands
across seas.

At the back of the big room was the small one where McElroy and Ridgar
had their living, furnished scantily with a bed and table, an open
fireplace and crane, some rude, hand-made chairs, and a shelf of books.

And to this post of De Seviere had come in the dusk of the previous
night a little company of people.

They were tired and travel-stained, with their belongings in packs on
the shoulders of the men, and the joy of the venturer in their eager
faces.

From far down in the country below the Rainy River they had come,
pushing to the west in that hope of gain and desire of travel which
opens the wilderness of every land. They had met the factor at the great
gate and entered in to rest and feast, as is the rule of every fire. By
morning had come the leaders of the party to McElroy, and there had been
talk that ended in an agreement, and the tired venturers had dropped
their burden of progress.

When they had rested, there were to be three new cabins squeezed somehow
into the already overcrowded stockade, and five more men and six women
would belong to Fort de Seviere.

As he walked toward the factory the young man was thinking of all this.
Of a surety the tall girl, had come with the strangers, yet he had not
noticed her until that moment outside the stockade wall, when he had
caught the striking picture in the morning sun.

Name? Most certainly it would be in that list which the leader of the
party had promised him by noon. When he entered the big room the man was
there before him, a picturesque figure of a man, big and graceful and
dark of brow, with long black curls beneath his crimson cap. As McElroy
went forward he straightened up from his lounging position against the
railing and held out the paper he had promised.

“For enrollment, M'sieu,” he said simply.

The factor took the proffered slip and read eagerly down its length,
done neatly in a finished hand.

“Adventurers,” he read, “from Grand Portage on Lake Superior, bound for
the west,--agreed to stop for the length of one year at Fort de Seviere
on the Assiniboine River,--Prix Laroux and wife Ninette, Pierre and Cif
Bordoux and their wives Anon and Micene, Franz LeClede and wife Mora,
Henri Baptiste and wife Marie, and Maren Le Moyne, an unmarried woman
and sister to Marie Baptiste.”

A sudden little light flamed for a moment in the young factor's blue
eyes.

For some unknown reason it had pleased him, that last ingenious
sentence.

“Prix Laroux,” he said, turning to his new acquisition, “we will get to
the work of our contract.”



CHAPTER II THE SPRING

Springtime lay over the vast region of lake and forest. Along the
shores of the little rivers the new grass was springing, and in nook and
sheltered corner of rock and depression shy white flowers lifted their
pretty heads to the coaxing sun. Deep in the budding woods birds in
flocks and bevies called across the wilderness of tender green, while at
the post the youths sang snatches of wild French songs and all the world
felt the thirst of the new life.

A somewhat hard winter it had been, long and cold, with crackling frost
of nights and the snow piled deep around the stockade, and the gracious
release was very welcome.

The somewhat fickle stream of the Assiniboine had loosed its locks of
ice and rolled and gurgled, full to its low banks, as if the late summer
would not see it shrunk to a lazy thread, refusing sometimes even the
shallow canoes and barely licking the parched lips of the land.

In gay attire the maids of De Seviere ventured beyond the gates to stray
a little way into the forest and come back laden with tiny green sprays
of the golden trailer, with wee white blossoms and now and again a great
swelling bud of the gorgeous purple flower of the death plant.

“Bien! It is of a drollness, mes cheries,” laughed Tessa Bibye one day,
stopping at the cabin by the south wall; “how Francette does but sit in
the shade and nurse that half-dead wolf. Is it by chance because of the
owner, or that hand which carried it here, Francette? Look for the man
behind Francette's devotion ever!”

Whereat there was a laugh and crinkling of pretty dark eyes at the
little maid's expense, but she sprang to her feet and faced her mates in
anger.

“Begone, you Tessa Bibye!” she cried hotly; “'tis little you know beyond
the thought of a man truly, and that because you have lacked one from
the cradle!”

Tessa flushed and drew away, vanquished. Merry laughter, turned as
readily upon her, wafted back on the golden wind. Francette, her eyes
flaming with all too great a fire, set a pan of cool water beneath the
fevered muzzle of the husky and glanced, scowling, across her shoulder
toward the factory.

Five days had passed since the episode beside the stockade, and Bois
DesCaut had said no word, of his property. In fact, the great dog was
seemingly scarce worth a thought, much less a word. Helpless, bruised
from tip to tip, one side flat under its broken ribs, he lay sullenly in
the shade; of the cabin where McElroy had put him down, covered at night
from the cool air by Francette's' own blanket of the gorgeous stripes,
fed by her small loving hands bit by bit, submitting for the first time
in his hard and eventful life to the touch of woman, thrilling in his
savage heart to the word of tenderness.

Gently the little maid stroked the rough grey fur and scowled toward the
factory.

So intent was she with her thought that she did not hear the step beside
her, springing quickly up when a voice spoke, cool and amused, behind.
“Well said, little maid,” it praised; “that was a neat turn.”

The tall stranger, Maren Le Moyne, stood smiling down upon her.

Francette, sharpest of tongue in all the settlement, was at sudden
loss before this woman. She looked up into her face and stood silent,
searching it with the gaze of a child.

It was a wondrous face, dark as her own, its cheeks as dusky red, but in
it was a baffling something that held her quick tongue mute, a look as
of great depth, of wondrous strength, and yet of fitful tenderness,--the
one playing through the other as flame about black marble, and with the
rest a smile.

More than little Francette had beheld that baffling expression and
squirmed beneath its strangeness. Francette looked, and the scowl drew
deeper.

She saw again this woman leaning slightly forward, her eyes a-glitter on
the prostrate DesCaut, her strong hand doubled and flecked with blood,
with Loup at her feet,--and quick on the heels of it she saw the look in
the factor's eyes as he had commanded her to silence with a motion.

“So?” she flamed at last, recovering her natural audacity, for the maid
was spoiled to recklessness by reason of her beauty; “I meant it to be
neat.”

At the look which leaped into the eyes of the stranger her own began to
waver, to shift from one to the other, and lastly dropped in confusion.

“But spoiled at the end by foolishness,” said Maren Le Moyne, and all
the pleasure had slipped from her deep voice, leaving it cold as steel.

Abruptly she turned away, her high head shining in the sun, her strong
shoulders swinging slightly as she walked.

Francette looked after her, with small hands clinched and breast heaving
with, anger, and there had the stranger made her second enemy in Fort de
Seviere within the first fortnight.

Along the northern wall there was much bustle and scurry, the noise of
voices and of preparation, for the men were busy with the raising of the
first new cabin. As some whimsical fate would have it, there were the
hewn logs that Bard McLellan had prepared a year back for his own new
house when he should have married the pretty Lila of old McKenzie, who
sickened suddenly in the early autumn when the leaves were dropping in
the forest and fled from his eager arms. No heart had been left in the
breast of the trapper after that and the logs lay where he had felled
them.

Now McElroy, tactful of tongue and gentle, touched the sore spot, and
Bard gave sad consent to their use.

“Take them, M'sieu,” he said wearily; “my pain may save another's need.”

So the first new cabin went up apace.

Anders McElroy looked over his settlement day by day and there was great
satisfaction in his eyes. Fort de Seviere was none so strong that it
could afford to look carelessly on the acquisition of five good men and
hardy trappers, and, beside, somehow there was a pleasanter feeling to
the warm spring air since they had arrived-a new sense of bustle and
accomplishment.

Often he stood in the door of the factory and looked to where the women
sang at their work or carried the shining pails full of water from the
one deep well of the settlement, situated near the gate in the eastern
wall, and the smiles were ever ready in his blue eyes.

A handsome man was this factor of Fort de Seviere, tall and well formed,
with that grace of carriage which speaks of perfect manhood; his head,
covered with a thick growth of sun-coloured hair curling lightly at the
ends, tossed ever back, ready to laugh. Scottish blood, mingled with a
strong Irish strain, ran riot in him, giving him at once both love of
life and honour.

They had known what they were doing, those lords of the H. B. Company,
when they had sent this young adventurer from Fenchurch Street to the
new continent, and, after five years among the hardships of the trade,
he found himself factor of Fort de Seviere,--lord of his little world,
even though that world were but one tiny finger of the great system
spreading itself like a stretching hand outward from the shores of the
Bay to that interior whose fringed skirts alone had been explored.

A high station it was for so young a man, for his twenties were not yet
behind him, and the pride of his heart, its holding.

Therefore, life was a living wine to Anders McElroy, and the small
world of his post a kingdom. And into it, with that travel-tired band of
venturers from Rainy Lake, had passed a princess.

Not yet did he know this,--not for many days, in which he looked from
the factory door among the women, singling out one who wore no brilliant
garment, yet whose shining head drew the eyes of the men like a magnet.

Slowly speech grew among them, very slowly, as if something held back
the usual comment of the trappers, concerning this Maren Le Moyne.

“Look you, Pierre,” ventured Marc Dupre to Pierre Garcon, as they
beached their canoe one dusk after a short trip up the river; “yonder
is the young woman of the strong arm. A high head, and eyes like a
thunderous night,--Eh? Is there love, think you, asleep anywhere within
her?”

Whereat Pierre glanced aside under his cap to where Maren hauled up the
bucket from the well, hand over hand, with the muscles slipping under
her tawny skin like whipcords.

“Nom de Dieu!” ejaculated Pierre under his breath; “if there is, I would
not be the one to awaken it and not be found its master! It would be a
thing of flame and fury.”

“Ah!” laughed the other, “but I would. It would be, past all chance,
a thing to remember, howe'er it went! But it is not like that you or
I will be the one to wake it. Milady, though clad in seeming poverty,
fixes those disdainful eyes upon the clouds.”



CHAPTER III NEW HOMES

The work of raising the new cabins went forward merrily. Every one lent
a hand, and by the end of May the new families were installed and living
happily. In that last house near the northeast corner of the post dwelt
Henri and Marie Baptiste and Maren Le Moyne.

A goodly place it was, divided into two rooms and already the hands of
the two sisters had fashioned of such scant things as they possessed and
dared buy from the factory on the year's debt, a semblance of comfort.

In the other cabins the rest of the party managed to double, each family
taking one of the two rooms in each, and the women at least drew a
sigh of content that the long trail had at last found an end, however
unstable of tenure.

“Ah, Maren,” said Marie Baptiste, sitting on the shining new log step
of her domicile, “what it is to have a home! Does it not clutch at your
heart sometimes, ma cherie, the desire for a home, and that which goes
with it, the love of a man?”

She raised her eyes to the face of Maren leaning above her against the
lintel, and they were full of a puzzled question.

Maren answered the look with a swift smile, toying lightly with a fold
of the faded sleeve rolled above her elbow.

“Home for me, Marie, is the wide blue sky above, the wind in the tossing
trees, the ripple of soft waters on the bow of a canoe. For me,--I
grieve that we have stopped. Not this year do we reach the Land of the
Whispering Hills.”

A swift change had fallen into the depth of her golden voice, a subtle
wistfulness that sang with weird pathos, and the eyes raised toward the
western rim of the forest were suddenly far and sombre.

“Forgive!” said her sister gently; “I had forgot. I know the dream, but
is it not better that we rest and gain new strength for another season?
Here might well be home, here on this pretty river. We have come a
mighty length already. What could be fairer, cherie,--even though we
leave another to win to the untracked West.”

A small spasm drew across the features of Maren, a twitching of the full
lips.

“Faint heart of you,” she said sadly. “Oh, Marie, 'tis your voice has
ever held us back. They would prod faster but for you. Is there no
glory within you, no daring, no dreams of conquest? Bien! But I could go
alone. This dallying stiffles the breath in me!”

She put up a hand and tore open the garment at her throat, taking a deep
breath of the sunlit air.

“But it is poverty that must be reckoned with. By spring again we may be
better equipped than ever.”

So rode up the hope that was ever in her.

“Yes,” sighed Marie, “as the good God wills.”

But she glanced wistfully around the new cabin, to be her own for the
length of the four seasons. And who should say what might not happen in
four seasons?

She wondered fretfully what fate had fashioned the glorious creature
beside her in the form of Love itself to put within the soul of the
restless conqueror. Never had she known Maren, though they two had come
from the same lap.

Presently Maren looked down at her, and the shimmering smile, like light
across dark waters, had again returned.

“Nay,” she said gently, “fret not. It is spring-and you have at last a
home.”

True, it was spring.

Did not each breath of the south wind tell it, each flute-like call
from the budding forest without the post, each burst of song from some
hot-blooded youth with his red cap perched on the back of his head, his
gay sash knotted jauntily?

It stirred the heart in the breast of Maren Le Moyne, but not with the
thought of love. It called to her as she stood at night alone under the
stars, with her head lifted as if to drink the keen, sweet darkness;
called to her from far-distant plains of blowing grass, virgin of man's
foot; from rushing rivers, bare of canoe and raft; from high hills,
smiling, sweet and fair, up to the cloudless sky--and always it called
from the West.

Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,--fate held back her
eager hand.

A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the
long trail, without which all would fail.

Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand its
toll of salvage.

At Rainy Lake they had been held by thieving Indians and a great part
of their provisions taken from them, leaving them to make their way in
comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.

Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of
the trappers with the factor.

And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among them,
urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in her
eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait at
Fort de Seviere for another spring.

Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her
eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by
her fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for the
woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of conquest
which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on the
perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for itself
an ideal holding.

Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood
to tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs
and trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the
peace-pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of
woman she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father,
grimy from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and
watch the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her
hands for that she was not born a man.

And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which
slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way
of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.

Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the
head of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.

Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years, why
not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place
of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap and
stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through the
stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River each
season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams where the
call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him,--how long none might
know. And at last he had heeded, laid down the staid, the sane, and
followed the will-o'-the-wisp of conquest and adventure that took the
current by his door.

Never had Maren chided him,--never for one moment held against him the
desertion of his children. For that, they were well provided for since
he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much, but
enough to bring both of them to the marriage age.

And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the
trust,--Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting
at Grand Portage.

So tenderly had the two maids grown in the love of the family that
Marie had, but at the start of the great journey, married young Henri
Baptiste.

Marie was all for a home and some black-eyed babies, but she clung to
Maren as she had ever done,--and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren
had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her
face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,--bound
for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague
rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing for
the father whose heart must be the pattern of her own.

And in her train, swept together by that fire within her, touched into
flame by her ever-mounting hope, her courage, and her magnetism, went
that small band of men and women, all young, all of adventurous blood,
all daring the odds that let reluctantly a woman into the wilderness.

Yet it has been ever women who have conquered the wilderness, for until
they trod the trace the men had cut it still remained a wilderness.

So she leaned in the door of Marie's new home, this taut-strung Maren
Le Moyne, and gazed away above the rim of the budding forest, and her
spirit was as a chaffing steed held into quiet by a hand it knows its
master.

For a year she must endure the strain,--then, as the good God willed,
the leap forward, the wild breath in her nostrils, the forging into the
unknown.

“Ah, yes!” she said again, “it is the spring.”

“Bon jour,” she nodded, unsmiling, as a slim youth swung jauntily up the
hard-beaten way between the cabins.

“Eh!” said Marie, alert, “and who is that lord-high-mighty, with his red
cheeks and his airs, Maren? You know, as it is always, every man in the
post already. It is not so with the women, I'll wager. For instance, who
lives in the tiny house there by the south bastion?”

“I know not,” answered Maren, as though she humoured a child, and taking
the last question first; “as for the youth, 'tis young Marc Dupre, and
one of a sturdy nature. I like his spirit, though all I know of it is
what sparkles from his roguish eyes. A fighter,--one to dare for love of
chance.”

Marie looked quickly up, ever ready to pounce on the first gleam of
aught that might ripen into a love interest, but she saw Maren's eyes,
cool and shining, watching the swaggering figure with a look that
measured its slim strength, its suggestion of reserve, its gay joy of
life, and naught else.

“A pretty fellow,” she said, with a touch of disappointment.

Each and every man went by Maren just so,--eliciting only that interest
which had to do apart from the personal.

But the black eyes of Marc Dupre had softened a bit under their daring
as he approached the factory.

“Holy Mother!” he whispered to himself; “what a woman! No maid, but
a WOMAN--for whose word one would fillip the face of Satan. She is
fire--and, if I am sure, all men are tow.”



CHAPTER IV THE STRANGER FROM CIVILISATION

“How goes it, little one, with Loup?”

The factor stopped a moment in the sunshine before the cabin of old
France Moline.

Clad in a red skirt, brilliant in its adornment of stained quills of the
porcupine got from the Indians, Francette paced daintily here and there
in the clean-swept yard, now snapping her small fingers, now coaxing
with soft noises in her round throat, her sparkling eyes fixed on the
gaunt grey skeleton that stood on its four feet braced wide apart,
wavering dizzily.

For a time she did not answer, as if he who spoke was no more than any
youth of the settlement, so exaggeratedly absorbed was she.

Then, pushing back the curls from her face, a pretty motion that always
wakened a look of admiration in masculine eyes beholding,--

“If he would only try, M'sieu,” she said, frowning, “but he does nothing
save stand and look at me like that. The strength is gone from his
legs.”

It seemed even as the little maid protested. Massive, silent,
contemptuous, his small eyes under the wolfish skull cold and alight
with a look that sent shuddering from him the timid,--thus he had been
in his hard-fought and hard-won supremacy, a great, mysterious beast
brought full-grown from the snowbound wilderness of the forest one
famine-time by old Aquamis and sold to Bois DesCaut for a tie of
tobacco.

Now he stood, a pitiable shadow, and begged mutely of the only tender
hand he had known for understanding of this strange weakness that took
his limbs and sent the heavens whirling.

McElroy looked long upon him.

“'Tis a shame,” he said, his straight brows drawing together, “the dog
is a better brute than Bois.”

“Aye,” flashed Francette, talking as though it were no uncommon thing
for the factor to stop at the cabin of the Molines, “and no more shall
the one brute serve the other. You have said, M'sieu.”

“Yes,” laughed the factor, “I have said and it shall be so. I will buy
the dog from Bois if he speaks of the matter. Take good care of him,
little one,” and McElroy turned down toward the gate. As he moved away,
free of step and straight as an Indian, he filliped away a small budding
twig of the saskatoon which one of the youths had brought in to show
how the woods were answering the call of the warm sun, and which he had
dandled in his fingers as he walked. It fell at the edge of the beaded
skirt and quick as thought the hand of Francette shot out and covered
it. A hot flush mounted under the silken black curls and she dropped her
eyes, peering under their lashes to see if any observed. She drew the
faded sprig toward her and hid it in her breast.

Before the cabin of the Baptistes, Jean Saville touched his cap and
stopped.

“Yes?” said the factor; “what is it, Jean?”

“Assuredly, M'sieu, has the tide of the spring set in. Pierre but now
reports the coming of a band of strangers down the river. They come in
canoes, five of them, well manned and armed as if the country of the
Assiniboine were bristling with dangers instead of being the abode of
God's chosen. Within the hour they will arrive at the landing.”

“Thank you, Jean,” said McElroy; “I will prepare for the meeting.”

The trapper touched his cap and passed.

“Ah,” smiled the factor to himself, “I like this bustle of passage. It
is good after the winter's housing, and who knows? There may be those
among the strangers who bring word from Hudson Bay.”

He turned briskly back and gave word to Jack de Lancy and his wife
Rette to cook a great meal, also to see that the store-room was cleared
sufficiently by the more orderly packing back of the goods to allow of
five canoe-loads of men sleeping upon the floor. Then he passed down
the main way, out of the gate in the warm sun and took his place at
the landing to look eagerly down stream for the first coming of the
strangers. Not far from the enthusiasm of boyhood was this young factor
of Fort de Seviere.

And within the hour, as Jean had said, they came, rounding the distant
bend in an even distanced string, long narrow craft, each bearing
the regular complement of five men, a bowman, a steersman, and three
middlemen whose paddles shone like crystal as they sank and lifted
evenly. Strangers they were in very truth, as McElroy saw at the first
glance.

Never had they been bred in the wilderness, these men, unless it were
the two guides in the first and fourth canoe, picked out readily by
their swarthy skins, their crimson caps, and their rugged litheness.
Fairer, all, were the rest, paler of skin, more loose of muscle, shown
by the very way they bent to their work. Their garments, too, as they
drew nearer brought a smile to the watcher's lips, a smile of memory.
Those coats, brave in their gilt braid, had assuredly come across seas.
Thus might one behold them on the Strand.

Ah! These were, without doubt, part of the fall ship's load of
adventurers come to the new continent filled with the fire of
achievement and excitement that brought so many youths over seas. They
had, most like, come down from the great bay by way of God's Lake and
the house there, traversed the length of Winnipeg, come along the river
at the southern end, and at last turned westward into the Assiniboine.
A long rest they would no doubt take at Fort de Seviere, and there would
be news of the outside world.

McElroy was at the water's very edge as the first canoe of the string
curved gracefully in and cut slimly up to the landing.

“Welcome, M'sieurs,” called the factor of Fort de Seviere, using
unconsciously the speech of the region, which had become his own in five
years, “in to the right a bit,--so! Well done!”

The word was not so sincere as he would have made it, for the bowman,
jumping out into the knee-deep water to keep the boat from touching
bottom, had floundered like an ox, thereby proving his newness at the
business. On the face of the swarthy Canuck guide who sat in the stern
there was a weary contempt.

“Friends, M'sieurs?” called McElroy tardily, scarcely deeming such
precaution necessary, yet giving the hail from force of habit.

They looked for the most part Scottish, these men, save here and there
among them one who might be anything of the motley that came across each
year.

In the first canoe a figure had risen and stood tall and straight among
the bales of goods with which the craft was seen to be close packed
from bow to stern, a figure striking in its lack of kinship to its
surroundings, yet commanding in its beauty. Garments of cloth, of a gay
blue shade and much adorned with trimming of gold braid, fitted close
to the slender form of the man. His limbs from the knee were encased in
leggings made, most evidently, in some leather shop, while tilted on his
splendid head he wore a hat of so wide a brim that no sunlight touched
either face or throat, while from beneath this covering there fell to
his shoulder long curls of hair that shone like silk. This, evidently,
was the leader of the party.

“Friends,” he said, “bound for the west and the country of the
Saskatchewan.”

For all his appearance he spoke with the accent of the French, and for a
moment McElroy looked closely at him.

“Of the Company?” he asked sharply.

“Aye,” said the other, with a little of wonder in voice and look, “of
the Company, M'sieu most assuredly.”

The momentary flicker of uneasiness that had gripped the factor with the
stranger's speech died at his words.

So, of a surety, why not?

Had not he himself, born in the smoke of a London street, accepted with
the ingenious adaptability of the Irish blood within him the very speech
he now wondered at in the other?

As the young man sprang lightly to land he held out his hand, and it was
gripped with a force that showed the spirit behind the beauty of this
new guest.

“Welcome, M'sieu,” said the factor, “to Fort de Seviere and all it
contains.”

“Bien!” laughed the other with a show of fine white teeth, “but it is
good to behold neighbours in so deadly a wilderness as we have passed
through for these many days. Naught but God-forgotten loneliness and
never-ending forest. Yet it is for these that we barter the comforts
of civilisation, eh, M'sieu, and waste ourselves on solitude and the
savage?” He turned and waved his gloved hand over the five canoes, now
curving one by one in to the landing, and shouted a few terse orders and
commands.

“But I had nigh forgot, so unused am I to society and the usages
thereof,”--he said, turning back with an engaging smile, “Alfred de
Courtenay, known in that world across the water; and which my taste, or
that of itself, more properly speaking, has caused me to forswear for
some length of time, as Mad Alfred, I am, M'sieu--?”

“Anders McElroy,” supplied the other, “and factor of Fort de Seviere.”

“Monsieur le facteur, your servant, of French lineage, English nativity,
and adventurous spirit.”

With a motion indescribably graceful he swept off his wide hat and
executed a bow which in itself was proof of his gentleness.

“And now, M'sieu, lead on to those delights of rest and converse which
your hospitality hath so graciously promised.”

Leaving his company to beach and store for the night the canoes
with their loads of merchandise, under the direction of his aide or
lieutenant whom he introduced to the factor as John Ivrey, a young
man of fine presence, Alfred de Courtenay walked beside McElroy up the
gentle slope of the river bank, entered the great eastern gate of the
post, not without an appreciative glance at its massive strength and
at the well-nigh impregnable thickness of the stockade, the well-placed
surveillance of the towering bastions, and thus up the way between the
cabins to the door of the factory, open and inviting.

“Mother of God, M'sieu!” he said with a copious sigh; “what it is to
meet with white faces! For weeks I have beheld along the shores peering
brown countenances that lifted my gorge, and I have well-nigh been
tempted to turn back.”

“It has been a long journey, then, to you?”

McElroy smiled, thinking of the first impressions and effect of the
wilderness on such a man fresh from the ways of civilisation.

“Long? Though it is my initial journey, yet am I veteran frontiersman.”

He turned upon the factor the brilliance of his smile, a combination of
dazzling teeth and eyes that fairly danced with spirit, like bubbling
wine, blue and swift in their changes from laughter to an exaggerated
dolorousness, as when he spoke of these terrible hardships.

And if they were quick after this fashion they were no less so in
roaming keenly over every corner of the enclosed space within the
stockade.

Before they had reached the factory the stranger knew that there were
three rows of cabins in the post, that the factory was a mighty fortress
in its low solidity, and that the small log structure to the right of it
with the barred window was the pot au beurre.

As they neared the factory the figure of a tall woman, young by the
straightness of the back, the gracious yet taut beauty of line and
curve, came from behind the cabin of the Savilles, and on her shoulder
was perched a three-year-old child which laughed and gurgled with
delight, holding tight to her widespread hands. The woman's face was
hidden by the child's body, but her voice, deep-throated and rich with
sliding minor tones, mingled with the high shrillness of the little
one's shrieks.

“Hold fast, ma cherie,” came its laughing caution, smothered by the
flying folds of the baby's little cotton shift. “See! The ship dips so,
in the ocean,--and so,--and so!”

The strong arms, bare and brown and muscular, swayed backward, throwing
up the milky whiteness of the little throat, the tiny feet flew
heavenward and the baby's wee heart choked it, as witness the screams
of irrepressible joy. As the child swayed back there came into view the
face of Maren Le Moyne, flushed all over its rare darkness, glowing with
tenderness, its great beauty transfigured divinely. The black braids,
wrapped smoothly round her head, shone in the evening sun, and the faded
garment, plain and uncompromising, but served to heighten the effect of
her physical perfection.

Alfred de Courtenay stopped in his tracks, the smile fixed on his face,
and drank in the pretty scene like one starved.

So long he looked that McElroy turned toward him and only then did he
shift his glance, remembering himself, while a blush suffused his rather
delicate features.

“Pardon!” he murmured; “truly do I forget myself, M'sieu; but not for a
twelvemonth have I seen aught to match this moment. I pray you, of what
station of life is the glorious young Madonna before you;--wife or widow
or maid? By Saint Agnes, never have I beheld such beauty!”

“Maid,” replied McElroy; “by name Maren Le Moyne, one of a party of
venturers who came but a short while back from Rainy River, and who have
cast in their lot with us for the matter of a year.”

The woman and the child passed on their way, disappearing again behind
the next cabin, unconscious of observation, still lost in their play of
the tossing ship at sea, and the two men entered the great trading-room
of Fort de Seviere, where Edmonton Ridgar, chief trader and accountant,
came forward to meet the stranger.

The young factor went in search of Jack de Lancy and word of the meal he
had ordered, and for some reason there was within him a vague vexation
which had to do with the look he had seen in the merry eyes of Alfred de
Courtenay.

He found the great kettles boiling over the fires and a ten-gallon pot
of coffee Venting the evening air.

As he gave word for the feast to be spread on strips of cloth laid on
the hard-beaten ground before the factory that many might sit round at
once and partake, there came from the direction of the gate the voices
of De Courtenay's men. The stranger and himself, with young Ivrey and
Ridgar should be served in the little room off to the west where were
the small table, the chairs, and the row of books.

Not often did Fort de Seviere have so illustrious a guest as must be
this young adventurer.



CHAPTER V NOR'WESTERS

“Merci, my friend, what extravagance is this! The savour of that pot
does fairly turn my head!”

Alfred de Courtenay settled himself gracefully in one of McElroy's
chairs and smiled across at his host with a twinkle in his laughing
eyes.

A dozen candles, lit in his honour, where three were wont to suffice,
shone mellowly in the little room, and Rette de Lancy, still comely
despite her forty years and a certain lavishness in the matter of
avoirdupois, set down in the midst of the table a steaming dish with a
cover. There were a white cloth of bleached linen and cups of blue
ware that had come with her and Jack from across seas, also a silver
coffee-urn that had been her great-grandmother's. When the factor gave
word for a meal to these two he knew well that all dignity would be
observed. As for himself, his living of every day was scant and plain as
regarded the manner of its serving.

“What is it, M'sieu, that so assails the nostrils with delicious aroma,
if I may so far forget politeness? 'Tis not beef, assuredly,--there is
too much of the scent of the wild about it.”

“Moose,” replied McElroy, and by this time the vague vexation had blown
out of his heart as all ill-feelings were wont to do, “moose, killed in
the snows and hung in the smoke of a little fire until the very heart
of the wood is in the meat. And now, M'sieu, fall to. I would I had
something better than Rette's strong coffee in which to pledge you, but,
as you see, Fort de Seviere has no cantine salope. It is not the policy
of the Great Company, as you doubtless know, to abet its trade with the
Indians by the use of liquor.”

De Courtenay looked quickly up.

“Why, I thought,--but then I have much to learn, in fact, all to learn,
since I am but raw in the wilderness.”

Like men hungry and athirst from the hardships of the trail and the
stream, the camp and the portage, the guests did justice to the savoury
viands, and at last leaned back in repletion, while Rette took off the
plates and cups; the spoons and forks, and set in their stead a huge pot
of crumbled tobacco with a tin box containing pipes.

“And now,” said the factor, smiling, “let us have talk of that world of
which I am hungering for news. You are of the fall ship's load of new
arrivals, I take it?”

“No,” said De Courtenay, “it was last spring, about this time, that I
first saw the shores of the New World. Five of my men came with me from
across seas and the rest I picked on starting into the wilderness. They
are mostly Canadians of Scottish blood. I have a fancy that the strong
blond peoples are best for the rigours of what one may find in this
country. Though,” he laughed as at some reminiscence, “I have found so
far that my two swarthy guides are worth any three of the rest.”

“You have found the way hard?”

“Mother of God! If the rest is like the first of it, I think you may
find my bones bleaching beside some portage where I have given up the
ghost. Truly do we pay for our whims of caprice, M'sieu.”

“Whims?”

“Aye, what save a whim of the moment could have induced me to undertake
so great a hardship as this winning to the Saskatchewan? What save the
love of excitement sent me to be, like yourself, the head of a lost
trading-post in this far north country?”

The merry blue eyes were full of gaiety and light.

“Truly,--and I pay.”

A whim it might be, yet there was in the spirited face of Alfred de
Courtenay that which told plainly that it would be followed to its end,
be that what it might, as faithfully as though it were a deeper thing.

For a moment a little line appeared between the straight brows of the
factor.

The word of so grave an office mentioned as a “whim,” “a caprice,” went
down hard with him. There was nowhere in the heavens above nor the earth
below so serious a thing as that same office, and he served it with his
whole heart. Therefore he could not quite understand the other. Yet he
thought in a moment of De Courtenay's newness and the frown cleared. Of
a very wide tolerance was McElroy.

“And you came, I suppose, from York Factory, down by way of God's Lake
and the house there. What is the word of Anderson who presides there? A
fine fellow,--I met him once at Churchill.”

“York Factory? God's Lake?”

De Courtenay lowered his pipe and looked through the smoke.

“Nay,” he said, “I know nothing of those places, M'sieu.”

He turned to young Ivrey.

“It might be that these locations answer to different names. Heard you
aught from the guides of these two posts?”

“We did not pass them, Sir Alfred,” answered the young man soberly.

“Then, in Heaven's name, which way have you journeyed?” asked McElroy
amazed.

“Why, by way of Lake Nipissing, across the straits below the Falls of
St. Mary, by canoe along the shores of Lake Superior, into Pigeon River,
and so on up the various streams to your own Assiniboine--from Montreal.
How else, M'sieu?”

But the factor of Fort de Seviere had risen in his place, his face gone
blank with consternation.

“From Montreal!” he cried, “but did you not answer to me as friends and
of the Company?”

“Aye,” answered De Courtenay, also rising, the gaiety fading from his
face and his eyes beginning to sparkle bodefully, “of the North-west
Company, trading from Montreal into the fur country. I am sent of my
uncle Elsworth McTavish, who is a shareholder and a most responsible
man, to take charge of the post De Brisac on the south branch of the
Saskatchewan. But I like not this sudden gravity, M'sieu. Wherein have I
offended?”

“In naught, De Courtenay,” said McElroy quite simply, “save that you are
in the heart of the country belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, as
does this fort and all therein.”

“Nom de Dieu!” cried the other, springing back and tossing up his head;
“I knew it not! How is it, then, that at midday of this day we met on
the river one who told us of this post of De Seviere, and that it
served the Montreal merchants? That we should here find hospitality and
friends?”

“Eh?” shot out McElroy sharply. “Of what like was such a person?”

“A big man, swarthy and dark, with sullen eyes, clad in garments of
tanned hides and wearing a red cap and a knife in his belt. He bore on
his left temple a pure white lock amid his black hair.”

“Bois DesCaut!” said Edmonton Ridgar; “he has been these two days gone
in his canoe.”

“A traitorous trapper, M'sieu,” said the factor, “one who has umbrage at
me for a rebuke administered some time back and hopes by this sorry
joke to win revenge. But what is done cannot be helped. We have met
as friends,--the unfortunate fact that we find ourselves rivals,--that
almost speaks the word 'foes,' I must inform you, M'sieu, since the
strife between our companies has become so sharp,--should not cause us
to forget the bread we have broken between us personally. I still offer
you a night's rest.”

But De Courtenay had drawn himself to his slender height, his hand at
his hip, where, in other times, had dangled a sword.

“Nay, M'sieu,” he said quickly, “a blunder found and unremedied
becomes two. If I ay gather my men we will sleep outside an unfriendly
fort,--and in the name of De Courtenay allow me to repay the cost of
their entertainment.”

Reckless, indeed, was this young cavalier, else he would not have made
that speech.

Anders McElroy turned white beneath his tan and his fingers tapped the
table.

“Not ungrateful am I, M'sieu, but I stick by the colours I choose. If
our companies are rivals, then we are such, and I follow my master's
lead. It is at present the North-west organisation. I am pledged in
Montreal--and--I prove faithful.”

The young man's face was fired with that spirit which ever lay so near
the surface and he looked at his whilom host with a mighty hauteur.

“I thank you for your kindness, M'sieu, but I must decline it further.
Come, Ivrey,” and turning he picked up his wide hat, bowed first to
McElroy and then to Ridgar, and strode toward the outer door. As he
passed the lintel the not insignificant form of Rette blocked his exit,
en route for a cup she had left behind. With an instant flourish the hat
in his hand swept the logs of the floor, he seized the woman's toil-hard
fingers and bore them to his lips.

“Excellent, Madame, was that meal,” he murmured, “and never to be forgot
so long as one unused to hardship faces privation. I thank you.”

Comely Rette flushed to her sleek hair and some flicker of a girlhood
that had its modicum of grace, flared up in the swift curtsy with which
she acknowledged the compliment.

And with a last flash of his blue coat Alfred de Courtenay was gone.

McElroy ran his fingers helplessly through his tousled light hair and
faced his friend.

“Now, by all the Saints!” he said with a strange mixture of regret and
relief, “what an unhappy ending!”

But at that moment he was thinking of the wondrous beauty of the man and
of the picture of Maren Le Moyne's brown arms spread wide apart with the
laughing child between, and again that little feeling of vexation crept
into his wholesome heart.

Without in the soft night the late guest was striding, a graceful
figure, hurriedly down toward the gate he had entered so short a time
ago, and his slender hand played restlessly at his hip. His heart was
seething with swift-roused emotions. So had its quick stirrings brought
him into many a scrape in his eventful life. That word of his host,
“which speaks almost of foes,” sang in his ears.

And yet it had been given only in the spirit of enlightenment.

Behind, John Ivrey gathered up the men idling about the fire and talking
with the men of the post, where question and answer had begun to stir
uneasiness.

In a ragged, uneven line they strung out, fading into the darkness, and
presently from down the river some forty rods there rose up the columns
of their fires.

Fort de Seviere closed its gates and settled into the night with a
feeling of something gone awry.

By morning all was early astir, those within to witness the departure of
the strangers, and, those without for that same departure.

The canoes were floated, the men embarked, and all in readiness with the
first flame of the sun above the eastern forest when Alfred de Courtenay
presented himself at the gate and called for McElroy.

Gladly the factor responded, hoping somewhat to soften the awkwardness
of the situation by a godspeed, to be met by the Frenchman high-headed
and most carefully polite. A servant beside him held a wickered jug.

“With your leave, M'sieu,” said De Courtenay, “I wish to leave some
earnest of my gratefulness for what we have received at your hands.
Therefore accept with my compliments this small gift, which, as you
say you have no cantine salope, must come most happily. Once more,
farewell.”

The man set down the jug at McElroy's feet and strode toward the
landing. The master was turning more leisurely away with his uncovered
curls shining in the first level beams of morning, when he stopped and
looked past the portal within the stockade.

With a small brass kettle in her hand, Maren Le Moyne was coming down
the open way toward the well.

With a colossal coolness he forgot the presence of the factor and the
ready light began to sparkle in his blue eyes with every step of the
approaching girl. Swiftly he glanced to right and left, as if in search
of something, and meeting only the green slope of the shore, a growing
excitement flushed his face.

Suddenly he snatched from a crevice of the stockade a tiny crimson
flower which nodded, frail and fragrant, from its precarious foothold,
and sprang forward as she set her vessel on the well's stone wall.

Unsurpassed was the bow he swept her, this daring soldier of fortune,
to whose delicate nostrils the taking of chances was the breath of life,
and his smile was brilliant as the spring morning itself.

“A chance is a chance, Ma'amselle,” he said winningly, “and who would
not risk its turning? For me,--I looked upon your face but now, and
behold! I must give you something, and this was all the moment offered.”

With hand on heart he held forth the little flower.

“In memory of a passing stranger far from all beauty, wear it, I pray
you, this day in the dusk of that braid, just there above the temple.
Have I permission?”

He stepped near and lifted the crimson star, smiling down into the
astonished eyes of Maren Le Moyne, to whom no man in all her life had
ever spoken thus.

For a moment she stared at him, and her face was a field of fleeting
sensations. And then, slowly, the sparkle in his eyes lit her own, the
smile on his lips curled up the corners of her full red mouth, and the
charm of the moment, fresh and sweet as the new day, swept over her.

“A venturer,-you!” she said; “some kin we must surely be, M'sieu! 'Tis
granted.”

She rested her hands on the kettle's rim, and bent forward her head,
wrapped round and round with its heavy braids, and with fingers deft as
a woman's Alfred de Courtenay placed the flower in a shining fold.

Somewhat lengthy was the process, for the braid was tight and the green
stem very fragile, but at last it was accomplished, and Maren lifted her
face flushed and laughing.

“Thank you, M'sieu,” she said demurely; “God speed your journey.”

De Courtenay took the kettle from her, filled it himself, and when he
gave it back the smile was gone; from his face, but the light remained.

“Some day, Ma'amselle,” he said gravely, “I shall come back to Fort de
Seviere.”

The tall girl turned away with her morning's kettle of fresh water, and
the man stood by the well watching her swinging easily to its weight,
forgetful of the canoes, manned and waiting on the river's breast for
their leader, forgetful of the factor of the post, waiting in the shadow
of the wall, on whose face there sat a deeper shade.

Then he turned and ran lightly down the bank, leaped into the canoe held
ready, once more bowed, and as the little craft swept out to midstream,
he shook back his curls and lifted his face toward the country of the
Saskatchewan.



CHAPTER VI SPRING TRADE

So passed out of Fort de Seviere one who was destined to be interwoven
with its fortunes.

Anders McElroy watched him go until the shadow of the great trees on the
eastern shore, long in the level sun, quenched the light on his silken
head and the men of the five canoes had taken up a song of the boats,
their voices lifting clear and fresh on the wings of the new day, until
the first canoe turned with the curve of the river above and was lost,
the second and the third, and even until the last had passed from view
and only the song came back.

Then he turned back into the gate and the tender mouth that was all
Irish above the square Scottish jaw was set tight together.

His foot touched the wickered jug and he called Jean Saville.

“Take this, Jean,” he said, “and give each of the men a cup. 'Tis a
shame to waste it.”

But for himself he had no taste for the stranger's gift of payment.

He was thinking of the red flower in Maren Le Moyne's black hair and a
vexation, past all reason held him.

But the spring was open and there was soon more to occupy his mind than
a maid and a posy and a reckless blade from Montreal.

At dusk of a day within that week a trapper brought word of a hundred
canoes on the river a day's journey up-country, laden with packs of
winter beaver, and bound for the post.

The Indians were coming down to trade.

Picturesque they were, in their fringed buckskin cunningly tanned and
beaded, their feathers and their ornaments of elk teeth and claws of the
huge, thick-coated bears. At day-dawn they came, having camped for the
night a short distance above the fort, to the letter display of their
arrival, and they swept down in a flotilla of graceful craft made of the
birch bark and light as clouds upon the water.

All was in readiness for them, for the factor had been expecting them
for a fortnight back; and, when the crackling shots of the braves
announced their coming, McElroy gave orders that the three small cannon
mounted on a half-moon of narrow breastwork to the south of the main
gate, and just before a small opening in the stockade for use in case of
attack, should be fired in salute.

These were the quiet and friendly Assiniboines, and the first of the
tribes, being the nearest, to reach the factory that year.

De Seviere was early awake and all was astir within its walls, for
this was the great time of the four seasons. Eagerly the maids and
the younger matrons flocked down to the great gate to peer out at the
gathering craft, afloat like the leaves of autumn upon the breast of the
little river,--two braves to a canoe, the gallant front of the young
men flanking and preceding that which held the leader of the expedition,
chief of the tribe, distinguished by its flag fluttering in the morning
wind upon a pole at the stern,--at the bedizened figure of the chief
himself, and lastly those canoes which held the women, the few children,
and even a dog or two.

Thus they came, those simple children of the forest and the lakes,
the open ways and the fastnesses, of the untrammelled summers, and the
snow-hindered winters, to the doors of the white man, dependent at last
upon him for the implements of life,--the gun, the trap, the knife, the
kettle, and the blanket.

Presently Edmonton Ridgar, chief trader of Fort de Seviere, came down
the main way between the cabins, passing alone between the rows of the
populace, and went forward to the lading to receive the guests.

The canoes had by this time swept swiftly and with utmost skill into two
half-moons, their points cutting to the landing; and down the reach of
water between them, slightly ruffled into little waves and sparkling
ripples by the soft wind and the deftly dipping paddles, there came the
larger craft of Quamenoka the leader.

“Welcome, my brothers!” called Ridgar, in their own tongue, for this man
had been born on the shores of Hudson Bay and knew the speech of every
tribe, from the almost extinct Nepisingues, of the Nepigon, to the
far-away Ouinebigonnolinis on the sea coast. His hair was thickly
silvered from the years he had spent in the service of the H. B. C., and
his heart was full of knowledge gathered from the four winds. Therefore,
his worth was above price and he would have been factor of a post of his
own, instead of chief trader for young Anders McElroy.

“We greet our brother,” gravely replied Quamenoka as he stepped from his
canoe, gathering his blanket around his body with a practised sweep.

Swiftly four headmen disembarked from the first four canoes of the
half-moon which closed in with scarce a paddle dip, so deft were the
braves with their slender, shining blades of white ash, and stood
behind.

Side by side, conversing in a few sentences, the trader and the chief
entered the post, followed by the headmen and proceeded to the factory,
where McElroy stood to welcome them in the open door.

They entered, to the ceremony of the pipe, the speech, and the bargain,
while those without made a great camp two hundred strong all along the
bank of the stream, beached the canoes, stacked the beaver packs, set up
the tepees of the seventeen sticks, and built the little fires without
which no camp is a camp.

In a little space the quiet shore was all a-bustle and activity reigned
where the silence of the spring morning had lain, dew-heavy.

Among those most eager who peered at the gate, and who presently
ventured forth to the better view the bustling concourse of braves and
squaws, was Maren Le Moyne, her dark eyes wide, soft lips apart, and
face all a-quiver with keen enjoyment of the scene.

These were the first she had ever seen of those Indians who came from
the west. Who knew? Perhaps those moccasined feet had trod the virgin
forest of her dreams, those sombre eyes looked upon the Whispering
Hills, those grave faces been lifted to the sweet wind that sang from
the west and whose caress she felt even now upon her cheeks.

Perhaps,--perhaps, even, some swift forest-runner among them, far on his
quest of the home of the caribou or with news of some friendly tribe,
had come upon a man, an old man rugged of frame and face, with blue eyes
like lakes in his swarthy darkness, and muscles that bespoke the forge
and hammer.

Who knew?

Maren's strongly modelled chin twitched a bit while the little flame of
tenderness that flickered ever behind the graveness of her eyes leaped
up. She longed for their speech that she might go among them and ask.

A little way along the stockade wall to the north there lay a great
rock, flat and smooth of surface, and here the girl drew apart from the
women and sat herself down thereon, hands clasping her knees and the
level sun in her eyes. Her thoughts were soon faraway on the misty trail
they had worn for themselves in the many years they had traversed the
wilderness in search of what it held, and the eyes between the narrowed
lids became blank with introspection. And as she sat thus, a little way
withdrawn from the scurrying activity of the scene, there came a step
on the soft green sod and a slim form in buckskins halted beside her.

It was young Marc Dupre, and his devil-may-care face was alert and
smiling.

“Is that seat big enough for two, Ma'amselle?” he asked impertinently,
though the heart in him was thumping a bit. This was a woman, he
recalled having thought, for whom one would fillip the face of Satan,
and he was uncertain whether or no he had made a right beginning.

Maren started and looked swiftly up at him.

“It is, M'sieu,” she said quietly, “if those two are in simple, sensible
accord. Not if one of the two coquettes.”

Over the handsome features of the youth there spread a deep red flush.

“Forgive me, Ma'amselle,” he said, “my speech was foolish as my heart.
They are both sobered.”

“Then,” said the girl, drawing aside the folds of her dress, “you may
sit beside me.”

With a sudden diffidence he sank upon the stone, this handsome boy whose
tongue was ever ready and whose heart of a light o' love had taken toll
from every maid in the settlement, and for the first time in his life he
had no sprightly word, no quip for his careless tongue.

They sat in silence, and presently he saw that her eyes were again
half-closed and the dreaming look had settled back in them. She had
forgotten his presence.

Never before in his experience had a woman sat thus unmoved beside him
when he longed to make her speak, and it stilled him with silent wonder.

He thought of the words of Pierre Garcon that day on the river bank when
this maid was new to the post, “if there is, I would not be the one to
waken it and not be found its master,” and they sent a thrill to his
inmost being.

Who would awaken her; he wondered, as he watched the cheek beside him
from the tail of his eye, a round womanly cheek, sweet and full and rich
as a damask rose with the thick lashes above shining like jet.

Obedient to her silence, he sat still while she dreamed her dream out to
its conclusion, and presently she straightened with a little breath like
a sigh, unclasped her hands from her knees and turned her glance upon
him as if she saw him for the first time.

His head whirled suddenly and he sought for some common word to cover
his rare confusion.

“See, Ma'amselle,” he said, pointing, “the well-lashed packs of the fat
winter beaver. Truly they come well laden, these Assiniboines, and
we may well thank le bon Dieu for the wealth of skins. Is it not a
heartening sight?”

The eyes of Maren Le Moyne left his face and swept swiftly down the
gentle slope to where the Indians had piled their bales of furs. At the
sight they darkened like the waters of a lake when a little wind runs
over its surface.

“A heartening sight? Nay, M'sieu,” she said, shaking her head, “I can
find no joy in it.”

“What?”

The trapper was aghast.

“No pleasure in the fruits of a fat season?”

“See the packs of marten, the dark streaks showing a bit at the edges
where the fur rounds over the dried skin. How were those pelts taken,
M'sieu?”

“How? Why, most cunningly, Ma'amselle,--in traps of the H. B. Company,
set with utmost skill, perhaps on a stump above the line of the heavy
snows, or balanced nicely at the far end of a slender pole set leaning
in the ground. The delicate hand of a seasoned player must match itself
with the forest instinct of these small creatures. The little pole holds
little snow and the scent of the bait calls the marten up, when,
snap! it is fast and waiting for the trapper and the lodge of the
Assiniboines, the women and the drying.”

“Yes. And those hundreds of beaver, M'sieu?”

Marc Dupre's eyes were shining and the red in his cheeks flushing with
pleasure.

What more to a man's liking than the exploitation of knowledge gained
first-hand in the pursuit of his life's work?

“Again the trap,” he said, “set this time at the edge of a stream where
the beaver huts peek through the ice, or lift their tops above the open
water. Neatly they are set, cunning as an Indian himself; hidden in the
soft slime at the margin if the water runs, waiting with open jaws in
the small runway above the dam where the creatures come out from the
swim. A sleek head lifting above the ripples a scrambling foot or
two,--snap! again the price of a pound and a half of powder, a tie of
tobacco. No footmark must the hunter leave, Ma'amselle, unsplashed with
water, no tainting touch of a hand ungloved on chain or stake or trap
itself. Ah! one must know the woods and the stream, the cold and the
snow and the winds.”

“You know them, M'sieu, I have no doubt,” said Maren, “for you follow
the trapping trail. And those beautiful silver fox, frosty and fine as
the sparkle of a winter morning? The heavy hides of the bear, soft and
glossy and thick as a folded blanket?”

“All the trap,--unless the latter drops through the flimsy roof of some
well-hidden dead-fall, covered with brush.”

The girl was not looking at him, her glance being still on the bustling
camp below. The fingers on her knee were laced tight together.

Now she began to speak in a low voice, deep and even.

“Aye! All you have said is true. Wealth, indeed, is in those packs, and
patience and cunning and utmost skill, defiance of the snows and the
crackling cold, long miles on snowshoes and the hardships of the trail,
the nights in the bough-tied huts, the pack galling the shoulders. But
what is all this beside that which waits the runner of the trail at
every 'set' in those many miles? Here he finds his leaning-pole. There
have been little tracks up its slim roadway, but those were covered by
the fall of three days back and the little creature who made them hangs
there at the end, three small feet beating the cold air feebly, a
tiny head squirming from side to side, two dull black eyes set at the
distorted world. He has caught his marten. It has not frozen, for the
snow was light and the forest still and thick, and three days have
passed, M'sieu. Three days! Mon Dieu! How much were those three days
worth? The trapper taps the squirming head and puts the bit of fur in
his pack-bag. On to the next. The beaver? Dead, M'sieu, thanks to the
good God, drowned in its own sweet water. The pack is heavy with small
bodies ere the Assiniboine reaches the place where he has laid his trap
for the silver fox. And what greets him here? Only a foot gnawed off in
the silence of the day and the night, and some beauty gone staggering
away to lie and suffer with starvation in the cold.”

The youth was staring at the averted face beside him, mouth open and
utter amazement on his features.

Maren went on.

“And lastly, M'sieu, far at the end of the trail,--at the outer, rim of
the circle traced by his traps,--he comes eagerly, to peep and peer for
what might have happened at the head of the little dip leading down to
the stream where the firs bend heavily under their weight of snow.

“Here he had laid his cunningest instrument, a thing of giant jaws, of
sharp ragged points, each inlocking with the other, the whole unholy
thing hung to a chain at whose other end there lay a ball of iron,
weighing, M'sieu, some eighty pounds. That was for the great shy bear,
rocking along ire his quest of berries or some tree that should ring
hollow under his scratching claws, bespeaking the hive of the wild bees.
The oiled and fur-wrapped Indian stoops down and looks along the dip.
Ah! There he sees that which brings a glint to his small eyes. No bear,
M'sieu, nor yet the trap he had left, but a thrashed and broken space
where the snow went flying in clouds and the bushes were torn from their
roots, where the very tree-trunks bore marks of the conflict and a wide
and terrible trail led wildly off to the deeper forest.

“He takes it up.

“All day he follows it. At night he camps and sleeps by his fire in
comfort. By daybreak again he is swinging along on that trail. Its word
is plain to him. At first it raged, that great shaggy creature, tall
as an ox and slow, raged and fought and broke its teeth on the strange
thing that bit to the bone with its relentless jaws, and tore along the
white silence dragging its hindering ball, that, catching on bush and
root, skinned down the flesh from the shining bone. And presently the
wild trail narrowed to undisturbed snow, with naught save two great
footprints, one after the other. With the cunning of a man, M'sieu, the
tortured animal has gathered in its arms that chain and ball, and is
walking upright. For another day and night the trapper follows this
trail of tragedy and at their end he comes upon it.

“Beside a boulder, where the snow is pushed away there lies a round heap
of anguish, curled up, pinched nose flat on the snow and two ears laid
lop to a vanquished head. It is still breathing, though the dull eyes
open not at sound of the trapper, bold in his safety, who lifts his gun
and ends it all.

“A fine pelt,--save that the right foreleg is somewhat spoiled.

“It lies there in that pile, M'sieu, and makes for wealth,--but to me it
is no heartening sight. I have followed that trail to the deeper woods.”

The eyes of the woman were deep as wells, flickering with light, and the
dark brows frowned down the slope. She had drawn her hands tight
around her knees, so tight that each knuckle stood out white from the
surrounding tan.

The young man shut his open lips and drew in a breath that quivered.

“Ma'amselle,” he said huskily, “nowhere in the wide world is there
another woman so deep of heart, so strong in tenderness. Never before
have I seen that side of the trapping. To a man that is shut. It needs
the soul of a woman to see behind those things. And, oh, Ma'amselle!”
 his voice fell low and trembling, “I have seen more,--the divinity
within your spirit. May the good God make me worthy that you may speak
so to me again. I would I might serve you,--with my life I would serve
you, Ma'amselle, for I have seen no woman like you.” He was on his feet,
this young Marc Dupre, and the hot blood was coursing fast in his veins.
The awakening was coming, though not for Maren Le Moyne.

“May the time come when I may be a stone for your foot,” he said
swiftly. “I ask no better fate.”

Maren looked up at him and a wonderful tenderness spread on her face.

“I think the time will come, M'sieu,--and, when it does, it will be
worth while. I think it would be a lifting sight to see you in some
great crisis, before some heavy test.”

“You do?” he said slowly; “you do, Ma'amselle? Then, by Heaven, it
would!”

“And some day I shall see it.”

They little knew, these two in their glowing youth, how true was that
word, nor how tragic that sight would be.

“And till then,” said this wild youth of the forest, “until then may we
be friends?” The head under the crimson cap was whirling.

“Friends?” smiled Maken, and her voice was very gentle; “assuredly,
M'sieu--I had destined you for that some time ago.”

As she turned away, her glance once more fell upon the long camp of the
Assiniboines, and Marc Dupre faded from her mind.

Not so with him, left sitting on the flat stone, the blood hot in his
face and a sudden mist before his eyes.

Her last words sang in his ears like the voice of many waters.

He did not look after her,--there was something within that held him
silent, staring at the waters of the river, now sparkling like a
stream of diamonds in the risen sun, the lightness gone from him and a
trembling loosed in his bosom.

Within the big trading-room at the factory, seats had been placed, the
chief and his headmen sat in a solemn circle, and McElroy, holding
in his two hands the long calumet, stood in the centre of the small
conclave.

Very gravely he pointed the stem, clinking with its dangling ornaments,
to east and west, to the heavens and to the earth, and then with a deft
motion swung it around his head.

“My brothers,” he said, glancing around at the solemn visages of these
his friends and people, “may the sun smile all day upon us together in
peace.”

Wherewith he smoked a moment at the carven mouthpiece and handed the
pipe to Quamenoka.

With the utmost gravity Ridgar took it from the chief, passed it to
the savage on his right, who likewise smoked and passed, it on, and
presently the ceremony was done and the visit had begun.

“My brothers are late this year at the trading,” said the factor. “For a
fortnight has the ox waited in the pen, the bread of the feast been set.
So do we love our brothers of the forest. What is the word of the west?
What tribes come in to the factory with peltry? We would hear Quamenoka
speak.”

He fell silent, sat down in his chair, and waited.

In the hush of that moment a shadow falling in the open door of the
factory caught his eye and he looked up to see the form of Maren Le
Moyne leaning against the lintel, her face filled with eagerness, her
eyes, clear as a child's and as far-seeing, fixed on the Indians. He
glanced swiftly to that tight braid just above the temple, where he had
last seen a small red flower nodding impishly, and was conscious of a
feeling of relief to find it gone.

It was irregular, the intrusion of an outsider in the ceremony of the
opening of the trade; but for his life the young factor of De Seviere
could not have said so to this girl who went fearlessly where she listed
and whose eyes held such mystery of strength and wistfulness.

Moreover, Quamenoka was speaking and the council harkened.



CHAPTER VII FOREST NEWS

He was an old man, this chief of the Assiniboines, and his face was
wrinkled like the dried bed of a stream` where the last little ripples
have cast up the sand in a thousand ridges. His black eyes were mild,
for these Indians were a peaceful people, relying on the trapping and
the hunting and the friendship of the white men at the posts which they
had held for three generations.

Fear of their more warlike kin had kept them near the factories and
driven them into the ways of civilisation.

Now he sat with quiet glance upon the floor looking back into the past
year, his feathered head-dress quivering a bit and the blue smoke rising
from the pipe.

“The wind in the woods aisles is full of words, my brothers,” he said,
in his own tongue, “and tales flit down the lakes like the leaves in
autumn. From the Saskatchewan come the French, who tell the Assiniboines
that at their posts will be given four axes for one beaver, eight pounds
of shot and four of powder. Yet thy brothers come down from their lodges
to Fort de Seviere because of the love they bear to you, and for the
fairness in trade that never varies. Many beavers are in the packs, much
marten and fox and ermine. We will do good trade. Guns that are light
and neat shaped to the hand, with good locks. Also much tobacco and
sweet fruits. Of these things we are sure,--also are we sure of the
next year and the next. Therefore do we come down the rivers to the
Assiniboine.

“The tales that flit in the forest, my brothers, tell of a new fort of
the French far, far to the northwest on the shores of the Slave Lake,
whose factor is of the name Living Stone. Also there are whispers that
fly like the wintering birds of new people, fair-skinned and red in the
cheeks, who come into the upper country from the west where lies the Big
Water. These are strange people, like none that trade with the Indians,
who are neither friends to the English, nor yet the French, but strive
for barter with those tribes that come up from the Blackfeet Hills and
down from the frozen regions of the North with bearskins, the one, and
seal and sea-otter, the other.

“A runner of the Saulteurs, resting in the lodges of the Assiniboines,
has told Quamenoka of their strange customs, their hardness, and their
shut forts guarded with suspicion and sentinelled with fear.”

He ceased a moment and smoked in silence.

No breath of sound broke the stillness, for this was ceremony and of
great dignity.

Only McElroy was acutely conscious of the figure in the doorway and the
peering face of the girl, so full of hushed intensity.

“Also do we bring word of a great tribe, the Nakonkirhirinons, living
far beyond the River Oujuragatchousibi, who this year journey down to
Fort de Seviere with many furs,--more than all that will come from
the Assiniboines, the Crees, the Ojibways, and the Migichihilinons put
together.

“Past York and Churchill on the Great Bay they come, because of unfair
dealings which met them at those places last year and the year before,
down to the country of the Assiniboines, in whose lodges they will eat
the great feast of the Peace Dance. Not long have the Nakonkirhirinons
traded their furs, living to themselves in their hills, and much credit
is due Quamenoka by whose word they come this year to his brothers on
the Assiniboine.”

The chief paused impressively and raised his glance to the factor's
face.

McElroy nodded.

“Greatly does the heart of thy brother rejoice at such word, and a
present over and above that meant for him shall be given Quamenoka. Let
the talk go on. We listen.”

But before the chief could speak again, Edmonton Ridgar had broken
silence:

“Negansahima is chief of that tribe and my Indian father, he having
adopted me with all ceremony once when I sojourned a year among them.
The sight of him will gladden my spirit.”

Swift surprise spread on the factor's face, but he did not speak. There
was much in the checkered life of his friend that had not been set
before him, and each revelation was full to the brim of romance,
of daring, and of that excitement which attends a life spent in the
wilderness.

The Indian nodded and went on:

“And last of the news of forest and lake and river is word of the
meeting of canoes, the half of one-ten, laden with goods and going up
the river, which passed but few suns back. A sun-man sat in the first,
beautiful of face and with hair like light, who strove to barter. But
the Assiniboines come to their brothers. They heeded not his words,
though they were sweet with promise. I have spoken.”

The chief fell silent, for the year had been told, and McElroy
spoke presently of his joy at their presence, their words, and their
friendship, as was the custom of the H. B. Company's factors on such
occasions; and Ridgar rose from the council to bid a young clerk, one
Gifford, bring forth the presents for the guests,--a coat with coarse
white lace and lining of vermilion, a hat of felt and a sash of many
colours for Quamenoka, and lesser glories for his four headmen. These
presented with due formality, and actually donned by the recipients
without loss of time, the ceremony of the opening council was over, save
for the triumphal march of the potentate, accompanied by McElroy and
Ridgar, back to the camp on the river bank.

As they passed out the factory door, they brushed by Maren Le Moyne,
where she had drawn aside, still wistfully watching the comers from the
wilderness.

The young factor's eyes went to her face and for a moment held her
glance.

Instantly, with that deep look, the girl's hand shot forth and touched
his arm, a light touch with the deftness of strength held in abeyance,
and McElroy felt his flesh tingle beneath it.

“M'sieu,” she said, “where do they come from, how far in the west?”

“Not far, Ma'amselle,--only from the Lower Saskatchewan. The
Assiniboines are our nearest tribe, living along the country from the
Hare Hills to the parting of the twin rivers above the Qui Appelle. Hold
they interest for you?”

“Nay,” she said, shaking her black head, “not if they come not far,
other than that excited by their strangeness. I thank you.”

She drew back, and McElroy, perforce, followed his way to the
encampment, but he thought not this time of the red flower.

Only within him was roused that same desire which had prompted De
Courtenay to snatch the bloom from the stockade wall,--a longing to
give her something, to offer homage to this tall young woman with the
wondrous face of beauty and wistful strength. Since she was but a child
had men who looked upon her felt this same longing, this stirring of the
worshipper within. But few had dared the wall of quietness about her;
therefore, she had remained apart. Only Prix Laroux of all those who had
seen her grow into her magnificent womanhood at Grand Portage had come
to her with his gift of faith and tied himself to hand for life, and he
came not with the love of man but rather as one who follows a goddess.
Yet it was that aching desire to serve her which sent him.

And now it gripped the young factor of Fort de Seviere and he looked
among the Assiniboines for a gift.

Here a squaw held forth to him a garment that took his eye at once.

Of doeskin it was, soft and white as a lady's hand, and cut after the
fashion of the Indian woman's dress, in a single piece from throat to
ankle, the sleeves straight from the shoulder, and at edge and seam,
sewed with thorn and sinew, rippled and fluttered a heavy fringe the
length of a man's hand.

Across the breast there gleamed and glittered a solid plastron of the
beadwork so justly famed for its beauty of colour and design, which
came from the hands of none save the women of this tribe, and at hem and
elbow, above the dangling fringe, there ran a heavy band of it. Above
the hips there hung a belt made of the brilliant stained quills of the
porcupine.

The factor took the beautiful thing in his hands, and the purpose in his
mind crystallised.

In a swift moment he had bargained with the silent woman for a price
that astonished her and was back within the post, walking hurriedly
toward the cabin of the Baptistes.

At the door Marie met him, her bright eyes sparkling with the honour of
this visit of him who was the Law, the Head of De Seviere, and at her
eager greeting the first abating of the flush within took hold upon him.

He stood like a boy, the gorgeous garment hanging in his hand and the
word on his lips forgotten.

“Madame,” he stammered, “I would--” and got no further.

Sudden embarrassment took him and he grew angry with himself.

What could he say, how dared he do what he had done?

He could have thrown the white garment into the river in his sudden
vexation. Factor of the post, he had made of himself a stammering youth,
all for sake of the compelling beauty of a woman's eyes.

But at that moment, while Marie stood blankly on the sill holding to the
doorside and the silence grew unbearable, there was a step within the
cabin and Maren Le Moyne came from the inner room.

In one moment, so keen was the perception of her, she had seen the red
blood in McElroy's face, the wonder on Marie's, and she, too, stood in
the open door.

“Ah, M'sieu!” she said quickly, “do some of them, by chance, come from
the west?”

The tone of her deep voice broke the spell, so subtly natural was it,
and McElroy found his tongue.

“No, Ma'amselle,” he smiled, the ease coming back to his blue eyes, “but
I have found something very beautiful among them which I wish you to
have. It is more beautiful than a red flower.”

He held up to her the doeskin garment and his eyes were very anxious.

For a moment Maren stared as she had stared at De Courtenay and a
curious expression of perplexity spread on her face.

Truly men were different here in this wilderness from those who lived at
the Grand Portage, and for a moment she drew herself up and the straight
brows began to frown. But as she had felt the whimsical charm of De
Courtenay, so now she felt the eagerness, the taut anxiety of this man,
and she noticed that there was no smile on his face as she hesitated.

Moreover, Marie was watching, sharp as a little hawk.

“Why, M'sieu,” she said, and there was a baffling note to the voice this
time, “why,--you wish me to have this?”

“Yes, Ma'amselle,” said McElroy simply.

The girl stooped and took it from him, and for a moment her hand lay
against his palm, a smooth warm hand.

“And you wish me to wear it?” she asked.

“If it shall please you.”

“Then it shall please me,” she said quite easily, “and I thank you.”

McElroy turned away and walked back to the factory, and all the way he
did not know what he had done. It had been an impulse, and he had rushed
to its fulfilling without a thought. Had he bungled in giving her a
garment where De Courtenay had played on a wind-harp in giving her a
little red flower?

He was hot and cold alternately, and the memory of that momentary frown
came turn and turn with that of the gentle manner in which she had
reached down for the lifted gift.

And Maren Le Moyne?

Within the cabin she had turned to that portion which was her own, the
while Marie's sharp eyes followed her with questions that were ripe on
her tongue.

“Maren,” she cried, as the girl passed the inner door, unable to longer
hold herself, “know you the factor well?”

But Maren only shook her head and closed the slab door between.

Once alone she laid the gift on the bed, covered with a patchwork quilt
made from the worn garments that had seen the long trail, and stood
bending above, looking closely at each beauty of colour, of softness and
design.

She spread the straight sleeves apart, smoothing out the dangling
fringe, and her hand lingered with a strange gentleness a-down the
glowing plastron of bright beads.

This was the first gift a man had ever given her, other than De
Courtenay's red flower, and somehow it pleased her vastly.

She fell to thinking of the factor, of his open face, his light head
forever tilted back with the square chin lifted, of the mouth above and
of the eyes, clear as the new day and anxious as a child's the while she
halted above his offering, and unconsciously she began within her mind
to compare him with all other men she had ever known.

There was Prix Laroux. Not like. Also Jean Folliere and Anthon Brisbee
of Grand Portage, who came to the wilderness each year. Neither were
they like this man, nor Cif and Pierre Bordoux, nor Franz LeClede,
nor yet her brother Henri. These she knew and they were of a different
pattern.

Also there was that venturer of the great beauty and the silken curls
who had spoken so prettily. With all his grace, he was unlike this
strong young man whose tongue faltered and whose eyes were anxious.

Verily, for the first time; this maid of the wilderness was thinking of
men.

And it was because he had seemed so ill-beset that she had taken the
gift so readily.

She would not have him stumble longer under the sharp eyes of Marie.

And then thought of him faded from her mind and she fell to
contemplation of the doeskin garment again. Things of its like she had
seen at Grand Portage, but nothing of its great beauty, and for the
first time she gave thought to self-adornment. She was strong, this
woman, and given to serious dreams, and the small things of womanhood
had left her wide apart in a land of her own wherein there were only
visions of afar country, of travel and of conquest, and perhaps of a
man, old and rugged and kindly, who had followed the long trail, and
this small new thought lodged wonderingly in her mind.

For the first time she was conscious of the plainness of the garment
that folded her form, and she held up her arms and looked at them, brown
beneath the up-rolled sleeves.

Yes, some day she would put it on, this gorgeous thing of white fringe
and sparkling colour, because she had told that man she would.

Unlike most women, she did not hold it up to her, pointing a foot
beneath its pretty edge, gathering it into her waist, trying its effect.
She was content to run a hand along its length, to feel the caress of
its softness.

Yet even as she touched it she thought of the pretty creature which had
worn it first, the slim-legged doe bounding in the forest depth, and a
little sigh lifted her breast.

But this had been the quick and merciful death of the bullet, the
legitimate death. That she could understand.

More quick and merciful than that which would come in the natural life
of the forest. Therefore this pelt held no such repugnance as those
stacked on the river bank.

Suddenly, as she bent above the bed, she felt the presence of another,
the peculiar power of eyes, upon her, and, turning quickly, she saw a
black head, black as her own and running with curls, that dipped from
the window.

There was no little head in all the post like that save one, and
it belonged to little Francette, the pretty maid who had run by the
factor's side that day of the meeting of Bois DesCaut by the river. With
the drop of that head from the sill there passed over Maren a strange
feeling, a prescience of evil, a thrill of fear in a heart that had
never known fear.

She left the tiny room with the gift of the factor still outspread, and
joined Marie in the outer space, where yawned a wide fireplace with its
dogs on the hearth, its swinging crane made from a rod of iron, its bed
and its hand-made table.

Here had come Anon Bordoux and Mora Le-Clede, drawn by the sight of the
factor at the Baptistes' door, their tongues flying in eager question.

“--of such gorgeousness,” Marie was saying, “such softness of white
doeskin, such wealth of the beading--”

“Marie,” said Maren sharply, “is there naught to do save gossip?”

Anon and Mora fell into confused silence, the habit of the trail where
this girl's word had been the law falling upon them, but Marie, saucy
and not to be daunted, was not so easily hushed.

“Is it not true,” she cried, “that the factor brought it but now to the
door in plain sight of all?”

Whereon Maren passed, out the open door and the tongues began again,
more carefully.

In the distance there flashed a crimson skirt at whose beaded edge there
hung a great grey dog, his heavy head waist-high to the little maid who
wore it.



CHAPTER VIII FIRST DAWN

Throughout the week that followed Fort de Seviere was gay with the
bustle of trading. Packs of furs went up the main way and loads of
merchandise went down, carried on the backs of the braves, guns and
blankets and many a foot of Spencer's Twist at one beaver a foot, powder
and balls in buckskin bags, and all the things of heart's desire that
had brought the Assiniboines from the forks of the Saskatchewan.

Kept close to the factory by the bartering, McElroy and Ridgar and the
two clerks hardly saw the blue spring sky, nor caught a breath of the
scented air of the spring. Within the forest the Saskatoon was blooming
and the blueberry bushes were tossing soft heads of foam, while many a
tree of the big woods gave forth a breath of spice. It came in at the
door and the young factor raised his head many times a day to drink
its sweetness in a sort of wistfulness. At dusk he stood on the sill,
released from the trade, and looked over his settlement as was his
habit, and ever his eyes strayed to that new cabin at the far end, of
the northern row.

What was she thinking, that dark-browed girl with the deep eyes that
changed as the waters of a lake with each breath of wind, of him and the
blundering gift he had carried to her door? What had she done with it,
and would he ever see it clinging to those splendid shoulders, falling
over the rounded breast?

A feeling of warmth grew at his heart each day with thought of her, and
when he saw her swinging down toward the well he felt the blood leap in
his veins. The very shine of the sun was different when it struck the
tight black braids wrapped round her head.

Verily the little kingdom had brought forth its Princess.

And with her coming there was one heart that burned hot with passion,
that fashioned itself after the form of hatred, for little Francette had
seen, first a glow in a man's eyes and then a gift in his hand, and she
fingered a small, flat blade that hung in her sash with one hand, the
while the other strayed on the head of Loup. Dark was the fire that
played in her pretty eyes, heavy the anguish that rode her breast.

She hated the memory of that white garment spread out on Maren Le
Moyne's bed.

“Tessa,” she said one day, sidling up to that Tessa Bibye who had cast a
taunt in her teeth, “know you the charm which that doctress of the Crees
gave to Marci Varendree when she sickened for love of that half-breed,
Tohi Stannard?”

“Oho!” cried Tessa gleefully, “a man again! Who lacks one now,
Francette?”

“Nay,” said Francette, “but I know of one who sickens inwardly and I
would give her the charm.”

“Go into the flats of the Beaver House after Marci and her Indian,
whither they went,” Tessa laughed. “I know not the charm. But it was
good, for she got him, and went to the wilds with him. Follow and learn,
Francette.”

But Francette, with a gesture of disgust, turned away.

The warm spring days passed in a riot of song from the depths outside
the post, the Assiniboine rippled and whispered along its shores and
over the illimitable stretches of the wilderness there hung the very
spirit of the mating-time.

Within the stockade, mothers sat in the doors crooning to the babes that
clutched at the sunbeams, dogs slept in the cool shadows of the cabins,
and here and there a youth sang a snatch of a love song.

“Verily, Marie, it is good to be here,” sighed Micene Bordoux, sitting
on her sill with her capable arms folded on her knees, and her eyes,
cool and sane and tolerant, roving over the settlement lolling so
quietly in the sun. “After the trail the rest is good, and yet I will
be eager long before the year has passed to follow Maren,--may Mary give
her grace!--into that wilderness which so draws at her heartstrings.”

“Oh, Micene!” cried Marie, a trifle vexed, “if only she might forget her
dreams! What is it like, the heart of a maid, that turns from thought of
love to that of these wild lands, to the mystery of the Whispering Hills
that lie, the good God knows where, in that dim and untracked West! I
would that Maren might love! Then would we have peace and stop forever
at this pleasant place.”

Good Micene, with her brave heart and her whole-souled sense, smiled at
Marie.

“Love,” she said,--“and think you THAT could turn that exalted spirit
from its quest? Still the stir of conquest within her bosom, hush the
call of that glorious country which we know from rumor, and plain
hearsay lies at the heart of the Athabasca?

“Little do you know Maren, Marie, though the same mother gave you birth.
There is naught that could turn the maid, and I love her for it. It is
that undaunted faith, that steadfast purpose, that white fire in her
face which holds at her heels the whole of us, that turns to her the
faces of our men, as those legions of France turned to the Holy Maid.
Love? She would turn not for it if she could not take it with her.”

Micene looked off across the cabins, and there was a warm light in her
eyes.

“Nay, Marie,” she said, “make ready for the trail the coming spring, for
we will surely go.”

It was this day, golden and sweet with little winds that wafted from
the blossom-laden woods, that Maren Le Moyne, drawn by the dusky depths,
passed, out the stockade gate, traversed slowly the length of the
Indian camp, stopping here and there to hold out a hand to a frightened
pappoose peeking from behind its mother's fringed leggings, to watch
a moment at the cooking fires, to smile at a slim young boy brave in a
checkered shirt, and entered the forest.

From the door of the factory McElroy saw her go and the call of the
spring suddenly became unbearable.

With a word to Ridgar he stepped off the long log step and deliberately
followed.

The Irish blood within him lifted his head and sent his heart
a-bounding, while the half-holy mysticism that came from the Scottish
hills drew his glance upward to the blue sky arching above.

A tumult surged in his breast and every pulse in his body leaped at
thought of speech with her, and yet again a diffidence fell upon him
that set him trembling.

As the conqueror he went, pushing toward victory, yet humble in his
ambition.

He felt a mist in his eyes as he entered the high arched aisles, cool
beneath their canopy of young green, and he looked eagerly here and
there for sight of a tall form, upright, easy, plain in its dark garb.

Along the river bank he went where he saw a footprint in the soft loam,
and presently it turned deeper into the great woods and he swung forward
into those depths whose sweetness had called him subtly for these many
days.

She was a strong traveller, that straight young creature of the open
ways, and a full hour went swiftly before he caught the sight he wanted.

At sight of her he halted and stood a moment in hushed joy, looking with
eyes that knew their glory, for with every passing second Anders McElroy
was learning that nowhere in all the world, as had said that flaming
youth Marc Dupre, was there another woman like this Maren Le Moyne.

She stood in a little glade, cool, high-canopied, where the sunlight
came in little spots to play over the soft carpet of the pale forest
grass thick-starred with frail white flowers, and her back was to a tree
that towered to heaven in its height. At her sides her brown arms hung,
palms out in an utter abandon of pleasure, while her lifted face, with
its closed eyes, communed with the very Spirit of the Wild. Like some
priestess she was, and McElroy felt an odd sensation of unworthiness
sweep over him as he stood silent, his sober blue eyes on the beauty of
her face. He cast swiftly back across his life. Was there anything there
which might forbid him now, when he would go forward to so pure a thing
as this maid, dreaming her dreams of prowess in the wilderness?

Nay, he saw no unworthy deed, nothing to spoil the page of a commonplace
life spent at his old father's side across the sea, nothing of the so
common evils of the settlement. Within him there was that which thanked
its Maker unashamed that he had kept himself from one or two temptations
which had beset him in these stirring years of service on the fringes of
the great country spreading from the bay.

With that thought he went forward, and Maren did not hear his step on
the soft grass, so far was she on her well-worn trail of dreams, until
he stood near and the feeling of a presence finally brought back the
wandering soul.

Then she opened her eyes and they fell full upon the factor, his light
head bared to the dancing sun-spots, his blue eyes sober and touched
again with that anxiety which had compelled her to take his gift.

There was no sudden start of fear, no little startled breath, for this
woman was calm as the dreaming woods and as serene.

“Bon jour, M'sieu,” she said, and at sound of her voice, so deep and
full of those sliding minors, McElroy felt her power sweep over him in a
tumultuous flood.

“Ma'amselle,” he said, “Ma'amselle!”

And in the next moment stopped, for the words of love were on his tongue
and the wide dark eyes were looking at him wonderingly.

“No longer could I withstand the call of the springtime and the woods,”
 he finished falteringly; “the trading-room and the bargain were grown
hateful to me in these warm days with the scent of flower and leaf and
heated mould coming in at the door and bidding me come. I left my post,
a traitor, Ma'amselle, betrayed by the forest. Too weak am I for courage
when the big woods call.”

Maren looked at him and the light grew up in her eyes, that little flame
that flickered and leaped and gave so baffling a charm to her beauty.

“Ah!” she said softly; “you love it too, the great wilderness?”

“Aye, most truly.”

“And you can hear the whisper of the far countries, the ripple of
distant streams, the wind in the pines that have never sheltered a white
man? You know these things, M'sieu?”

She leaned forward from the great smooth-barked tree and looked at him
eagerly.

“They are what brought me over seas,” he said quietly, “what sent me to
De Seviere, what hold me to the tribes that come each year to my doors.”

Maren's lips were parted, the fire of her passion in her flaming face.
“Then you know why I come to the woods, why I grieve that the spring
is passing, why I can scarcely hold my soul in patience through this
delay!”

With the suddenness of her words her breath had leaped to a heaving
tumult, the wide eyes, so calm, so cool, had filled first with fire and
then with a mist. That clouded them like tears.

“Oh, M'sieu!” she cried tensely; “know you of that country which lies
far to the west and which the Indians call the Land of the Whispering
Hills?”

“Aye. It lies circling a great lake, blue as the summer skies, its
waters forever rippled by the winds of the west which sing in the grassy
vales and over the rounded knolls that stud the region,--a land of
waving trees, of high coolness, or rich valleys thick with rank grasses
and abounding with the pelt animals. It is the country of the Athabasca
and from it came last year a band of the Chippewas heavily laden with
furs. They told fine tales of its beauty. It is for that land you are
bound?”

“For that land, M'sieu,” said Maren Le Moyne, and her lips trembled;
“for that virgin goddess of the dreams of years! I have seen its hills,
its waving grass, wind-blown, its leaping streams,--I have breathed
the sweet air of its forests and gazed on its beauties since my early
childhood, in dreams, always in dreams, M'sieu, until I could bear the
strain no longer. And now, when it beckons almost within my reach, when
its very breath seems in my nostrils, I must stop for a year's space!
You know, M'sieu,--you comprehend?”

She leaned forward looking earnestly into McElroy's eyes, and a surge
of painful ecstasy shot to the man's heart, so near she seemed in the
suddenly created sympathy of the moment, so near and gracious, so strong
in her pure passion, so infinitely sweet.

“I know,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his ears; “I know
every pulse of your heart, Ma'amselle, every longing of your spirit,
every pure thought of your mind,--for these many days I have trembled to
every vibration that has touched or thrilled you. Oh, Ma'amselle!”

With the surge of that overwhelming thing within him the young man had
forgot all things,--that this girl was near a stranger, that he had
quaked at his temerity of the gift, forgot all but that she leaned
toward him with the mist in her wide eyes, and he strode forward the
step between them, his arms reaching out instinctively to enfold her.

With the swiftness of the impulse he swept her into them until the eager
face lay on his breast, the smooth black braids pressing his lips with
their satiny folds.

For one intoxicating moment he held her, as the primal man takes and
holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would
defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in
golden billows high above his head.

Then from the depths there came a cry that cleared his whirling brain,
a very embodiment of startled amaze, of indefinable horror, of mixed
intonations.

“M'sieu!”

Maren Le Moyne wrenched herself free and lifted her face to look at him.

It was a warring field.

Upon it lay a great astonishment, a wonder, and a newness. Behind these
there came, creeping swiftly with each moment of her startled gaze, an
odd excitement that mounted with each panting breath that left his lips,
for it was from him that it took its life. Her red mouth dropped apart,
showing the gleam of the white teeth between. She looked like a child
rudely shaken from its sleep, startled, perhaps vaguely frightened at
the strange shapes of familiar things distorted by the vision not yet
adjusted.

“M'sieu!” she stammered; “M'sieu!”

And with her voice McElroy felt the arrested blood rush back to his
heart again, for it held no anger. Instead it was full of that startled
wonder, and it was as gold to him.

“Maren,” he said, the emotion choking him; “Maren--” and with that new
courage he put both hands on her shoulders and drew her near, looking
down into the eyes so near on a level with his own.

Deliberately, slowly, that she might fully catch the meaning of what he
was about to do, he drooped his lips until they rested square on the red
mouth.

This was the thing he had left the factory for, this was what had drawn
him, unconsciously perhaps, to the path along the river's bank, that had
made him follow deliberately the light trail of the girl into the woods.

“Maren,” he said, so thrilled that his words shook, “from this day forth
you are mine. Mine only and against the whole world. I have taken you
and you are mine.”

He was full of his glory, dominating the dark eyes that had never left
his own, and his soul was big within him. He was still very much a boy,
this young factor, and the crowning moment of life had him in his grip.

He knew no fear, no thought of her next word or action touched him until
she, as deliberately as he had acted, reached up and took both his hands
from her shoulders.

“Adieu, M'sieu,” said Maren Le Moyne quietly, the excitement of that
breathed “M'sieu! M'sieu!” quite lost in the calmness that was her usual
characteristic, and turning she walked away down the glen toward the
river bank, the little spots of sun dancing on her black head like a
leopard's gold as she passed in the checkered shade, and not once did
she turn her head to see the factor of De Seviere standing where she had
left him beside the forest giant.



CHAPTER IX GOLD FIRE

If that time in the tuneful spring was crowded full to the brim of
emotions scarce bearable to McElroy, how much more wonderful was it
to Maren Le Moyne, for the first time in her life trembling in all her
being from the touch of a man's lips?

To the outward world there was no sign of the tumult within her as she
came and went about the business of the new cabin by the stockade wall,
but in her virgin heart there stirred strange new things that filled her
calm eyes with wonder.

In the seclusion of the little room to the east she spread out on the
patchwork quilt the Indian garment and looked at it with a new meaning.

Never before in her life had she thought of a man's eyes as she thought
of McElroy's, thrilling to the very tips of her fingers at memory of the
blue fire in them, and never before had she been conscious of anything
as she was conscious of the flesh on her shoulders where his hands had
rested, her lips sealed under the warm caress of his. Verily, there was
nowhere another such man as this one who knew the longing of the wild as
did she, whose heart responded to the same call of the great wilderness.

Night and day she thought of him, and the memory of that day in the
forest glade haunted her like a golden melody newly heard.

Yet something within her held her back from his sight, kept her eyes
from that part of the small settlement where stood the factory with its
wide doorway. She could not bear to look upon him yet in the newness of
this awakening.

And McElroy, deep in the work of the trading, was eaten by a thousand
qualms and torments. All those doubts that beset lovers tore at his
heart and made of his days a nightmare.

With the cooling of his exalted intoxication what time the touch of the
girl's young body had fired him with all confidence, came a thousand
condemnations for his blundering haste, his stupid boasting of conquest.

To what depths of scorn might he not now be fallen in the mind of such
a girl as Maren Le Moyne with her calm judgment; how far might he not be
from the object of his longing!

And the fact that he could catch no sight of her, no matter how often he
stepped near the door nor how diligently he sought for a glimpse of the
shining braids and plain garment among the women at the well, but added
fuel to the fire that scorched him.

But the times were getting very busy at Fort de Seviere. Before the
Assiniboines were ready to depart back up the waterways down which they
had come, their canoes laden with the wealth of the coming season, other
flotillas were on the little waves of the river, other chiefs made their
entrance up the main way of the post, and the goods of the Hudson's Bay
Company went out in a stream as the priceless pelts came in.

“Lad,” said Edmonton Ridgar with that easy probing of the well-known
friend, “there is something eating at your mind these days. The trade
goes differently from that of last year. It is not so all-absorbing. I
fear me that the Nor'westers, with their plundering and their tales of
deportation, have entered a wedge of worry.”

“'Tis not of the Nor'westers I give a thought, Ridgar,” he smiled,
accepting the veiled raillery, “for you well know that we of the Company
are above them, though it was but yesterday that an Indian brought word
of a trapper at Isle a La Crosse being maltreated in the woods by a
couple of their sneaking cutthroats and two packs of beaver taken from
him for which they laughingly offered him in payment a bundle of mangy
skins cast out from the summer's pickings. 'Twas Peter Brins and I'll
wager that those two are marked for a long reckoning when the tables
turn. And by the same Indian I hear that the young blade from Montreal
with his light-haired brigade who stumbled upon us a while back, has
reached his post on the Saskatchewan and has taken hold with a high
hand, doing his utmost to intercept our Indians and turn the tide of
the Company's furs into the trading-rooms of the Nor'westers. I think
it will be a bootless process, for we hold our people with the hand of
surety.”

“Aye, but what of the Nakonkirhirinons, making their initial trip by
way of Rapid River and Deer Lake, coming through the country of the
Saskatchewan and held by no bond of loyalty? I see trouble ahead if this
young De Courtenay gets wind of their coming, for they will be rich in
peltry and they are a warlike tribe.”

“But they are to celebrate the Peace Dance in the lodges of the
Assiniboines. Surely they will come straight to their friends before
trusting their trade to any.”

Edmonton Ridgar shook his head.

“Hey fear nothing, these Nakonkirhirinons, and would as soon enter trade
with one as another, having come for trade, if the values were above
those at York and Churchill. I hope they swing eastward to Winipigoos
and thus miss that young hot-brain on the Saskatchewan.”

“By the way, Ridgar, Pierre Garcon says that Bois DesCaut is at Seven
Isles on the Qui Appelle with Henderson. Since telling that wanton lie
to the Nor'wester he has not had enough to show his face here. A bad lot
Bois, and one to be watched for tricks.”

“Aye, a bad lot, but salted with a prudence that savours of cowardice.
His tricks are all turncoats that slip danger like an old garment.”

But for all Ridgar's hope, at that very moment the great tribe from the
far north country, even twelve leagues beyond the Oujuragatchousibi,
was swinging down through the wilderness bound for the lodges of the
Assiniboines, burdened with a wealth of peltry to make a trader's eyes
stand out and clad in all the glory of the visiting tribes, and it was
heading straight for the country of the Saskatchewan.

Towering head-dresses swept above their moving columns, pomp and
ceremony showed in the panoply of carved spear-heads, feathered shafts,
and slung bows of the white ash which decked them on their peaceful
mission, while underneath fringed garments of buckskin, stained and
beaded with porcupine quills, were bands and stripes of war-paint. They
were ready for anything that might happen in this unknown country into
which they journeyed at the word of their friends the Assiniboines,
given at the buffalo hunt the fall before, above the Great Slave Lake.

Never before had the Nakonkirhirinons been so far in the south.

And long before they reached Deer Lake word had been brought to that new
venturer in his post on the Saskatchewan, Alfred de Courtenay, and he
was keenly alert.

About the same time a half-breed trapper came into Fort de Seviere, loud
in his lamentations, and sought McElroy.

From the flats south of the Capot River, where he had wintered amid a
band of Blackfoot Indians, a rare thing for a white man, he had come
laden with rich furs from that unopened country, bound for De Seviere,
and on the banks of the Qui Appelle three men had come upon him who had
shared his lonely campfire. Rollicking fellows they were, brawny of form
and light of head, and they had carried much liquor in flasks in their
leg-straps, which liquor flowed freely amid songs and fireglow.

In the morning when he awoke late with, Mon Dieu! such a head! there
were no three men, who had vanished like dreams of the liquor, likewise
there was no well-strapped pack of fat winter beaver!

The man, a French half-breed, whimpered and cursed in impotent wrath,
and showed McElroy one of the flasks that had been in the leg-straps of
his visitors. It was covered with a fine light wicker weave, of the same
pattern as that jug which De Courtenay had left at the post gate that
morning in early spring.

“Ridgar,” said the factor, showing the thing to him, “our friend from
Montreal is taking a high hand with the country. The freedom of the wild
has gone to his head.”

Indeed it seemed as though that were true, for the tales of the reckless
doings of that post of the Nor'westers on the Saskatchewan over which
De Courtenay presided became more frequent and always they were
characterised by a wildness and folly that were only exceeded by their
daring.

The young adventurer had already made a headlong sally into the fringes
of that country which came too near his Tom-Thumb garrison, and along
which roving bands of the sullen Blackfeet trailed with a watching eye
on the white men at the forts, and returned without two of those long
curls of which he was so proud, a spear-head pinning them in the trunk
of a tree which happened to form a convenient background.

To add to the small resentment against him which began to rankle in
McElroy's heart, and which had never really left it since that evening
in De Seviere when Maren Le Moyne had passed behind the cabin of the
Savilles with some voyageur's tot on her shoulder and the handsome
gallant from Montreal had lost his manners staring, one day in this same
week a Bois-Brules came to the post gates and asked for one Maren Le
Moyne.

He stood without and stubbornly refused to give his message, and at last
McElroy himself went to the cabin of the Baptistes.

He had not seen the girl since that day in the forest, and his heart
beat to suffocation as he neared the open door and caught the sound of
her voice singing a French love song. He stopped on the step, and for
a moment his glance took in the interior: By a window to the north she
stood at a table, its wooden surface soft and white as doeskin from
water and stone, and prepared the meal for ash-cakes, her sleeves, as
usual, rolled to her shoulder and the collar of her dress open at the
throat.

To the young factor's eyes she was a sight that weakened the knees
beneath him and set him quaking with a new fear. He dared not speak and
bring her gaze upon him, the memory of his boastful words in the forest
was too poignant.

But it needed not speech. Had he but known the wonder that had lived
within her all these days he would have understood the force that
presently stopped the song on her lips, as if her soul listened
unconsciously for tangible knowledge of the presence it already felt
near, that slowed her nimble brown fingers in the pan, that presently
lifted her head and turned her face to him.

Instantly a warm flush leaped up to the dark cheeks, and McElroy felt
its answer in his own.

“Ma'amselle,” he stammered, far from that glib “Maren” of the glade,
“there is one at the gate who demands speech of you.”

The words were commonplace enough and the girl did not get their import
for the intensity of her gaze into the eyes whose blue fire had set her
first wondering and then a-thrill with these strange emotions.

“Eh, M'sieu?” she smiled, and McElroy, revived through all his being
with that smile, repeated his message.

She took her hands from the yellow meal and dusted them on a hempen
towel, and was ready to go forth beside him.

That short walk to the stockade gate was silent with the silence of
shy new joy, and once the factor glanced sidewise at the drooped lashes
above the dusky cheeks.

“Had you expected any messenger, Ma'amselle?” he asked indifferently as
they neared the portal with its fringe of peeping women and saw beyond
them the tall figure of the Bois-Brule, his lank hair banded back by a
red kerchief.

“Nay, M'sieu,” replied the girl, and went forward to stand in the gate.

The messenger from the woods asked in good French if she were Maren Le
Moyne, and being answered in the affirmative, he took from his hunting
shirt a package wrapped in broad green leaves and placed it in her
hands.

The leaves were wilted with the heat of the man's body and came easily
off in her fingers, disclosing a small square box cunningly made from
birchbark and stained after the Indian fashion in brilliant colours. A
tiny lid was fastened with a thong of braided grass.

Wonderingly she slipped the little catch and lifted the cover.

Inside upon a bed of dampened moss there lay a wee red flower, the exact
counterpart of that one which Alfred de Courtenay had fastened in her
hair that morning by the well.

McElroy, at her shoulder, looked down upon it, and instantly the warmth
in his heart cooled.

When Maren looked up it was to find his eyes fixed on the messenger
whose tall figure swung away up the river's bank toward the north
forest, and they were coolly impersonal.

She was unversed in the ways of men where a maid is concerned, this
woman of the trail and portage, and she only knew vaguely that something
had gone wrong with sight of the little flower.

She stood, holding the box in her hand, among the women craning their
necks for a glimpse of the contents, and looked in open perplexity
at McElroy until a light laugh from the fringe behind her broke the
silence.

“A gift!” cried the little Francette, her childish voice full of a
concealed delight; “a gift from the forest; and where do such trinkets
come from save the lower branch of the Saskatchewan! It savours of our
pretty man of the long gold curls! Mon Dieu! The cavalier has made good
time!”

Whereat there was a stirring at the gate, and the peeping fringe drew
back while the factor turned on his heel and strode away toward the
factory, leaving the tall girl alone at the portal, holding her gift.

There was a devilish light in the dancing eyes of Francette as she
flirted away.

But Maren Le Moyne walked slowly back to the cabin, wondering.



CHAPTER X THE SASKATOON

It was at dusk of that same day that McElroy, as near sullen anger
as one of his temperament could be, sat alone on the log step of the
factory, his pipe unlighted in his lips and his moody eyes on the beaten
ground worn hard by the passing feet of moccasined Indians from the four
winds.

Edmonton Ridgar, with that keenness which gave him such tact, had shut
himself in the living-room, and the two clerks were off among the maids
at the cabins.

Once again McElroy had made himself ridiculous by that abrupt turning
away because of a small red flower sent a maid by a man he now knew to
be his foe and rival in all things of a man's life.

Down by the southern wall an old fiddle squeaked dolefully, and from
beyond the stockade came the drowsy call of a bird deep in the forest
depths.

On the river bank young Marc Dupre sang as he fumbled at a canoe
awaiting the morn when he was to set off up-stream for any word that he
might pick up of the coming of the Nakonkirhirinons. There was no moon
and the twilight had deepened softly, covering the post with a soft
mantle of dreams, when there was a step on the hard earth and the factor
turned sharply to behold a little figure in a red kirtle, its curly head
hanging a bit as if in shame, and at its side the shadowy form of the
great dog Loup.

“M'sieu,” said Francette timidly, and the tone was new to that audacious
slip of impudence; “M'sieu.”

“What is it, little one?” said McElroy gently, his own disgust of his
morning's quickness softening his voice that he might not again play the
hasty fool, and Francette crept nearer until she stood close to the log
step.

The small hands were twisting nervously and the little breast lifting
swiftly with an agitation entirely new to her.

Presently she seemed to find the voice that eluded her.

“Oh, M'sieu!” she cried at last, breaking out as if the words were thick
crowded in her throat; “a heavy burden has fallen upon me! Is it right,
M'sieu, for a maid to die for love of a man, waiting, waiting, waiting
for the look, the word that shall crown her bondage? Love lives all
round in the post save in the heart that is all the world to Francette!
Why should there be happiness everywhere but here?”

With a gesture pathetically dramatic the little maid threw her hands
across her heaving breast and gazed at McElroy with big eyes, starry in
the dusk.

Her emotion was genuine he could not help but see, even through his
astonishment, and he stared at her with awaking sympathy.

“Is there some one who is so much to you, little one?” he asked. “I
thought there wasn't a youth in the post--no, nor in any other this side
the Red River-who did not pay homage to France Moline's little daughter.
Who is of such poor taste? Tell me, and what I can do I will do to
remedy the evil.”

He was smiling at the little maid's pretty daring in coming straight to
the very head of De Seviere with her trouble, and he reached out a hand
to draw her down on the step beside him. There was never a woman in
distress who did not pull at the strings of his heart, and he longed to
soothe her, even while he smiled to himself at her childishness.

But Francette was not so childish, and he was one day to marvel at her
artless skill.

At the touch of his hand she came down, not upon the step beside him as
he meant, but upon her knees before him, with her two little hands upon
his knees and her face of elfin beauty upheld to him in the starlight.

“Oh, M'sieu, there is one who is so much,--oui, even more than all the
world, more than life itself,--more than heaven or hell, for whose sake
I would die a thousand deaths! One at whose feet I worship, scorning all
those youths of the settlement and the posts. See, M'sieu,” she leaned
forward so close that the fragrance of her curls blew into the man's
nostrils and he could see that the little face was pale with a passion
that caused him wonder; “see! Today came one from the forest bringing
love's message to that tall woman of Grand Portage,--the little red
flower in the birchbark case. It spoke its tale and she knew,”--subtle
Francette!--“she knew its meaning by the eye of love itself. So would I,
who have no words and am a woman, send my message by a flower.”

The hands on the factor's knees were trembling with a rigour that shook
the whole small form before him.

“See, M'sieu!” she cried, with the sudden sound of tears in the low
voice; “read the heart of the little Francette!”

She took from her bosom a fragile object and laid it in his palm, then
clasped her hands over her face and bowed until the little head with its
running curls was low to the log step.

McElroy strained his eyes to see what he held.

It was a dried spray of the blossoms of the saskatoon.

For a moment he sat in stupid wonder. Then swiftly, more by intuition
and that strange sense which recalls a previous happening by a touch, or
a smell, than by actual memory, he saw that golden morning when he had
stopped by the Molines' cabin and watched the great husky balance on his
shaky legs. He had twirled in his fingers the first little spray of
the saskatoon, brought in by Henri Corlier to show how the woods were
answering the call of the spring.

“Why,” he said, astounded beyond measure, “why, Francette,--little one,
what does this mean?”

But Francette had lost her tongue and there was no answer from the bowed
figure at his knees.

He put out a hand and laid it on her shoulder and it was shaken with
sobs,--the sobs of a woman who has cast her all on the throw of the die
and in a panic would have it back.

Off in the forest a night bird called to its mate and the squeaky fiddle
whined dolorously and a profound pity began to well in the factor's
heart. She was such a little maid, such a childish thing, a veritable
creature of the sunlight, like those great golden butterflies that
danced in the flowered glades of the woods, and she had brought her one
great gift to him unasked.

Some thought of Maren Le Moyne and of that reckless cavalier with his
curls and his red flowers crept into his voice and made it wondrously
tender with sympathy.

“Sh, little one,” he comforted, as he had comforted that day on the
river bank when she had wept over Loup; “come up and let us talk of
this.” He lifted her as one would lift a child and strove to raise the
weeping eyes from the shelter of her hands, but the small head drooped
toward him so near that it was but a step until it lay in the shelter
of his shoulder, and he was rocking a bit, unconsciously, as the sobbing
grew less pitiful.

“Sh-sh-little one,” he said gently; “sh--sh.”

Meanwhile Maren Le Moyne sat in the doorway of her sister's cabin with
her chin on her hands and stared into the night. Marie and Henri were at
the cabin of the Bordoux, laughing and chattering in the gay abandon of
youth. She could hear their snatches of songs, their quips and laughter
rising now and again in shrill gusts. Also the wailing fiddle seemed a
part of the warm night, and the bird that called in the forest.

All the little homely things of the post and the woods crept into her
heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be
looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other
dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where
appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young
factor with his anxious eyes. Strange new thrills raced hotly through
her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness. She tingled from head to
foot at the memory of that day in the glade, and for the first time in
her life she read the love-signs in a man. That change in his eyes when
he had looked upon De Courtenay's red flower was jealousy. With the
thought came a greater fulness of the unexplainable joy that had
flooded her all these days. Aye, verily, that red flower had caused him
pain,--him,--with his laughing blue eyes and his fair head tilted back
ever ready for mirth, with his tender mouth and his strong hands. The
very thought of that killed the joy of the other. If love was jealousy,
and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other.
With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was
upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door.
She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than
nothing to her, its giver less than it.

At that moment a figure came out of the dusk and stopped before her.

It was her leader, Prix Laroux, silent, a shadow of the shadows.

“Maren,” he said, in that deep confidence of trusted friends, “Maren, is
all well with you?”

“All is well, Prix,” said the girl, her voice tremulous with pleasure,
“most assuredly. Thought you aught was wrong?”

“Nay,--only I felt the desire to know.”

“Friend,” said Maren, reaching out a hand which the man took strongly in
both his own; “good, good friend! Ever you are at my back.”

“Where you may easily reach me when you will.”

“I know. 'Tis you alone have made possible the long trail. Ah! how long
until another spring?”

But, when Prix had lounged away into the dusk and the girl had stepped
into the soft dust of the roadway, she fell to wondering how it was that
mention of the year's wait brought no longer its impatience, its old
dissatisfaction.

She was thinking of this as she neared the factory, her light tread
muffled in the dust.

“Foolish Francette! What should I do with a gay little girl like you?
Play in the sunshine years yet, little one, and think not of the bonds
and cares of marriage. How could these little hands lift the heavy
kettles, wash the blankets, and do the thousand tasks of a household?
You are mistaken, child. It is not love you feel, but the changing
fancies of maidenhood. Play in the sun with Loup and wait for the real
prince. He will come some day with great beauty and you will give no
more thought to me. He must be young, little one, a youth of twenty; not
one like me, nearer the mark of another decade. It would not be fitting.
Youth to youth, and those of a riper age to each other.” He was thinking
of a tall form, full and round with womanhood, whose eyes held knowledge
of the earth, and yet, had he been able to define their charm, were
younger even than Francette's.

The little maid had ceased her weeping long since and the face on
McElroy's shoulder, turned out toward the night, was drawn and hard.
The black eyes were no longer starry with passion, but glittering with
failure. And the man, stupid and good of heart as are all men of his
type, congratulated himself that he had talked the nonsense out of her
little head.

Suddenly he felt the slender figure shiver in his arms and the curly
head brushed his cheek as she raised her face.

“Aye, M'sieu,” she whispered, “it is as you say, but only one thing
remains. Kiss me, M'sieu, and I go to--forget.”

The factor hesitated.

He felt again his one passionate avowal on the lips of his one woman.

This was against the grain.

“Please, M'sieu,” begged the childish voice, with a world of coaxing;
and, thinking to finish his gentle cure, he bent his head and kissed her
lightly on the cheek.

“And now--” he started to admonish, when she threw her arms about his
neck, stiffling the words in her garments.

At the corner of the factory Maren Le Moyne stood looking through the
twilight at the scene.

When Francette released him there were only they two and he had heard no
step nor seen the silent beholder.

When the little French maid slipped away with the husky she fingered the
carved toy of a knife in her sash and tossed her short curls in triumph.

Her failure had taken on a hue of victory.



CHAPTER XI LEAVEN AT WORK

“M'sieu,” said Marc Dupre, coming up the slope from the river, his
buckskins much tattered, showing a swift cross-country run, “I have news
of the great tribe. Like the forest leaves in fall in point of numbers
they are, and they wear a wealth of wampum and elk teeth, so much that
they are rich beyond any other tribe. Their young men are tall and heavy
of stature and wonderful in the casting of their great carven spears.
Also do they excel in the use of the bow. Warlike and suspicious,
scouting every inch of country before them, they come down by way of
Dear Lake,--and the young Nor'wester at Fort Brisac has already sent
forth his messengers to meet them.”

McElroy frowned.

Double anger swelled suddenly within him. In two ways had De Courtenay
crossed his plane at opposing angles. It was evidently war that the
adventurer wanted, the hot war of the two fur companies coupled to that
of man and man for a maid. He stood a while and thought. Then he turned
to Dupre.

“You have done well, Dupre,” he said shortly. “Get you to your cabin
and rest, for I may want your wit again. Only, on the way, send Pierre
Garqon to me.”

The young man touched his red toque, symbol of safety to all trappers
in a land where the universal law is “kill,” for no wild animal of the
woods bears a crimson head save that animal man who is the greatest
killer of all, and turned away. He was draggled and stained from a
forced march through forest and up-stream, over portage and rapid,
carrying his tiny birchbark craft on his head, snatching a short
sleep on a bed of moss, hurrying on that he might learn of the
Nakonkirhirinons travelling slowly down from that unknown land to the
far north, even many leagues beyond York factory on the shores of the
great bay.

As he went toward his own cabin he glanced swiftly at the open door of
the Baptistes. Always these days he glanced that way with a sick feeling
in the region of his heart. Who was he, Marc Dupre, trapper of the
big woods, that he should dare think so often of that woman from Grand
Portage, with her wondrous beauty and her tongue that could be like a
cold knife-blade or the petal of a lily for softness? And yet he was
conscious of a mighty change that had come over him with that day on the
flat rock by the stockade when she had talked to him of the trapping,--a
change like that which comes to one when he is so fortunate as to be in
distant Montreal and sits in the dusk of the great church there among
the saints and the incense.

There was no longer pleasure in flipping jests and love words with the
red-cheeked maids, and something had happened to the dashing spirit of
the youth. All through those long days in the forest, those short blue
nights under the velvet sky, one image had stood before him, calm,
smiling, quivering with that illusive light which held men's hearts.
Never a day that he could win forgetfulness of the face of Maren Le
Moyne, and now he glanced toward her doorway. It lay in the sunlight
without a foot upon its sill, and Marc sighed unconsciously. He was not
to see her, perhaps, to-day.

But suddenly, as he rounded a corner among the cabins, he came full
upon her, and his flippant tongue clove to the roof of his mouth without
speech.

She came toward him with a bread-pan in her hands and her eyes were cast
down. The heart in him ran to water at sight of her, and he stopped.

Once more thought of his unworthiness abased him.

Then she felt his presence and raised her eyes, and the young trapper
looked deep into them with that helplessness which draws the look of a
child. Deep he looked and long, and the woman looked back, and in that
moment there sprang into life the first thrill of that thing which was
to lead to the great crisis which she had predicted that day by the
stockade.

With it Marc Dupre found his tongue.

“Ma'amselle!” he cried sharply, “what is it? Mon Dieu! What is it?”
 For the dark eyes, with their light-behind-black-marble splendour, were
quenched and dazed and all knowledge seemed stricken from them. The look
of them cut to his very soul, quick and sensitive from the working
of the great change, made ready as a wind-harp by the silent days of
dreams, the nights of visions. To him alone was the devastation within
them apparent. He stretched out a timid hand and touched her sleeve.

“What is it, Ma'amselle?” he begged abjectly. “I would heal it with my
blood!”

Extravagant, impulsive, the boy was in deadly earnest, and Maren Le
Moyne was conscious of it as simply as that she lived.

Just as simply she acknowledged to him what she would have to none other
in De Seviere, that something had fallen from a clear sky.

“Nay,” she said, and the deep voice was lifeless, “I am beyond help.”

Dupre's fingers slipped, trembling, around her arm.

“But I am a stone to your foot, Ma'amselle,--always remember that. When
the way becomes too hard there shall be a stone to your foot. I ask no
better fate and you have said.”

The miserable eyes were not dead to everything. At his swift words they
glowed a moment.

“Aye,--I have said, and I thank God, M'sieu, for such friendship. I am
rich, indeed.”

“Oho! Marc Dupre does better at the lovemaking than at the trapping! His
account at the factory suffers from les amours!”

A childish voice broke in upon them, and Francette's impish face peeped
round the corner of the nearest cabin.

“Let it be, Marc Dupre,” as the youth dropped his and from Maren's arm.
“Ma'amselle does not object,--a trapper or a cavalier, all are fish to
Ma'amselle's net. Mon Dieu! If all were so attractive as Ma'amselle!”

The little maid sighed in exaggerated dolour.

Dupre flashed round on his moccasined heel and reached her in a stride.

“Aha! It is you, by all the saints!” he said beneath his breath, as he
took her none too gently by the shoulder. “I know your tricks.”

Aloud he said, “Francette, children should keep from where they are not
wanted. Get you back to your mother.”

“Children, you say, M'sieu Dupre? Is eighteen so far behind twenty-two?
Grow a beard on your cheek before you give yourself the airs of a
man. And, anyway, grown men of twice eighteen have been known to love
children of that age.”

It was a dagger thrust, and it found its mark even as the girl glanced
slily at her victim. Maren's full mouth twitched and she looked dully
away to the fort gate. Dupre gave Francette an ungallant push. “Begone!”
 he cried angrily; “you little cat!”

With a ringing laugh the maid danced away in the sunshine, and Dupre
faced Maren.

“It is that imp of le diable, Francette?” he asked. “What has she done
to you, Ma'amselle?”

But Maren shook her head.

“The maid is not to blame. She is but a child in spirit and what le bon
Dieu has seen fit to give her has gone to her head. That is all, save as
your quick eye has detected, M'sieu, I have received a heavy hurt.”

Suddenly, with that whimsical youthfulness of soul which glimmered at
times through her apparent strength, she looked at Dupre with a sort of
fright.

“Merci, M'sieu! For what reason does the good God let some things
befall?... But I have still a stone. Throughout I will remember that.”

In a moment she was gone, walking toward the cabin of Micene Bordoux,
and Marc Dupre went on his quest of Pierre, wondering and all a-tremble
with pity and thought of that promise.

Where Marc, with the revelation of adoration, had seen sharply, Micene
with her good sense felt vaguely that something was wrong with the
intrepid leader of the long trail.

“Maren,” she said this day, as she took the bread pan which had been
borrowed, “I fear there is something troubling you. Is there bad news
from Athabasca?”

Always there lay behind Maren's eagerness a fear, sleeping like a
hidden fawn but ever ready to quiver into life, a fear of news from
the Whispering Hills, news that should make the promise of the trail a
sudden void.

“Nay, Micene,” smiled Maren, “these latest Indians come from the south.”

“And all is well with the plans?”

The vague uneasiness was not stilled in Micene.

“All is well with the plans. There is not a year now.”

The girl looked straight in her friend's eyes without a trace of the
dazed misery which Marc Dupre had surprised in her own.

Micene smiled back, but that night she lay far into the dark hours
thinking of the subtle change in the maid of the trail. With a woman's
intuition she knew that the girl had lied, that all was not well with
her.

And one other there was of that small party of venturers housed in
the new cabins of De Seviere who knew vaguely that something had gone
wrong-Prix Laroux, the sturdy prow of that little vessel of progress of
which the girl was the beating heart, the unresting engine.

He had felt its coming even before it fell, that mighty shadow which
blotted out the heavens and the earth, for to Maren, once given, there
was no recalling the gift, and with that day in the glade she had lost
possession of her soul and body forever.

Dazed in all the regions of her being, enshadowed in every vista of hope
and scarce-tasted joy, she went quietly about the cabin, her mind a dark
space in which there flashed sudden, reiterated visions,--now McElroy's
blue eyes, anxious and eager as he held up the doeskin dress at the
door-sill, burning with fire and truth and passion in the glade in the
forest, again tender and diffident what time they walked together to the
gate to meet De Courtenay's messenger, and again it was that scene
at the factory steps that haunted her,--McElroy with his arms about
Francette Moline, the grey husky crouching in the twilight. Throughout
the whole sick tangle there went a twisting thread of wonder, of
striving for understanding. What was this thing which had come clutching
sweetly at her heart, which had stilled the very life in her with holy
mystery, and whose swift passing had left her benumbed within as some
old woman mumbling in the sun on a door-sill? Where was the glory of the
spring? What had come upon the face of the waters, that the light had
gone from them? What was this thing that the good God wished her to
learn, where was the lesson?

Given to reason and plain judgment of all things, the girl tried to
think out her problem, to fathom the meaning of this which had befallen
her, and to find if there was any good in it. But everywhere she looked
there was the laughing face of the factor with his sunburnt hair and his
blue eyes. The spring days were heavy as those steel-grey stretches that
pass for the days in winter.

Too dull for sharp pain, she went about in a sort of apathy.

For several days McElroy watched uneasily for her, hoping for a chance
meeting. He was anxious to speak about his boyish jealousy, to beg
forgiveness for that abrupt leaving at the gate. So close did she stay
at the cabin, however, that at last he was forced to go to her. It was
twilight again, soft, filled with the breath of the forest, vibrant with
the call of birds off in some marshy land to the south, and he found her
alone, sitting upon the step, staring into the gathering dusk, listening
to the laughter of the young married folk from the cabin next where
Marie and Henri were loudest.

A lump rose in his throat as he caught the outline of the braided head
bowed lower than he had ever seen it, saw the whole attitude of the
strong figure, every line relaxed as if in a great weariness.

“Maren,” he said, with the wonder of love in his voice, “Maren--my
maid!”

And he strode forward swiftly, stooped, and laid his hand on her
shoulder.

With a jerk the drooped head came up. She drew from his touch as if it
burned her.

“If you please, M'sieu,” she said coldly, “go away.”

McElroy sprang back.

“What? Go away! You wish that,--Ma'amselle?”

The tone more than the words drove out of him all daring of her sweet
name, took away in a flash all the personal.

“Of a surety,--go away.”

The factor stood a moment in amazed silence. Did the red flower mean so
much to her, then? Had she accepted its message? And yet he knew in his
heart that the look in her eyes, the smile on her lips had told their
own tale of awakening to his touch. What but the red flower in its
birchbark case had wrought the change?

He thought swiftly of De Courtenay's beauty, of his sparkling grace, his
braided blue coat, his wide hat, and the long golden curls sweeping his
shoulder. Truly a figure to turn a woman's head. But within him there
rose a tide of rage, blind vent of the hurt of love, that boded ill for
the dashing Nor'wester on the Saskatchewan.

Sick to the very bottom of his heart, he bowed ever so slightly to the
tense figure on the step and strode away in the shadows.

So! Thus ended his one love.

For this he had kept himself from the common lot of the factors in their
lonely posts; for this he had never looked with aught save friendly
compassion upon the maids of the settlements, the half breed girls of
the wilderness, the wild daughters of the forest.

Waiting for this one princess in his small kingdom, he had thrown
himself on the out-bearing tide of love only to be stranded on some
barren beach, to see her taken from him by some reckless courtier not
fit to touch a woman's hand!

Thus they turned apart, these two meant for each other from the
beginning, and in each love worked its will of pain.

Maren on the step stared dry-eyed into the night, uncomprehending,
unrebelling, and McElroy strode ahead, blind with sudden anguish, scarce
knowing which way his steps tended.

And, like a ghoul behind a stone, a small dark face peeped keenly from a
corner.

Francette was watching her leaven work.



CHAPTER XII THE NAKONKIRHIRINONS

In the week that followed the waters of the Assiniboine grew black with
myriads of canoes. Like the leaves in fall, truly, they came drifting
out of the forest, long slim craft, made with a wondrous cunning of
birchbark peeled from the tree in one piece, fitted to frames of ash
fragile as cockleshell and strong as steel under the practised hand, and
smeared in every crinkle and crease and crevasse with the resinous gum
of the pine tree. By scores and hundreds and battalions, it seemed to
the traders at De Seviere, they poured out of the wilderness, choking
the river with their numbers, spilling their contents on the slope under
the bastioned walls until a camp was made so vast that it stretched into
the forest on each side the clearing of the post and even extended to
the marsh at the south.

Half-naked braves stalked in countless numbers among the tepees that
went rapidly up, tall fellows, mighty of build and fearless of carriage
and of eagle eye, aloof, suspicious, watching the fort, guarding the
rich piles of peltry and exchanging a word with none.

These were the great Nakonkirhirinons from that limitless region of the
Pays Ten d'en Haut.

If McElroy's heart had not been so full of his own trouble he would have
exulted mightily in their coming, for did it not prove one failure for
that reckless Nor'wester on the Saskatchewan? They had come, past all
his blandishments of trade, to Fort de Seviere, and their coming spelled
a number of furs this season far in advance of any other for that small
post. If he wondered at first how they had held out against De
Courtenay it was all made plain when among the strangers he espied many
Assiniboines and saw in the great canoe of the chief Negansahima, old
Quamenoka, who had boasted of the coming of this tribe to De Seviere as
his work.

He had spoken truly and had evidently made his word good by meeting the
approaching columns and returning with them.

To him alone was due the failure of De Courtenay, McElroy felt at once,
and determined in his mind on that present which he had promised for
this zeal.

With the coming of the strangers Fort de Seviere was put under military
rule. The half-moon to the right of the gate, with its small cannon,
received a quota of men who strayed carelessly all day within reach of
the low rampart; a guard lounged in the great gate, ready at a moment's
notice to clang it shut, and seemingly matter-of-course precautions were
taken throughout, for these Indians were as uncertain as the flickering
north lights crackling in a frosty sky.

There was a scene not to be likened to any other outside the region of
the Hudson Bay country, where strange relations existed between white
trader and savage, when Edmonton Ridgar met the canoe of the chief at
the landing.

Savage delight overspread the eagle features of Negansahima as he beheld
the white man.

Towering mightily in the prow of his canoe, the sweeping head-dress of
feathers crowning him with a certain majesty, he fixed his keen glance
on Ridgar and came gliding toward him across the rippled water.

As the canoe cut cleanly up and stopped just short of scraping on the
stones at the edge, obeying the paddles like a thoroughbred the bit, the
chief trader of De Seviere stepped forward and held out his arms.

“Who art thou?” he called.

Deep and guttural as thunder from the broad chest, naked under the lines
of elk teeth, came the reply,

“Thy father,”

“And master of my goods. The heart of thy son melts as the snow in
spring. Wiskendjac has sent thee.”

McElroy, standing near, saw the face of his friend illumined with a
real affection as the savage landed and, contrary to the custom of the
Indians in the lower country, embraced with every sign of joy the lean
white man whose skin was nearly as dark as his own and whose greying
temples bespoke almost a as many years as the chief's black locks could
boast.

In the eyes of both, as they regarded each other, were memories known
to no one else. McElroy wondered what they were and what that year, of
which Ridgar had spoken only once, had held.

The trader spoke their tongue as easily as he spoke any other that came
to the post, naturally and with quiet fluency.

So deep was the apparent pleasure of the meeting that, when the
interpreting was done and the ceremonies over, Ridgar went with the
Indian among the tepees and no more did McElroy see him until he came to
the factory at dusk.

“Mother of Heaven!” he ejaculated, flinging himself down at the table in
the living-room where Rette's strong coffee tempted the nostril; “such
furs! Beaver in countless packs, all the fat winter skins, no Bordeaux,
no Mittain. Fox, also of the best only,--black fox, fine and shining,
fox of those far-north regions where they hunt beyond the sun, white as
the snow it runs on, and Mon Dieu, McElroy! Seven silvers as I hope for
salvation! Verily are they a prize beyond price, these Indians that have
come in to us, and I fancy that young Nor'wester is swearing at his luck
in losing them. Old Quamenoka struts as if their wealth belonged to his
meek Assiniboines.... But the furs! Ermine and nekik and sakwasew and
wapistan, all the little fellows that, taken from those virgin north
lands, are worth their weight in gold! Nowhere have I seen a common
pelt. They are connoisseurs, these wild Nakonkirhirinons, and they carry
a king's ransom in their long canoes. White bear and brown arctic wolf
and everywhere the best of its kind! To-morrow's trade will be worth
while--but keep the guns in evidence and quiet above all things.”

“Ah!” said McElroy, “what is there to fear, think you? Is not the chief
bound to you by all ties of ceremony and regard?”

“Most assuredly,” returned Ridgar quietly, “but those young braves
are strung like a singing wire and swift as a girl to take suspicious
fright; and there are somewhere near five hundred of them, as near as I
can make out from the numbers seething among the lodges. They are in a
strange country and watching every leaf and shadow.”

Thus the sun went down on De Seviere, with the eager maids and women
passing and repassing near the gate to peep out at the rustling throng,
at the tepees with their fine skin coverings painted with all the
wonders of battle and the chase, at the comely squaws and maidens, the
chubby brown children, the dogs snarling and savage, for they had full
complement of the grey northern huskies.

To a woman they peeped at the gate from all the cabins of the post,
save only that one who had been most eager before when the Indians came,
Maren Le Moyne, sitting in idle apathy on her sister's doorstep.

“Ma'amselle,” said Marc Dupre, stopping hesitant before her, “have you
seen the Nakonkirhirinons?”

“Nay,” she said listlessly, “I care not, M'sieu.”

And the youth went gloomily away.

“Something there is which preys on her like the blood-sucker on the
rabbit's throat. But what? Holy Mother, what?”

His handsome eyes were troubled.

By dawn on the following day the trading had begun. Up the main way
passed a line of braves, each laden with his winter's catch of furs,
to barter at the trading-room, haggle with the clerks by sign and
pantomime, and pass down again with gun and hatchet and axe, kettle and
bright blanket, beads, and, most eagerly sought of all, yards of crimson
cloth.

There was babble of chatter among the squaws, shrill laughter, and
comparison of purchases.

In the trading-room sat the chief with his headmen and old Quamenoka
of the Assiniboines, smoking gravely many pipes and listening to the
trading. Like some wild eagle of the peaks brought down to earth he
seemed, ever alert and watchful behind his stately silence.

For two days the trading progressed finely, and McElroy had so far laid
aside his doubts as to take delight in the quality of the rare furs.

Never before had such pelts stacked themselves in the sorting-room.

It was a sight for eyes tired by many springs of common trade.

Then, like a bomb in a peaceful city, came a running word of excitement.

The Nor'wester from the Saskatchewan was among the Nakonkirhirinons! Was
at the very gates of De Seviere! When Pierre Garcon brought the news,
McElroy flushed darkly to his fair hair and went on with his work.

This was unbearable insolence.

“An', M'sieu,” pursued Pierre, “not only the man from Montreal, but,
like the treacherous dog he is, among the Nor'westers is that vagabond
Bois DesCaut.”

“Turncoat?” said the factor.

“Aye.”

True enough. When McElroy, after trading hours, strolled down to the
gate between the bastions, whom should he behold but the hulking figure
of his erstwhile trapper, sulky of appearance, shifty eyes flitting
everywhere but toward his old factor. And farther down the bank, among
a group of warriors, a brown baby on his shoulder and his long curls
shining in the sunset, was that incomparable adventurer, Alfred de
Courtenay.

Apparently he had not come for barter, nor for anything save the love of
the unusual, the thirst for adventure that had brought him primarily to
the wilderness.

“A fine fit of apoplexy would he have, that peppery old uncle at
Montreal, Elsworth McTavish, could he see his precious nephew following
his whims up and down the land, leaving his post in the hands of his
chief trader,” thought McElroy, as he looked at the scene before him.

While he stood so, there was a rustle of women behind him and voices
that bespoke more eager eyes for the Indians, and he glanced over his
shoulder.

Micene Bordoux and Mora LeClede approached, and between them walked
Maren Le Moyne. McElroy's heart pounded hard with a quick excitement as
he saw the listless droop of the face under the black braids and
stopped with a prescience of disaster. His glance went swiftly to
the long-haired gallant in the braided coat. Surely were the elements
brought together.

It seemed as if Fate was weaving these little threads of destiny, for
no sooner did Maren Le Moyne step through the gate among the lodges than
her very nearness drew round upon his heel De Courtenay.

His eyes lighted upon her and the sparkling smile lit up his features.
With inimitable grace he swung the child from his shoulder, tossed it
to a timid squaw watching like a hawk, and, shaking back his curls, came
forward.

“Ah, Ma'amselle!” he said, bending before her with his courtly manner,
“you see, as I said in the early spring,--I have come back to Fort de
Seviere.”

“So I see, M'sieu,” smiled Maren, with a touch of whimsical amusement
at the memory of that morning, and his venturesome spirit. “Have you by
chance brought me a red flower?”

“Why else should I come?” he returned, and, with a flourish, brought
from his bosom a second birchbark box which he held out to the girl.

Over her face there spread a crimson flood at this swift, literal
proving of a secret pact and she stood hesitating, at loss.

The stretch of beach was alive with spectators. Near the wall a group of
girls hugged together, with Francette Moline in the centre; down by the
canoes Pierre Garcon and Marc Dupre stood, the dark eyes of the latter
watching every move, while at the door of the chief's lodge, directly
before the fort and between it and the river, Edmonton Ridgar talked
in low tones with Negansahima. Indeed, like father and son seemed this
strangely assorted pair. Maren remembered afterward how near together
they had stood, the wild savage in his elk teeth and scant buckskin
garments, an indiscreet band of yellow paint showing a corner above his
blanket, and the dark, wiry trader with the grey eyes. Scattered, here
and there among the braves were many Bois-Brules, lean Runners of the
Burnt Woods, belonging she knew to the North-west Company. Also in that
moment she saw the frowning face and ugly eyes of Bois DesCaut beneath
the white lock on his temple. Long afterward was the girl to recall that
evening scene.

For another moment she hesitated, and then, from sheer loss of poise,
reached out her hand. The dancing eyes of the cavalier lit with all the
daring of conquest.

“My heart, Ma'amselle,” he said gallantly, as he pressed the fragile
thing in her palm; and in another second he had stooped and kissed her,
as he had kissed many another woman, lightly, delicately, in the face of
the populace, joying to the depths of his careless nature in the dare of
the thing.

With a cry the girl sprang back, crushing the birchbark case with its
red flower into shapeless ruin. There was a muffled word, the flash of a
figure, and McElroy the factor had flung himself before her. She caught
the thud of a blow upon flesh and in a moment there were two men locked
in deadly combat before the post gate. In less time than the telling, a
circle of faces drew round, dark faces of Indians and Bois-Brules, light
faces of De Courtenay's men, and in all there leaped swift excitement as
they saw the combatants. White with passion, his brilliant eyes flaming
and dancing with fury, De Courtenay fought like a madman to avenge that
blow in the face, while McElroy, flushed and calmer, took with his hands
payment for all things,--slighted kindliness, Company thefts, and, above
all else, the stolen heart of his one woman.

How it would have ended there is no telling, for these two were evenly
matched--what De Courtenay lacked in weight he made up in swiftness and
agility,--had it not been for the side arm that hung at his hip, one
of those small pistols in use across the water where gentlemen fight at
given paces and not across a frozen river or through a mile of brush.

Once, twice, he tried to reach it, and twice did McElroy snatch the
groping hand away. Three times he passed swiftly for the inlaid handle
and, as if there lay luck in the number, the weapon flashed in the red
light.

Swift as was the draw, McElroy was swifter.

With an upward stroke he flung up the hand that held it. There was a
shot, ringing down the Assiniboine and echoing in the woods, and little
Francette by the stockade wall screamed. With the first flash of metal
Maren Le Moyne had gripped her hands until the nails cut raw, standing
where she had sprung at the stranger's kiss.

She could no more move than the bastioned wall behind her.

For a moment there was deathly silence after that shot. Then pandemonium
broke loose as Negansahima, chief of the Nakonkirhirinons, flung up his
arms, the dull metal bands with their inset stones catching the crimson
light, and fell into the outstretched arms of Edmonton Ridgar.

A long cry broke from his lips, the death-cry of a warrior.



CHAPTER XIII “A SKIN FOR A SKIN”

For a moment the whole evening scene, red with the late light, was set
in the mould of immobility. The two fighting men at sound of that cry
following hard upon the shot stopped rigidly, still clasped in the grip
of rage, the women staring wide-eyed from the wall, the Bois-Brules, the
leaning eager faces of the wild Nakonkirhirinons, the figure of the
girl in the foreground, all, all were stricken into stillness by that
dirge-like cry. For only the fraction of a second it held, that tense
waiting.

Then from nine hundred throats there shot up to the sky, turquoise
and pink and calm, such a sound as all the northland knew,--the wild
blood-cry of the savage.

It filled the arching aisles of the shouldering forest, rolled down the
breast of the river, and echoed in the cabins of the post, and with it
there broke loose the leashed wildness of the Indians. There was one
vast surging around the lodge where Ridgar knelt with the figure of the
chief in his arms, another where a tumbling horde fought to get to the
factor and De Courtenay.

At the stockade gate Prix Laroux, swift of foot and strong as twenty men
in the exigency of the moment, swept the women into his arms and rushed
them within the post. Above the hideous turmoil his voice rose in
carrying command,

“Into the post! Into the post,--every man inside! Man the rampart!”

It fell on ears startled into apathy by the suddenness of the tragic
happening, and there was a wild confusion of white people pulling out
of the mass like threads, all headed for the open gate. Swift as light
those guards of the guns on the rampart sprang to place, the watcher of
the portal swung the great studded gate ready for the clanging close,
and, in a twinkling, so alert to peril do they become who pierce the
wilderness, there were without only that howling mass of savages, De
Courtenay, McElroy, and Edmonton Ridgar gazing with dimmed vision into
the fast glazing eyes of the dying chief.

Only they? Standing where she had leaped at the cavalier's kiss, her
eyes wide, her lips apart, was Maren Le Moyne. In the hurrying rush of
frantic people she had been forgotten and she was utterly helpless.

As in a dream she saw the leaping forms close in upon the two men who
fought for her, knew that those of De Seviere were pouring past her to
safety, heard the boom of the great gate as it swung into place, and for
her life she could move neither hand nor foot. Her body stood frozen
as in those horrid dreams of night when one is conscious, yet held, in a
clutch of steel.

Over the heaving heads with their waving eagle feathers she saw the head
and shoulders of De Courtenay rise, tipped sidewise so that his long
curls swung clear, shining in the light, and already he was bound with
thongs of hide.

She saw his handsome face again sparkling with that smile that was so
brilliant and that bore such infinite shades of meaning.

Now it was full of devil-may-care, as if he shrugged his shoulders at a
loss at cards, and in that second it fell upon her standing in horror.

“Ah, Ma'amselle!” he called, across the surging feathers; “the tune
changes! But you have my heart, and I,--I have one kiss! Adieu, my Maid
of the Long Trail! The chance was worth its turning.”

Then the shining head sank into the mass and she heard no more.

She was conscious only of a giant form lurching, red-eyed and yelling,
out of the turmoil, of brown hands that clutched her arms, and of
another form which shot past her. For the second time in a few moments
one man had reached for her and another flung himself to her rescue. She
saw the Indian reel back with a red line spurting across his eyes,
felt herself lifted and flung across a shoulder, and knew that the gate
behind was swinging open. The next instant she slid down to her feet
with her face in the buckskin shirt of Marc Dupre, who leaned shaking
against the stockade wall and held her in a grip like steel, while Henri
Corlier shot the bolts into place.

Huddled in white groups were the women, some of them already raising
their voices in weeping, others silent with the training of the women
of the wilderness. The men faced each other with lips drawn tight and
breath that came swiftly. Prix Laroux, his dark eyes cool and sharp,
looked swiftly over the populace as they stood, for with that first shot
every man in Fort de Seviere had rushed to the gate, and in that first
moment of getting breath he calculated their strength and their ability.

A leader born himself, he was looking for a leader among McElroy's men;
but, with that intrepid factor himself gone and Edmonton Ridgar also,
there was nowhere a man with the signs of leadership upon him.

Through Prix's mind this went while they stood listening to the
death-wail that was beginning to rise from the tepees without.

Then he quietly took command, knowing himself to be best fitted.

“Corlier,” he said quietly, “leave the gate to Cif Bordoux. Take one man
and get to the southwest bastion. You, Gifford,” turning to that young
clerk who worked in the sorting-room, “man the northwest. Garcon and
Dupre will take the forward two. The rest will stand ready with guns and
ammunition along the four walls and at the gates. We know not what will
transpire.”

As if their factor spoke, the men of De Seviere turned to obey, feeling
that strange compelling which causes men to follow one man to death on
the field of battle, and which is surely the gift of God.

Out of his shaking arms Marc Dupre loosed Maren, the trembling lessening
as the danger passed. That sight of the defenceless girl among the
Indians had shaken him like a leaf in the wind, had nerved his arms with
iron, had worked in him both with strength and weakness.

Now he looked into her eyes and said never a word, for once again he saw
that they were dazed and void of knowledge.

As he set her upon her own strength, she swayed. Her eyes went round the
hushed groups of faces with wild searching. At last they found the face
of her leader, and clung there, dark and dull.

“Prix!” she cried. “Prix! Open the gate!”

“I cannot, Maren,” he said quietly; “'twould be but madness.”

“But they are without!”

All horror was in the cry.

“They are among the Indians!”

“Aye,--and may the good God have mercy on them!”

Laroux hastily made the sign of the cross.

“We must guard the post, Maren.”

“But--” She turned her eyes slowly around from face to face and not a
woman there but read her secret plain, the open script of love,--but for
which man?

“But-they-will--be--” She did not finish the sentence, staring at
Laroux. Once she moistened her lips.

“They will--Prix,--as I am your leader, open that gate!”

With sudden reviving the daze went out of her features and the old light
came back to her eyes, the far-seeing, undaunted light that had beaconed
the long way from Grand Portage. She was every inch the leader again,
tall, straight against the logs, her brown arm pointing imperiously to
the closed gate.

“Open, I say!”

For a moment Laroux faced her squarely, the man who had tied himself to
her hand, pledged himself to forge the way to the Whispering Hills, who
followed her compelling leadership as these lesser men had turned to
follow his but now. Then he set his will to hers.

“I will not,” he said quietly.

With no more words she flung herself upon the gate and tore at the
chains, her strong hands able as a man's. As the sight of her in peril
had worked for both weakness and strength in Dupre, so had McElroy's
plight affected her. That helpless moment was the one defection of her
dauntless life.

Now again she was herself, reaching for the thing of the moment, and the
roar outside the palisade, constantly rising in volume, in menace and
savagery, brushed out of her brain every cloud of shock. Laroux caught
her from behind, pinioning her arms.

“Maren,” he said quietly, “hear me. Out there are five hundred warriors
wild as the heart of the Pays d'en Haut, howling over the body of their
dying chief. What would be the opening of the gate but the massacre of
all within? Could forty men take the factor from them? There would be
but as many more scalps on their belts as there are heads within the
post. See you not, Maren?”

In his iron grip the girl stood still, breathing heavily. As he ceased
speaking a great sigh came from her lips, a sigh like a sob.

“Aye,” she said brokenly, “I see,--I see! Mary Mother! Let me go, Prix.
I see.”

Laroux loosed her, knowing that the moment was past, and went at once
about his duties of throwing the post into a state of defence.

Once more strong and quiet, Maren went to the cabin by the gate. Here
Marie knelt at her bed with a crucifix grasped in her shaking hands, her
face white as milk and prayers on her trembling lips.

“Maren!” she gasped, with the child's appeal to the stronger nature.
“Oh, Maren, what will befall? For love of God, what will befall?”

“Hush, Marie,” answered Maren; “'tis but a tragedy of the wild. Naught
will befall us of the post.”

“But those without? What is that roaring of many throats? Little Jean
Bleaureau but now ran past crying that the Nakonkirhirinons were killing
the factor”

“No!” Marie jumped at the word like one shot, so wild and sudden it was.
“No! No! Not yet!”

Even in the stress of the moment Marie stared open-mouthed at her
sister.

“Holy Mother! It is love,--that cry! You love the factor!”

“Hush!” whispered Maren, dry-lipped.

The roar from the river bank had sharpened itself into one point of
utterance which pierced the calm heavens in a mingling of native speech,
French and broken English from Nakonkirhirinon and halfbreed, and, worse
than both, dissolute “white Indian,” and its burden was,

“A skin for a skin!”



CHAPTER XIV FELLOW CAPTIVES

After that tense moment of hush following the shot, McElroy had no
distinct recollection of what occurred. He was conscious of a sickening
knowledge of Negansahima with his banded brown arms stretching into
the evening light, of the tepees, of the river beyond, of the face of
Edmonton Ridgar, and of all these etched distinctly in that effect of
sun and shade which picks out each smallest detail sometimes of a rare
evening in early summer. Then the whole scene went out in a smother
as an avalanche of bodies descended upon him. He could smell the heavy
odour of flesh half-naked, the scent of the hidden paint, he felt arms
that fought to grip him and fingers that clutched like talons. Under
it all he went down in the grass of the slope, fighting with all his
strength, but powerless as a gnat in a pond. Above the turmoil of cries
and guttural yells, even while he felt himself crushed at the bottom
of that boiling mass, he heard the light voice of De Courtenay ringing
clear in his whimsical farewell to Maren Le Moyne. Then he was wrenched
up through the mass, something struck him on the head with a sharp blow,
a shower of stars fell like a cataract, and the sickening scents in his
nostrils faded away.

When he again opened his eyes it was to behold real stars shining down
from a velvet sky, to hear the river lapping gently at the landing,
and the night birds calling in the forest. From the prairie beyond the
fringe of woods to the east there came the yapping of the coyotes, and
far to the north a wolf howled.

At first a sense of bewilderment held him. Then in a rush came back the
memory of what had happened. He listened intently. Back and forth, back
and forth somewhere near went a soft footstep, the swish and glide of
a moccasin. He strained his eyes, which smarted terribly, into the
darkness, and presently descried a tall form pacing slowly up against
the skyline of his vision and back again into the shadows. A single
feather slanted against the stars. A guard pacing the place of captives.

With a slight movement McElroy tried to lift a hand.

It was immovable. He tried the other. It likewise refused his will.

So with both feet when he attempted, ever so cautiously, to move them.

He was bound hand and foot, and with cruel tightness, for with that tiny
slipping of his muscles there set up all through him such a tingling and
aching as was almost unbearable.

His head seemed a lump of lead, glued to whatever it lay upon, and big
as a buttertub.

Turning his eyes far as he could to the right, he looked long in that
direction. Faintly, after a while, he picked out the straight line of
the stockade top, the rising tower at the corner. The line of the wall
faded out in darkness the other way, strain as he might. To the left
were the ragged tops of the tepees, their two longer sticks pointing
above the others.

From the sound of the river, he must be between it and the stockade
gate.

Presently his numbed hearing became conscious of a sound somewhere near,
a sound that had rung so ceaselessly since his waking that it had seemed
the background for the lesser noise of the sentry's slipping moccasin.
It was the weird, unending, unbeginning wail of the women, the
death-song of the tribe mourning the passing of a chief, the voices of
some four hundred squaws blending indescribably.

McElroy listened.

With consciousness of that his mind grew clearer and he began to think.

What a fool he had been!

Once more had he played like an unbalanced boy at the game of love.

What right had he to strike De Courtenay for kissing the woman whom he
had won with his red flowers and his curls before the populace? That he
himself had fancied for a brief space that she was his was no excuse for
plunging like a boy at his rival's throat. If he had held his peace, all
would be well now and the old chief would not be lying stiff and stark
somewhere in the shadowed camp, the women wailing without fires.

It was no balm to his sore heart that he in his blundering wrath had
wrought this fresh disaster. And his post, De Seviere, which he had won
by daring service and loyalty to the H. B. C., what would become of it?

Who after him would rule on the Assiniboine?

For well he knew that death, and death thrice,--aye, a million times
refined,--awaited so luckless a victim as he whose hand had killed the
great chief. But he had not killed Negansahima. It was the gun in De
Courtenay's hand. Ah, De Courtenay! Where was De Courtenay? A captive
assuredly, if he was one. They had both gone down together under the
foam of that angry human sea. And, if he was here, his antagonist must
be somewhere near. With exquisite torture, McElroy slowly turned his
head to right and left. At the second motion his face brushed something
close against his shoulder. It was cloth, a rough surface corrugated
and encrusted with ridges,--what but the braid on the blue coat of the
Montreal gallant!

There was no start, no answering movement at his touch. The rough
surface seemed strangely set and still.

He lay silent and thought a moment with strange feelings of new horror
surging through him.

Was De Courtenay dead?

Or was it by chance a stone under the braided coat, a hillock where it
had been thrown? That strange feeling of starkness never belonged to a
human body soft with the pulse of life.

For hours McElroy lay staring into the night sky with its frosting of
great northern stars, and passed again over every week, every day,--nay,
almost every hour,--since that morning in early spring when she had
stepped off the factory-sill to accompany little Francette to the river
bank where Bois DesCaut stood facing a tall young woman against the
stockade wall.

With dreary insistence his sore heart brought up each sweet memory, each
thrill of joy of those warm days. He saw every flush on her open face,
every droop of her eyes. Again he saw the white fire in her features
that day in the forest glade when she spoke of the Land of the
Whispering Hills. He pondered for the first time, lying bound and
helpless among savages, of that unbending thing within her which drove
her into the wilderness with such resistless force. Granted that she had
loved him as he thought during that delirious short space of time,
would love have been stronger than that force, or would it have been
sacrificed? She was so strong, this strange girl of the long trail, so
strong for all things gentle, so unmoving from the way of tenderness.
Proving that came the picture of the tot on her shoulder, “dipping as
the ships at sea, ma cherie,” and the look of her face transfigured. And
yet home for her was “the blue sky above, the wind in the pine-tops, the
sound of water lapping at the prow of a canoe.” So she had said on that
last day they spoke together in happiness, passing in diffident joy to
the gate to meet De Courtenay's fateful messenger.

Of all women in the vast world she was the one woman. There was never
another face with that strange allurement, that baffling light of
strength and tenderness.

Sore, sore, indeed, was the heart of the young factor of Fort de Seviere
as he lay under the stars and listened to the death-wail in the darkened
camp.

Nowhere was there a fire.

Desolation sat upon the Nakonkirhirinons.

Along toward dawn, presaged by the westward wheeling of the big stars,
tom-toms began to beat throughout the maze of lodges. They beat oddly
into the air, cold with the chill of the coming day.

McElroy's thoughts had left the great country of the Hudson Bay and
travelled back along the winding waterways, across the lakes, and at
last out on that heaving sea which bore away from his homeland. Once
more he had been in the smoke of London town, had looked into the loving
eyes of his mother and gripped the hand of his tradesman father. Once
more he had wondered what the future held.

The sudden striking up of the tom-toms answered him.

This.

This was to be the end of his eager advance in the Company's favour,
the end of that good glass of life whose red draught he had drunk with
wholesome joy, the end of love that had but dawned for him to sink into
aching darkness.

He sighed wearily. So poignant was his sense of loss and the pain of it
that the end was a weariness rather than a new pain.

The thing that hurt was the fact that he himself had juggled the cards
of fate to this sorry dealing.

The sudden rage concerning De Courtenay had spent itself. There remained
only the deep anger of the man who has lost in the game of love. And
yet, what right had he to cherish even this wholesome anger against his
rival when the maid had chosen of her own free will? As well hold
grudge to the great Power whose wisdom had given the man such marvellous
beauty. As he lay in the darkness listening to the unearthly noises he
worked it all out with justice.

He alone was to blame for the sorry state of things.

De Courtenay was but a man, and what man, looking upon Maren Le Moyne,
could fail to love her?

Therefore, he freed his rival of all blame.

And Maren,--oh, blameless as the winds of heaven was Maren!

What had she given him that he could construe as love?

Only a look, a blush to her cheek, the touch of a warm hand.

In his folly he had hailed himself king of her affections when perchance
it was but the kindliness of her womanly heart.

And what maid could be blind to De Courtenay's sparkling
grace,--compared to which he was himself a blundering yokel?

Thus in bound darkness he reasoned it all out and strove to wash away
the anger from his heart.

And presently there came dawn. First a cold air blowing out of the
forest, and then a deeper darkness that presently gave way to faint,
shadowy light.

Here and there tall figures came looming, ghostly-fashion, out of chaos,
to take slow shape and form, to resolve themselves into tapering lodges,
into hunched and huddled groups.

And with light came action.

McElroy saw that around the central lodge before the gate there was a
solid pack of prostrate Indians covering the ground like a cloth, and
from this centre came the tom-toms and the wailing.

It was the lodge of the chief and within lay the stark body of the
murdered Negansahima.

As the faint light grew, one by one the warriors rose out of the mass
like smoke spirals, drawing away to disappear among the tepees. Soon
there came the sound of falling poles and McElroy knew that they were
striking the camp.

For what?

Why, surely, for one thing.

A chief must go to the great Hunting Ground from his own country; in his
own country must his bones seek rest.

They would journey back up the long and difficult trail down which they
had just come to that vague region from which they hailed.

But what of him, and of De Courtenay, if he was yet alive?

He wondered why they had been reserved.

The light came quickly and he looked eagerly around on the moving camp.

With quickness and precision the whole long village was reduced in a few
minutes to rolled coverings, gathered and tied utensils, stacked packs
of furs, and ranged canoes already in the water lining the shore.

He could not help a feeling of regret for this wild people, coming but
few suns back with their rich peltry, their pomp, and their hopes of
gain, as they prepared for the back trail, the whole tribe in deepest
mourning.

Of all the tents, that one before the post gate alone stood, silent
reproach to the white man's ways.

Around it still knelt a solid pack, wailing and beating the drums.

As the grey light turned whiter, he turned his stiffened neck for a
glance at the thing against his shoulder.

He looked into the smiling eyes of Alfred de Courtenay.

“Bonjour, M'sieu,” whispered that ardent venturer; “you nuzzled my
arm all night. Apparently we are fellows in captivity, as we have been
opposed in war,--and love.”

“Aye, M'sieu,” whispered back McElroy, not relishing the turn of the
sentence but passing it by; “and a sorry man am I for this state of
events. I owe you my regrets,--not for what I did, mark you,--but
for the way and the time and place. Had I waited and proceeded as a
gentleman, we should not be in this devilish plight, nor that fine old
chief a victim to our blunder.”

“Tish!” said De Courtenay lightly; “'tis all in a day's march. And,
besides, I have,--memories,--to shorten the way.”

The pacing guard came back and the two men fell silent.

At that moment a stentorian call pealed above the dismantled camp, and
there began a vast surge of the mass of Nakonkirhirinons toward the
waiting canoes, a dragging of goods and chattels, a hurry of crying
children, a scurrying of squaws. In the midst of it the flaps of the
big lodge were opened and, amid redoubled wailing, a stark wedge of the
length of a tall man came headforemost out, carried on the shoulders of
six gigantic warriors; and walking beside it, bareheaded in the new day,
was Edmonton Ridgar, his face pale and downcast. He paid no heed to the
two men on the ground, though one was his factor and his friend.



CHAPTER XV LONG TRAIL

The women changed their wail as the procession started for the waiting
canoes, and from all the long camp there drew in a horde of savages,
their eagle feathers slanting in the light, bare shoulders shining under
unhidden paint, skin garments and gaudy shirts alike cast to the winds.

They surged along chanting their unearthly song, and the mass of them
swept by where lay the two men.

Not a glance was given them, no taunts, no jeers with which the tribes
of the North-west were wont to torment their captives.

The swish of the moccasined feet was as the sound of many waters.

“No time for play,” thought McElroy; “that will come later,--when we
have reached the Pays d'en Haut.”

For he knew now that he and De Courtenay were to be taken along.

The body of Negansahima was placed in the first canoe, covered with
a priceless robe of six silver foxskins laced together; the six big
warriors, their halfnaked bodies painted black, manned the paddles, and
at the prow there stood the sad figure of Edmonton Ridgar.

At one side had drawn out old Quamenoka and his Assiniboines, their way
lying to the west. They raised a chant as the first canoe circled
out and headed down the stream. Behind it fell in five canoe-loads of
Bois-Brules, their attachment a mystery, and the river became alive with
the great flotilla.

Not until the death-boat had passed the far bend did the pacing Indian
give way to a dozen naked giants, who lifted the captives with ceremony
and carried them down the slope.

As he swung between his captors McElroy looked back at the closed gates
of De Seviere and a sharp pain struck at his heart, a childish hurt that
the post he had loved should watch his exit from the light of life with
unmoved front. It seemed almost that the bastioned wall was sensate, as
if the small portholes here and there were living eyes, cold and hard
with indifference, nay, even a-glitter with selfishness.

But quick on the sense of hurt came the knowledge which is part of every
man in the wilderness; and he knew well that every face in the little
fort was drawn with the tragedy, that from those blank portholes looked
human eyes, sick with the thing they could not avert, that whoever had
taken charge within was only working for the safety of the greatest
number, and with the thought his weakness passed.

Only one more pang assailed him.

He gave one swift thought to Maren Le Moyne. Where in Fort de Seviere
was she, and what was in her heart?

Then he was swung, still bound, into the bottom of a canoe, saw
De Courtenay tossed into another, felt the careless feet of
Nakonkirhirinons as the paddlemen stepped in, and existence became a
thing of gliding motion, the lapping of water on birchbark, and the
passing of a long strip of cloud-flecked sky, pink and blue and gold
with the new day.

Lulled by the rocking of the fragile craft that shot forward like a
thing of life beneath the paddles dipping in perfect unison, McElroy lay
its a sort of apathy for hours, watching the sliding strip of sky and
the bending bodies of the Indians. He knew that the end awaited him
somewhere ahead, but it was far ahead, very far, even many leagues
beyond York factory, and his mind, again dropping into the dulness of
his early awakening, refused to concern itself with aught save the blue
sky and the sound of water lapping on birchbark. That sound was sweet to
his befuddled brain, suggesting something vaguely pleasant.

Ah, yes, it was the deep voice of the maid of the long trail speaking
of the streams and the waving grass of that visionary Land of the
Whispering Hills.

He fell to wondering at broken intervals if she would ever reach it, to
see drowsy visions of the tall form leading its band of venturers into
the wilderness beyond Lac a la Croix, penetrating that country which
tried the hearts of men, and with the visions came a sadness.

She would go without love, mourning her cavalier of the curls, and who
would be responsible for the desolation of the heart he would fain have
made happy but himself?

McElroy sighed, and the visions faded.

When he again awakened it was evening and camp had been made. Fires
danced and crackled all up and down the reach of shore set like a
half-moon of pearl in a sea of emerald, where the forest shouldered down
to the stream, and the smell of cooking meat was poignantly sweet. Women
were busy at the work of the camp, carrying wood, mending the fires,
tending the kettles swung from forked sticks, and scolding the
scrambling children.

Here and there a half-naked Indian stalked silently, his long feather
slanting in the light, but for the most part the warriors were gathered
in a silent mass a little way apart where the big tepee had been set up.

The clouds were gone from his brain, and he was keenly conscious of
hunger.

He was still bound, though not so tightly, some of the thongs having
been taken off entirely, and he found that he could sit up with
comparative ease, though his hands were still fast behind him and his
ankles tied.

There was no pacing guard this time, distance and possession making such
precaution needless, for well the Nakonkirhirinons knew that none from
the little post on the Assiniboine would attempt rescue in face of so
great a horde as an entire tribe.

McElroy sat up and looked around.

One of the first things he encountered was the face of the cavalier,
still smiling and looking very much as it had looked in the dawn.

Like that encounter, too, De Courtenay was the first to speak in this.

“Aha, my fighter of the H. B. C.,” he laughed from his seat against a
towering maple, “have your laggard wits come in from wool-gathering?”

He, too, was more comfortably bound, and McElroy noticed that there
were little rubbed creases in the sleeves of the gay blue coat where the
numbing bonds had cut. The sparkling spirit was as high in his handsome
face as it had been that long past morning morning by the well. The
factor wondered if there was in heaven or earth anything with power to
dim it.

He was to see, and marvel at, the test.

“Aye,” he answered the cheerful query; “it has been a weary day, M'sieu,
it would seem, with my senses drifting out and in at ragged intervals of
which I have only vague impressions. How has it fared with you?”

“Much as another day. There has been plenty to see and enjoy, even from
under the feet of our hasty friends of the paddles.”

“Enjoy! Holy Mother! Have you not been thinking over your sins, M'sieu?”

“Sins? I have none. Who thinks of sins while the red blood runs? Rather
have I dreamed dreams of,--memories. Ah, no, M'sieu, it has not been
a weary day to me, but one of swift emotions, of riots of colour in
a strip of racing sky when the sun turned his palette for a gorgeous
spread. The sunset was stupendous at its beginning. Now the darker greys
come with so much forest.”

McElroy fell silent, biting his lip.

Sorry as he felt for the plight of his rival, the old anger was close to
his heart, and it seemed that the rascal knew it and probed for a weak
spot with his smiling allusions to his memories. Memories of what but of
the red lips of a girl?

The young factor, too, had memories of those red lips, though they gave
him only a pain so bitter as not to be borne.

Almost it forced from his heart the gentle justice he had striven so
hard to keep in sight.

As he sat thinking and staring at the twilight river rippling below, a
man came from the forest at the back of the camp and passed near on his
way to the fires.

It was Bois DesCaut, and he did not lift his evil eyes.

The white lack on his temple gleamed with a sinister distinctness amid
his black hair.

“Double foe,” thought McElroy; “I am to pay for my own words and Maren's
blow.”

As the trapper passed he sidled swiftly near the Nor'wester and
something dropped from a legstrap. It was a small knife, and it tumbled
with seeming carelessness close to De Courtenay's knee.

“So,” thought McElroy again; “by all rights that should have been for
me.”

DesCaut went on into the heart of the camp among the women, and De
Courtenay began moving ever so cautiously toward the priceless bit of
steel.

With that hidden in one's garments what not of hope might rise within a
daring heart?

What not, indeed! Life and liberty and escape and a home-coming to a
rival's very hearthstone, and more,--soft lips and arms of a woman.

The cavalier was smiling still as he edged inch by inch along the little
way, his back against the maple.

“See you, M'sieu,” he whispered; “how loyal are the servants of the
North-west Company?”

McElroy did not answer. Bitterness was rife within him. Even his one
friend in the wilderness, Edmonton Ridgar, on whose sound heart he would
have risked his soul, had passed him by without a look.

Verily, life had suddenly been stripped, as the hapless birch, of all
its possessions.

He was thinking grimly of these things when a young squaw came lightly
up from somewhere and stopped for a second beside De Courtenay. She
looked keenly at him, and stooping, picked up the knife.

“Another turn to the wheel, M'sieu,” said that intrepid venturer; “what
next?”

As if his thought had reached out among the shadows of the wood where
stood the death tepee and touched its object, Edmonton Ridgar appeared
among the lodges. He was bare-headed, and McElroy saw that his face
was deep-lined and anxious, filled with a sadness at which he could but
marvel and he passed within a stone's throw without so much as a glance
at his superior.

No captive was this man, passing where he listed, but McE

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