"Let me go instead. I can't stay quiet here."
"You must. You don't know their talk as well as I do. Nothing can
happen to me. If they do find me out, they are my friends."
"But the dogs----"
"They bark at nothing. No one minds them."
Her eyes beamed on him softly, like stars through the night; her soft
voice was of the night too; and so brave and tender! She was adorable
to him. He abruptly flung himself down in the grass to keep from
seizing her in his arms.
"Go on," he said a little thickly. "Hurry back."
Hours passed, it seemed to him; it was perhaps half of one hour. The
dogs barked and howled, and finally fell silent. A partridge drummed
in the depths of the forest, and an owl flew out from among the trees
with a moan that rose to a shriek of agony. Down the valley a fox
uttered his sharp, challenging bark, and the dogs returned with a
renewed infernal clamour. A band of horses stampeded aimlessly up and
down between the tepees. It was a heavy, ominous night, and every
creature was uneasy.
At last quite suddenly he saw her crouching and running up the grassy
slope toward him. His heart bounded with relief.
"Be quick," she whispered. "Jean Paul has started back."
They set off at a run through the black forest, with warding hands
outstretched in front of them. Their flying feet gave little sound on
the thick carpet of needles. In a few minutes she slowed down, and
caught Jack's arm.
"All right now," she said. "He'll take his time. He suspects nothing
yet."
"What did you learn?" Jack asked.
Following him in the trail, she put her hand on his shoulder to keep in
touch with him in the dark. The light contact warmed Jack through and
through. "Jean Paul came to Etzeeah, the head man, to tell him what to
say to us to-morrow. I listened outside with my ear at the bottom of
the tepee. They spoke softly. I couldn't hear everything. It seems
Jean Paul's talk is always for the people to stand together and drive
the white men out of their country."
"The old story," said Jack.
"He is clever and they are simple. He tells them my father cheats
them, and gets their furs for nothing. He says all the redmen are
ready to rise when he gives the word. He makes them think he is not a
man like themselves, but a kind of spirit. They are completely under
his influence. They are excited and ugly, like bad children."
"What about Garrod?"
"Nothing," she said sadly. "I think they know, but I heard nothing."
"One thing is certain," said Jack; "if we wish to get anything out of
them to-morrow, we'll have to leave Jean Paul behind."
"How can we prevent him from coming with us?"
"I'll have to think about that," Jack said grimly.
Next morning Jean Paul issued out of his tent as demure and
smooth-faced as a copper-coloured saint. Looking at him they were
almost ready to believe that he had never left it. He did his full
share of the work about camp, did it cheerfully and well. He even had
the delicacy--or whatever the feeling was--to retire with his breakfast
to a little distance from the others, that they might be relieved of
the constraint of his company.
"He's a wonder," Jack said to Mary with a kind of admiration.
When they had finished eating, Jack spoke a word to Davy, and the two
of them got a tracking line out of the baggage, a light, strong cord
that Jack had included because of the thousand uses to which it lends
itself. He gave the coil to Davy to carry, and they returned to Jean
Paul. Jack covertly made sure that his six-shooter was loose in its
case. The half-breed, having finished eating, was sitting on the
ground, lighting his pipe. Jack stood grimly waiting until he got it
going well. Jean Paul flipped the match away with an air of bravado,
and a sidelong sneer.
"Put your hands behind you!" Jack suddenly commanded.
Jean Paul sprang up astonished. Jack drew his gun.
"Don't move again," he harshly warned him. "Put your hands behind you."
Jean Paul slowly obeyed, and Davy twisted the cord around his wrists.
"Wat you do?" Jean Paul protested, with an eye on the gun and an
admirable air of astonished innocence. "I your man, me. I all time
work for you. You always moch bad to me. No believe no'ting."
"Next time you leave camp at night tell us where you're going," said
Jack with a hard smile.
It did not feaze Jean Paul. "Mus' I tell w'en I go to see a girl?" he
demanded, highly injured.
Jack laughed. "Very clever! But the girl was Etzeeah, and I know all
you said."
Jean Paul fell suddenly silent.
"Kneel down," commanded Jack. "Tie his ankles together, Davy, with his
wrists between."
Jack finished the job himself, going over all the knots, and taking
half a dozen turns around Jean Paul's body, with a final knot on his
chest, out of reach of both hands and teeth. He and Davy then picked
him up and laid him inside his own tent. His pipe dropped out of his
mouth in transit. Jack, with grim good-nature, picked it up and thrust
it between his teeth again. Jean Paul puffed at it defiantly. Jack
fastened the tent flaps back, affording a clear view of the interior.
"I'll have to leave him to you while we're gone, Davy. Keep away from
him. Don't listen to anything he says. Above all, don't touch him. I
don't see how he can work loose, but if he should"--Jack raised his
voice so it would carry into the tent--"shoot him like a coyote. I
order you to do it. I take the consequences."
Jean Paul lay without stirring. His face was hidden.
"God knows what poisonous mess is stewing inside his skull," Jack said
to Mary, as they rode away.
When the two of them cantered into the quadrangle of the tepees, with
its uproar of screaming children, yelping curs, and loose horses, it
needed no second glance to confirm the report that the redskins were in
an ugly temper. An angry murmur went hissing down the line like the
sputtering of a fuse. Every one dropped what he was doing; heads stuck
out of all the tepee openings; the little children scuttled inside.
Men scowled and fingered their guns; women laughed derisively, and spat
on the ground.
Jack and Mary pulled up their horses at the top of the quadrangle, and
coolly looked about them. Filth and confusion were the keynotes of the
scene. This was the home-camp of this little tribe, and the offal of
many seasons was disintegrating within sight. All their winter gear,
furs, snowshoes and sledges, was slung from vertical poles out of
harm's way. Between the tepees, on high racks out of reach of the
dogs, meat was slowly curing.
As for the people, they were miserably degenerate. Their fathers, the
old freebooters of the plains, would have disowned such offspring. The
mark of ugliness was upon them; pinched gray cheeks and sunken chests
were pitifully common; their ragged store clothes hung loosely on their
meagre limbs. A consciousness of their weakness lurked in their angry
eyes; in spite of themselves the quiet pose and the cold, commanding
eyes of the whites struck awe into their breasts. They saw that the
man and the girl had guns, but they hung in buckskin cases from the
saddles, and they made no move to reach for them. They saw the two
speak to each other quietly. Once they smiled.
It was upon Jack's calling Mary's attention to the absurdity of it,
this little company of tatterdemalions seeking to defy the white race.
There were eighteen tepees, small and large, containing perhaps ninety
souls. It was absurd and it was tragic. Remote and cut-off even from
the other tribes of their own people, they had never seen any white men
except the traders at Fort Cheever and Fort Erskine, and the rare
travellers who passed up and down their river in the summer.
"I'm sorry for them," Mary murmured. "They don't know what they're
doing."
"Don't look sorry for them," Jack warned. "They wouldn't understand
it."
An old man issued from the largest tepee, and approached them, not
without dignity. He was of good stature, but beginning to stoop. He
wore a dingy capote, or overcoat made out of a blanket, and to keep his
long, uncombed gray hair out of his face, he had a dirty cotton band
around his forehead. Not an imposing figure, but there was a remnant
of fire and pride in his old eyes.
"Etzeeah, the head man," Mary whispered to Jack.
Etzeeah concealed his feelings. Approaching Jack's horses he silently
held up his hand.
Jack's eyes impaled the old man. He ignored the hand. Jack had enough
of their talk for his purpose. "I do not shake hands with horse
thieves," he said.
Etzeeah fell back with an angry gesture. "I am no horse thief," he
said. "All the horses you see are mine, and my people's!"
"You drove away the governor's horses," said Jack. "And drove them
back after he had gone. They are company horses. It was a foolish
thing to do."
"It is Ascota who speaks me ill," cried Etzeeah with a great display of
anger. "He comes here, and he makes trouble. He calls us thieves and
bad men. What do I know of white men, and white men's horses?"
"This is what Jean Paul told him to say," Mary murmured in English.
"They were going to make believe to quarrel before us."
"Since when has the chief of the Sapis learned to lie?" demanded Jack
coldly.
"I, no liar!" cried Etzeeah, taken aback.
"You told a different tale when Ascota came to your lodge last night."
Etzeeah was silenced. His jaw dropped, and his black eyes looked old
and furtive.
"I have come for the sick white man, Garrod," said Jack. "Where is he?"
"I have seen no sick white man," muttered Etzeeah. "Ascota ask me
already."
"Your women hear you lie," said Jack scornfully. "They are laughing
behind you. I have had enough lies. Call everybody out of the tepees!"
Etzeeah stood motionless and scowling.
"Call them out!" repeated Jack, "or I will pull them out by the hair."
Etzeeah raised his voice in sullen command, and the rest of the women
and the children issued out of the tepees, the little children
scurrying madly to hide behind their mothers, and clinging to their
skirts.
Jack pointed to the bottom of the square. "All stand close together!"
he ordered.
The men scowled and muttered, but obeyed. There was no reason why any
one of them should not have put a bullet through Jack's breast, sitting
on his horse before them empty-handed--no reason, that is, except the
terrible blue eyes, travelling among them like scorching fires. Many a
little man's soul was sick with rage, and his fingers itching for the
trigger, but before he could raise his gun the eyes would fall on him,
withering his breast. It was the white man's scorn that emasculated
them. How could one fire at a being who held himself so high?
"Go through the tepees as quickly as you can," Jack said to Mary. "I
will hold your horse and watch them."
Dismounting, she made her way to Etzeeah's lodge.
A hundred pairs of black eyes watched their every movement. Etzeeah
made to edge back toward the crowd.
"Stand where you are!" Jack commanded. "I am not through with you."
Etzeeah lowered his eyes, and stood still.
"Etzeeah, you are a fool," said Jack, loud enough for all to hear.
"Ascota feeds you lies, and you swallow them without chewing. Do you
think you can fight all the white men with your eighteen lodges? To
the south there are more white men than cranes in the flocks that fly
overhead in the spring. When your few shells are spent, where will you
get more bullets to shoot the white men?"
"Ascota will give us plenty shells!" cried a voice in the crowd.
"Why isn't Ascota here now to help you?" asked Jack quickly. "He said
he would be here to show you how to fool me? Why? Because I tied him
like a dog in his tent, with a boy to watch him."
They looked at each other and murmured.
"If you did drive the white men away," Jack went on, "how would you
kill the moose for food without their powder? Who would buy your furs?
Where would you get flour and tea and tobacco, and matches to light
your fires? Wah! You are like children who throw their food down and
tread on it, and cry for it again!"
What effect this had, if any, could not be read in the dark, walled
faces that fronted him.
Mary returned to Jack, bringing a gun, which she handed him without
comment. He recognized it. It was a weapon that had lately been aimed
at him.
"This is the sick man's gun," he said, looking hard at Etzeeah.
The chief threw up his hands. "A Winchester thirty-thirty, like all
our guns," he protested. "There are twenty here the same."
Other men held up their weapons to show. Jack merely turned the gun
around, and pointed to initials neatly scratched on the stock.
"F. G.," he said grimly; "Francis Garrod."
[Illustration: "F. G.," he said grimly, "Francis Garrod"]
"How do I know?" said Etzeeah excitedly. "I have no letters. If it is
the white man's gun, Ascota left it."
"Ascota does not leave a gun," said Jack. "Where is Garrod?"
"I don't know," muttered Etzeeah. "I have not seen him."
"You are lying," Jack said coldly. "For the last time I ask you, where
is Garrod?"
Etzeeah fell back on a sullen, walled silence.
Jack turned to Mary. "Is there a woman or a child that he sets great
store by?" he asked swiftly in English.
"Etzoogah, his son, the pretty boy yonder," she answered.
Following her glance, Jack had no difficulty in picking out the one she
meant. He was a handsome, slender boy, a year or so younger than Davy.
Where the other children were in rags, he was wearing an expensive
wide-brimmed hat from the store, a clean blue gingham shirt, new
trousers, and around his waist a gay red sash. Moreover, he had the
wilful, petulant look of the spoiled child; plainly the apple of the
old man's eye.
"Get me a horse and a rope bridle," Jack whispered to Mary.
There were several horses picketed within the square, handy to their
owners' uses, and Mary made for the nearest.
"You take my horse?" Etzeeah demanded, scowling.
"It is for your son to ride," Jack said with a grim smile. "Etzoogah,
come here!" he commanded.
The boy approached with an awed, scared air. Etzeeah started to his
side, but Jack coolly separated them by moving his horse between. Mary
returned with the other horse, and the boy fell into her hands. She
smiled at him reassuringly.
"Get on," she said. "Nobody's going to hurt you. Come with us to our
camp. Davy is there."
All the children knew Mary and Davy. Moreover, there were always good
things to eat in a white man's camp. The boy was well pleased to obey.
Etzeeah shrilly commanded him to dismount, but the apple of his eye
merely laughed at him. The old man began to break. His eyes dulled
with anxiety; his hands trembled.
"What you do with my boy?" he demanded. "We shoot if you take him."
Jack laughed. "A red man can't shoot a white man," he said. "His hand
shakes too much. We will take the boy to our camp. We will keep him
until you bring the sick white man to us. If you don't bring him back,
well, maybe we will send the boy outside and make a white man of him."
Jack gave him a moment. There was no sign from Etzeeah, except his
trembling.
"Ride on," Jack said to Mary.
They wheeled their horses, and Etzeeah broke down.
His hand went to his throat. "Stop!" he muttered thickly. He did not
cry out or protest. He merely shrugged. "So be it," he said
stoically. "I will find Garrod if I can. Ascota took him away from
camp two days ago, and came back without him."
"Killed him?" cried Jack.
Etzeeah shook his head. "He was mad. Madmen are not harmed. He took
him into the bush and left him."
"Left him to starve?" cried Jack. "Good God!"
"He was mad," repeated Etzeeah. "The beasts and the birds will bring
him food."
Jack shrugged impatiently. "Very well," he said. "I'll have no more
lies. You come back and show me the place now, or I take the boy."
"I come," he said. "Etzoogah, get down. Get my blanket!"
The boy obeyed, none too willingly, and Etzeeah mounted in his place.
"You feed me?" he asked.
"There is plenty," said Jack. To Mary he said in English. "Make him
ride ahead of you out of camp. I'll stay and hold the crowd. Sing out
when you reach the trees, and I'll come."
In spite of herself, fear for him transfixed her eyes. "Jack," she
murmured.