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 McElroy noticed
the keen eyes watching his every move.
What was he among this silent tribe with their war-paint and their
distrust of white men?
It was a hopeless puzzle, and the factor laid it grimly aside. Next to
the closed and impregnable front of his own post what time he passed
from its sight, this cold aloofness of his chief trader cut to inmost
soul.
But these things were that life of the great North-west whose
unspeakable lure thralled men's souls to the death, and he was content.
It was chance and daring and danger which drew him in the beginning to
the country, love of the wild and breath of the vast reaches, something
within which pushed him forward among these savage peoples, even as the
same thing pushed Maren Le Moyne toward the Whispering Hills, sent De
Courtenay to the Saskatchewan.
At any rate he was very hungry, and when a bent and withered crone of a
squaw brought food and loosed his right hand, the young factor tossed
up his head to get the falling hair out of his eyes and fell to with a
relish.
“Faugh!” said De Courtenay with the first mouthful; “I wonder, M'sieu,
is there nothing we can do to hasten the end? Many meals of this would
equal the stake.”
Whereat the gallant smilingly tossed the meat and its birchbark platter
at the woman's feet.
“If you would not prefer starvation, I would suggest that you crawl for
that, M'sieu,” said McElroy gravely; but the wrinkled hag gathered it
up, and left them to the night that was fast settling over the forest.
Thus began the long trail up to the waters of Churchill and beyond into
that unknown region where few white men had yet penetrated, and fewer
still returned.