For a moment John Adare stood like an avenging demon in the midst
of the startled faces of the forest men. His shaggy hair blew out
from under his gray lynx cap. His eyes were red and glaring with
the lights of the hunting wolf. His deep chest rose and fell in
panting breaths. Then he saw Jean and Philip, side by side. Toward
them he came, as if to crush them, and Philip sprang toward him,
so that he was ahead of Jean. Adare stopped. The wind rattled in
his throat.
"And you came WITHOUT ME--"
His voice was a rumble, deep, tense, like the muttering vibration
before an explosion. Philip's hands gripped his arms, and those
arms were as hard as oak. In one hand Adare held a gun. His other
fist was knotted, heavy.
"Yes, Mon Pere, we came without you," said Philip. "It is
terrible. We did not want you two to suffer. We did not want you
to know until it was all over, and Josephine was back in your
arms. We thought it drive her mother mad. And you, Mon Pere, we
wanted to save you!"
Adare's face relaxed. His arm dropped. His red eyes shifted to the
faces about him, and he said, as he looked:
"It was Breuil. He said you and Josephine were not at his cabin.
He came to tell Mignonne the child was so much better. I cornered
Metoosin, and he told me. I have been coming fast, running."
He drew in a deep breath. Then suddenly he became like a tiger. He
sprang among the men, and threw up his great arms. His voice rose
more than human, fierce and savage, above the growing tumult of
the dogs and the wailing of the wind.
"Ye are with me, men?"
A rumble of voice answered him.
"Then come!"
He had seen that they were ready, and he strode on ahead of them.
He was leader now, and Philip saw Father George close at his side,
clutching his arm, talking. In Jean's face there was a great fear.
He spoke low to Philip.
"If he meets Lang, if he fights face to face with Thoreau, or if
they call upon us to parley, all is lost! M'sieur, for the love of
God, hold your fire for those two! We must kill them. If a parley
is granted, they will come to us. We will kill them--even as they
come toward us with a white flag, if we must!"
"No truce will be granted!" cried Philip.
As if John Adare himself had heard his words, he stopped and faced
those behind him. They were in the shelter of the forest. In the
gray gloom of dawn they were only a sea of shifting shadows.
"Men, there is to be no mercy this day!" he said, and his voice
rumbled like an echo through the aisles of the forest. "We are not
on the trail of men, but of beasts and murderers. The Law that is
three hundred miles away has let them live in our midst. It has
let them kill. It said nothing when they stole Red Fawn from her
father's tepee and ravaged her to death. It has said: 'Give us
proof that Thoreau killed Reville, and that his wife did not die a
natural death.' We are our own law. In these forests we are
masters. And yet with this brothel at our doors we are not safe,
our wives and daughters are within the reach of monsters. To-day
it is my daughter--her husband's wife. To-morrow it may be yours.
There can be no mercy. We must kill--kill and burn! Am I right,
men?"
This time it was not a murmur but a low thunder of voice that
answered. Philip and Jean forged ahead to his side. Shoulder to
shoulder they led the way.
From the camp at the Forks it was eighteen miles to the Devil's
Nest, where hung on the edge of a chasm the log buildings that
sheltered Lang and his crew. To these men of the trails those
eighteen miles meant nothing. White-bearded Janesse's trapline was
sixty miles long, and he covered it in two days, stripping his
pelts as he went. Renault had run sixty miles with his dogs
between daybreak and dusk, and "Mad" Joe Horn had come down one
hundred and eighty miles from the North in five days. These were
not records. They were the average. Those who followed the master
of Adare were thin-legged, small-footed, narrow-waisted--but
their sinews were like rawhide, and their lungs filled chests that
were deep and wide.
With the break of day the wind fell, the sky cleared, and it grew
colder. In silence John Adare, Jean, and Philip broke the trail.
In silence followed close behind them the Missioner with his
smooth-bore. In silence followed the French and half-breeds and
Crees. Now and then came the sharp clink of steel as rifle barrel
struck rifle barrel. Voices were low, monosyllabic; breaths were
deep, the throbbing of hearts like that of engines. Here were
friends who were meeting for the first time in months, yet they
spoke no word of each other, of the fortunes of the "line," of
wives or children. There was but one thought in their brains,
pumping the blood through their veins, setting their dark faces in
lines of iron, filling their eyes with the feverish fires of
excitement. Yet this excitement, the tremendous passion that was
working in them, found no vent in wild outcry.
It was like the deadly undertow of the maelstroms in the spring
floods. It was there, unseen--silent as death. And this thought,
blinding them to all else, insensating them to all emotions but
that of vengeance, was thought of Josephine.
John Adare himself seemed possessed of a strange madness. He said
no word to Jean or Philip. Hour after hour he strode ahead, until
it seemed that tendons must snap and legs give way under the
strain. Not once did he stop for rest until, hours later, they
reached the summit of a ridge, and he pointed far off into the
plain below. They could see the smoke rising up from the Devil's
Nest. A breath like a great sigh swept through the band.
And now, silently, there slipped away behind a rock Kaskisoon and
his Indians. From under his blanket-coat the chief brought forth
the thing that had bulged there, a tom-tom. Philip and the waiting
men heard then the low Te-dum--Te-dum--Te-dum of it, as Kaskisoon
turned his face first to the east and then the west, north and
then south, calling upon Iskootawapoo to come from out of the
valley of Silent Men and lead them to triumph. And the waiting men
were silent--deadly silent--as they listened. For they knew that
the low Te-dum was the call to death. Their hands gripped harder
at the barrels of their guns, and when Kaskisoon and his braves
came from behind the rock they faced the smoke above the Devil's
Nest, wiped their eyes to see more clearly, and followed John
Adare down into the plain.
And to other ears than their own the medicine-drum had carried the
Song of Death. Down in the thick spruce of the plain a man on the
trail of a caribou had heard. He looked up, and on the cap of the
ridge he saw. He was old in the ways and the unwritten laws of the
North, and like a deer he turned and sped back unseen in the
direction of the Devil's Nest. And as the avengers came down into
the plain Kaskisoon chanted in a low monotone:
Our fathers--come!
Come from out of the valley.
Guide us--for to-day we fight,
And the winds whisper of death!
And those who heard did not laugh. Father George crossed himself,
and muttered something that might have been a prayer. For in this
hour Kaskisoon's God was very near.