and at intervals Dolores would run in the trail that the load might be
lightened and the dogs might make better time. It was then that Peter
watched Uppy with the revolver, and it was also in these
intervals--running close beside the woman--that the blood in Wapi's
veins was fired with a riotous joy.
For three hours there was almost no slackening in Uppy's speed. The
fourth and fifth were slower. In the sixth and seventh the pace began
to tell. And the plain was no longer hard and level, swept like a floor
by the polar winds. Rolling undulations grew into ridges of snow and
ice; in places the dogs dragged the sledge over thin crusts that broke
under the runners; fields of drift snow, fine as shot, lay in their
way; and in the eighth hour Uppy stopped the lagging dogs and held up
his two hands in the mute signal of the Eskimo that they could go no
farther without a rest.
Wapi dropped on his belly and watched. His eyes followed Uppy
suspiciously as he strung up the tent on its whalebone supports to keep
the bite of the wind from the sledge on which Dolores sat at Peter's
feet. Then Uppy built a fire of kindlings, and scraped up a pot of ice
for tea-water. After that, while the water was heating, he gave each of
the trace dogs a frozen fish. Dolores herself picked out one of the
largest and tossed it to Wapi. Then she sat down again and began to
talk to Peter, bundled up in his furs. After a time they ate, and drank
hot tea, and after he had devoured a chunk of raw meat the size of his
two fists, Uppy rolled himself in his sleeping bag near the dogs. A
little at a time Wapi dragged himself nearer until his head lay on
Dolores' coat. After that there was a long silence broken only by the
low voices of the woman and the man, and the heavy breathing of the
tired dogs. Wapi himself dozed off, but never for long. Then Dolores
nodded, and her head drooped until it found a pillow on Peter's
shoulder. Gently Peter drew a bearskin about her, and for a long time
sat wide-awake, guarding Uppy and baring his ears at intervals to
listen. A dozen times he saw Wapi's bloodshot eyes looking at him, and
twice he put out a hand to the dog's head and spoke to him in a whisper.
Even Peter's eyes were filmed by a growing drowsiness when Wapi drew
silently away and slunk suspiciously into the night. There was no
yapping foxes here, forty miles from the coast. An almost appalling
silence hung under the white stars, a silence broken only by the low
and distant moaning the wind always makes on the barrens. Wapi listened
to it, and he sniffed with his gray muzzle turned to the north. And
then he whined. Had Dolores or Peter seen him or heard the note in his
throat, they, too, would have stared back over the trail they had
traveled. For something was coming to Wapi. Faint, elusive, and
indefinable breath in the air, he smelled it in one moment, and the
next it was gone. For many minutes he stood undecided, and then he
returned to the sledge, his spine bristling and a growl in his throat.
Wide-eyed and staring, Peter was looking back. "What is it, Wapi?"
His voice aroused Dolores. She sat up with a start. The growl had grown
into a snarl in Wapi's throat.
"I think they are coming," said Peter calmly. "You'd better rouse Uppy.
He hasn't moved in the last two hours."
Something that was like a sob came from Dolores' lips as she stood up.
"They're not coming," she whispered. "They've stopped--and they're
building a fire!"
Not more than a third of a mile away a point of yellow flame flared up
in the night.
"Give me the revolver, Peter."
Peter gave it to her without a word. She went to Uppy, and at the touch
of her foot he was out of his sleeping-bag, his moon-face staring at
her. She pointed back to the fire. Her face was dead white. The
revolver was pointed straight at Uppy's heart.
"If they come up with us, Uppy--you die!"
The Eskimo's narrow eyes widened. There was murder in this white
woman's face, in the steadiness of her hand, and in her voice. If they
came up with them--he would die! Swiftly he gathered up his
sleeping-bag and placed it on the sledge. Then he roused the dogs,
tangled in their traces. They rose to their feet, sleepy and
ill-humored. One of them snapped at his hand. Another snarled viciously
as he untwisted a trace. Then one of the yawning brutes caught the new
smell in the air, the smell that Wapi had gathered when it was a mile
farther off. He sniffed. He sat back on his haunches and sent forth a
yelping howl to his comrades in the other team. In ten seconds the
other five were howling with him, and scarcely had the tumult burst
from their throats when there came a response from the fire half a mile
away.
"My God!" gasped Peter, under his breath.
Dolores sprang to the gee-bar, and Uppy lashed his long whip until it
cracked like a repeating rifle over the pack. The dogs responded and
sped through the night. Behind them the pandemonium of dog voices in
the other camp had ceased. Men had leaped into life. Fifteen dogs were
straightening in the tandem trace of a single sledge.
Dolores laughed, a sobbing, broken laugh, that in itself was a cry of
despair. "Peter, if they come up with us, what shall we do?"
"If they overtake us," said Peter, "give me the revolver. It is fully
loaded?"
"I have cartridges--"
For the first time she remembered that she had not filled the three
empty chambers. Crooking her arm under the gee-bar, she fumbled in her
pocket. The dogs, refreshed by their sleep and urged by Uppy's whip,
were tearing off the first mile at a great speed. The trail ahead of
them was level and hard again. Uppy knew they were on the edge of the
big barren of the Lacs Delesse, and he cracked his whip just as the off
runner of the sledge struck a hidden snow-blister. There was a sudden
lurch, and in a vicious up-shoot of the gee-bar the revolver was
knocked from Dolores' hand--and was gone. A shriek rose to her lips,
but she stifled it before it was given voice. Until this minute she had
not felt the terror of utter hopelessness upon her. Now it made her
faint. The revolver had not only given her hope, but also a steadfast
faith in herself. From the beginning she had made up her mind how she
would use it in the end, even though a few moments before she had asked
Peter what they would do.
Crumpled down on the sledge, she clung to Peter, and suddenly the
inspiration came to her not to let him know what had happened. Her arms
tightened about his shoulders, and she looked ahead over the backs of
the wolfish pack, shivering as she thought of what Uppy would do could
he guess her loss. But he was running now for his life, driven on by
his fear of her unerring marksmanship--and Wapi. She looked over her
shoulder. Wapi was there, a huge gray shadow twenty paces behind. And
she thought she heard a shout!
Peter was speaking to her. "Blake's dogs are tired," he was saying.
"They were just about to camp, and ours have had a rest. Perhaps--"
"We shall beat them!" she interrupted him. "See how fast we are going,
Peter! It is splendid!"
A rifle-shot sounded behind them. It was not far away, and
involuntarily she clutched him tighter. Peter reached up a hand.
"Give me the revolver, Dolores."
"No," she protested. "They are not going to overtake us."
"You must give me the revolver," he insisted.
"Peter, I can't. You understand, I can't. I must keep the revolver."
She looked back again. There was no doubt now. Their pursuers were
drawing nearer. She heard a voice, the la-looing of running Eskimos, a
faint shout which she knew was a white man's shout--and another rifle
shot. Wapi was running nearer. He was almost at the tail of the sledge,
and his red eyes were fixed on her as he ran.
"Wapi!" she cried. "Wapi!"
His jaws dropped agape. She could hear his panting response to her
voice.
A third shot--over their heads sped a strange droning sound.
"Wapi," she almost screamed, "go back! Sick 'em, Wapi--sick 'em--sick
'em--sick 'em!" She flung out her arms, driving him back, repeating the
words over and over again. She leaned over the edge of the sledge,
clinging to the gee-bar. "Go back, Wapi! Sick 'em--sick 'em--sick 'em!"
As if in response to her wild exhortation, there came a sudden yelping
outcry from the team behind. It was close upon them now. Another ten
minutes.
And then she saw that Wapi was dropping behind. Quickly he was
swallowed up in the starlit chaos of the night.
"Peter," she cried, sobbingly. "Peter!"
Listening to the retreating sound of the sledge, Wapi stood a silent
shadow in the trail. Then he turned and faced the north. He heard the
other sound now, and ahead of it the wind brought him a smell, the
smell of things he hated. For many years something had been fighting
itself toward understanding within him, and the yelping of dogs and the
taint in the air of creatures who had been his slave-masters narrowed
his instinct to the one vital point. Again it was not a process of
reason but the cumulative effect of things that had happened, and were
happening. He had scented menace when first he had given warning of the
nearness of pursuers, and this menace was no longer an elusive and
unseizable thing that had merely stirred the fires of his hatred. It
was now a near and physical fact. He had tried to run away from
it--with the woman--but it had followed and was overtaking him, and the
yelping dogs were challenging him to fight as they had challenged him
from the day he was old enough to take his own part. And now he had
something to fight for. His intelligence gripped the fact that one
sledge was running away from the other, and that the sledge which was
running away was his sledge--and that for his sledge he must fight.
He waited, almost squarely in the trail. There was no longer the
slinking, club-driven attitude of a creature at bay in the manner in
which he stood in the path of his enemies. He had risen out of his
serfdom. The stinging slash of the whip and his dread of it were gone.
Standing there in the starlight with his magnificent head thrown up and
the muscles of his huge body like corded steel, the passing spirit of
Shan Tung would have taken him for Tao, the Great Dane. He was not
excited--and yet he was filled with a mighty desire--more than that, a
tremendous purpose. The yelping excitement of the oncoming Eskimo dogs
no longer urged him to turn aside to avoid their insolent bluster, as
he would have turned aside yesterday or the day before. The voices of
his old masters no longer sent him slinking out of their way, a growl
in his throat and his body sagging with humiliation and the rage of his
slavery. He stood like a rock, his broad chest facing them squarely,
and when he saw the shadows of them racing up out of the star-mist an
eighth of a mile away, it was not a growl but a whine that rose in his
throat, a whine of low and repressed eagerness, of a great yearning
about to be fulfilled. Two hundred yards--a hundred--eighty--not until
the dogs were less than fifty from him did he move. And then, like a
rock hurled by a mighty force, he was at them.
He met the onrushing weight of the pack breast to breast. There was no
warning. Neither men nor dogs had seen the waiting shadow. The crash
sent the lead-dog back with Wapi's great fangs in his throat, and in an
instant the fourteen dogs behind had piled over them, tangled in their
traces, yelping and snarling and biting, while over them round-faced,
hooded men shouted shrilly and struck with their whips, and from the
sledge a white man sprang with a rifle in his hands. It was Rydal.
Under the mass of dogs Wapi, the Walrus, heard nothing of the shouts of
men. He was fighting. He was fighting as he had never fought before in
all the days of his life. The fierce little Eskimo dogs had smelled
him, and they knew their enemy. The lead-dog was dead. A second Wapi
had disemboweled with a single slash of his inch-long fangs. He was
buried now. But his jaws met flesh and bone, and out of the squirming
mass there rose fearful cries of agony that mingled hideously with the
bawling of men and the snarling and yelping of beasts that had not yet
felt Wapi's fangs. Three and four at a time they were at him. He felt
the wolfish slash of their teeth in his flesh. In him the sense of pain
was gone. His jaws closed on a foreleg, and it snapped like a stick.
His teeth sank like ivory knives into the groin of a brute that had
torn a hole in his side, and a smothered death-howl rose out of the
heap. A fang pierced his eye. Even then no cry came from Wapi, the
Walrus. He heaved upward with his giant body. He found another throat,
and it was then that he rose above the pack, shaking the life from his
victim as a terrier would have shaken a rat. For the first time the
Eskimos saw him, and out of their superstitious souls strange cries
found utterance as they sprang back and shrieked out to Rydal that it
was a devil and not a beast that had waited for them in the trail.
Rydal threw up his rifle. The shot came. It burned a crease in Wapi's
shoulder and tore a hole as big as a man's fist in the breast of a dog
about to spring upon him f rom behind. Again he was down, and Rydal
dropped his rifle, and snatched a whip from the hand of an Eskimo.
Shouting and cursing, he lashed the pack, and in a moment he saw a
huge, open-jawed shadow rise up on the far side and start off into the
open starlight. He sprang back to his rifle. Twice he fired at the
retreating shadow before it disappeared. And the Eskimo dogs made no
movement to follow. Five of the fifteen were dead. The remaining ten,
torn and bleeding--three of them with legs that dragged in the bloody
snow--gathered in a whipped and whimpering group. And the Eskimos,
shivering in their fear of this devil that had entered into the body of
Wapi, the Walrus, failed to respond to Rydal's command when he pointed
to the red trail that ran out under the stars.
At Fort Confidence, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, there was
day--day that was like cold, gray dawn, the day one finds just beyond
the edge of the Arctic night, in which the sun hangs like a pale
lantern over the far southern horizon. In a log-built room that faced
this bit of glorious red glow lay Peter, bolstered up in his bed so
that he could see it until it faded from the sky. There was a new light
in his face, and there was something of the old Peter back in his eyes.
Watching the final glow with him was Dolores. It was their second day.
Into this world, in the twilight that was falling swiftly as they
watched the setting of the sun, came Wapi, the Walrus. Blinded in the
eye, gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, covered with wounds, and with
his great heart almost ready to die, he came at last to the river
across which lay the barracks. His vision was nearly gone, but under
his nose he could still smell faintly the trail he was following until
the last. It led him across the river. And in darkness it brought him
to a door.
After a little the door opened, and with its opening came at last the
fulfilment of the promise of his dreams--hope, happiness, things to
live for in a new, a white-man's world. For Wapi, the Walrus, forty
years removed from Tao of Vancouver, had at last come home.
THE YELLOW-BACK
Above God's Lake, where the Bent Arrow runs red as pale blood under its
crust of ice, Reese Beaudin heard of the dog auction that was to take
place at Post Lac Bain three days later. It was in the cabin of Joe
Delesse, a trapper, who lived at Lac Bain during the summer, and
trapped the fox and the lynx sixty miles farther north in this month of
February.
"Diantre, but I tell you it is to be the greatest sale of dogs that has
ever happened at Lac Bain!" said Delesse. "To this Wakao they are
coming from all the four directions. There will be a hundred dogs,
huskies, and malamutes, and Mackenzie hounds, and mongrels from the
south, and I should not wonder if some of the little Eskimo devils were
brought from the north to be sold as breeders. Surely you will not miss
it, my friend?"
"I am going by way of Post Lac Bain," replied Reese Beaudin equivocally.
But his mind was not on the sale of dogs. From his pipe he puffed out
thick clouds of smoke, and his eyes narrowed until they seemed like
coals peering out of cracks; and he said, in his quiet, soft voice:
"Do you know of a man named Jacques Dupont, m'sieu?"
Joe Delesse tried to peer through the cloud of smoke at Reese Beaudin's
face.
"Yes, I know him. Does he happen to be a friend of yours?"
Reese laughed softly.
"I have heard of him. They say that he is a devil. To the west I was
told that he can whip any man between Hudson's Bay and the Great Bear,
that he is a beast in man-shape, and that he will surely be at the big
sale at Lac Bain."
On his knees the huge hands of Joe Delesse clenched slowly, gripping in
their imaginary clutch a hated thing.
"Oui, I know him," he said. "I know also--Elise--his wife. See!"
He thrust suddenly his two huge knotted hands through the smoke that
drifted between him and the stranger who had sought the shelter of his
cabin that night.
"See--I am a man full-grown, m'sieu--a man--and yet I am afraid of him!
That is how much of a devil and a beast in man-shape he is."
Again Reese Beaudin laughed in his low, soft voice.
"And his wife, mon ami? Is she afraid of him?"
He had stopped smoking. Joe Delesse saw his face. The stranger's eyes
made him look twice and think twice.
"You have known her--sometime?"
"Yes, a long time ago. We were children together. And I have heard all
has not gone well with her. Is it so?"
"Does it go well when a dove is mated to a vulture, m'sieu?"
"I have also heard that she grew up to be very beautiful," said Reese
Beaudin, "and that Jacques Dupont killed a man for her. If that is so--"
"It is not so," interrupted Delesse. "He drove another man away--no,
not a man, but a yellow-livered coward who had no more fight in him
than a porcupine without quills! And yet she says he was not a coward.
She has always said, even to Dupont, that it was the way le Bon Dieu
made him, and that because he was made that way he was greater than all
other men in the North Country. How do I know? Because, m'sieu, I am
Elise Dupont's cousin."
Delesse wondered why Reese Beaudin's eyes were glowing like living
coals.
"And yet--again, it is only rumor I have heard--they say this man,
whoever he was, did actually run away, like a dog that had been whipped
and was afraid to return to its kennel."
"Pst!" Joe Delesse flung his great arms wide. "Like that--he was gone.
And no one ever saw him again, or heard of him again. But I know that
she knew--my cousin, Elise. What word it was he left for her at the
last she has always kept in her own heart, mon Dieu, and what a
wonderful thing he had to fight for! You knew the child. But the
woman--non? She was like an angel. Her eyes, when you looked into
them--hat can I say, m'sieu? They made you forget. And I have seen her
hair, unbound, black and glossy as the velvet side of a sable, covering
her to the hips. And two years ago I saw Jacques Dupont's hands in that
hair, and he was dragging her by it--"
Something snapped. It was a muscle in Reese Beaudin's arm. He had
stiffened like iron.
"And you let him do that!"
Joe Delesse shrugged his shoulders. It was a shrug of hopelessness, of
disgust.
"For the third time I interfered, and for the third time Jacques Dupont
beat me until I was nearer dead than alive. And since then I have made
it none of my business. It was, after all, the fault of the man who ran
away. You see, m'sieu, it was like this: Dupont was mad for her, and
this man who ran away--the Yellow-back--wanted her, and Elise loved the
Yellow-back. This Yellow-back was twenty-three or four, and he read
books, and played a fiddle and drew strange pictures--and was weak in
the heart when it came to a fight. But Elise loved him. She loved him
for those very things that made him a fool and a weakling, m'sieu, the
books and the fiddle and the pictures; and she stood up with the
courage for them both. And she would have married him, too, and would
have fought for him with a club if it had come to that, when the thing
happened that made him run away. It was at the midsummer carnival, when
all the trappers and their wives and children were at Lac Bain. And
Dupont followed the Yellow-back about like a dog. He taunted him, he
insulted him, he got down on his knees and offered to fight him without
getting on his feet; and there, before the very eyes of Elise, he
washed the Yellow-back's face in the grease of one of the roasted
caribou! And the Yellow-back was a man! Yes, a grown man! And it was
then that Jacques Dupont shouted out his challenge to all that crowd.
He would fight the Yellow-back. He would fight him with his right arm
tied behind his back! And before Elise and the Yellow-back, and all
that crowd, friends tied his arm so that it was like a piece of wood
behind him, and it was his right arm, his fighting arm, the better half
of him that was gone. And even then the Yellow-back was as white as the
paper he drew pictures on. Ventre saint gris, but then was his chance
to have killed Jacques Dupont! Half a man could have done it. Did he,
m'sieu? No, he did not. With his one arm and his one hand Jacques
Dupont whipped that Yellow-back, and he would have killed him if Elise
had not rushed in to sav e the Yellow-back's purple face from going
dead black. And that night the Yellow-back slunk away. Shame? Yes. From
that night he was ashamed to show his face ever again at Lac Bain. And
no one knows where he went. No one--except Elise. And her secret is in
her own breast."
"And after that?" questioned Reese Beaudin, in a voice that was
scarcely above a whisper.
"I cannot understand," said Joe Delesse. "It was strange, m'sieu, very
strange. I know that Elise, even after that coward ran away, still
loved him. And yet--well, something happened. I overheard a terrible
quarrel one day between Jan Thiebout, father of Elise, and Jacques
Dupont. After that Thiebout was very much afraid of Dupont. I have my
own suspicion. Now that Thiebout is dead it is not wrong for me to say
what it is. I think Thiebout killed the halfbreed Bedore who was found
dead on his trap-line five years ago. There was a feud between them.
And Dupont, discovering Thiebout's secret--well, you can understand how
easy it would be after that, m'sieu. Thiebout's winter trapping was in
that Burntwood country, fifty miles from neighbor to neighbor, and very
soon after Bedore's death Jacques Dupont became Thiebout's partner. I
know that Elise was forced to marry him. That was four years ago. The
next year old Thiebout died, and in all that time not once has Elise
been to Post Lac Bain!"
"Like the Yellow-back--she never returned," breathed Reese Beaudin.
"Never. And now--it is strange--"
"What is strange, Joe Delesse?"
"That for the first time in all these years she is going to Lac
Bain--to the dog sale."
Reese Beaudin's face was again hidden in the smoke of his pipe. Through
it his voice came.
"It is a cold night, M'sieu Delesse. Hear the wind howl!"
"Yes, it is cold--so cold the foxes will not run. My traps and
poison-baits will need no tending tomorrow."
"Unless you dig them out of the drifts."
"I will stay in the cabin."
"What! You are not going to Lac Bain!"
"I doubt it."
"Even though Elise, your cousin, is to be there?"
"I have no stomach for it, m'sieu. Nor would you were you in my boots,
and did you know why he is going. Par les mille cornes d'u diable, I
cannot whip him but I can kill him--and if I went--and the thing
happens which I guess is going to happen--"
"Qui? Surely you will tell me--"
"Yes, I will tell you. Jacques Dupont knows that Elise has never
stopped loving the Yellow-back. I do not believe she has ever tried to
hide it from him. Why should she? And there is a rumor, m'sieu, that
the Yellow-back will be at the Lac Bain dog sale."
Reese Beaudin rose slowly to his feet, and yawned in that smoke-filled
cabin.
"And if the Yellow-back should turn the tables, Joe Delesse, think of
what a fine thing you will miss," he said.
Joe Delesse also rose, with a contemptuous laugh.
"That fiddler, that picture-drawer, that book-reader--Pouff! You are
tired, m'sieu, that is your bunk."
Reese Beaudin held out a hand. The bulk of the two stood out in the
lamp-glow, and Joe Delesse was so much the bigger man that his hand was
half again the size of Reese Beaudin's. They gripped. And then a
strange look went over the face of Joe Delesse. A cry came from out of
his beard. His mouth grew twisted. His knees doubled slowly under him,
and in the space of ten seconds his huge bulk was kneeling on the
floor, while Reese Beaudin looked at him, smiling.