and almost unclassifiable diversities. But there is only one cough when
a man has a bullet through his lungs and is measuring his life by
minutes, perhaps seconds. Yet Breault, even as he coughed the red stain
from his lips, was not afraid. Many times he had found himself in the
presence of death, and long ago it had ceased to frighten him. Some day
he had expected to come under the black shadow of it himself--not in a
quiet and peaceful way, but all at once, with a shock. And the time had
come. He knew that he was dying; and he was calm. More than that--in
dying he was achieving a triumph. The red-hot death-sting in his lung
had given birth to a frightful thought in his sickening brain. The day
of his great opportunity was at hand. The hour--the minute.
A last flush of the pale afternoon sun lighted up his black-bearded
face as his eyes turned, with their new inspiration, to his sledge. It
was a face that one would remember--not pleasantly, perhaps, but as a
fixture in a shifting memory of things; a face strong with a brute
strength, implacable in its hard lines, emotionless almost, and beyond
that, a mystery.
It was the best known face in all that part of the northland which
reaches up from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and westward to Fond du
Lac and the Wholdais country. For ten years Breault had made that trip
twice a year with the northern mails. In all its reaches there was not
a cabin he did not know, a face he had not seen, or a name he could not
speak; yet there was not a man, woman, or child who welcomed him except
for what he brought. But the government had found its faith in him
justified. The police at their lonely outposts had come to regard his
comings and goings as dependable as day and night. They blessed him for
his punctuality, and not one of them missed him when he was gone. A
strange man was Breault.
With his back against a tree, where he had propped himself after the
first shock of the bullet in his lung, he took a last look at life with
a passionless imperturbability. If there was any emotion at all in his
face it was one of vindictiveness--an emotion roused by an intense and
terrible hatred that in this hour saw the fulfilment of its vengeance.
Few men nursed a hatred as Breault had nursed his. And it gave him
strength now, when another man would have died.
He measured the distance between himself and the sledge. It was,
perhaps, a dozen paces. The dogs were still standing, tangled a little
in their traces,--eight of them,--wide-chested, thin at the groins, a
wolfish horde, built for endurance and speed. On the sledge was a
quarter of a ton of his Majesty's mail. Toward this Breault began to
creep slowly and with great pain. A hand inside of him seemed crushing
the fiber of his lung, so that the blood oozed out of his mouth. When
he reached the sledge there were many red patches in the snow behind
him. He opened with considerable difficulty a small dunnage sack, and
after fumbling a bit took there-from a pencil attached to a long red
string, and a soiled envelope.
For the first time a change came upon his countenance--a ghastly smile.
And above his hissing breath, that gushed between his lips with the
sound of air pumped through the fine mesh of a colander, there rose a
still more ghastly croak of exultation and of triumph. Laboriously he
wrote. A few words, and the pencil dropped from his stiffening fingers
into the snow. Around his neck he wore a long red scarf held together
by a big brass pin, and to this pin he fastened securely the envelope.
This much done,--the mystery of his death solved for those who might
some day find him,--the ordinary man would have contented himself by
yielding up life's struggle with as little more physical difficulty as
possible. Breault was not ordinary. He was, in his one way, efficiency
incarnate. He made space for himself on the sledge, and laid himself
out in that space with great care, first taking pains to fasten about
his thighs two babiche thongs that were employed at times to steady his
freight. Then he ran his left arm through one of the loops of the stout
mail-chest. By taking these precautions he was fairly secure in the
belief that after he was dead and frozen stiff no amount of rough
trailing by the dogs could roll him from the sledge.
In this conjecture he was right. When the starved and exhausted
malamutes dragged their silent burden into the Northwest Mounted Police
outpost barracks at Crooked Bow twenty-four hours later, an ax and a
sapling bar were required to pry Francois Breault from his bier.
Previous to this process, however, Sergeant Fitzgerald, in charge at
the outpost, took possession of the soiled envelope pinned to Breault's
red scarf. The information it bore was simple, and yet exceedingly
definite. Few men in dying as Breault had died could have made the
matter easier for the police.
On the envelope he had written:
Jan Thoreau shot me and left me for dead. Have just strength to write
this--no more.
Francois Breault.
It was epic--a colossal monument to this man, thought Sergeant
Fitzgerald, as they pried the frozen body loose.
To Corporal Blake fell the unpleasant task of going after Jan Thoreau.
Unpleasant, because Breault's starved huskies and frozen body brought
with them the worst storm of the winter. In the face of this storm
Blake set out, with the Sergeant's last admonition in his ears:
"Don't come back, Blake, until you've got him, dead or alive."
That is a simple and efficacious formula in the rank and file of the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police. It has made volumes of stirring
history, because it means a great deal and has been lived up to. Twice
before, the words had been uttered to Blake--in extreme cases. The
first time they had taken him for six months into the Barren Lands
between Hudson's Bay and the Great Slave--and he came back with his
man; the second time he was gone for nearly a year along the rim of the
Arctic--and from there also he came back with his man. Blake was of
that sort. A bull-dog, a Nemesis when he was once on the trail,
and--like most men of that kind--without a conscience. In the Blue
Books of the service he was credited with arduous patrols and unusual
exploits. "Put Blake on the trail" meant something, and "He is one of
our best men" was a firmly established conviction at departmental
headquarters.
Only one man knew Blake as Blake actually lived under his skin--and
that was Blake himself. He hunted men and ran them down without
mercy--not because he loved the law, but for the reason that he had in
him the inherited instincts of the hound. This comparison, if quite
true, is none the less unfair to the hound. A hound is a good dog at
heart.
In the January storm it may be that the vengeful spirit of Francois
Breault set out in company with Corporal Blake to witness the
consummation of his vengeance. That first night, as he sat close to his
fire in the shelter of a thick spruce timber, Blake felt the unusual
and disturbing sensation of a presence somewhere near him. The storm
was at its height. He had passed through many storms, but to-night
there seemed to be an uncannily concentrated fury in its beating and
wailing over the roofs of the forests.
He was physically comfortable. The spruce trees were so dense that the
storm did not reach him, and fortune favored him with a good fire and
plenty of fuel. But the sensation oppressed him. He could not keep away
from him his mental vision of Breault as he had helped to pry him from
the sledge--his frozen features, the stiffened fingers, the curious
twist of the icy lips that had been almost a grin.
Blake was not superstitious. He was too much a man of iron for that.
His soul had lost the plasticity of imagination. But he could not
forget Breault's lips as they had seemed to grin up at him. There was a
reason for it. On his last trip down, Breault had said to him, with
that same half-grin on his face:
"M'sieu, some day you may go after my murderer, and when you do,
Francois Breault will go with you."
That was three months ago. Blake measured the time back as he sucked at
his pipe, and at the same time he looked at the shadowy and half-lost
forms of his dogs, curled up for the night in the outer rim of
firelight.
Over the tree-tops a sudden blast of wind howled. It was like a monster
voice. Blake rose to his feet and rolled upon the fire the big night
log he had dragged in, and to this he added, with the woodman's craft
of long experience, lengths of green timber, so arranged that they
would hold fire until morning. Then he went into his silk service tent
and buried himself in his sleeping-bag.
For a long time he did not sleep. He listened to the crackle of the
fire. Again and again he heard that monster voice moaning and shrieking
over the forest. Never had the rage of storm filled him with the
uneasiness of to-night. At last the mystery of it was solved for him.
The wind came and went each time in a great moaning, half shrieking
sound: B-r-r-r-r--e-e-e-e--aw-w-w-w!
It was like a shock to him; and yet, he was not a superstitious man.
No, he was not that. He would have staked his life on it. But it was
not pleasant to hear a dead man's name shrieked over one's head by the
wind. Under the cover of his sleeping-bag flap Corporal Blake laughed.
Funny things were always happening, he tried to tell himself. And this
was a mighty good joke. Breault wasn't so slow, after all. He had given
his promise, and he was keeping it; for, if it wasn't really Breault's
voice up there in the wind, multiplied a thousand times, it was a good
imitation of it. Again Corporal Blake laughed--a laugh as unpleasant as
the cough that had come from Breault's bullet-punctured lung. He fell
asleep after a time; but even sleep could not drive from him the
clinging obsession of the thought that strange things were to happen in
this taking of Jan Thoreau.
With the gray dawn there was nothing to mark the passing of the storm
except freshly fallen snow, and Blake was on the trail before it was
light enough to see a hundred yards ahead. There was a defiance and a
contempt of last night in the crack of his long caribou-gut whip and
the halloo of his voice as he urged on his dogs. Breault's voice in the
wind? Bah! Only a fool would have thought that. Therefore he was a
fool. And Jan Thoreau--it would be like taking a child. There would be
no happenings to report--merely an arrest, a quick return journey, an
affair altogether too ordinary to be interesting. Perhaps it was all on
account of the hearty supper of caribou liver he had eaten. He was fond
of liver, and once or twice before it had played him tricks.
He began to wonder if he would find Jan Thoreau at home. He remembered
Jan quite vividly. The Indians called him Kitoochikun because he played
a fiddle. Blake, the Iron Man, disliked him because of that fiddle. Jan
was never without it, on the trail or off. The Fiddling Man, he called
him contemptuously--a baby, a woman; not fit for the big north. Tall
and slim, with blond hair in spite of his French blood and name, a
quiet and unexcitable face, and an air that Blake called "damned
superiority." He wondered how the Fiddling Man had ever screwed up
nerve enough to kill Breault. Undoubtedly there had been no fight. A
quick and treacherous shot, no doubt. That was like a man who played a
fiddle. POOF! He had no more respect for him than if he dressed in
woman's clothing.
And he DID have a wife, this Jan Thoreau. They lived a good twenty
miles off the north-and-south trail, on an island in the middle of
Black Bear Lake. He had never seen the wife. A poor sort of woman, he
made up his mind, that would marry a fiddler. Probably a half-breed;
maybe an Indian. Anyway, he had no sympathy for her. Without a doubt,
it was the woman who did the trapping and cut the wood. Any man who
would tote a fiddle around on his back--
Corporal Blake traveled fast, and it was afternoon of the second day
when he came to the dense spruce forest that shut in Black Bear Lake.
Here something happened to change his plans somewhat. He met an Indian
he knew--an Indian who, for two or three good reasons that stuck in the
back of his head, dared not lie to him; and this tribesman, coming
straight from the Thoreau cabin, told him that Jan was not at home, but
had gone on a three-day trip to see the French missioner who lived on
one of the lower Wholdaia waterways.
Blake was keen on strategem. With him, man-hunting was like a game of
chess; and after he had questioned the Indian for a quarter of an hour
he saw his opportunity. Pastamoo, the Cree, was made a part of his
Majesty's service on the spot, with the promise of torture and speedy
execution if he proved himself a traitor.
Blake turned over to him his dogs and sledge, his provisions, and his
tent, and commanded him to camp in the heart of a cedar swamp a few
miles back, with the information that he would return for his outfit at
some time in the indefinite future. He might be gone a day or a week.
When he had seen Pastamoo off, he continued his journey toward the
cabin, in the hope that Jan Thoreau's wife was either an Indian or a
fool. He was too old a hand at his game to be taken in by the story
that had been told to the Cree.
Jan had not gone to the French missioner's. A murderer's trail would
not be given away like that. Of course the wife knew. And Corporal
Blake desired no better string to a criminal than the faith of a wife.
Wives were easy if handled right, and they had put the finishing touch
to more than one of his great successes.
At the edge of the lake he fell back on his old trick--hunger,
exhaustion, a sprained leg. It was not more than a quarter of a mile
across the snow-covered ice of the lake to the thin spiral of smoke
that he saw rising above the thick balsams on the island. Five times in
that distance he fell upon his face; he crawled like a man about to
die. He performed an arduous task, a devilish task, and when at last he
reached the balsams he cursed his luck until he was red in the face. No
one had seen him. That quarter-mile of labor was lost, its finesse a
failure. But he kept up the play, and staggered weakly through the
sheltering balsams to the cabin. His artifice had no shame, even when
played on women; and he fell heavily against the door, beat upon it
with his fist; and slipped down into the snow, where he lay with his
head bowed, as if his last strength was gone.
He heard movement inside, quick steps--and then the door opened. He did
not look up for a moment. That would have been crude. When he did raise
his head, it was very slowly, with a look of anguish in his face. And
then--he stared. His body all at once grew tense, and the counterfeit
pain in his eyes died out like a flash in this most astounding moment
of his life. Man of iron though he was, steeled to the core against the
weaknesses of sudden emotions, it was impossible for him to restrain
the gasp of amazement that rose to his lips.
In that stifled cry Jan Thoreau's wife heard the supplication of a
dying man. She did not catch, back of it, the note of a startled beast.
She was herself startled, frightened for a moment by the unexpectedness
of it all.
And Blake stared. This--the fiddler's wife! She was clutching in her
hand a brush with which she had been arranging her hair. The hair, jet
black, was wonderful. Her eyes were still more wonderful to Blake. She
was not an Indian--not a half-breed--and beautiful. The loveliest face
he had ever visioned, sleeping or awake, was looking down at him.
With a second gasp, he remembered himself, and his body sagged, and the
amazed stare went out of his eyes as he allowed his head to fall a
little. In this movement his cap fell off. In another moment she was at
his side, kneeling in the snow and bending over him.
"You are hurt, m'sieu!"
Her hair fell upon him, smothering his neck and shoulders. The perfume
of it was like the delicate scent of a rare flower in his nostrils. A
strange thrill swept through him. He did not try to analyze it in those
few astonishing moments. It was beyond his comprehension, even had he
tried. He was ignorant of the finer fundamentals of life, and of the
great truth that the case-hardened nature of a man, like the body of an
athlete, crumbles fastest under sudden and unexpected change and strain.
He regained his feet slowly and stupidly, assisted by Marie. They
climbed the one step to the door. As he sank back heavily on the cot,
in the room they entered, a thick tress of her hair fell softly upon
his face. He closed his eyes for a space. When he opened them, Marie
was bending over the stove.
And SHE was Thoreau's wife! The instant he had looked up into her face,
he had forgotten the fiddler; but he remembered him now as he watched
the woman, who stood with her back toward him. She was as slim as a
reed. Her hair fell to her hips. He drew a deep breath. Unconsciously
he clenched his hands. SHE--the fiddler's wife! The thought repeated
itself again and again. Jan Thoreau, MURDERER, and this woman--HIS WIFE.
She returned in a moment with hot tea, and he drank with subtle
hypocrisy from the cup she held to his lips.
"Sprained my leg," he said then, remembering his old part, and replying
to the questioning anxiety in her eyes. "Dogs ran away and left me, and
I got here just by chance. A little more and--"
He smiled grimly, and as he sank back he gave a sharp cry. He had
practised that cry in more than one cabin, and along with it a
convulsion of his features to emphasize the impression he labored to
make.
"I'm afraid--I'll be a trouble to you," he apologized. "It's not
broken; but it's bad, and I won't be able to move--soon. Is Jan at
home?"
"No, m'sieu; he is away."
"Away," repeated Blake disappointedly. "Perhaps sometime he has told
you about me," he added with sudden hopefulness. "I am John Duval."
"M'sieu--DUVAL!"
Marie's eyes, looking down at him, became all at once great pools of
glowing light. Her lips parted. She leaned toward him, her slim hands
clasped suddenly to her breast.
"M'sieu Duval--who nursed him through the smallpox?" she cried, her
voice trembling. "M'sieu Duval--who saved my Jan's life!"
Blake had looked up his facts at headquarters. He knew what Duval, the
Barren Land trapper, had once upon a time done for Jan.
"Yes; I am John Duval," said. "And so--you see--I am sorry that Jan is
away."
"But he is coming back soon--in a few days," exclaimed Marie. "You
shall stay, m'sieu! You will wait for him? Yes?"
"This leg--" began Blake. He cut himself short with a grimace. "Yes,
I'll stay. I guess I'll have to."
Marie had changed at the mention of Duval's name. With the glow in her
eyes had come a flush into her cheeks, and Blake could see the strange
little quiver at her throat as she looked at him. But she did not see
Blake so much as what lay beyond him--Duval's lonely cabin away up on
the edge of the Great Barren, the hours of darkness and agony through
which Jan had passed, and the magnificent comradeship of this man who
had now dragged himself to their own cabin, half dead.
Many times Jan had told her the story of that terrible winter when
Duval had nursed him like a woman, and had almost given up his life as
a sacrifice. And this--THIS--was Duval? She bent over him again as he
lay on the cot, her eyes shining like stars in the growing dusk. In
that dusk she was unconscious of the fact that his fingers had found a
long tress of her hair and were clutching it passionately. Remembering
Duval as Jan had enshrined him in her heart, she said:
"I have prayed many times that the great God might thank you, m'sieu."
He raised a hand. For an instant it touched her soft, warm cheek and
caressed her hair. Marie did not shrink--yes, that would have been an
insult. Even Jan would have said that. For was not this Duval, to whom
she owed all the happiness in her life--Duval, more than brother to Jan
Thoreau, her husband?
"And you--are Marie?" said Blake.
"Yes, m'sieu, I am Marie."
A joyous note trembled in her voice as she drew back from the cot. He
could hear her swiftly braiding her hair before she struck a match to
light the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. After that, through partly
closed eyes, he watched her as she prepared their supper. Occasionally,
when she turned toward him as if to speak, he feigned a desire to
sleep. It was a catlike watchfulness, filled with his old cunning. In
his face there was no sign to betray its hideous significance.
Outwardly he had regained his iron-like impassiveness; but in his body
and his brain every nerve and fiber was consumed by a monstrous
desire--a desire for this woman, the murderer's wife. It was as strange
and as sudden as the death that had come to Francois Breault.
The moment he had looked up into her face in the doorway, it had
overwhelmed him. And now even the sound of her footsteps on the floor
filled him with an exquisite exultation. It was more than exultation.
It was a feeling of POSSESSION.
In the hollow of his hand he--Blake, the man-hunter--held the fate of
this woman. She was the Fiddler's wife--and the Fiddler was a murderer.
Marie heard the sudden deep breath that forced itself from his lips, a
gasp that would have been a cry of triumph if he had given it voice.
"You are in pain, m'sieu," she exclaimed, turning toward him quickly.
"A little," he said, smiling at her. "Will you help me to sit up,
Marie?"
He saw ahead of him another and more thrilling game than the man-hunt
now. And Marie, unsuspicious, put her arms about the shoulders of the
Pharisee and helped him to rise. They ate their supper with a narrow
table between them. If there had been a doubt in Blake's mind before
that, the half hour in which she sat facing him dispelled it utterly.
At first the amazing beauty of Thoreau's wife had impinged itself upon
his senses with something of a shock. But he was cool now. He was again
master of his old cunning. Pitilessly and without conscience, he was
marshaling the crafty forces of his brute nature for this new and more
thrilling fight--the fight for a woman.
That in representing the Law he was pledged to virtue as well as order
had never entered into his code of life. To him the Law was
force--power. It had exalted him. It had forged an iron mask over the
face of his savagery. And it was the savage that was dominant in him
now. He saw in Marie's dark eyes a great love--love for a murderer.
It was not his thought that he might alienate that. For that look,
turned upon himself, he would have sacrificed his whole world as it had
previously existed. He was scheming beyond that impossibility,
measuring her even as he called himself Duval, counting--not his
chances of success, but the length of time it would take him to succeed.
He had never failed. A man had never beaten him. A woman had never
tricked him. And he granted no possibility of failure now. But--HOW?
That was the question that writhed and twisted itself in his brain even
as he smiled at her over the table and told her of the black days of
Jan's sickness up on the edge of the Barren.
And then it came to him--all at once. Marie did not see. She did not
FEEL. She had no suspicion of this loyal friend of her husband's.
Blake's heart pounded triumphant. He hobbled back to the cot, leaning
on Marie slim shoulder; and as he hobbled he told her how he had helped
Jan into his cabin in just this same way, and how at the end Jan had
collapsed--just as he collapsed when he came to the cot. He pulled
Marie down with him--accidentally. His lips touched her head. He
laughed.
For a few moments he was like a drunken man in his new joy. Willingly
he would have gambled his life on his chance of winning. But confidence
displaced none of his cunning. He rubbed his hands and said:
"Gawd, but won't it be a surprise for Jan? I told him that some day I'd
come. I told him!"
It would be a tremendous joke--this surprise he had in store for Jan.
He chuckled over it again and again as Marie went about her work; and
Marie's face flushed and her eyes were bright and she laughed softly at
this great love which Duval betrayed for her husband. No; even the loss
of his dogs and his outfit couldn't spoil his pleasure! Why should it?
He could get other dogs and another outfit--but it had been three years
since he had seen Jan Thoreau! When Marie had finished her work he put
his hand suddenly to his eyes and said:
"Peste! but last night's storm must have hurt my eyes. The light blinds
them, ma cheri. Will you put it out, and sit down near me, so that I
can see you as you talk, and tell me all that has happened to Jan
Thoreau since that winter three years ago?"
She put out the light, and threw open the door of the box-stove. In the
dim firelight she sat on a stool beside Blake's cot. Her faith in him
was like that of a child. She was twenty-two. Blake was fifteen years
older. She felt the immense superiority of his age.