While lovely Nepeese was shuddering over her thrilling experience under
the rock—while Pierrot still offered grateful thanks in his prayers for
her deliverance and Baree was becoming more and more a fixture at the
beaver-pond—Bush McTaggart was perfecting a little scheme of his own up
at Post Lac Bain, about forty miles north and west. McTaggart had been
factor at Lac Bain for seven years. In the Company’s books down in
Winnipeg he was counted a remarkably successful man. The expense of his
post was below the average, and his semi-annual report of furs always
ranked among the first. After his name, kept on file in the main office,
was one notation which said: “Gets more out of a dollar than any other
man north of God’s Lake.”
The Indians knew why this was so. They called him _Napao Wetikoo_—the
man-devil. This was under their breath—a name whispered sinisterly in
the glow of tepee fires, or spoken softly where not even the winds might
carry it to the ears of Bush McTaggart. They feared him; they hated him.
They died of starvation and sickness, and the tighter Bush McTaggart
clenched the fingers of his iron rule, the more meekly, it seemed to
him, did they respond to his mastery. His was a small soul, hidden in
the hulk of a brute, which rejoiced in power. And here—with the raw
wilderness on four sides of him—his power knew no end. The Big Company
was behind him. It had made him king of a domain in which there was
little law except his own. And in return he gave back to the Company
bales and bundles of furs beyond their expectation. It was not for them
to have suspicions. They were a thousand or more miles away—and dollars
counted.
Gregson might have told. Gregson was the Investigating Agent of that
district, who visited McTaggart once each year. He might have reported
that the Indians called McTaggart _Napao Wetikoo_ because he gave them
only half price for their furs; he might have told the Company quite
plainly that he kept the people of the trap-lines at the edge of
starvation through every month of the winter, that he had them on their
knees with his hands at their throats—putting the truth in a mild and
pretty way—and that he always had a woman or a girl, Indian or
halfbreed, living with him at the Post. But Gregson enjoyed his visits
too much at Lac Bain. Always he could count on two weeks of coarse
pleasures; and in addition to that, his own womenfolk at home wore a
rich treasure of fur that came to them from McTaggart.
One evening, a week after the adventure of Nepeese and Baree under the
rock, McTaggart sat under the glow of an oil lamp in his “store.” He had
sent his little pippin-faced English clerk to bed, and he was alone. For
six weeks there had been in him a great unrest. It was just six weeks
ago that Pierrot had brought Nepeese on her first visit to Lac Bain
since McTaggart had been factor there. She had taken his breath away.
Since then he had been able to think of nothing but her. Twice in that
six weeks he had gone down to Pierrot’s cabin. To-morrow he was going
again. Marie, the slim Cree girl over in his cabin, he had
forgotten—just as a dozen others before Marie had slipped out of his
memory. It was Nepeese now. He had never seen anything quite so
beautiful as Pierrot’s girl.
Audibly he cursed Pierrot as he looked at a sheet of paper under his
hand, on which for an hour or more he had been making notes out of worn
and dusty Company ledgers. It was Pierrot who stood in his way.
Pierrot’s father, according to those notes, had been a full-blooded
Frenchman. Therefore Pierrot was half French, and Nepeese was quarter
French—though she was so beautiful he could have sworn there was not
more than a drop or two of Indian blood in her veins. If they had been
all Indian—Chippewayan, Cree, Ojibway, Dog Rib—anything—there would have
been no trouble at all in the matter. He would have bent them to his
power, and Nepeese would have come to his cabin, as Marie came six
months ago. But there was the accursed French of it! Pierrot and Nepeese
were different. And yet——
He smiled grimly, and his hands clenched tighter. After all, was not his
power sufficient? Would even Pierrot dare stand against that? If Pierrot
objected, he would drive him from the country—from the trapping regions
that had come down to him as heritage from father and grandfather, and
even before their day. He would make of Pierrot a wanderer and an
outcast, as he had made wanderers and outcasts of a score of others who
had lost his favour. No other Post would sell to or buy from Pierrot if
_Le Bête_—the black cross—was put after his name. That was his power—a
law of the Factors that had come down through the centuries. It was a
tremendous power for evil. It had brought him Marie, the slim, dark-eyed
Cree girl, who hated him—and in spite of her hatred “kept house for
him.” That was the polite way of explaining her presence if explanations
were ever necessary.
McTaggart looked again at the notes he had made on the sheet of paper.
Pierrot’s trapping-country, his own property according to the common law
of the wilderness, was very valuable. During the last seven years he had
received an average of a thousand dollars a year for his furs, for
McTaggart had been unable to cheat Pierrot quite as completely as he had
cheated the Indians. A thousand dollars a year! Pierrot would think
twice before he gave that up. McTaggart chuckled as he crumpled the
paper in his hand and prepared to put out the light. Under his
close-cropped shaggy beard his reddish face blazed with the fire that
was in his blood. It was an unpleasant face—like iron, merciless, filled
with the look that gave him his name of _Napao Wetikoo_. His eyes
gleamed, and he drew a quick breath as he put out the light.
He chuckled again as he made his way through the darkness to the door.
Nepeese as good as belonged to him. He would have her if it
cost—_Pierrot’s life_. And—_why not_? It was all so easy. A shot on a
lonely trap-line, a single knife-thrust—and who would know? Who would
guess where Pierrot had gone? And it would all be Pierrot’s fault. For
the last time he had seen Pierrot, he had made an honest proposition: he
would marry Nepeese. Yes, even that. He had told Pierrot so. He had told
Pierrot that when the latter was his father-in-law, he would pay him
double price for furs.
And Pierrot had stared—had stared with that strange, stunned look in his
face, like a man dazed by a blow from a club. And so if he did not get
Nepeese without trouble it would all be Pierrot’s fault. To-morrow
McTaggart would start again for the halfbreed’s country. And the next
day Pierrot would have an answer for him. Bush McTaggart chuckled again
when he went to bed.
Until the next to the last day Pierrot said nothing to Nepeese about
what had passed between him and the factor at Lac Bain. Then he told
her.
“He is a beast—a man-devil,” he said, when he had finished. “I would
rather see you out there—with her—dead.” And he pointed to the tall
spruce under which the princess mother lay.
Nepeese had not uttered a sound. But her eyes had grown bigger and
darker, and there was a flush in her cheeks which Pierrot had never seen
there before. She stood up when he had done, and she seemed taller to
him. Never had she looked quite so much like a woman, and Pierrot’s eyes
were deep-shadowed with fear and uneasiness as he watched her while she
gazed off into the northwest—toward Lac Bain.
She was wonderful, this slip of a girl-woman. Her beauty troubled him.
He had seen the look in Bush McTaggart’s eyes. He had heard the thrill
in McTaggart’s voice. He had caught the desire of a beast in McTaggart’s
face. It had frightened him at first. But now—he was not frightened. He
was uneasy, but his hands were clenched. In his heart there was a
smoldering fire. At last Nepeese turned and came and sat down beside him
again, at his feet.
“He is coming to-morrow, _ma chérie_,” he said. “What shall I tell him?”
The Willow’s lips were red. Her eyes shone. But she did not look up at
her father.
“Nothing, Nootawe—except that you are to say to him that I am the one to
whom he must come—for what he seeks.”
Pierrot bent over and caught her smiling. The sun went down. His heart
sank with it, like cold lead.
* * * * *
From Lac Bain to Pierrot’s cabin the trail cut within half a mile of the
beaver-pond, a dozen miles from where Pierrot lived; and it was here, on
a twist of the creek in which Wakayoo had caught fish for Baree, that
Bush McTaggart made his camp for the night. Only twenty miles of the
journey could be made by canoe, and as McTaggart was travelling the last
stretch afoot, his camp was a simple affair—a few cut balsams, a light
blanket, a small fire. Before he prepared his supper, the Factor drew a
number of copper-wire snares from his small pack and spent half an hour
in setting them in rabbit runways. This method of securing meat was far
less arduous than carrying a gun in hot weather, and it was certain.
Half a dozen snares were good for at least three rabbits, and one of
these three was sure to be young and tender enough for the frying-pan.
After he had placed his snares McTaggart set a skillet of bacon over the
coals and boiled his coffee.
Of all the odours of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the
forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a
fox will sniff it a mile away—twice that far if the air is moving in the
right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he
lay in his hollow on top of the beaver-dam.
Since his experience in the cañon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not
fared particularly well. Caution had held him near the pond, and he had
lived almost entirely on crawfish. This new perfume that came with the
night wind roused his hunger. But it was elusive: now he could smell
it—the next instant it was gone. He left the dam and began questing for
the source of it in the forest, until after a time he lost it
altogether. McTaggart had finished frying his bacon and was eating it.
It was a splendid night that followed. Perhaps Baree would have slept
through it in his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not
stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the cañon, the
deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this
night was like a pale, golden day: it was moonless; but the stars shone
like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy
sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the
treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was _Puskowepesim_—the
Moulting Moon—and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their
voice, the foxes slunk with he silence of shadows, and even the beavers
had begun to cease their labours. The horns of the moose, the deer, and
the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little and fought
not at all. It was late July, Moulting Moon of the Cree, Moon of Silence
for the Chippewayan.
In this silence Baree began to hunt. He stirred up a family of
half-grown partridges, but they escaped him. He pursued a rabbit that
was swifter than he. For an hour he had no luck. Then he heard a sound
that made every drop of blood in him thrill. He was close to McTaggart’s
camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of McTaggart’s snares.
He came out into a little starlit open and there he saw the rabbit going
through a most marvellous pantomime. It amazed him for a moment, and he
stopped in his tracks.
Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his first
frightened jump had “shot” the sapling to which the copper wire was
attached so that he was now hung half in midair, with only his hind feet
touching the ground. And there he was dancing madly while the noose
about his neck slowly choked him to death.
Baree gave a sort of gasp. He could understand nothing of the part that
the wire and the sapling were playing in this curious game. All he could
see was that Wapoos was hopping and dancing about on his hind legs in a
most puzzling and unrabbit-like fashion. It may be that he thought it
some sort of play. In this instance, however, he did not regard Wapoos
as he had looked on Umisk the beaver. He knew that Wapoos made mighty
fine eating, and after another moment or two of hesitation he darted
upon his prey.
Wapoos, half gone already, made almost no struggle, and in the glow of
the stars Baree finished him, and for half an hour afterward he feasted.
McTaggart had heard no sound, for the snare into which Wapoos had run
his head was the one set farthest from his camp. Beside the smouldering
coals of his fire he sat with his back to a tree, smoking his black pipe
and dreaming covetously of Nepeese, when Baree continued his
night-wandering. Baree no longer had the desire to hunt. He was too
full. But he nosed in and out of the starlit spaces, enjoying immensely
the stillness and the golden glow of the night. He was following a
rabbit-run when he came to a place where two fallen logs left a trail no
wider than his body. He squeezed through; something tightened about his
neck; there was a sudden snap—a swish as the sapling was released from
its “trigger”—and Baree was jerked off his feet so suddenly that he had
no time to conjecture as to what was happening.
The yelp in his throat died in a gurgle, and the next moment he was
going through the pantomimic actions of Wapoos, who was having his
vengeance inside him. For the life of him Baree could not keep from
dancing about, while the wire grew tighter and tighter about his neck.
When he snapped at the wire and flung the weight of his body to the
ground, the sapling would bend obligingly, and then—in its rebound—would
yank him for an instant completely off the earth. Furiously he
struggled. It was a miracle that the fine wire held him. In a few
moments more it must have broken—but McTaggart had heard him! The Factor
caught up his blanket and a heavy stick as he hurried toward the snare.
It was not a rabbit making those sounds—he knew that. Perhaps a
fisher-cat—a lynx, a fox, a young wolf——
It was the wolf he thought of first when he saw Baree at the end of the
wire. He dropped the blanket and raised the club. If there had been
clouds overhead, or the stars had been less brilliant, Baree would have
died as surely as Wapoos had died. With the club raised over his head
McTaggart saw in time the white star, the white-tipped ear, and the jet
black of Baree’s coat.
With a swift movement he exchanged the club for the blanket.
In that hour, could McTaggart have looked ahead to the days that were to
come, he would have used the club. Could he have foreseen the great
tragedy in which Baree was to play a vital part, wrecking his hopes and
destroying his world, he would have beaten him to a pulp there under the
light of the stars. And Baree, could he have foreseen what was to happen
between this brute with a white skin and the most beautiful thing in the
forests, would have fought even more bitterly before he surrendered
himself to the smothering embrace of the Factor’s blanket. On this night
Fate had played a strange hand for them both, and only that Fate, and
perhaps the stars above, held a knowledge of what its outcome was to be.