A moment later the Factor from Lac Bain stood at the edge of the chasm.
His voice had called out in a hoarse bellow—a wild cry of disbelief and
horror that had formed the Willow’s name as she disappeared. He looked
down, clutching his huge red hands and staring in ghastly suspense at
the boiling water and black rocks far below. There was nothing there
now—no sign of her, no last flash of her pale face and streaming hair in
the white foam. And she had done _that_—to save herself from him!
The soul of the man-beast turned sick within him, so sick that he
staggered back, his vision blinded and his legs tottering under him. He
had killed Pierrot, and it had been a triumph; all his life he had
played the part of the brute with a stoicism and cruelty that had known
no shock—nothing like this that overwhelmed him now, numbing him to the
marrow of his bones until he stood like one paralyzed. He did not see
Baree. He did not hear the dog’s whining cries at the edge of the chasm.
For a few moments the world turned black for him; and then, dragging
himself out of his stupor, he ran frantically along the edge of the
gorge, looking down wherever his eyes could reach the water, striving
for a glimpse of her. At last it grew too deep. There was no hope. She
was gone—and she had faced _that_ to escape him!
He mumbled that fact over and over again, stupidly, thickly, as though
his brain could grasp nothing beyond it. She was dead. And Pierrot was
dead. And he, in a few minutes, had accomplished it all.
He turned back toward the cabin—not by the trail over which he had
pursued Nepeese, but straight through the thick bush. Great flakes of
snow had begun to fall. He looked at the sky, where banks of dark clouds
were rolling up from the south and east. The sun went out. Soon there
would be a storm—a heavy snowstorm. The big flakes falling on his naked
hands and face set his mind to work. It was lucky for him, this storm.
It would cover everything—the fresh trails, even the grave he would dig
for Pierrot.
It does not take such a man as the Factor long to recover from a moral
concussion. By the time he came in sight of the cabin his mind was again
at work on physical things—on the necessities of the situation. The
appalling thing, after all, was not that both Pierrot and Nepeese were
dead, but that his dream was shattered. It was not that Nepeese was
dead, but that he had lost her. This was his vital disappointment. The
other thing—his crime—it was easy to cover.
It was not sentiment that made him dig Pierrot’s grave close to the
princess mother’s under the tall spruce. It was not sentiment that made
him dig the grave at all, but caution. He buried Pierrot decently. Then
he poured Pierrot’s stock of kerosene where it would be most effective
and touched a match to it. He stood in the edge of the forest until the
cabin was a mass of flames. The snow was falling thickly. The freshly
made grave was a white mound, and the trails were filling. For the
physical things he had done there was no fear in Bush McTaggart’s heart
as he turned back toward Lac Bain. No one would ever look into the grave
of Pierrot du Quesne. And there was no one to betray him if such a
miracle happened. But of one thing his black soul would never be able to
free itself. Always he would see the pale, triumphant face of the Willow
as she stood facing him in that moment of her glory when, even as she
was choosing death rather than him, he had cried to himself: “Ah! Is she
not wonderful!”
As Bush McTaggart had forgotten Baree, so Baree had forgotten the Factor
from Lac Bain. When McTaggart had run along the edge of the chasm, Baree
had squatted himself in the foot-beaten plot of snow where Nepeese had
last stood, his body stiffened and his forefeet braced as he looked
down. He had seen her take the leap. Many times that summer he had
followed her in her daring dives into the deep, quiet water of the pool.
But this was a tremendous distance. She had never dived into a place
like that. He could see the black heads of the rocks, appearing and
disappearing in the whirling foam like the heads of monsters at play;
the roar of the water filled him with dread; his eyes caught the swift
rush of crumbled ice between the rock walls. And she had gone down
there!
He had a great desire to follow her, to jump in, as he had always jumped
in after her. She was surely down there, even though he could not see
her. Probably she was playing among the rocks and hiding herself in the
white froth and wondering why he didn’t come. But he hesitated—hesitated
with his head and neck over the abyss, and his forefeet giving way a
little in the snow. With an effort he dragged himself back and whined.
He caught the fresh scent of McTaggart’s moccasins in the snow, and the
whine changed slowly into a long snarl. He looked over again. Still he
could not see her. He barked—the short, sharp signal with which he
always called her. There was no answer. Again and again he barked, and
always there was nothing but the roar of the water that came back to
him. Then for a few moments he stood back, silent and listening, his
body shivering with the strange dread that was possessing him.
The snow was falling now, and McTaggart had returned to the cabin. After
a little Baree followed in the trail he had made along the edge of the
chasm, and wherever McTaggart had stopped to peer over, Baree paused
also. For a space his hatred of the man was burned up in his desire to
join the Willow, and he continued along the gorge until, a quarter of a
mile beyond where the Factor had last looked into it, he came to the
narrow trail down which he and Nepeese had many time adventured in quest
of rock-violets. The twisting path that led down the face of the cliff
was filled with snow now, but Baree cleared his way through it until at
last he stood at the edge of the unfrozen torrent. Nepeese was not here.
He whined, and barked again, but this time there was in his signal to
her an uneasy repression, a whimpering note which told that he did not
expect a reply. For five minutes after that he sat on his haunches in
the snow, stolid as a rock. What it was that came down out of the dark
mystery and tumult of the chasm to him, what spirit-whispers of nature
that told him the truth, it is beyond the power of reason to explain.
But he listened, and he looked; and his muscles twitched as the truth
grew in him; and at last he raised his head slowly until his black
muzzle pointed to the white storm in the sky, and out of his throat
there went forth the quavering, long-drawn howl of the husky who mourns
outside the tepee of a master who is newly dead.
On the trail, heading for Lac Bain, Bush McTaggart heard that cry and
shivered.
It was the smell of smoke, thickening in the air until it stung his
nostrils, that drew Baree at last away from the chasm and back to the
cabin. There was not much left when he came to the clearing. Where the
cabin had been was a red-hot, smouldering mass. For a long time he sat
watching it, still waiting and still listening. He no longer felt the
effect of the bullet that had stunned him, but his senses were
undergoing another change now, as strange and unreal as their struggle
against that darkness of near-death in the cabin. In a space that had
not covered more than an hour the world had twisted itself grotesquely
for Baree. That long ago the Willow was sitting before her little mirror
in the cabin, talking to him and laughing in her happiness, while he lay
in vast contentment on the floor. And now there was no cabin, no
Nepeese, no Pierrot. Quietly he struggled to comprehend. It was some
time before he moved from under the thick balsams, for already a deep
and growing suspicion began to guide his movements. He did not go nearer
to the smouldering mass of the cabin, but slinking low, made his way
about the circle of the open to the dog-corral. This took him under the
tall spruce. For a full minute he paused here, sniffing at the freshly
made mound under its white mantle of snow. When he went on, he slunk
still lower, and his ears were flat against his head.
The dog-corral was open and empty. McTaggart had seen to that. Again
Baree squatted back on his haunches and sent forth the death-howl. This
time it was for Pierrot. In it there was a different note from that of
the howl he had sent forth from the chasm: it was positive, certain. In
the chasm his cry had been tempered with doubt—a questioning hope,
something that was so almost human that McTaggart had shivered on the
trail. But Baree knew what lay in that freshly dug snow-covered grave. A
scant three feet of earth could not hide its secret from him. There was
death—definite and unequivocal. But for Nepeese he was still hoping and
seeking.
Until noon he did not go far from the cabin, but only once did he
actually approach and sniff about the black pile of steaming timbers.
Again and again he circled the edge of the clearing, keeping just within
the bush and timber, sniffing the air and listening. Twice he went back
to the chasm. Late in the afternoon there came to him a sudden impulse
that carried him swiftly through the forest. He did not run openly now;
caution, suspicion, and fear had roused in him afresh the instincts of
the wolf. With his ears flattened against the side of his head, his tail
drooping until the tip of it dragged the snow and his back sagging in
the curious, evasive gait of the wolf, he scarcely made himself
distinguishable from the shadows of the spruce and balsams.
There was no faltering in the trail Baree made; it was straight as a
rope might have been drawn through the forest, and it brought him, early
in the dusk, to the open spot where Nepeese had fled with him that day
she had pushed McTaggart over the edge of the precipice into the pool.
In the place of the balsam shelter of that day there was now a
water-tight birch-bark tepee which Pierrot had helped the Willow to make
during the summer. Baree went straight to it and thrust in his head with
a low and expectant whine.
There was no answer. It was dark and cold in the tepee. He could make
out indistinctly the two blankets that were always in it, the row of big
tin boxes in which Nepeese kept their stores, and the stove which
Pierrot had improvised out of scraps of iron and heavy tin. But Nepeese
was not there. And there was no sign of her outside. The snow was
unbroken except by his own trail. It was dark when he returned to the
burned cabin. All that night he hung about the deserted dog-corral, and
all through the night the snow fell steadily, so that by dawn he sank
into it to his shoulders when he moved out into the clearing.
But with day the sky had cleared. The sun came up, and the world was
almost too dazzling for the eyes. It warmed Baree’s blood with new hope
and expectation. His brain struggled even more eagerly than yesterday to
comprehend. Surely the Willow would be returning soon! He would hear her
voice. She would appear suddenly out of the forest. He would receive
some signal from her. One of these things, or all of them, must happen.
He stopped sharply in his tracks at every sound, and sniffed the air
from every point of the wind. He was travelling ceaselessly. His body
made deep trails in the snow around and over the huge white mound where
the cabin had stood; his tracks led from the corral to the tall spruce,
and they were as numerous as the footprints of a wolf-pack for half a
mile up and down the chasm.
On the afternoon of this day the second big impulse came to him. It was
not reason, and neither was it instinct alone. It was the struggle
halfway between, the brute mind fighting at its best with the mystery of
an intangible thing—something that could not be seen by the eye or heard
by the ear. Nepeese was not in the cabin, because there was no cabin.
She was not at the tepee. He could find no trace of her in the chasm.
She was not with Pierrot under the big spruce.
Therefore, unreasoning but sure, he began to follow the old trap-line
into the north and west.