THE FUNGUS
My rest was miserable. In a succession of brief dreams I fled with
Jacqueline over a wilderness of ice, while in the distance, ever
drawing nearer, followed Leroux, Lacroix, and Père Antoine. I heard
Jacqueline's despairing cries as she was torn from me, while my
weighted arms, heavier than lead, drooped helplessly at my sides, and
from afar Simon mocked me.
Then ensued a world without Jacqueline, a dead eternity of ice and snow.
I must have fallen sound asleep at last, for when I opened my eyes the
sun was shining brightly low down over the Rivière d'Or. The door of
the tent stood open and Jacqueline was not inside.
With the remembrance of my dream still confusing reality, I ran toward
the trees, shouting for her in fear.
"Jacqueline! Jacqueline!" I called.
She was coming toward me. She took me by the arm. "Paul!" she began
with quivering lips. "Paul!"
She led me into the recesses of the pines. There, in a little open
place, clustered together upon the ground, were the bodies of our dogs.
All were dead, and the soft forms were frozen into the snow, which the
poor creatures had licked in their agony, so that their open jaws were
stuffed with icicles.
Jacqueline sank down upon the ground and sobbed as though her heart
would break. I stood there watching, my brain paralyzed by the shock
of the discovery.
Then I went back to the sleigh, on the rear of which the frozen fish
was piled. I noticed that it had a faint, slightly aromatic odor. I
flung the hard masses aside and scooped up a powdery substance with my
hands.
Mycology had been a hobby of mine, and it was easy to recognize what
that substance was.
It was the _amanita_, the deadliest and the most widely distributed of
the fungi, and the direst of all vegetable poisons to man and beast
alike. The alkaloid which it contains takes effect only some hours
after its ingestion, when it has entered the blood-streams and begun
its disintegrating action upon the red corpuscles. The dogs must have
partaken of it on the preceding afternoon.
Jacqueline joined me. The tears were streaming down her cheeks; she
slipped her arm through mine and looked mutely at me.
I knew this was Leroux's work. He had tricked me again. I had seen
clusters of the frozen fungus outside St. Boniface. I suppose that,
when winter comes suddenly, such growths remain standing till spring
thaws and rots them, retaining in the meanwhile all their noxious
qualities.
It would have been an easy matter for one of Leroux's agents to have
cast a few handfuls of the deadly powder over the fish while the sleigh
stood waiting outside Danton's door, and the jolting of the vehicle
would have shaken the substance down into the middle of the heap, so
that it would be three or four days before the dogs got to the poisoned
fish.
I was mad with anger. The white landscape seemed to swim before my
eyes. I meant to kill the man now, and without mercy. I would be as
unscrupulous as he. He would be in this place by the afternoon; I
would wait for him outside the trail. My pistols----
Jacqueline was looking up into my face in terror. The sight of her
recalled me to my senses. Leroux afterward--first my duty to her!
"Paul! What is the matter, Paul?" she cried. "I never saw you look
like that before."
I calmed myself and led her away, and presently we were standing before
the fire again.
"Jacqueline," I said, "it is easier to go on than to turn back now."
She watched me like a lip-reader. "Yes, Paul; let us go on," she
answered.
So we went on. But our journey was to be very different now. There
was no possibility of taking much baggage with us. We took a few
things out of our suit-cases and disposed them about us as best they
could.
The heavy sleeping-bags would have made our progress, encumbered as we
were with our fur coats, too slow; but I had hopes that we would reach
the trappers' huts that afternoon, and so decided to discard them in
favour of the fur-lined sleigh-rug, which would, at least, keep
Jacqueline warm.
So we strapped on our snow-shoes, and I made a pack and put three days'
supplies of food in it and fastened it on my shoulders, securing it
with two straps from the harness. I rolled the rug into a bundle and
tied it below the pack; and thus equipped, we left the dead beasts and
the useless sleigh behind us for Leroux's satisfaction, and set out
briskly upon our march.
It is a strange thing, but no sooner had I passed out of sight of the
sleigh than, weighted though I was, I felt my spirits rising rapidly.
The freedom of movement and the exhilarating air gave my mind a new
sense of liberty, and Jacqueline, who had been watching me anxiously,
seeing the gloom disappear from my face, tried, first to tempt me to
mirth, and then to match me in it. Sometimes we would run a little
way, and then we would fall back into our steady, ambling plod once
more.
The cold was less intense, but, looking at the sky, which was heavily
overcast, I knew that the rise in temperature betokened the advent of a
heavy fall of snow, probably before night.
We were merrier than at any previous time, having by tacit agreement
resolved to put our troubles behind us. Jacqueline laughed gaily at my
clumsy attempts to avoid tripping myself upon my snow-shoes.
We stopped to look at the trees and the traces of deer-croppings upon
the bark. Sometimes we took to the river-bed, and then again we paced
among the trees, which were now becoming so sparsely scattered that the
trail was hardly discernible. This caused me no concern, however, for
I believed that when we reached the huts, we should be able to obtain
certain information as to the remainder of our course.
And though I knew that Leroux was behind, and that he would press
forward the more impetuously when he discovered the success of his
deadly ruse, I did not seem to care. Above me was the pale sun, the
glow of health was in my limbs--and beside me walked Jacqueline.
We must have covered at least a dozen miles or more at the time, when
we stopped for a brief midday meal. I was a little fatigued from
carrying the pack, and my ankles ached from the snow-shoes; but
Jacqueline, who had evidently been accustomed to their use, was as
fresh as when she started.
I was glad of the respite; but we needed to press on. It was probable
that Simon would camp by our dismantled sleigh that night.
When we resumed our march the character of the country began to change.
Hitherto we had been traversing an almost interminable plain, but now a
ridge of jagged mountains, bare at their peaks and fringed around the
base with evergreens, appeared in the distance. The sky became more
leaden.
Suddenly we emerged from among the trees upon an almost barren plateau,
and there again we halted for a breathing spell.
All that morning I had been looking for the trappers' huts. I had
already come to the conclusion that M. Danton's instructions were to be
taken by and large, for we could not now be more than twenty-five miles
from the château, and it was only here that the Rivière d'Or left us,
whirling in quick cascades, ice-free, among the rocks of its narrow
bed, some distance east of us.
There was, of course, the possibility that the distance had been
understated, and that we were only now half way. But I could not let
my mind dwell upon that possibility.
I scanned the horizon on every side. It had seemed to me all that day
that our road was running up-hill, but now, looking back, I was
astonished to see how high we had ascended, for the whole of the vast
plain across which we had been travelling lay spread out like a
wrinkled table-cloth before my eyes.
In that grey light, which shortened every distance, it almost seemed
that I could discern the slope of the St. Lawrence far away, and the
hills, foot-spurs of the mighty Laurentian range, that bordered it.
The mountains which we were approaching seemed quite near, and I knew
that beyond them lay the seigniory.
I resolved to take my bearings still more accurately, and telling
Jacqueline to wait for me a few minutes at the base of a hill and
setting down my pack, I began the ascent alone. The climb was longer
than I had anticipated. My eyes were aching from the glare of the
snow. I had left my coloured glasses behind me in the tent and gone
on, saying nothing, though I had realized my loss when I was only a
mile or so away.
However, I hoped that the night would restore my sight, and so,
dismissing the matter from my mind, I struggled up until at last I
stood upon the summit of the hill.
The view from this point was a stupendous one. New peaks sprang into
vision, shimmering in the sunlight. Patches of dark forest stained the
whiteness of the land, and far away, like a thin, winding ribbon among
the hills, I saw the valley of the Rivière d'Or.
I cried out in delight and lingered to enjoy the grandeur of the
spectacle.
Beneath me I saw Jacqueline waiting, a tiny figure upon the snow. My
heart smote me with a deep sense of reproach that I had put her to so
much sacrifice. But I had seen the valley between those mountains, the
only possible entrance to that mysterious land. Nothing could fail us
now.
I cast my eyes beyond her toward the mist-wrapped tops of the far
Laurentians and the plains.
And a sense of an inevitable fate came over me as I perceived far away
a tiny, crawling ant upon the snows--Simon Leroux's dog sleigh.
I went back to the little, patient figure that was waiting for me, and
I took up my pack again and told her nothing. She stepped bravely out
beside me, frozen, fatigued, but willing because I bade her. She did
not ask anything of me.
The sun dipped lower, and far away I heard the howl of the solitary
wolf again.
My mind had been working very fast during that journey down the hill,
and long before I reached Jacqueline I had resolved that she should
know nothing of the pursuit until the moment came when she must be told.
That the pursuer was Leroux there could be no possible doubt. He had
evidently passed the sleigh, and was undoubtedly pressing forward,
elated and confident of our capture. But he must still be at least a
dozen miles away.
He could not reach us that night and he could hardly travel by night.
We should have a half day's start of him in the morning.
I gripped my pistols as we strode along.
We went on and on. The afternoon was wearing away; the sun was very
low now and all its strength had gone. The wolf followed us, howling
from afar. Once I saw it across the treeless wastes--a gaunt, white,
dog-like figure, trotting against the steely grey of the sky.
We ascended the last of the foot-hills before the trail dipped toward
the valley, which was guarded by two sentinel mountains of that jagged
ridge before us. From the top I looked back. Simon was nowhere to be
seen.
"Courage, Jacqueline," I said, patting her arm, "The huts ought to be
here."
Her courage was greater than my own. She looked up and smiled at me.
And so we descended and went on and on, and the sun dipped below the
edge of the world.
The wolf crept nearer, and its howls rang out with piercing strokes
across the silence. My eyes ached so that I could hardly discern the
darkening land, and the snow came down, not steadily, but in swirling
eddies blown on fierce gusts of wind.
And suddenly raising my eyes despairingly, I saw the huts. They stood
about four hundred yards away from where the trail ran through the
mountains.
There were five of them, and they had not been occupied for at least
two seasons, for the blackened timbers were falling apart, and the
roofs had been torn off all but one of them, no doubt for fuel. The
wind was whirling the snow wildly around them, and it whistled through
the broken, rotting walls.
I flung my pack inside the roofed one, and began tearing apart the
timbers of another to make a fire.
Jacqueline stood looking at me in docile faith.
"I can go on," she said quietly. "I can go on, Paul."
I caught her hands in mine. "We shall stay here, Jacqueline," I said.
She did not answer me, but, opening the pack, began the preparation of
our meal, which consisted of some biscuits left from the night before,
when we had made a quantity on the wood ashes. We made tea over the
roaring flames, and sat listening to the wolf's call and the wind that
drove our fire in gusts of smoke and flame.
The wind grew fiercer. It was a hurricane. It drowned the wolf's
call; it almost silenced the sound of our own voices. Thank God that
we had at least our shelter in that storm.
I scooped out a bed for Jacqueline inside the snow-filled hut and
spread it with the big sleigh robe. She lay down in her fur coat, and
I wrapped the ends around her. I looked into her sweet face and
marvelled at its serenity. Her eyes closed wearily.
But, though I was as tired as she, I could not sleep. I crouched over
the fire, pondering over the morrow's acts.
Should I wait for Leroux and shoot him down like a dog if he molested
us? Or should we hide among the hills and watch him pass by? But that
would avail us nothing. If we went on we must encounter him, and the
sooner the better.
This problem and a fiercer one filled my mind, for my soul was as
storm-beset as the hut, whose planking shook under the gale's force. I
realized how incongruous my position was.
I had no status at all. I was accompanying a run-away wife back to her
father's home, perhaps to meet her husband there. And whether Leroux
held me in his present power or not, inexorably I was heading for his
own objective.