_A_ Gentleman _of_
COURAGE
_Other Books by_
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
The Alaskan
The Country Beyond
The River's End } _A Trilogy of the_
The Valley of Silent Men } _Three River_
The Flaming Forest } _Country_
God's Country, _The Trail to Happiness_
Baree, Son of Kazan
The Courage of Captain Plum
The Courage of Marge O'Doone
The Danger Trail
Flower of the North
God's Country--and the Woman
The Gold Hunters
The Golden Snare
The Great Lakes
The Grizzly King
The Honor of the Big Snows
The Hunted Woman
Isobel
Kazan
Nomads of the North
Steele of the Royal Mounted
The Wolf Hunters
[Illustration: Frontispiece--_PETER_ was the same Peter,
but now he was a man]
_A_ Gentleman _of_
COURAGE
_A Novel of the Wilderness_
_By_ JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
_With Illustrations by Robert W. Stewart_
[Illustration]
COSMOPOLITAN BOOK CORPORATION
NEW YORK MCMXXIV
_Copyright, 1923, by International Magazine Company._
_Copyright, 1924, by International Magazine Company._
_Copyright, 1924, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New
York. All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian._
_Printed in the United States of America by_
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
_The Illustrations
consist of
A Frontispiece and a Centerspread
reproduced in Color from the
Original Paintings by_
ROBERT W. STEWART
_A_ Gentleman _of_
COURAGE
_A_ Gentleman _of_
COURAGE
CHAPTER I
Pierre Gourdon had the love of God in his heart, a man's love for a
man's God, and it seemed to him that in this golden sunset of a July
afternoon the great Canadian wilderness all about him was whispering
softly the truth of his faith and his creed. For Pierre was the son
of a runner of the streams and forests, as that son's father had been
before him, and love of adventure ran in his blood, and romance, too;
so it was only in the wild and silent places that he felt the soul in
him attuned to that fellowship with nature which the good teachers at
Ste. Anne de Beaupré did not entirely approve. Nature was Pierre's God,
and would ever be until he died. And though he had crept up the holy
stair at Ste. Anne's on his knees, and had touched the consecrated
water from the sacred font, and had looked with awe upon mountains of
canes and crutches left by those who had come afflicted and doubting
and had departed cured and believing, still he was sure that in this
sunset of a certain July afternoon he was nearer to the God he desired
than at any other time in all his life.
Josette, his wife, slender and tired, her dark head bare in the fading
sun, stood wistful and hoping at his side, praying gently that at last
their long wanderings up the St. Lawrence and along this wilderness
shore of Superior had come to an end, and that they might abide in this
new paradise, and never travel again until the end of their days.
Back of them, where a little stream ran out of the cool forest, a
tireless boy quested on hands and knees in the ferns and green grass
for wild strawberries, and though strawberry season was late his mouth
was smeared red.
The man said, pointing down, "It makes one almost think the big lake is
alive, and a hand is reaching in for him."
"Yes, they are Five Fingers of water reaching in from the lake," agreed
Josette, seating herself wearily upon a big stone, "though it seems to
me there should be only four fingers, and one thumb."
And so the place came to be named, and through all the years that have
followed since that day it has tenaciously clung to its birthright.
The boy came to his mother, bringing her strawberries to eat; and
the man, climbing a scarp of rock, made a megaphone of his hands and
hallooed through it until an answering shout came from deep in the
spruces and balsams, and a little later Dominique Beauvais came out to
the edge of the slope, his whiskered face bright with expectancy, and
with him his little wife Marie, panting hard to keep pace with his long
legs.
When they were together Pierre Gourdon made a wide and all-embracing
sweep with his arms.
"This will be a good place to live in," he said. "It is what we have
been looking for."
With enthusiasm Dominique agreed. The women smiled. Again they were
happy. The boy was hunting for strawberries. He was always empty, this
boy.
Pierre Gourdon kissed his wife's smooth hair as they went back to the
camp they had made two hours earlier in the day, and broke into a wild
boat song which his grandfather had taught him on his knee in the
wicked days before he had known Josette at Ste. Anne, and Dominique
joined in heartily through his whiskers.
The women's smiles were sweeter and their eyes brighter, for fatigue
seemed to have run away from them now that their questing men-folk were
satisfied and had given them a promise of home.
That night, after supper, with their green birch camp-fire lighting
up the blackness of the wilderness, they sat and made plans, and long
after nine-year-old Joe had crawled into his blanket to sleep, and the
women's eyes were growing soft with drowsiness, Pierre and Dominique
continued to smoke pipefuls of tobacco and to build over and over the
homes of their dreams.
Young and happy, and overflowing with the adventurous enthusiasm of the
race of _coureurs_ from which they had sprung, they saw themselves with
the rising of another sun pitched into the heart of realities which
they had anticipated for a long time; and when at last Josette fell
asleep, her head pillowed close to her boy's, her red lips that had
not lost their prettiness through motherhood and wandering were tender
with a new peace and contentment. And a little later, while Pierre and
Dominique still smoked and painted their futures, the moon rose over
the forest-tops in a great golden welcome to the pioneers, and the wind
came in softly and more coolly from the lake, and at the last, from far
away, rose faintly a wilderness note that thrilled them--the cry of
wolves.
Dominique listened, and silently emptied the ash from his pipe into the
palm of his hand.
"Where wolves run there is plenty of game, and where there is game
there is trapping," he said.
And then came a sound which stopped the hearts of both for an instant,
a deep and murmuring echo, faint and very far, that broke in a note of
strange and vital music upon the stillness of the night.
"A ship!" whispered Pierre.
"Yes, a ship!" repeated Dominique, half rising to catch the last of the
sound.
For this was a night of forty years ago, when on the north shore of
Superior the cry of wolves in the forest was commoner than the blast of
a ship's whistle at sea.
The pioneers slept. The yellow moon climbed up until it was straight
overhead. Shadows in the deep forest moved like living things. The
wolves howled, circled, came nearer, and stopped their cry where
the kill was made. Mellow darkness trembled and thrilled with life.
Silent-winged creatures came and disappeared like ghosts. Bright eyes
watched the sleeping camp of the home seekers. A porcupine waddled
through it, chuckling and complaining in his foolish way. A buck caught
the scent of it, stamped his foot and whistled. There were whisperings
in the tall, dark spruce tops.
Caverns of darkness gave out velvety footfalls of life, and little
birds that were silent in the day uttered their notes softly in the
moon glow.
A bar of this light lay across Josette's face, softening it and giving
to its beauty a touch of something divine. The boy was dreaming. Pierre
slept with his head pillowed in the crook of his arm. Dominique's
whiskers were turned to the sky, bristling and fierce, as if he had
taken this posture to guard against harm the tired little wife who lay
at his side.
So the night passed, and dawn came, wakening them with the morning
chatter of a multitude of red squirrels in a little corner of the
world as yet unspoiled by man.
* * * * *
That first day from which they began to measure their new lives the
axes of Pierre and Dominique struck deep into the sweetly scented
hearts of the cedar trees out of which they were to build their
homes at Five Fingers. But first they looked more carefully into the
prospects of their domain.
The forest was back of them, a forest of high ridges and craggy
ravines, of hidden meadows and swamps, a picturesque upheaval of
wild country which reached for many miles from the Superior shore
to the thin strip of settlement lands along the Canadian Pacific.
Black and green and purple with its balsam, cedar and spruce, silver
and gold with its poplar and birch, splashed red with mountain ash,
its climbing billows and dripping hollows were radiantly tinted by
midsummer sun--and darkly sullen and mysterious under cloud or storm.
Out of these fastnesses, choked with ice and snow in winter, Pierre
knew how the floods must come roaring in springtime, and his heart beat
exultantly, for he loved the rush and thunder of streams, and the music
of water among rocks.
At the tip of the longest of the five inlets which broke like gouging
fingers through the rock walls of the lake half a mile away they
decided upon the sites for their cabins. Against those walls they
could hear faintly the moaning of surf, never quite still even when
there was no whisper of wind. But the long finger of water, narrow and
twisted, as if broken at the joint, was a placid pool of green and
silver over which the gulls floated, calling out their soft notes in
welcome to the home builders, and in its white sand were the prints
of many feet, both of birds and of beasts, who played and washed
themselves there, and came down to drink. Between these two, the open
and peaceful serenity of the inlet and the cool, still hiding-places of
the forest, were the green meadowland and slopes and patches of level
plain, a narrow strip of park-like beauty at the upper edge of which,
in the very shadow of the forest, Pierre and Dominique struck off their
plots and squared their angles, making ready for the logs in which the
afternoon saw their axes buried.
The days passed. Each dawn the red squirrel chorus greeted the rising
sun; through hours that followed came the ring of steel and the
freedom of voice which is born of love and home. Pierre sang, as his
grandfather had sung long years ago, and Dominique bellowed like a
baying hound when the chorus came. Women's laughter rose with the
singing of the birds. Josette and Marie were girls again, and the boy
was forever leading them to newly discovered strawberry patches hidden
among the rocks and grass and ferns.
It was a new thing for the wilderness, this invasion of human life,
and for a long time it fell away from them, listening, frightened and
subdued. But the birds and the red squirrels gave it courage, and
softly it returned, curious and shy and friendly. The deer came down to
drink again in the dusk, and moose rattled their antlers up the ridge.
Pop-eyed whisky jacks began to eat bannock crumbs close to Josette's
hands. Jays came nearer to scream their defiance, like wild Indians, in
the tree-tops, and thrushes and warblers sang until their throats were
ready to burst, and twenty times a day Pierre would pause in his labor
and say, "This is going to be a fine place to live in, with the sea at
our front door and the woods at our back."
He called Superior "the sea," and twice in the first week they saw far
out in its hazy vastness white and shimmering specks which were sailing
ships.
Log upon log the first of the cabins rose, until the roof was covered,
and scarcely was it done when Josette and Marie were planting wild
morning glories and crimson splashes of roses about it, and were
digging in the dark, cool mold of birch and poplar thickets for violet
roots, and out in the sheltered fens and meadow-dips for hyacinths and
fire-flowers; and in the hour before dusk, when the day's work was over
and supper was eaten, they would go hand in hand with their men-folk to
study and ponder over the fertile patches of earth here and there where
next spring they would plant potatoes and carrots and turnips and all
the other fine things they had known back in the land of Ste. Anne.
It was August when the two cabins were finished, small in dimensions
but snug as dovecotes, and in the eyes of Josette and Marie grew a
deeper and more serious look. For they were housewives again, with
little to do with, but with a world full of endeavor and anticipation
ahead of them. And it worried them to see that the fruits were
ripening, red raspberries so thick the bears were turning into hulks of
fat, black currants and saskatoons among the rocks, and all over the
ridgesides great trees of wild plums and mountain ash berries, waiting
for the first frosts to make them ready for preserves and jams.
So Dominique, one day, set out to blaze a trail to the nearest
settlement, thirty miles away; and thereafter their men-folk took
turns, one and then the other, going with empty pack and returning with
sixty pounds of burden, and berries were put into cans and dried and
preserved--until Pierre and Dominique began to tease their wives and
ask them if they wanted their husbands to turn into bears and sleep
on their fat all winter. It was this banter which reminded Josette
of candles, and in September they killed two bears and made several
hundred of them.
With the first frosts of autumn Pierre said even more frequently than
before, "This is a fine place to live in," and Josette and Marie,
seeing what the frosts were doing, rose each morning with new wonder
and new joy in their eyes. For if these frosts were giving to the
waters of the lake a colder and harder sheen, with something of menace
and gloom about it, they were also painting the ridges and hollows and
all the forest land as far as they could see with a glory of color
which they had never known at Ste. Anne.
Breath of winter came in the nights. Higher grew the great birch piles
of firewood which Pierre and Dominique dragged close to the cabin
doors, and very soon came the days when the carnival of autumn color
was gone and all but the evergreen trees assumed the ragged distress
of naked limbs and branches, and winds broke down fiercely over the
wilderness, and the moan of the lake, beating against its rock walls,
grew clearer and at times was a muffled and sullen roar half a mile
away.
But these changes were not frightening to Pierre and his people.
Canadian winter was, after all, the heart of their lives; long months
of adventure and thrill of deep snows and stinging blizzards on the
trap lines, of red-hot stoves, and snug evenings at home telling the
tales of the day, and appetites as keen as the winds that howled down
from the north.
This season, of all seasons, they would not have changed. It was then
the wolf howl took on a new note, the foxes cried out hungrily at
the edge of the clearing in the night. The call of the moose floated
awesomely through the frost of still evenings, and the bears hunted
their dens. One after another songbirds departed, leaving the whisky
jacks and the jays behind, and the ravens gathered in flocks, while in
the thickets and swamps the big snowshoe rabbits turned from brown
to gray and from gray to white. All hunting things were astir, from
the wolf and the fox and the little outlaw ermine to the owl and the
dog-faced fisher-cat, and in November Pierre and Dominique dipped their
traps in hot bear grease and prayed for the first snow.
It came in the night, so quietly that none heard the breathless fall
of it, and the world was white when little Joe got out of his bed at
dawn to look at his rabbit snares in the edge of the timber. That was
the beginning of their first winter at Five Fingers. It was a cold, dry
winter, and there was never a day that a haunch of venison or moose
meat was not hanging behind the cabins. Trapping was good, and the
store of pelts grew as the weeks went on, until Pierre and Dominique
both swore in the same breath that it was a paradise that they had
found on this north shore of Superior, and each day they made new
promises of what they would buy for Josette and Marie in the spring.
The snow piled itself deeper, and the lake froze over. In January it
was thirty degrees below zero.
The white world, Josette called it, and at times they all played in it
like children. There was Christmas, and then New Year's, and a birthday
for Marie, and games and stories at night round the crackling stoves in
the cabins. Pierre and Dominique built toboggans, and from the crest of
the ridge where they had first looked down upon the Five Fingers they
sped in wild races over the open and halfway across the snow-crusted
ice of the middle finger. And yet when Dominique came in one day and
said quite casually that he had heard the chirp of a brush warbler back
in the big swamp Marie gave a little cry of delight and Josette's eyes
grew suddenly bright.
It meant spring. A day or two later Pierre said the coats of the
snowshoe rabbits were turning rusty, which meant early spring. Then
came discovery of the first bear track, the track of a foolish bear who
had come out hungrily, like a woodchuck, only to hunt himself a den
again when he saw his shadow freezing in the snow. After this there was
more sun in the morning and less of the cold of sullen twilight each
night, and before even the crust of the snow had begun to thaw Pierre
brought in a poplar twig to show how the buds were swelling until they
seemed ready to pop. "I have never seen them fatter," he said. "It
means spring isn't far away."
When the first robin came Josette told her husband she could already
smell the perfume of flowers. He was a cold-footed and crabbed-looking
bird, forlorn and disappointed at the world's chill aspect, and for a
few minutes he sat humped up on the roof log and then flew away.
This was the beginning. The snow began to thaw on the sunny sides
of the slopes, and after that the change came swiftly. In April a
steady and swelling murmur ran through the forests, the music of the
gathering waters. Meadows and flats became flooded, little creeks
changed suddenly into rushing torrents, lakes and ponds crept up over
their sides, and the tiny stream which passed near the cabins, quiet
and gentle in summertime, was all at once a riotous and quarrelsome
outlaw, roaring and foaming in its mad rush down to the Middle Finger.
Half a mile away was a larger stream whose flood sounds came to them
like the distant roar of a cataract. It was glorious music, with
something in it that stirred the blood of Pierre and his people like
tonic and wine. Pierre, in his optimism and love of life, explained
it all by saying, "It is good to have a long, cold winter that we may
fully enjoy the spring."
The birds seemed to return in a night and a day--robins perky and glad
to get back from the lazy southland, thrushes and catbirds and a dozen
kinds of little brown warblers and brush sparrows whose voices were
sweetest of all the spring songsters. The earth itself began to breathe
with swelling roots and tips of green; the first flowers popped up; the
poplar buds exploded into fuzzy leaves, and Pierre and Dominique worked
from morning until night, clearing the patches they were to plant this
year, and spading up the rich, dark soil.
It was about this time Pierre gave voice to a thought which had been
growing in his head all winter. He was standing with Josette at the tip
of the green ridge from which they had first looked down upon Five
Fingers.
"Ste. Anne was never as fine as this, _chérie_," he said.
"No, not even before the woods were cut," agreed Josette.
He took her hand and held it softly in his own, and Josette laid her
cheek against his shoulder so that his lips could touch her smooth
hair. Pierre always liked it that way.
"I have been having a dream," he said, his voice a little queer because
of its secret, and because he knew how its confession would thrill the
one at his side, "and I have said nothing about it, but have done much
thinking. Would not a little church look pretty down there, just where
the tip of the evergreen forest reaches to the Middle Finger?"
"A church!" whispered Josette, her heart giving a sudden swift beat.
"Yes, a church," chuckled Pierre softly. "And over there, in that
green bit of meadow--what a place for a home for our old friend Poleon
Dufresne, and Sara, and all the children. And there is room for the
Clamarts, too, and Jean Croisset and his wife. It is a big land, with
plenty of fur and game and good rich soil underfoot, and I have thought
it is not right to keep it all to ourselves, _douce amie_."
From the door of her cabin some distance away Marie Beauvais wondered
just why it was that Josette threw her arms so suddenly round her
husband's neck and kissed him. And Pierre, with a heart full of
happiness, little guessed that with the fulfilment of his dreams would
come tragedy into the wilderness paradise at Five Fingers.