While lovely Nepeese was still 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 semiannual
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 were what 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
half-breed, 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. Tomorrow
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--Chipewyan, 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 had come
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 up 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 favor. No other Post would sell to or
buy from Pierrot if Le Bete--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 who 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 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. Tomorrow
McTaggart would start again for the half-breed's country. And the next
day Pierrot would have an answer for him. Bush McTaggart chuckled again
as 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 finished, 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 tomorrow, ma cherie," 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
traveling 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 odors 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 canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not
fared particularly well. Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had
lived almost entirely on crayfish. This new aroma 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 canyon, 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
Molting Moon--and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their
voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the
beavers had begun to cease their labors. 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, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon
of Silence for the Chipewyan.
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 marvelous 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 mid-air, 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 unrabbitlike 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 smoldering
coals of his fire he sat with his back to a tree, smoking his black
pipe and dreaming covetously of Nepeese, while 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 fishercat--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.