NOVICE AND EXPERT.
Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of
1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced
waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round
the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It
shrieked across the garden like malignant furies, rushed with the boom
of a sea through the cedars and pines, and tore up the mountain slope
till all the many voices of the forest were echoing back a thousand
tumultuous discords. Again, I see Hamilton gazing at the leaping flames
of the log fire, as if their frenzied motion reflected something of his
own burning grief. Then, the agony of our utter helplessness, as long as
the storm raged, would prove too great for his self-control. Rising, he
would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room till his
eye would be caught by some object with which the boy had played. He
would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the
dead. Afterwards, lanterns, which we had placed on the oak center table
on coming in, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and
each of us involuntarily walked across to a window and drew aside the
curtains to see how daylight was coming on. The white glare of early
morning flooded the room, but the snow-storm had changed to driving
sleet and the panes were iced from corner to corner with frozen
rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved
with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the
blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he
could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him
to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had
fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts,
crusted over by the frozen sleet and reflecting a white dazzle that made
one's eyes blink. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the
sheeted pines and snow was wreathed in fantastic forms among the cedars.
We had laid our plans while we waited. After lifting the canvas from the
camping-ground and seeking in vain for more trace of the fugitives, we
despatched a dozen different search-parties that very morning, Eric
leading those who were to go on the river-side of the Chateau, and I
some well-trained bushrangers picked from the _habitants_ of the
hillside, who could track the forest to every Indian haunt within a
week's march of the city. After putting my men on a trail with
instructions to send back an Indian courier to report each night, I
hunted up an old _habitant_ guide, named Paul Larocque, who had often
helped me to thread the woods of Quebec after big game. Now Paul was
habitually as silent as a dumb animal, and sportsmen had nicknamed him
The Mute; but what he lacked in speech he made up like other wild
creatures in a wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. Indeed, it was
commonly believed among trappers that Paul possessed some nameless sense
by which he could actually _feel_ the presence of an enemy before
ordinary men could either see, or hear. For my part, I would be willing
to pit that "feel" of Paul's against the nose of any hound that
dog-fanciers could back.
"Paul," said I, as the _habitant_ stood before me licking the short stem
of an inverted clay pipe, "there's an Indian, a bad Indian, an Iroquois,
Paul,"--I was particular in describing the Indian as an Iroquois, for
Paul's wife was a Huron from Lorette--"An Iroquois, who stole a white
woman and a little boy from the Chateau three days ago, in the morning."
There, I paused to let the facts soak in; for The Mute digested
information in small morsels. Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not
at all the picturesque figure which fancy has painted of his class.
Instead of the red toque, which artists place on the heads of
_habitants_, he wore a cloth cap with ear flaps coming down to be tied
under his chin. His jacket was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat
of some well-to-do man, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above
brightly beaded moccasins. When I paused, Paul fixed his eyes on an
invisible spot in the snow and ruminated. Then he hitched the baggy
trousers up, pulled the red scarf, that held them to his waist,
tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for me to go on.
"That Iroquois, who belongs to the North-West trappers----"
"_Pays d'En Haut?_" asks Paul, speaking for the first time.
"Yes," I answered, "and they all disappeared with the woman and the
child the day before the storm."
The Mute's eyes were back on the snow.
"Now," said I, "I'll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the
place where he's hiding."
Paul's eyes looked up with the question of how much.
"Five pounds a day." This was four more than we paid for the cariboo
hunts.
Again he stood thinking, then darted off into the forest like a hare;
but I knew his strange, silent ways, and confidently awaited his return.
How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five
minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous
half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods; but he was back again
all equipped for a long tramp, and as soon as I had laced on the
racquets, we were skimming over the drift like a boat on billows. In the
mazy confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Paul would have found
and kept that tangled, forest path. Where great trunks had fallen across
the way, Paul planted his pole and took the barrier at a bound. Then he
raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot
common to the _coureurs-des-bois_. The encased branches snapped like
glass when we brushed past, and so heavily were snow and icicles frozen
to the trees we might have been in some grotesque crystal-walled cavern.
The _habitant_ spoke not a word, but on we pressed over the brushwood,
now so packed with snow and crusted ice, our snow-shoes were not once
tripped by loose branches, and we glided from drift to drift. In vain I
tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, and I
noticed that my guide was keeping his course by following the marks
blazed on trees. At one place we came to a steep, clear slope, where the
earth had fallen sheer away from the hillside and snow had filled the
incline. First prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid,
Paul promptly sat down on the rear end of his snow-shoes, and, quicker
than I can tell it, tobogganed down to the valley. I came leaping
clumsily from point to point with my pole, like a ski-jumping Norwegian,
risking my neck at every bound. Then we coursed along the valley, the
_habitant's_ eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a
gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up
sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were over a
prospect of sugaring-off in the maple-woods, or at some foolish
_habitant_ who had tapped the maple too early. How often had I known my
guide to exhaust city athletes in these swift marches of his! But I had
been schooled to his pace from boyhood and kept up with him at every
step, though we were going so fast I lost all track of my bearings.
"Where to, Paul?" I asked with a vague suspicion that we were heading
for the Huron village at Lorette. "To Lorette, Paul?"
But Paul condescended only a grunt and whisked suddenly round a headland
up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the
mountains and might have sheltered any number of fugitives. In the gorge
we stopped to take a light meal of gingerbread horses--a cake that is
the peculiar glory of the _habitant_--dried herrings and sea biscuits.
By the sun, I knew it was long past noon and that we had been traveling
northwest. I also vaguely guessed that Paul's object was to intercept
the North-West trappers, if they had planned to slip away from the St.
Lawrence through the bush to the Upper Ottawa, where they could meet
north-bound boats. But not one syllable had my taciturn guide uttered.
Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, we found ourselves in
the upper reaches of a mountain, where the trees fell away in scraggy
clumps and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the hill-crest.
Paul grunted, licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to
the hill-top. The dark peak of a solitary wigwam appeared above the
snow. He pointed again to the fringe of woods below us. A dozen wigwams
were visible among the trees and smoke curled up from a central
camp-fire.
"_Voilà, Monsieur?_" said the _habitant_, which made four words for that
day.
The Mute then fell to my rear and we first approached the general camp.
The campers were evidently thieves as well as hunters; for frozen pork
hung with venison from the branches of several trees. The sap trough
might also have belonged to them, which would explain Paul's laugh, as
the whole paraphernalia of a sugaring-off was on the outskirts of the
encampment.
"Not the Indians we're after," said I, noting the signs of permanency;
but Paul Larocque shoved me forward with the end of his pole and a
curious, almost intelligent, expression came on the dull, pock-pitted
face. Strangely enough, as I looked over my shoulder to the guide, I
caught sight of an Indian figure climbing up the bank in our very
tracks. The significance of this incident was to reveal itself later.
As usual, a pack of savage dogs flew out to announce our coming with
furious barking. But I declare the _habitant_ was so much like any
ragged Indian, the creatures recognized him and left off their vicious
snarl. Only the shrill-voiced children, who rushed from the wigwams;
evinced either surprise or interest in our arrival. Men and women were
haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the
savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as
much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they
sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting
for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women
were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the
circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, lay
in all variety of lazy attitudes on buffalo robes and caribou skins.
I had known, as every one familiar with Quebec's family histories must
know, that the sons of old seigneurs sometimes inherited the adventurous
spirit, which led their ancestors of three centuries ago to exchange the
gayeties of the French court for the wild life of the new world.
I was aware this spirit frequently transformed seigneurs
into bush-rangers and descendants of the royal blood into
_coureurs-des-bois_. But it is one thing to know a fact, another to see
that fact in living embodiment; and in this case, the living embodiment
was Louis Laplante, a school-fellow of Laval, whom, to my amazement, I
now saw, with a beard of some months' growth and clad in buckskin, lying
at full length on his back among that villainous band of nondescript
trappers. Something of the surprise I felt must have shown on my face,
for as Louis recognized me he uttered a shout of laughter.
"Hullo, Gillespie!" he called with the saucy nonchalance which made him
both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the
prophets?" and he sat up making room for me on his buffalo robe.
"I'll wager, Louis," said I, shaking his hand heartily and accepting the
proffered seat, "I'll wager it's prophets spelt with an 'f' brings you
here." For the young rake had been one of the most notorious borrowers
at the seminary.
"Good boy!" laughed he, giving my shoulder a clap. "I see your time was
not wasted with me. Now, what the devil," he asked as I surveyed the
motley throng of fat, coarse-faced squaws and hard-looking men who
surrounded him, "now, what the devil's brought you here?"
"What's the same, to yourself, Louis lad?" said I. He laughed the merry,
heedless laugh that had been the distraction of the class-room.
"Do you need to ask with such a galaxy of nut-brown maidens?" and Louis
looked with the assurance of privileged impudence straight across the
fire into the hideous, angry face of a big squaw, who was glaring at me.
The creature was one to command attention. She might have been a great,
bronze statue, a type of some ancient goddess, a symbol of fury, or
cruelty. Her eyes fastened themselves on mine and held me, whether I
would or no, while her whole face darkened.
"The lady evidently objects to having her place usurped, Louis," I
remarked, for he was watching the silent duel between the native woman's
questioning eyes and mine.
"The gentleman wants to know if the lady objects to having her place
usurped?" called Louis to the squaw.
At that the woman flinched and looked to Laplante. Of course, she did
not understand our words; but I think she was suspicious we were
laughing at her. There was a vindictive flash across her face, then the
usual impenetrable expression of the Indian came over her features. I
noticed that her cheeks and forehead were scarred, and a cut had laid
open her upper lip from nose to teeth.
"You must know that the lady is the daughter of a chief and a fighter,"
whispered Louis in my ear.
I might have known she was above common rank from the extraordinary
number of trinkets she wore. Pendants hung from her ears like the
pendulum of a clock. She had a double necklace of polished bear's claws
and around her waist was a girdle of agates, which to me proclaimed that
she was of a far-western tribe. In the girdle was an ivory-handled
knife, which had doubtless given as many scars as its owner displayed.
"What tribe, Louis?" I asked.
"I'll be hanged, now, if I'm not jealous," he began. "You'll stare the
lady out of countenance----" But at this moment the Indian who had come
up the bank behind us came round and interrupted Laplante's merriment by
tossing a piece of bethumbed paper between my comrade's knees.
"The deuce!" exclaimed Louis, bulging his tongue into one cheek and
glancing at me with a queer, quizzical look as he unfolded and read the
paper.
If he had not spoken I might not have turned; but having turned I could
not but notice two things. Louis jerked back from me, as if I might try
to read the soiled note in his hand, and in raising the paper displayed
on the back the stamp of the commissariat department from Quebec
Citadel.
Neither Laplante's suppressed surprise, nor my observations of his
movement, escaped the big squaw. She came quickly round the fire to us
both.
"Give me that," she commanded, holding out her hand to the French youth.
"The deuce I will," he returned, twisting the paper up in his clenched
fist. Half in jest, half in earnest, just as Louis used to be punished
at the seminary, she gave him a prompt box on the ear. He took it in
perfect good-nature. And the whole encampment laughed. The squaw went
back to the other side of the fire. Laplante leaned forward and threw
the paper towards the flames; but without his knowledge, he overshot the
mark; and when the trader was looking elsewhere the big squaw stooped,
picked up the coveted note and slipped it into her skirt pocket.
"Now, Louis, nonsense aside," I began.
"With all my soul, if I have one," said he, lying back languidly with a
perceptible cooling of the cordiality he had first evinced.
I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every wigwam for trace
of the lost woman and child. He listened with shut eyes.
"It isn't," I explained in a low voice, eager to arouse his interest,
"it isn't in the least, Laplante, that we suspect these people; but you
know the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to your people----"
"Oh! Go ahead!" he interjected impatiently. "Don't beat round the bush!
What do you want of me?"
"To go through the tents with me and help me. By Jove! Laplante! I
thought at least a spark of the man would suggest that without my
speaking," I broke out hotly.
He was on his feet with an alacrity that brought old Paul Larocque round
to my side and the squaw to his.
"Curse you," he cried out roughly, shoving the squaw back. For a moment
I was uncertain whether he were addressing the woman or myself. "You
mind your own business and go to your Indian! Here, Gillespie, I'll do
the tents with you. Get off with you," he muttered at the squaw,
rumbling out a lingo of persuasive expletives; and he led the way to the
first wigwam.
But the squaw was not to be dismissed; for when I followed the
Frenchman, she closed in behind looking thunder, not at her abuser, but
at me; and The Mute, fearing foul play and pole in hand, loyally brought
up the rear of our strange procession. I shall not retail that search
through robes and skins and blankets and boxes, in foul-smelling,
vermin-infested wigwams. It was fruitless. I only recall the lowering
face of the big squaw looking over my shoulder at every turn, with
heavy brows contracted and gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious
challenge. I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory
handle in the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his
beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole.
Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the
fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the
child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the
squaw on the other.
"And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked
Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill.
The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence
among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching.
Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest
attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him
suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether
he would or no, just as she had mine.
"Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting
possession of me. "Why don't you answer?"
The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face
accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with
downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.
"You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should
have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't
lead you into it."
"Well?" I demanded.
"Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the
squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and
we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why
we're all here. You must go. It is not safe."
"Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand
when I made to take leave.
"Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on
the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of
the valley.
Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have
no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this
century. The _habitant_ is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and
accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to
the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried
down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I
remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a
skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled
that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this
disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If
the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within a mile of
the pest tent? It would be more like Indian character to reverse
Samaritan practises and leave the victim to die. This man might, of
course, be a French-Canadian trapper, but I would take no risks of a
trick, so I ordered Paul to lead me back to that tepee.
The Mute seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers.
He skirted round the base of the hill till we were on the side remote
from the tribe. Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he
scrambled up the cliff to reconnoitre. I knew he received a surprise as
soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank; for he curled
himself up behind a snow-pile and gave a low whistle for me. I was
beside him with one bound. We were not twenty pole-lengths from the
wigwam. There was no appearance of life. The tent flaps had been laced
up and a solitary watch-dog was tied to a stake before the entrance.
Down the valley the setting sun shone through the naked trees like a
wall of fire, and dyed all the glistening snow-drifts primrose and opal.
At one place in the forest the red light burst through and struck
against the tent on the hill-top, giving the skins a peculiar appearance
of being streaked with blood. The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh
of moving air-currents peculiar to snow-padded areas, came up from the
woods with far-away echoes of the trappers' voices. Perhaps this was
heard by the watch-dog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of
my half-wild _habitant_ guide; for it sat back on its haunches and
throwing up its head, let out the most doleful howlings imaginable.
"Oh! _Monsieur_," shuddered out the superstitious habitant shivering
like an aspen leaf, "sick man moan,--moan,--moan hard! He die,
_Monsieur_, he die, he die now when dog cry lak dat," and full of fear
he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent gestures for me to
follow.
For a time--but not long, I must acknowledge--I lay there alone,
watching and listening. Paul's ears might hear the moans of a sick man,
mine could not: nor would I return to the Chateau without ascertaining
for a certainty what was in that wigwam. Slipping off the snow-shoes, I
rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the
dog with my pole; but I was suddenly arrested by the distinct sound of
pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and
with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a
vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper,
popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect
English--"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!"
"Who has smallpox?" I bawled back.
"A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it
on the snow and I'll come for it."
As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not
particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man
from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and
hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change
towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the
big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a
significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions
like those of my _habitant_ guide, which instinctively put out feelers
with the caution of an insect's antennæ for the presence of vague,
unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the
incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding
information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition
to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one
missing factor--Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante
had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the
novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly
and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not
a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and
Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed
learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips
on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when
he opened his lips to me.