MICK OTTER, INJUN
The newspapers had a great deal to say about the extraordinary
behavior and mysterious disappearance of Major T. V. Akerley, M. C.,
of the Royal Air Force. Why had he hit Lieutenant-Colonel E. F.
Nasher on the point of the chin? That was the question; and no one
seemed to be so ignorant of the answer as Colonel Nasher himself.
Many young men who possessed pens of ready writers (more or less)
and little else dealt lengthily with the problem.
The Press soon came to the conclusion that the major had hit the
colonel out of pure cussedness—that a young and distinguished
officer had committed assault and battery; insubordination with
violence; behavior unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and
desertion coupled with theft of Government property, all in an
outburst of causeless and unreasoning temper.
Then military men, demobilized and otherwise, of various arms of the
Service and various ranks, began dipping unaccustomed pens on the
vanished Akerley’s behalf. One wrote, “I was Major Akerley’s groom
when he was a cavalry lieutenant. He was the quietest officer I ever
knew. Some of our officers ...; but that Mr. Akerley didn’t even get
mad, so’s you’d notice when his batman burnt his boots he’d paid
seven guineas for in London. I guess Major Akerley had a reason for
doing what he did.”
Many other warriors wrote in the same vein, among them a retired
major-general. Much was written of Akerley’s reserve of manner,
devotion to duty, skill as an airman and cool courage as a fighter.
All these champions had known Akerley in France, of course; and all
denied any personal knowledge of Colonel Nasher, whose military
activities had not carried him beyond Ottawa.
The result of all this literary effort on the part of the veterans
was a very general sympathy, strong and wide-spread, for the
run-away Ace—but as neither newspapers nor the faintest echoes of
public opinion reach Gaspard’s clearings, Akerley knew nothing of
it. The civil and military police continued to scratch their heads,
and run finger-tips (not entirely free from splinters) across and
around maps of the world, and submit reports to their respective
headquarters through the proper channels, with a view to the
disciplining and undoing of Major Akerley and the recovery of the
aëroplane.
Tom Akerley, known to old Gaspard as Tom Anderson, lived his new
life from day to day and tried not to worry. His shoulder mended
rapidly, and he worked about the farm with a will. He spent much of
his time in Gaspard’s company, working in the crops, mending fences
and clearing stones from the fields; and the fact that the old man’s
rifle always lay or stood near at hand at once amused and irritated
him.
Gaspard continued to cling to his belief that he had been visited by
a devil, a fiend of darkness out of the night, and that the visitor
was still somewhere in the vicinity; and sometimes Tom joined him on
these fruitless hunts for the intruder through the surrounding
forests. On these occasions, Tom was armed with a muzzle-loading,
double-barrelled gun, the left barrel rammed with a bullet and the
right with duck-shot.
“Would you know him if you saw him?” asked Tom during one of these
expeditions, as they rested after a stumbling struggle through an
alder swamp.
“He’d be discovered to me quick as the flash of an eye,” replied the
old man. “Fer years have I bin expectin’ him, in punishment for the
reckless ways o’ my youth; an’ I’ll know ’im when I set eyes on ’im,
ye kin lay to that!”
“And then what will you do?” asked Tom.
“Pump it to ’im! Pump it into ’im!” exclaimed the old man, heartily;
and he illustrated his pleasant intention by crooking and wiggling
the trigger-finger of his right hand.
Even the knowledge of the fact that the cartridges in the rifle were
harmless failed to put Tom entirely at his ease.
Tom enjoyed the evenings and rainy days. Then he read or played
chess with Catherine or listened to Gaspard’s stories of the past.
The old man told some stirring tales of his physical prowess; and
always at the conclusion of such narratives he would say, in a
fallen voice, “Vanity, vanity, all sich things is vanity.”
The grass ripened for the scythe; and Tom drew Gaspard’s attention
to the fact.
“Mick would feel reel put out if we started hayin’ before he got
here,” said Gaspard. “He ain’t missed a hayin’ in twenty year, Mick
Otter ain’t.”
“Where does he live?” asked Tom.
“Everywheres,” replied the old man. “Mostly crost the
height-o’-land, I reckon. He can’t keep still fer long, that Injun.
Soon as the ice busts up he’s off, runnin’ the woods till the grass
is ripe. He lights out agin after harvest, an’ lives on the gun till
the snow lays a foot deep over these clearin’s. He’ll be here inside
the week, to mow the first swath—onless somethin’s happened to ’im.”
They took down the scythes next morning, and Tom turned the
grindstone while Gaspard ground the long blades. They were intent on
their task in the sunshine when a shadow fell suddenly upon the
stone. Tom glanced up and saw a squat figure standing within a few
feet of him. He ceased to turn the stone and straightened his back.
Old Gaspard poured water from a rusty tin along the edge of the
blade, tested its keenness with a thumb and said, “How do, Mick.”
“How do,” replied the old Maliseet. “You start hayin’, what?”
“Reckoned ye’d be along in time to cut the first swath,” returned
Gaspard.
Mick Otter nodded his head and looked at Tom. His eyes were round
and dark and very bright. He stared unwinking for several seconds,
then turned again to Gaspard.
“You got young man for Catherine, what?” he said.
Gaspard smiled.
“That’s as may be,” he replied. “Ask Catherine herself, if ye wanter
know. Howsumever, this here’s Tom Anderson, from ’way over on the
upper St. John. He speared a salmon an’ the wardens chased ’im out.”
“That so?” said Mick Otter. “Chase ’im quite a ways, what?”
Tom laughed goodnaturedly.
The three went into the house, where Catherine welcomed Mick Otter
cordially and produced a second breakfast. The Maliseet ate swiftly,
heartily and in silence, nodding or shaking his head now and then in
answer to a question. Then the three men returned to the scythes and
the grindstone. Fifteen minutes later they were mowing in the oldest
and ripest meadow. Mick Otter led along the edge of the field; old
Gaspard followed and Tom brought up the rear. Tom had learned to
swing a scythe when a small boy. Like swimming and milking, it is a
knack not easily forgotten. Catherine came out and sat on the fence.
Mick Otter left his place and walked over to her, wiped his long
blade with a handful of grass and then played on it with his ringing
scythe-stone. Returning the stone to his hip-pocket, he said, “How
that young feller come here, anyhow?”
“Why, how would he come?” returned the girl, “not in a canoe, that’s
certain; and he didn’t bring a horse.”
“Maybe he walk here, hey?”
“That seems reasonable, Mick.”
“An’ maybe he don’t walk, what?”
Catherine glanced over to assure herself that her grandfather was
out of ear-shot, then descended from her perch on the top rail and
stepped close to the old Maliseet.
“What do you mean, Mick Otter?” she asked in a whisper.
“That young feller no guide nor lumberman,” said Mick. “Big man,
him. See his picter in the paper, all dress up like soldier.”
While he spoke his round, bright eyes searched her eyes.
“Keep quiet,” she whispered. “Grandad doesn’t know—nobody knows.
I’ll tell you first chance I get. You are my friend, Mick. You’ll
keep quiet, won’t you? Grandad thinks it was a devil—and he is
always hunting around with his rifle.”
“That a’ right,” said the Indian; and he returned to his work.
Catherine soon found an opportunity for speech with Akerley. She
told him of her conversation with Mick Otter.
“I am not afraid of him,” she continued. “He is kind and sane: He
will keep your secret, if we are perfectly frank with him. I am
afraid of the newspapers. A mail comes in once a fortnight to
Millbrow, and that is only ten miles below Boiling Pot; and perhaps
Ned Tone has already seen a paper with your photograph and story in
it.”
Tom’s face paled for an instant.
“Please don’t think that I am afraid of Ned Tone,” he said. “I am
only afraid of being driven away from here. But perhaps there is no
real danger of it. That fellow’s eyes may not be as sharp as Mick
Otter’s. If the old Indian is to be trusted I’ll just carry on and
let Ned Tone make the next move; but I think he would have been
nosing around before this, if he had recognized my phiz in a
newspaper.”
“But he does not know you are here,” said the girl. “He has every
reason to believe that you are lost in the woods, wandering about
eating wild berries—or dead.”
When old Mick Otter heard Tom Akerley’s story from Catherine, he
permitted himself the faintest flicker of a smile. The thing that
tickled his sense of humor was the position of his old friend
Gaspard Javet.
“Gaspar’ he hate devil darn bad an’ like Tom darn well, what?” he
remarked. “We bes’ fix them catridges again before Gaspar’ shoot at
deer or bobcat, or maybe he smell somethin’, hey?”
“But what shall we do if Ned Tone sees a newspaper and suspects the
truth about Tom?” asked Catherine.
“How you know that until he come, hey? He don’t git no newspaper,
maybe, down to B’ilin’ Pot. We watch out sharp, anyhow; an’ if Ned
Tone make the move, me an’ Tom take to the big woods; an’ nobody
find ’im then, you bet. Ned Tone got nothin’ in his skull ’cept some
muscle off his neck.”
With this the girl had to be satisfied, but she believed that both
Tom and the old Maliseet under-rated Ned Tone’s cunning and the
possible danger which he represented.
The weather held fine and the hay-making went briskly on day by day;
and in odd half-hours, usually late at night, Mick and Tom worked at
replacing the explosive charges in Gaspard’s cartridges. Catherine
helped in this, by carrying and returning, as she had helped Tom in
the work of withdrawing the same charges of cordite. She and Tom
felt no fear now of the old man’s recognizing Tom as the being that
had swooped down from the sky; and Tom felt so sure now of Gaspard’s
friendship and sanity that, but for the girl, he would have
confessed the facts of the case to him. She would not hear of this,
however.
“You don’t know him as well as I do,” she argued. “He is a dear,
kind old man—but he is quite mad on that one subject of a visit from
a devil. But, of course, if you want to be shot dead, if you are
tired of life in this dull place, tell Grandad.”
“Then I’ll not tell him—for I was never more interested in life than
I am now,” said Tom, gravely.
Soon all the grass was cut, cured and housed, except that in the
“new clearin’.” This piece of land was actually four, five and six
years old as a clearing. Though not more than four acres in extent
it represented three seasons’ brushing and burning. Old Gaspard
Javet had cleared every rod of it single-handed. Each spring, as
soon as the ground was dry, he had set to work, cutting out the
brush and smaller growth at the roots but leaving waist-high stumps
in the felling of the larger timber. Then, having trimmed and
twitched out the stuff for fence-rails and firewood, he had piled
the brush and branches and set fire to them, piled them again and
burned them again, then scattered his oats and grass-seed and
harrowed them into the ashes among the scorched stumps. Thus he had
taken a crop of grain, or a crop of fodder if the frosts fell early,
from each patch of new land in the first year, and harvests of hay
in the following years. Now the whole clearing stood thick with long
spears of timothy grass that topped the gray and black stumps.
The new clearing lay north of the older fields and was separated
from them by a belt of woods several hundred yards wide.
Tom cut into the ripe timothy early one morning, while Gaspard Javet
and Mick Otter were still engaged in an argument concerning the
relative merits of several methods of trapping mink. He cut along
the northern edge of the field—a wavering swath, owing to obtrusive
stumps. He was about to return to the starting-point when the
excited barking of Blackie, the little dog of obscure antecedents,
attracted his attention. There was a serious, threatening note in
Blackie’s outcry that was new to it—a tone that Tom had never heard
when chipmunks, or even porcupines, were the cause of the
excitement.
“He has found something interesting,” said Tom, and he immediately
balanced the scythe on the top of a stump, vaulted the brush-fence
and made for the sound through the thick undergrowth of young
spruces. The dog continued to bark; and suddenly Tom realized that
he was moving to the right in full cry. So he quickened his own pace
and shouted to the dog as he ran. Then he heard the crashing of a
heavy body through the thickets, receding swiftly; and Blackie’s
angry yelps, also receding, took on a breathless note. He ran at top
speed for several hundred yards, avoiding the trunks of trees but
setting his feet down blindly, until a sprawled root tripped him and
laid him flat on the moss. He sat up as soon as he had recovered his
breath.
“It didn’t sound like a deer,” he reflected. “It wasn’t jumping. The
pup doesn’t pay any attention to deer. It may have been a bear or a
moose—though I can’t quite imagine either of them running away from
that pup.”
He got to his feet and spent a few minutes in searching around for
tracks in the moss. Though rain had fallen during the night, he
failed to discover any marks of hoof or claw. So he returned to the
clearing; and there he found Gaspard and Mick.
“What you bin chasin’, hey?” asked the Maliseet.
Tom told them. Mick immediately discarded his scythe and scrambled
through the fence. Old Gaspard Javet grinned and stroked his white
whiskers.
“There goes that durned Injun, fer a run in the woods,” he said,
with an expression of face and voice as if he were speaking of a
beloved infant. “He’s the everlastin’est wild-goose chaser I ever
see. He’d foller a shadder, Mick would—aye, foller its tracks, an’
overhaul it, too—an’ maybe try to skin it. But he’s more for the
chase nor the kill, Mick is—more for the hunt nor the skin. He’s
what Cathie’s pa uster call a good sportsman, I reckon—that
gad-about old Injun.”
Then he swung his scythe with a dry swish through the stems of tall
timothy and a thousand purple-powdered heads bowed down before him.
Gaspard and Tom moved steadily among the stumps for about half an
hour; and then Mick Otter scrambled back through the fence with the
little dog panting at his heels.
“That b’ar got boots on, anyhow,” said Mick.
“Boots, d’ye say?” exclaimed Gaspard. “Boots!—an’ spyin’ ’round like
a wild critter instead of walkin’ up to the house an’ namin’ his
business like a Christian. I reckon I best take a look at him an’
his boots.”
He laid aside the scythe and took up his ever-handy rifle.
“You think him devil, what?” said Mick.
“Ye can’t never tell,” returned Gaspard, climbing the barrier of
brush that shut the forest from the clearing.
Mick Otter and the little dog followed. Tom checked his own impulse
to go rambling in the cool woods, filled and lit his pipe and
returned to the mowing. He had not gone half the length of the field
before Catherine came running to him, straight through the standing
crop.
“Ned Tone is at the house,” she said, breathlessly; and then, “Where
are the others?” she asked.
Tom told her of the morning’s excitement.
“That was Ned Tone,” she said. “He had been running, I know. You
didn’t see him; and I am sure he didn’t see you, by the questions he
asked. But he wouldn’t have come spying like that if he didn’t think
there was a chance of your being here.”
“Do you suppose he has seen a paper and suspects something?” asked
Tom.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything in his manner to suggest it.
He was just as he always is—except that he asked if I had seen
anything of a stranger recently.”
“Where is he now?”
“Sitting on the porch. I told him to wait there—that I would soon be
back.”
“And he didn’t wait!” exclaimed Tom. “He came sneaking after you.”
He stepped past the girl and ran forward through the tall grass.
“I see you,” he shouted as he ran. “What are you prying ’round here
for? Stand up and show yourself.”
Ned Tone advanced reluctantly from the belt of forest that separated
the old clearings from the new, with an air of embarrassment and
anger. Tom walked aggressively up to him, halting within a yard of
him. They were in plain sight of Catherine.
“So it’s you!” exclaimed Tom. “Were you looking for me?”
“Nope, I wasn’t,” said Tone. “Who be ye, anyhow?”
“I’m the man who didn’t take the track to the left, as you know very
well,” replied Tom, smiling dangerously. “Your face looks better
than it did when I last saw you. Your lip has healed quite nicely.”
“’S that so! Mind yer own business, will ye? Have I got to ask yer
leave to come to Gaspard Javet’s clearin’s?”
“Certainly not—but I thought you didn’t know the way. You told me
that Gaspard’s place lay to the west. What were you spying ’round
here for, half an hour ago?”
Tom jerked a thumb toward the northern edge of the field.
“What of it?” retorted the other. “I go where I choose. I was here
afore ye ever come an’ I’ll be here still, after ye’re gone. I don’t
step outer my tracks fer every tramp an’ thief that runs the woods.
Don’t think ye own this country jist because the game-wardens chased
ye away from where ye belong.”
“What do you know about the game-wardens?” asked Tom, in surprise,
wondering where the fellow had heard the yarn which he had been
forced to tell to old Gaspard Javet.
“I ain’t a fool,” returned Ned Tone, with a knowing leer. “What else
would ye’ve come into this country for? But if ye don’t clear out,
I’ll put old Gaspard wise to ye; an’ he’ll run ye outer these
woods.”
Tom laughed cheerfully; and Catherine heard it and caught the note
of relief in it.
“Gaspard is hunting you with his rifle this very minute,” he said.
“He and Mick Otter are on your tracks.”
“Huntin’ me!” exclaimed Tone. “Me an’ this family is old friends.”
Catherine MacKim joined them at that moment.
“You are not a friend of ours, Ned Tone,” she said, looking him
straight in the eyes. “Grandad and I don’t have cowards and liars
for friends.”