There was a river-driver beyond the Northwest Carry who respected neither
moose nor man. Because he was the best river-driver on the West Branch
they let him alone until he struck an Indian with a pick-pole.
The Indian’s head was damaged and while he waited for it to heal, he
selected his revenge. His revenge was simple and effective. He hunted up
the moose-warden and told many lies. Deftly concealed among these lies,
however, was a truth that infuriated the warden.
The river-driver, whose name was Skeene, sat on his haunches and sneered
when the moose-warden glided into camp. But when he dug out a head and
antlers behind a shanty, Skeene picked up his rifle, looked obliquely at
the moose-warden, tied his blanket and fry-pan, hoisted his canoe onto
his head, and walked away to the southward, still sneering. I don’t know
what they said about it in Foxcroft, but Hale, who owned the timber, and
who thought he owned Skeene, hunted him up and sent him to work on the
new cut-off, hoping the affair might blow over in time for Skeene to
drive logs again. But Skeene turned lazy and lined the dead water with
traps and set-lines, and when Hale remonstrated, Skeene laughed. Then
Hale threatened him and hinted about moose-wardens, and $500 fines, but
Skeene thrashed Hale before the whole camp, packed his kit and canoe, and
paddled serenely away down the West Branch.
That really began the trouble, for Hale never forgave him. When Skeene
started to guide for Henderson on the upper Portage, Hale heard of it
and ran him out. That, of course, marked him among the guides in the
lake-country, and Skeene perhaps felt the ostracism, for he quietly went
to work for Colby on the new sluice that ran from the carry-pond to the
lake. Possibly, if they had let him alone, he might have turned out as
tame as a moose-bird,—he was only twenty-three,—but Hale remembered, and
the Indian remembered, and one day a man came in to the Carry Camp with a
44 bullet in his wrist and an unserved warrant in his pocket. The man was
a moose-warden, and the warrant was for Skeene.
When the news spread that Skeene had shot a warden, the guides from
Portage to Lily Bay condemned him. Down at Greenville a sheriff and
posse boarded the “Katahdin,” and spent several weeks cruising about at
public expense. The lake steamboat was comfortable, the food good, and
the sheriff and posse were in no hurry to quit. Possibly they expected
Skeene to come down to the shore and sit on the rocks; perhaps they
fancied he might paddle across their bows in his sleep. Naturally he did
neither. When at length somebody suggested that the sheriff and posse
take to their canoes, that official steamed back to the foot of the
lake in a huff, and presently the rumours of Skeene’s misdoings became
scarcely more definite than camp-fire gossip.
Perhaps even then, if they had given him a chance, he might have
surrendered and taken his punishment, but they didn’t give him the
chance. A warden saw him building a lean-to, on the island that divides
the West Branch. The warden waited until dark, crawled in outside the
fire, and caught Skeene asleep. That is all the warden recollects, merely
that he caught Skeene asleep. What Skeene did to the warden when he
awoke, the official cannot remember distinctly.
Three weeks after that, Skeene walked into Kineo store, handling his
rifle in a most alarming fashion. He suggested that they place certain
provisions and ammunition in his canoe, which lay on the beach below. The
three clerks complied with an enthusiasm borne of fright. Twenty minutes
later Skeene, in his canoe, was seen making for Moose River. Two guides,
just from Lily Bay, refused to fire at him, arguing it was not right to
drown a man for stealing pork and powder. The hotel had not yet opened,
and the people at the annex objected to a man-hunting trip, so they only
notified the sheriff again and secretly wished Skeene in hell.
Of course, at the hotels they denied the very existence of Skeene; but
the Bangor “News” printed the story, and people fought shy of Moose River
and the lake beyond which is called Red Lake. In vain the guides declared
the region safe. It was safe as far as they were concerned. It is not
the nature of a guide—that is, a white guide—to inform on or interfere
with any man. Skeene let them alone. The Indians, too, paddled about Red
Lake when they wanted to. The Indian log-driver, however, stayed away
after Skeene had shot a hole in his canoe. The canoe being bark, it was
through Providence and a patch of gum that the log-driving half-breed
ever paddled out of the mouth of Moose River.
Now if they had not started to hunt Skeene from the Lakes, he would never
have troubled anybody, except possibly Hale and the half-breed. He went
to Canada for a year, worked at anything that came along, and sent money
to Kineo store to pay for his pork and powder. That, of course, won him
the guides again. So when home-sickness drove him back to Red Lake, he
expected to be let alone. Hale, sluicing at the Northwest Carry, heard he
had returned, and started for Red Lake with the log-driving half-breed
and six men. Two days later they returned; Hale had a bullet in his leg
above the knee and the half-breed carried a similar gift in his fore-arm.
This incident, while relieving the conversational monotony at camp and
landing, bothered the sheriff cruelly. He went to Foxcroft where they
said unpleasant things to him; he went back to the Landing and they made
fun of him.
There was a captain on the lake named Snow,—a white-bearded, mild-eyed
giant. When the local paper wanted an item it filled in with,
“Extraordinary weather on the Lake in July! Steamboat ‘Red-Deer’ in port
with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot-house!”
The sheriff went to see Snow, and, after a long confab, summoned his
posse, boarded the Red-Deer, and left Greenville, as the local paper
expressed it, “under sealed orders, bound for Moose River.” Naturally,
half a dozen canoes were aboard, some lying bottom upward on the
superstructure, some lashed to the rail. The posse carried Winchesters,
although no game was in season.
Off the Grey Gull, an island, the little steamboat slowed down and
stopped, the canoes were hoisted over the rail and dropped; the posse
embarked. The sheriff said good-bye in a voice made loud by nervousness,
and the Red-Deer swung about and steamed back to the foot of the lake
with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot-house.
At the mouth of Moose River two more canoes were waiting; Hale sat in
one, paddle glistening in the pale spring sunshine; in the other sat the
Indian log-driver, nursing the hammer of a rifle.
Below the long ridge the water is nearly dead, although a canoe might
drift to the point in twenty-four hours. It was paddling for a mile
to the first wing-dam, and there, the sheriff, who led, flung his
stern-paddle into the bottom of the canoe, flourished the setting-pole,
and stood up. At the same moment a jet of flame leaped from the edge of
the wing-dam and a bullet passed through the sheriff’s hat. The amazed
official promptly fell overboard, sank, rose, grasped the edge of the
canoe, and swamped it, turning the bow-paddler into the river. The swift
current landed them on a shoal before the sheriff could shriek more than
twice, and they crawled up on a rock, sleek and wet as half drowned flies
in a sap-pan.
The other canoes had halted; some of the posse waved their rifles, but
nobody fired at the wing-dam except Hale. He banged away as fast as he
could pump the breach-lever, and Billy Sebato, the Indian, took to the
bushes and lay patiently waiting for a mark, purring with eagerness.
“Jim Skeene, you darned thief!” shouted Hale, “come out from them stones!
Jest you come out on to that there wing-dam once!”
Above the rush and gurgle of the river they heard Skeene’s voice: “You
let me be or I’ll shoot to kill!”
“Thief! Thief!” yelled Hale, dancing in his seat with anger, until the
canoe heeled and almost swamped.
“I ain’t no more thief than you be, Josh Hale!” bawled Skeene, “I paid
for them rations and ca’tridges and you know damn well I did!” Before he
could add anything, the Indian, Sebato, fired twice.
“If that nigger Sebato don’t quit shootin’ I’ll let loose on all o’ ye!”
called Skeene, shaking his rifle above the wing-dam edge. “Git back to
your dreen, Josh Hale, I tell you.”
Hale had reloaded his magazine, and now, swinging his setting-pole with
one hand, started to push his canoe among the rocks where he could hold
it and fire under cover. Skeene evidently saw him for he slid suddenly
to the corner of the wing-dam and fired three shots through the canoe,
cutting a swale lengthwise at the water’s edge.
“Oh, you sneaky bob-cat!” yelled Hale, white with rage. In another moment
he was working cup and sponge to bail his canoe, which swung away on the
current and drifted broadside across the sand-bar below, where it settled
in two feet of limpid water.
“Now’ll you let me be?” called Skeene. “I hain’t done nothin’ to you.
If that there moose-warden wants me let him come and get me. Ain’t you
ashamed to go huntin’ a man like a Lucivee? I tell ye I’ll shoot to kill,
b’ God I will, at the next man that fires!”
“You dasn’t,” shouted the sheriff from behind his rock; “you ain’t half a
man, Jim Skeene!”
“I be,” said Skeene calmly, “but I don’t want no fuss. You keep off’n
this river, and you keep off’n this here wing-dam. And you stop sneakin’
along the woods there, Billy Sebato! Git back there! Git back, or I’ll
shoot to kill!”
“You’ll hang if you do!” bawled the sheriff.
“Then tell that nigger Indian to git back! Tell him quick! I see him—I—”
Sebato’s rifle cracked, and the shot was repeated by Hale, wading out on
the shoal. Then a forked flame flashed from the wing-dam, there came a
crash and crackle of dry twigs, and the Indian pitched heavily over the
bank into the swirling river.
The echoes of the shots died out among the trees; for a minute the gurgle
of the river ripple alone troubled the stillness. A kingfisher wheeled
up stream, the sun flashing on his blue wings; a fish soused in a calm
pool below the dam. Presently the changed voice of the sheriff broke the
silence:
“Jim Skeene, God help you, you’ll swing for this.”
Skeene’s pale face appeared above the dam, but nobody shot at him.
“You drove me to it,” said Skeene. He spoke huskily. “I told him to git
back,—I warned him to quit sneakin’ up on me.”
“Come down off’n that wing-dam,” commanded Hale.
“Not for you, Josh Hale,” replied Skeene, “nor not for any man o’ ye! An’
I won’t be took neither. I’m goin’ away to live quiet if they let me.”
He crouched and watched them as they pushed their canoes out into the
main channel. The sheriff and Hale advanced to the pool where Sebato lay.
A slender fillet of blood, a mere thread hung in the water just below
the surface, and stretched out, following the current, floating like a
red string.
“Bring them settin’-poles,” said the sheriff soberly, “paddles won’t
stand the heft, an’ he’s hefty.” Hale suddenly turned, snarling at the
wing-dam; “Jim Skeene, you sneakin’ musk-rat!—” he said; but Skeene was
gone when Hale’s bullet stung the rock above.