THE FIGHT AT DAWN
For a few moments Jan stood with his back to Mélisse and his eyes upon
the carnival about the great fire. As he looked, the third caribou was
pulled down from its spit, and the multitude of dogs rushed in upon the
abandoned carcasses of the other two.
He caught his breath quickly as a loud shout and the wailing yelp of a
hurt dog rose for an instant above all other sounds. Only one thing was
wanting to complete another picture in his brain--a scene which had
burned itself into his life for ever, and which he strove to fight back
as he stood staring from the doorway. He half expected it to come--the
shrill scream of a boyish voice, an instant's sullen quiet, then the
low-throated thunder of impending vengeance--and the fight!
With marvelous quickness his excited mind reconstructed the scene
before him into the scene that had been. He heard the scream again,
which had been HIS voice; saw, as if in a dream, the frenzied rush of
men and the flash of knives; and then, from where he lay trampled and
bleeding in the snow, the long, lean team of swift huskies that had
carried in mad flight the one whose life those knives sought.
Williams had been there; he had seen the fight--his knife had flashed
with the others in its demand for life. And yet he--Jan Thoreau--had
not been recognized by the factor out there beside the caribou roast!
He hurried toward the fire. Half-way across the open he stopped. From
out of the forest opposite Cummins' cabin there trailed slowly a team
of dogs. In the shadows of the spruce, hidden from the revelers, the
team halted. Jan heard the low voices of men, and a figure detached
itself from the gloom, walking slowly and in the manner of one near to
exhaustion in the direction of the carnival.
It was a new team. It had come from the trails to the east, and Jan's
heart gave a sudden jump as he thought of the missionary who was
expected with the overdue mail. At first he had a mind to intercept the
figure laboring across the open, but without apparent reason he changed
his course and approached the sledge.
As he came nearer, he observed a second figure, which rose from behind
the dogs and advanced to meet him. A dozen paces ahead of the team it
stopped and waited.
"Our dogs are so near exhaustion that we're afraid to take them any
nearer," said a voice. "They'd die like puppies under those packs!"
The voice thrilled Jan. He advanced with his back to the fire, so that
he could see the stranger.
"You come from Churchill?" he asked.
His words were hardly a question. They were more of an excuse for him
to draw nearer, and he turned a little, so that for an instant the
glowing fire flashed in his eyes.
"Yes, we started from the Etawney just a week ago to-day."
Jan had come very near. The stranger interrupted himself to stare into
the thin, fierce face that had grown like a white cameo almost within
reach of him. With a startled cry, he drew a step back, and Jan's
violin dropped to the snow.
For no longer than a breath there was silence. The man wormed himself
back into the shadows inch by inch, followed by the white face of the
boy. Then there came shrilly from Jan's lips the mad shrieking of a
name, and his knife flashed as he leaped at the other's breast.
The stranger was quicker than he. With a sudden movement he cleared
himself of the blow; and as Jan's arm went past him, the point of the
knife ripping his coat-sleeve, he shot out a powerful fist and sent the
boy reeling to the ground.
Stunned and bleeding, Jan dragged himself to his knees. He saw the dogs
turning, heard a low voice urging them to the trail, and saw the sledge
disappear into the forest. He staggered from his knees to his feet, and
stood swaying in his weakness. Then he followed.
He forgot that he was leaving his knife in the snow, forgot that back
there about the fire there were other dogs and other men. He only knew
that once before he had seen a sledge slip off into the wilderness;
that its going had left him a life of hatred and bitterness and desire
for vengeance; and that this was the same man who was slipping away
from him in the same way again.
He followed, sickened by the blow, but gaining strength as he pursued.
Ahead of him he could hear the sound of the toboggan and the cautious
lashing of a whip over the backs of the tired huskies. The sounds
filled him with fierce strength. He wiped away the warm trickle of
blood that ran over his cheek, and began to run, slowly at first,
swinging in the easy wolf-lope of the forest runner, with his elbows
close to his sides.
At that pace he could have followed for hours, losing when the pack
took a spurt, gaining when they lagged, an insistent Nemesis just
behind when the weighted dogs lay down in their traces. But there was
neither the coolness of Mukee nor the cleverness of Jean de Gravois in
the manner of Jan's running. When he heard the cracking of the whip
growing fainter, he dropped his arms straight to his sides and ran more
swiftly, his brain reeling with the madness of his desire to reach the
sledge--to drag from it the man who had struck him, to choke life from
the face that haunted that mental picture of his, grinning at him and
gloating always from the shadow world, just beyond the pale, sweet
loveliness of the woman who lived in it.
That picture came to him now as he ran, more and more vividly, and from
out of it the woman urged him on to the vengeance which she demanded of
him, her great eyes glowing like fire, her beautiful face torn with the
agony which he had last seen in it in life.
To Jan Thoreau there seemed almost to come from that face a living
voice, crying to him its prayer for retribution, pleading with him to
fasten his lithe, brown hands about the throat of the monster upon the
sledge ahead, and choke from it all life. It drove reason from him,
leaving him with the one thought that the monster was almost within
reach; and he replied to the prayer with the breath that came in
moaning exhaustion from between his lips.
He did not feel the soft, sun-packed snow under the beat of his feet.
He received the lash of low-hanging bushes without experiencing the
sensation of their sting. Only he knew that he wanted air--more and
more air; and to get it he ran with open mouth, struggling and gasping
for it, and yet not knowing that Jean de Gravois would have called him
a fool for the manner in which he sought it.
He heard more and more faintly the run of the sledge. Then he heard it
no longer, and even the cracking of the whip died away. His heart
swelled in a final bursting effort, and he plunged on, until at last
his legs crumpled under him and he pitched face downward in the snow,
like a thing stung by sudden death.
It was then, with his scratched and bleeding face lying in the snow,
that reason began to return to him. After a little while he dragged
himself weakly to his knees, still panting from the mad effort he had
made to overtake the sledge. From a great distance he heard faintly the
noise of shouting, the whispering echo of half a hundred voices, and he
knew that the sound came from the revelers at the post. It was proof to
him that there had been no interruption to the carnival, and that the
scene at the edge of the forest had been witnessed by none. Quickly his
mental faculties readjusted themselves. He rose to his feet, and for a
few moments stood hesitatingly. He had no weapon; but as his hand
rested upon the empty knife-sheath at his belt, there came to him a
thought of the way in which Mukee had avenged Cummins' wife, and he
turned again upon the trail. He no longer touched the low-hanging
bushes. He was no more than a shadow, appearing and disappearing
without warning, trailing as the white ermine follows its prey,
noiseless, alert, his body responding sinuously and without apparent
effort to the working commands of his brain.
Where the forest broke into an open, lighted by the stars, he found
blood in the footprints of the leading dog. Half-way across the open,
he saw where the leader had swung out from the trail and the others of
the pack had crowded about him, to be urged on by the lashings of the
man's whip. Other signs of the pack's growing exhaustion followed close.
The man now traveled beside the sledge where the trail was rough, and
rode where it was smooth and hard. The deep imprints of his heeled
boots in the soft snow showed that he ran for only a short distance at
a time--a hundred yards or less--and that after each running spell he
brought the pack to a walk. He was heavy and lacked endurance, and this
discovery brought a low cry of exultation to Jan's lips.
He fell into a dog-trot. Mile after mile dropped behind him; other
miles were ahead of him, an endless wilderness of miles, and through
them the tired pack persisted, keeping always beyond sound and vision.
The stars began fading out of the skies. The shadows of the forest grew
deeper and blacker, and where the aurora had lightened the heavens
there crept the somber gray film that preceded dawn by three hours.
Jan followed more and more slowly. There was hard-breathing effort now
in his running--effort that caused him physical pain and discomfort.
His feet stumbled occasionally in the snow; his legs, from thigh to
knee, began to ache with the gnawing torment that centers in the
marrowbone; and with this beginning of the "runner's cramp" he was
filled with a new and poignant terror.
Would the dogs beat him out? Sloughing in the trail, bleeding at every
foot, would they still drag their burden beyond the reach of his
vengeance? The fear fastened itself upon him, urging him to greater
effort, and he called upon the last of his strength in a spurt that
carried him to where the thick spruce gave place to thin bush, and the
bush to the barren and rocky side of a huge ridge, up which the trail
climbed strong and well defined. For a few paces he followed it, then
slipped and rolled back as the fatal paralysis deadened all power of
movement in his limbs. He lay where he fell, moaning out his grief with
his wide-staring eyes turned straight up into the cold gray of the
starless sky.
For a long time he was motionless. From the top of the ridge, where the
trail cut over the mountain, he looked like a bit of fire-blackened
wood half buried in the snow. Half-way up the ridge a wolf, slinking
hungrily, sniffed first up the trail and then down, and broke the
stillness of the gray night-end with a mournful howl. It did not stir
Jan Thoreau.
Long after the wolf had passed on, he moved a little, twisting himself
so that his eyes could follow the tracks made by the sledge and dogs.
When he came to where the snow-covered backbone of the ridge cut itself
in faint outline against the desolate coldness of the sky, there fell
from him the first sound of returning life. Up there he was sure that
he had seen something move--an object which at first he had taken for a
bush, and which he knew was not the wolf.
He watched for its reappearance, until all sorts of gray dawn shadows
danced before his eyes. Then he began slowly to crawl up the trail.
Some of the dull, paralytic ache was gone from his limbs, and as he
worked his blood began to warm them into new strength, until he stood
up and sniffed like an animal in the wind that was coming over the
ridge from the south.
There was something in that wind that thrilled him. It stung his
nostrils to a quick sensing of the nearness of something that was
human. He smelled smoke. In it there was the pungent odor of green
balsam, mixed with a faint perfume of pitch pine; and because the odor
of pitch grew stronger as he ascended, he knew that it was a small fire
that was making the smoke, with none of the fierce, dry woods to burn
up the smell. It was a fire hidden among the rocks, a tiny fire, over
which the fleeing missioner was cooking his breakfast.
Jan almost moaned aloud in his gladness, and the old mad strength
returned to his body. Near the summit of the ridge he picked up a club.
It was a short, thick club, with the heavy end knotted and twisted.
Cautiously he lifted his face over the rocks, and looked out upon a
plateau, still deep in snow, swept bare by the winter's winds, and
covered with rocks and bushes. His face was so white that at a little
distance it might have been taken for a snow hare. It went whiter when,
a few yards away, he saw the fire, the man, and the dogs.
The man was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched
over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs
huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death.
Jan drew himself over the rocks. Once he had seen a big-footed lynx
creep upon a wide-awake fox, and like that lynx he crept upon the man
beside the fire. One of the tired dogs moved, and his pointed nostrils
quivered in the air. Jan lay flat in the snow. Then the dog's muzzle
dropped between his paws, and the boy moved on.
Inch by inch he advanced. The inches multiplied themselves into a foot,
the foot lengthened into yards, and still the man remained hunched over
his simmering pot.
Jan rose gently from his hands and knees to his feet, a furnace of
madness blazing in his eyes. The restless dog raised his head again. He
sniffed danger--near, menacing danger--and sprang up with a snarling
cry that brought the man over the fire to quick attention. In a flash
Jan took the last leap, and his club crashed down upon the missioner's
head. The man pitched over like a log, and with a shrill cry the boy
was at his throat.
"I am Jan Thoreau!" he shrieked. "I am Jan Thoreau--Jan Thoreau--come
to keel you!" He dropped his club, and was upon the man's chest, his
slender fingers tightening like steel wire about the thick throat of
his enemy. "I keel you slow--slow!" he cried, as the missioner
struggled weakly.
The great thick body heaved under him, and he put all his strength into
his hands. Something struck him in the face. Something struck him again
and again, but he felt neither the pain nor the force of it, and his
voice sobbed out his triumph as he choked. The man's hands reached up
and tore at his hair; but Jan saw only the missioner's mottled face
growing more mottled, and his eyes staring in greater agony up into his
own.
"I am Jan Thoreau," he panted again and again. "I am Jan Thoreau, an' I
keel you--keel you!"
The blood poured from his face. It blinded him until he could no longer
see the one from which he was choking life. He bent down his head to
escape the blows. The man's body heaved more and more; it turned until
he was half under it; but still he hung to the thick throat, as the
weasel hangs in tenacious death to the jugular of its prey.
The missioner's weight was upon him in crushing force now. His huge
hands struck and tore at the boy's head and face, and then they had
fastened themselves at his neck. Jan was conscious of a terrible effort
to take in breath, but he was not conscious of pain. The clutch did not
frighten him. It did not make him loosen his grip. His fingers dug
deeper. He strove to cry out still his words of triumph; but he could
make no sound, except a gasping like that which came from between the
gaping jaws of the man whose life his body and soul were fighting to
smother.
There was death in each of the two grips; but the man's was the
stronger, and his neck was larger and tougher, so that after a time he
staggered to his knees and then to his feet, while Jan lay upon his
back, his face and hair red with blood, his eyes wide open and with a
lifeless glare in them. The missioner looked down upon his victim in
horror. As the life that had nearly ebbed out of him poured back into
his body, he staggered among the dogs, fastened them to the sledge, and
urged them down the mountain into the plain. There was soon no sound of
the sledge.
From a bush a dozen yards away a wondering moose-bird had watched the
terrible struggle. Now he hopped boldly upon Jan's motionless body, and
perked his head inquisitively as he examined the strange face, covered
with blood and twisted in torture.
The gray film of dawn dissolved itself into the white beginning of day.
Far to the south, a bit of the red sunrise was creeping into the
northern world.