THE CAUSE INVINCIBLE
Off Caribou Point Wahbiscaw, the bowsman of Dunvegan's canoe, cried out
sharply in his native tongue. The craft turned aside from a jagged reef
of rock that poked like a pike's nose almost to the surface. Then they
sped on with increasing rapidity. The Cree knew every channel, every
fang, every shoal, every bar in the shallows of Oxford Lake. And of
every other lake and river in his district there was a map in his mind.
It is the unequalled gift of the true red man to remember country over
which he has travelled but once. Not only does he recall the trails or
the waterways but the things which go to make those trails or waterways.
He can place the smooth current, the broken, the rapid, the eddy, the
rocks, the bends of shore. Even the Indian youth quickly acquires such
power of recollection. The retentive faculty is developed to an enormous
degree by those who roam in the wilderness.
Ahead of the brigade loomed Wasita Island, a cliff of crag and spruce
sunk to its knees in some volcanic crater which had opened under it
aeons ago. Its headlands were scarred and seamed, old in time, marked
with the brand of chaos that had once rocked the mighty northland as the
tornado rocks the balsams.
Dunvegan, mechanically doing his work as steersman, scanned the shores
for a glimpse of a canoe. At last he placed it on the island margin
drawn up in a little cove called Spirit Bay. It was directly in the
course of the brigade. His heart beats quickened.
"Faster," he commanded the paddlers, and steered closer to the island
shore.
"Spirit Bay?" questioned the stolid Cree bowsman.
"So!" answered his leader. He made a motion for the rest of the fleet
to continue on its way.
The chief trader's canoe slipped over a white sandbar and nosed in
against the rock alongside the other empty craft which required no tying
in the absence of any lake swell.
"Behold the canoe of _ayume-aookemou_, the praying man," spoke
Wahbiscaw, puzzled.
But with a command for him to wait in silence Dunvegan was climbing the
rocks. Up on the peak of the boulder-like island he found Desirée and
Father Brochet.
"See," she laughed, her beauty increased tenfold by the splendor of sun
and sky, "we have come this far to bid you farewell. Are you not
grateful? It is far to come to say a sentence or two!"
She gave him her hands, smiling saucily into his eyes. No vision he had
ever seen or dreamed of was so entrancing, so tempting, and yet so
human!
"Grateful? Ah--yes!" he breathed. "But pray God you may come this far
to meet me on my return! Would you?" He retained the hands that made
him quiver.
"Who knows?" Desirée pouted teasingly. "The snows will be lying deep.
You may come in a blizzard! Who knows?"
Like a red ring her lips allured. Father Brochet piously turned his
back. If there was a passionate kiss, he did not see it. He heard only
the heart strain in Dunvegan's voice; saw only the great yearning in his
eyes.
"Your vow?" he asked. "Will you hold it till I come?"
"Yes--and after," she plagued.
"Till I come," Dunvegan pleaded.
"Yes," Desirée answered, softening. "I told you I would never marry a
Hudson's Bay man."
"Keep it well, then," he adjured--"till I come!"
It took effort to release her warm palms! Dunvegan turned hastily to the
priest.
"Good-bye, Brochet." Their hands welded.
"_A Dieu_," murmured his friend.
There was a mist in Dunvegan's eyes as he walked. Father Brochet noted
that he stumbled a little in reaching the canoe.
"Wik! Wik!" Wahbiscaw called. The craft slanted through the channel and
was gone.
Brochet, watching closely, saw a great void grow in Desirée's eyes.
"Ah," he mused, "if this had been return!"
September smiled between the scarlet curtains of the moose maples upon
Dunvegan's arrival in the Katchawan Valley. October glared through the
bare lattice work of the branches at the upstanding walls of trading
room, store and blockhouse. November swept wrathfully down the open
forest lanes, blustering a frosty challenge to the hive of men toiling
at the roofing over, the gabling in, the palisading.
But the challenge rang too late. Kamattawa's stockades grinned back
undaunted. Behind them crouched the broad-bulked buildings,
weather-proof, grim, impregnable alike to destructive elements and
predatory foes.
There still remained the finer inside work; the flooring, the store
shelving, the compartment shaping, the counter making for the trading
room, the stairs of the same and the grill in the supply loft above. But
all this could be accomplished with comparative luxury in the warmth of
the fireplaces whose birch flames crackled defiance to the cold.
The incidents of the Hudson's Bay men's journey to the Valley and the
log of events during the post's building stand in bold orthography upon
the daybook of the Fort. One hundred spacious pages the story covers.
And because Bruce Dunvegan was not given to write of trifles, the sheets
claim a sequence of bold facts which prompt the imagination with the
allurement of boundless suggestion.
For instance, there is a line telling that they encountered a squall on
Trout Lake. But the yellow paper says nothing of how for hours they
bucked the monstrous seas which broke over the canoe bows till each
bailer's muscles cramped under the strain of clearing shipped water, or
how the craft, sliding meteor-like down the passed surge crests, slapped
and pounded in the wave troughs till the bottoms broke in rents and the
daring crews won the shore race with death by a scant paddle's stroke.
Likewise a brief obituary states that Gabriel Fonderel was killed in a
skirmish with some of Running Wolf's tribe at the Channel Du Loup. Yet
there is no word of how the now hostile Crees, strong in numbers and led
by the fiery Three Feathers held back Dunvegan's men for four days till
finally the chief trader ran the rocky passage in the dark beneath a
vicious fire that wounded a half-dozen voyageurs besides snuffing out
Fonderel's breath.
Two burnings of the unfinished palisades by stealthy enemies; three
night attacks of combined bodies of Nor'westers and Running Wolf's
Crees; the finding of a full powder bag standing among the flour sacks
drying before the fire--all these were mildly noted!
But between the brief lines of this daybook which reposed upon
Dunvegan's desk in the trading room of Fort Kamattawa could be read the
whole round of a virile, courageous existence; could be felt the pulse
of danger and hidden menace; could be witnessed the keen drama of the
inimical wilderness conflict. Crowded into these northmen's short span
of months were years of endeavor. They took cognizance of no restraining
limits to this and that undertaking. Theirs were the herculean things,
the endless creations, the hot ambitions. Out of the vast resources of
the northland they established a well-defined era, a cycle of supremacy,
an epoch of undying history which would round their full conquest of the
land.
The powerful instruments of their healthy bodies were applied by the
shrewdness of their concentrated minds, guarded always by the blessing
of sane leadership. Through his wise counsels Bruce Dunvegan conserved
the powers of his retainers and turned them along the required channels,
directing brain and sinew, blood and spirit, to the profit of the
Ancient and Honorable Company.
Over every part of the Fort hung his rigid, progressive discipline. At
daybreak all the post Indians, the voyageurs, the H. B. C. servants were
engaged upon their various tasks, fashioning, constructing, finishing!
They labored with care, but with the merriest of dispositions. At seven
they breakfasted. In an hour the hum of work rose again. Leisure could
wait for the deep winter snows!
Outside the trading room a great flagstaff was reared before the ground
froze too solidly. Up the pine stick ran the Company's crimson ensign,
marking another step of conquest, flinging defiance to the Nor'westers,
shutting out the stronghold of Fort La Roche from the Katchawan Valley.
Tumultuous cheering greeted the first flap of the banner. Shouts more
sincere than patriotic cries rang out loudly. The Company's adherents
but voiced their allegiance.
"_Vive La Compagnie!_" exulted the impetuous Baptiste Verenne, a
typical voyageur.
"_Grace à Dieu!_" pealed his comrades, stridently--"_Grace à Dieu!_"
Like some wild orison to an invisible god--the Company god it might
be--their musical tongues chanted the phrase.
Could the Nor'westers have seen these outland sons thus greet their
flag, chests big with the emotional breath of love, cheeks bright with
the inspiring blood that comes of proud prestige, eyes burning with the
fire of eternal loyalty, they would have stopped to think. Could Black
Ferguson have witnessed the scene, he would have understood that he was
combating not iron determination alone; not reckless strength, not
unswerving pertinacity, but a stern faith in a power so vast as to be
almost beyond comprehension; a belief in a precedence dominant and
complete, a love of an ideal which even death could not conquer because
it extended beyond through that exalted medium of heroism. And where the
ideal is raised to the clear eye of faith rests the cause invincible.