MASKWA'S FIND
A fork of fire leaped up under the quick hands of the Indians. The dead
spruce boughs crackled merrily. Baptiste Verenne lay back on a pile of
green branches before the flames and hummed to the kettles that they
might the more quickly melt their contents of snow into steam and boil
the tea. His high tenor voice chanted the air of _L'Exilé_, a song of
far-off France. Very softly and dreamily he sang:
"_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
Du joli lieu de ma naissance!
Ma coeur, qu'ils étaient beaux, les jours de France!
O mon pays! sois mes amours,
O mon pays! sois mes amours. Toujours!_"
Over the spruce fire the kettles began to drone to his music as he went
on more tenderly:
"_Te souvient-il que notre mère,
Au foyer de notre chaumière,
Nous pressait sur son coeur joyeux
Ma chère?
Et nous baisions ses blancs cheveux.
Tous deux._"
Almost while Baptiste sang, the meal was ready. The Hudson's Bay men
thawed their strips of jerked caribou over the coals and washed the meat
down with small pails of hot tea. They snatched a few whiffs from their
pipes before the command to march was given.
The afternoon sun shed abundance of light but afforded no warmth. The
traveling was through a cheerless cold that intensified by degrees. The
toil of marching had begun to tell on the men; they moved with less
elasticity, their limbs began to lag as from some indefinable hindering
pressure. This pressure seemed to come from without like unfriendly
hands holding them back, but they knew it was really the weakening
fibers protesting from within.
Only three of the travelers were untouched by this peculiar lethargy.
Maskwa ran as ever with his unchanging, lurching stride. Dunvegan,
knowing not the hint of weariness, traveled mechanically, his mind
dwelling on personal things. And Baptiste Verenne still hummed of his
sunny France, asking:
"_Te souvient-il du lac tranquille
Que' effleurait l'hirondelle agile,
Du vent qui courbait le roseau Mobile,
Et du soleil couchant sur l'eau. Si beau?
Ma coeur, te souv_----"
"G'wan, Baptiste, ye Frinch rogue," cried Terence Burke, "ye've no
sister here to ask that. An' phwat the divil's the use o' askin'? Shure
it's not France but Greenland we're in. An' it's on a howly treadmill o'
snow we're walkin'."
Pete Connear kicked the Irishman's calves from behind with the toes of
his snowshoes.
"Walk faster, man," he urged. "It makes it twice as easy and the frost
doesn't touch you then."
But Terence shivered in the trail. The sweat of the morning's travel had
chilled on him at the noonday halt, and he felt the lowering temperature
keenly.
"It's so beastly cowld," he groaned dismally, "that me thoughts freeze
'fore Oi can express thim."
The sailor kicked him again to cheer him on. "Bucko! Bucko!" he growled.
And Baptiste Verenne, smiling, flashed white teeth over his shoulder and
remarked:
"Mebbe you don' lak remembaire somet'ing lak dat in your own countree!
Eh, dat so, M'sieu Burke?"
Terence frowned. Baptiste's smile grew more mischievous as he continued:
"_Te souvient-il de cette amie,
Douce compagne de ma vie?
Dans les bois, en cueillant la fleur Jolie,
Hélène appuyait sur mon coeur. Son coeur._
_Oh, qui rendra mon Hélène,
Et la montagne, et le grand chêne?
Leur souvenir fait tous les jours ma peine.
Mon pays sera mes amours. Toujours!_"
The latter half of the day wore to a desolate grayness. The Hudson's Bay
force was now in Nor'west country, and a strict lookout had to be
maintained. Night approached quickly as the sun dipped. Maskwa, keeping
closer to the main body, signaled that he had found something. Dunvegan
ran up to him hastily.
The Indian stood pointing to the tracks made by a single person on
snowshoes. The marks lay diagonally across their line of progress.
"Strong Father, see," Maskwa requested.
"Some trapper," commented the chief trader. "The shoes are Ojibway
pattern."
"Yes," assented Maskwa, quietly. "I made the shoes."
Dunvegan scanned him sharply in the gathering dark.
"You?" he cried, astonished. "How do you know that?"
"By the knots," Maskwa answered, stooping to point out little dents in
the snow pattern. "See how they lie in a curve? No one but Maskwa makes
them that way!"
"Whose feet?" demanded Dunvegan, with swift suspicion. "Whose feet are
in those shoes?"
The fort runner felt the pressed flakes gently before speaking. He arose
immediately from the stooping posture.
"The Little Fool's," was his response. "And he has just passed here!"
"Gaspard Follet's tracks!" exclaimed the chief trader incredulously.
"Maskwa, are you sure you are not mistaken?"
"I am not mistaken, Strong Father," the Ojibway declared gravely. "In
the summer moons I made the shoes for the Little Fool. Give me leave to
follow. I will bring him to you. He is no farther away than the ridge of
balsam."
"Go," ordered Dunvegan curtly.
The fort runner launched himself into the gloom of the stunted
shrubbery. Bunching where their leader was halted, the Hudson's Bay men
waited silently. Presently there sounded the double crunch of two pairs
of raquettes on the brittle crust. The branches of the dwarfed
evergreens swayed. Maskwa strode out, dragging a diminutive figure by
one arm.
"Here, Strong Father, is the Little Fool," he announced without emotion.
At the sight of the Oxford House men Gaspard Follet began to utter a
series of joyous squeals.
"Blessed be the Virgin," he cried. "Here is safety. Oh! name of the dead
saints, I was lost, lost--lost!"
He sprang to Dunvegan, ingratiating himself, praising, fawning,
beseeching. The Ojibway fort runner looked grimly at the antics of his
prize.
"The Little Fool is glad to meet with the Company's servants," he
observed in ironic fashion. "It gives him great joy."
Dunvegan looked into Maskwa's face, quite surprised at the tone.
"Why not?" he questioned.
"That did not dwell in his mind until I caught him," the Indian
declared. "Neither was the Little Fool lost."
"What do you mean, Maskwa?" Dunvegan asked. "My brother, you speak in
riddles. Gaspard has evidently wandered from Oxford House and lost his
way." To the idiot, he added: "Do you know where you are at all?"
"No, no," moaned Gaspard piteously. "I was lost, I tell you. I do not
know this country."
The Ojibway fort runner grunted in derision. "Strong Father," he said,
"the Little Fool was not lost as you believe. He has been following the
Caribou Ridge all day. And Strong Father will remember that the trail on
the Caribou Ridges, though it cannot be traveled with dog teams,
shortens by half the distance to the fort of the French Hearts where we
journey. That is how the Little Fool thought to reach it first!"
The Indian stopped his speech abruptly and took a stride onward as if
this circumstance was no concern of his. Dunvegan halted him, crying
out:
"Hold there, Maskwa! Do you pretend to suspect Gaspard?"
Maskwa made a gesture of complete unconcern. "I have spoken," he
returned placidly.
"Why," fumed Dunvegan, "such a thing in my estimation is
incredible--preposterous! The idea of that dwarf, that idiot----No! It's
too ridiculous!"
"I have spoken," repeated Maskwa, in the same even key.
When the chief trader attempted to question him by way of discovering
his exact meaning, the Ojibway maintained a stubborn silence which he
broke only with a suggestion about the night camp.
"Turn to the ridge of balsam, Strong Father," he advised. "We shall
find it good to rest there."
Dunvegan accepted his trusted runner's hint. He knew that the Indian eye
read wilderness signs which no white man living could ever interpret. He
understood that the Indian brain gleaned an intelligence from inanimate
things which the greatest mind of civilization could never comprehend.
Therefore he was content to follow the native wisdom and follow it
unseeingly, for at Maskwa's word he had walked blindly to his own
ultimate advantage some hundreds of times.
So the Oxford House men diverged from their course on the first track
that Gaspard Follet had tramped in the snowy ridge where it crossed
Blazing Pine River. The Ojibway went ahead, and, when lost to the view
of his fellows among the timber, he paralleled Gaspard's trail at some
distance first on one side and then on the other. Soon he found what he
sought and tramped on to the balsams, grunting with great satisfaction.
When Dunvegan and his retainers reached the balsam ridge, Maskwa stood
there awaiting them. He called the chief trader aside.
"Strong Father," he began in a low voice, "does a lost man throw away
his rifle and his food?"
"No! Great heavens, no!" exclaimed Dunvegan. "Why?"
Maskwa put his hand into a green tree and held out two objects.
"Because here is the rifle and the pack-sack of the Little Fool."
The chief trader wheeled with hot accusations for Gaspard Follet, but
Maskwa checked them.
"Softly, Strong Father," was his caution. "I have something else to show
you first."
"But he is the spy," murmured Dunvegan, trying to keep his voice down in
spite of his anger. "I see it all now--curse his blithering impudence!
What dolts we have been at Oxford House! And he fooled Malcolm Macleod.
Good Lord, what infants, what imbeciles! A fool, a dwarf, an idiot to
get the best of us! Maskwa, I think we need some guidance such as
yours."
"The Little One is a dwarf," conceded Maskwa, "but he is not an idiot.
Neither is he a fool, though the name comes easily to my tongue. Strong
Father, he has the wisdom of the beaver, and the heart of the fox. But
at last he is trapped!"
"I'll bind him," declared Dunvegan, full of vexation and self-contempt.
"I'll tie the rat fast lest he outwit the elephants."
"Wait," begged the Ojibway fort runner. "Come to the top of the ridge of
balsam first. Then we can bind the Little Fool."
Maskwa pushed through the trees with a slouching movement. He set his
shoes without the slightest noise in the soft, deep undersnows of the
evergreens. Dunvegan did likewise, taking care to snap no twig. On the
crest which commanded the open valley the Ojibway pushed aside the thick
branches hanging screen-like over the edge.
"Strong Father, look!" he directed.