[Frontispiece: "The next instant his arms were pinioned
to his sides."]
The Gun-Brand
By JAMES B. HENDRYX
AUTHOR OF
"The Promise" Etc.
With Frontispiece in Colors
By CLYDE FORSYTHE
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
published by arrangement with G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
COPYRIGHT, 1917
By
JAMES B. HENDRYX
Second Impression
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE CALL OF THE RAW
II VERMILION SHOWS HIS HAND
III PIERRE LAPIERRE
IV CHLOE SECURES AN ALLY
V PLANS AND SPECIFICATIONS
VI BRUTE MACNAIR
VII THE MASTER MIND
VIII A SHOT IN THE NIGHT
IX ON SNARE LAKE
X AN INTERVIEW
XI BACK ON THE YELLOW KNIFE
XII A FIGHT IN THE NIGHT
XIII LAPIERRE RETURNS FROM THE SOUTH
XIV THE WHISKEY RUNNERS
XV "ARREST THAT MAN!"
XVI MACNAIR GOES TO JAIL
XVII A FRAME-UP
XVIII WHAT HAPPENED AT BROWN'S
XIX THE LOUCHOUX GIRL
XX ON THE TRAIL OF PIERRE LAPIERRE
XXI LAPIERRE PAYS A VISIT
XXII CHLOE WRITES A LETTER
XXIII THE WOLF-CRY!
XXIV THE BATTLE
XXV THE GUN-BRAND
THE GUN-BRAND
CHAPTER I
THE CALL OF THE RAW
Seated upon a thick, burlap-covered bale of freight--a "piece," in the
parlance of the North--Chloe Elliston idly watched the loading of the
scows. The operation was not new to her; a dozen times within the
month since the outfit had swung out from Athabasca Landing she had
watched from the muddy bank while the half-breeds and Indians unloaded
the big scows, ran them light through whirling rock-ribbed rapids,
carried the innumerable pieces of freight upon their shoulders across
portages made all but impassable by scrub timber, oozy muskeg, and low
sand-mountains, loaded the scows again at the foot of the rapid and
steered them through devious and dangerous miles of swift-moving
white-water, to the head of the next rapid.
They are patient men--these water freighters of the far North. For
more than two centuries and a quarter they have sweated the wilderness
freight across these same portages. And they are sober men--when
civilization is behind them--far behind.
Close beside Chloe Elliston, upon the same piece, Harriet Penny, of
vague age, and vaguer purpose, also watched the loading of the scows.
Harriet Penny was Chloe Elliston's one concession to convention--excess
baggage, beyond the outposts, being a creature of fear. Upon another
piece, Big Lena, the gigantic Swedish Amazon who, in the capacity of
general factotum, had accompanied Chloe Elliston over half the world,
stared stolidly at the river.
Having arrived at Athabasca Landing four days after the departure of
the Hudson Bay Company's annual brigade, Chloe had engaged
transportation into the North in the scows of an independent. And,
when he heard of this, the old factor at the post shook his head
dubiously, but when the girl pressed him for the reason, he shrugged
and remained silent. Only when the outfit was loaded did the old man
whisper one sentence:
"Beware o' Pierre Lapierre."
Again Chloe questioned him, and again he remained silent. So, as the
days passed upon the river trail, the name of Pierre Lapierre was all
but forgotten in the menace of rapids and the monotony of portages.
And now the last of the great rapids had been run--the rapid of the
Slave--and the scows were almost loaded.
Vermilion, the boss scowman, stood upon the running-board of the
leading scow and directed the stowing of the freight. He was a
picturesque figure--Vermilion. A squat, thick half-breed, with eyes
set wide apart beneath a low forehead bound tightly around with a
handkerchief of flaming silk.
A heavy-eyed Indian, moving ponderously up the rough plank with a piece
balanced upon his shoulders, missed his footing and fell with a loud
splash into the water. The Indian scrambled clumsily ashore, and the
piece was rescued, but not before a perfect torrent of
French-English-Indian profanity had poured from the lips of the
ever-versatile Vermilion. Harriet Penny shrank against the younger
woman and shuddered.
"Oh!" she gasped, "he's swearing!"
"No!" exclaimed Chloe, in feigned surprise. "Why, I believe he is!"
Miss Penny flushed. "But, it is terrible! Just listen!"
"For Heaven's sake, Hat! If you don't like it, why do you listen?"
"But he ought to be stopped. I am sure the poor Indian did not _try_
to fall in the river."
Chloe made a gesture of impatience. "Very well, Hat; just look up the
ordinance against swearing on Slave River, and report him to Ottawa."
"But I'm afraid! He--the Hudson Bay Company's man--told us not to
come."
Chloe straightened up with a jerk. "See here, Hat Penny! Stop your
snivelling! What do you expect from rivermen? Haven't the seven
hundred miles of water trail taught you _anything_? And, as for being
afraid--I don't care _who_ told us not to come! I'm an Elliston, and
I'll go whereever I want to go! This isn't a pleasure trip. I came up
here for a purpose. Do you think I'm going to be scared out by the
first old man that wags his head and shrugs his shoulders? Or by any
other man! Or by any swearing that I can't understand, or any that I
can, either, for that matter! Come on, they're waiting for this bale."
Chloe Elliston's presence in the far outlands was the culmination of an
ideal, spurred by dissuasion and antagonism into a determination, and
developed by longing into an obsession. Since infancy the girl had
been left much to her own devices. Environment, and the prescribed
course at an expensive school, should have made her pretty much what
other girls are, and an able satellite to her mother, who managed to
remain one of the busiest women of the Western metropolis--doing
absolutely nothing--but, doing it with _eclat_.
The girl's father, Blair Elliston, from his desk in a luxurious office
suite, presided over the destiny of the Elliston fleet of yellow-stack
tramps that poked their noses into queer ports and put to sea with
queer cargoes--cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of
the far South Seas. Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston
commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews--a
respect not wholly uncommingled with fear.
For this man was the son of old "Tiger" Elliston, founder of the fleet.
The man who, shoulder to shoulder with Brooke, the elder, put the fear
of God in the hearts of the pirates, and swept wide trade-lanes among
the islands of terror-infested Malaysia. And through Chloe Elliston's
veins coursed the blood of her world-roving ancestor. Her most
treasured possession was a blackened and scarred oil portrait of the
old sea-trader and adventurer, which always lay swathed in many
wrappings in the bottom of her favourite trunk.
In her heart she loved and admired this grandfather, with a love and
admiration that bordered upon idolatry. She loved the lean, hard
features, and the cold, rapier-blade eyes. She loved the name men
called him; Tiger Elliston, an earned name--that. The name of a man
who, by his might and the strength and mastery of him, had won his
place in the world of the men who dare.
Since babyhood she had listened with awe to tales of him; and the
red-letter days of her childhood's calendar were the days upon which
her father would take her down to the docks, past great windowless
warehouses of concrete and sheet-iron, where big glossy horses stood
harnessed to high-piled trucks--past great tiers of bales and boxes
between which trotted hurrying, sweating men--past the clang and clash
of iron truck wheels, the rattle of chains, the shriek of pulleys, and
the loud-bawled orders in strange tongues. Until, at last, they would
come to the great dingy hulk of the ship and walk up the gangway and
onto the deck, where funny yellow and brown men, with their hair
braided into curious pigtails, worked with ropes and tackles and called
to other funny men with bright-coloured ribbons braided into their
beards.
Almost as she learned to walk she learned to pick out the yellow stacks
of "papa's boats," learned their names, and the names of their
captains, the bronzed, bearded men who would take her in their laps,
holding her very awkwardly and very, very carefully, as if she were
something that would break, and tell her stories in deep, rumbly
voices. And nearly always they were stories of the Tiger--"yer
gran'pap, leetle missey," they would say. And then, by palms, and
pearls, and the fires of blazing mountains, they would swear "He wor a
man!"
To the helpless horror of her mother, the genuine wonder of her many
friends, and the ill-veiled amusement and approval of her father, a
month after the doors of her _alma mater_ closed behind her, she took
passage on the _Cora Blair_, the oldest and most disreputable-looking
yellow stack of them all, and hied her for a year's sojourn among the
spicy lotus-ports of the dreamy Southern Ocean--there to hear at first
hand from the men who knew him, further deeds of Tiger Elliston.
To her, on board the battered tramp, came gladly the men of power--the
men whose spoken word in their polyglot domains was more feared and
heeded than decrees of emperors or edicts of kings. And there, in the
time-blackened cabin that had once been _his_ cabin, these men talked
and the girl listened while her eyes glowed with pride as they
recounted the exploits of Tiger Elliston. And, as they talked, the
hearts of these men warmed, and the years rolled backward, and they
swore weird oaths, and hammered the thick planks of the chart-table
with bangs of approving fists, and invoked the blessings of strange
gods upon the soul of the Tiger--and their curses upon the souls of his
enemies.
Nor were these men slow to return hospitality, and Chloe Elliston was
entertained royally in halls of lavish splendour, and plied with costly
gifts and rare. And honoured by the men, and the sons and daughters of
men who had fought side by side with the Tiger in the days when the
yellow sands ran red, and tall masts and white sails rose like clouds
from the blue fog of the cannon-crashing powder-smoke.
So, from the lips of governors and potentates, native princes and
rajahs, the girl learned of the deeds of her grandsire, and in their
eyes she read approval, and respect, and reverence even greater than
her own--for these were the men who knew him. But, not alone from the
mighty did she learn. For, over rice-cakes and _poi_, in the thatched
hovels of Malays, Kayans, and savage Dyaks, she heard the tale from the
lips of the vanquished men--men who still hated, yet always respected,
the reddened sword of the Tiger.
The year Chloe Elliston spent among the copra-ports of the South Seas
was the shaping year of her destiny. Never again were the standards of
her compeers to be her standards--never again the measure of the world
of convention to be her measure. For, in her heart the awakened spirit
of Tiger Elliston burned and seared like a living flame, calling for
other wilds to conquer, other savages to subdue--to crush down, if need
be, that it might build up into the very civilization of which the
unconquerable spirit is the forerunner, yet which, in realization,
palls and deadens it to extinction.
For social triumphs the girl cared nothing. The heart of her felt the
irresistible call of the raw. She returned to the land of her birth
and deliberately, determinedly, in the face of opposition, ridicule,
advice, and command--as Tiger Elliston, himself, would have done--she
cast about until she found the raw, upon the rim of the Arctic. And,
with the avowed purpose of carrying education and civilization to the
Indians of the far North, turned her back upon the world-fashionable,
and without fanfare or trumpetry, headed into the land of primal things.
When the three women had taken their places in the head scow, Vermilion
gave the order to shove off, and with the swarthy crew straining at the
rude sweeps, the heavy scows threaded their way into the North.
Once through the swift water at the tail of Slave Rapids, the four
scows drifted lazily down the river. The scowmen distributed
themselves among the pieces in more or less comfortable attitudes and
slept. In the head scow only the boss and the three women remained
awake.
"Who is Pierre Lapierre?" Chloe asked suddenly.
The man darted her a searching glance and shrugged. "Pierre Lapierre,
she free-trader," he answered. "Dees scow, she Pierre Lapierre scow."
If Chloe was surprised at this bit of information, she succeeded
admirably in disguising her feelings. Not so Harriet Penny, who sank
back among the freight pieces to stare fearfully into the face of the
younger woman.
"Then you are Pierre Lapierre's man? You work for him?"
The man nodded. "On de reevaire I'm run de scow--me--Vermilion! I'm
tak' de reesk. Lapierre, she tak' de money." The man's eyes glinted
wickedly.
"Risk? What risk?" asked the girl.
Again the man eyed her shrewdly and laughed. "Das plent' reesk--on de
reevaire. De scow--me'be so, she heet de rock in de rapids--bre'k all
to hell--_Voila_!" Somehow the words did not ring true.
"You hate Lapierre!" The words flashed swift, taking the man by
surprise.
"_Non_! _Non_!" he cried, and Chloe noticed that his glance flashed
swiftly over the sprawling forms of the five sleeping scowmen.
"And you are afraid of him," the girl added before he could frame a
reply.
A sudden gleam of anger leaped into the eyes of the half-breed. He
seemed on the point of speaking, but with an unintelligible muttered
imprecation he relapsed into sullen silence. Chloe had purposely
baited the man, hoping in his anger he would blurt out some bit of
information concerning the mysterious Pierre Lapierre. Instead, the
man crouched silent, scowling, with his gaze fixed upon the forms of
the scowmen.
Had the girl been more familiar with the French half-breeds of the
outlands she would have been suspicious of the man's sudden taciturnity
under stress of anger--suspicious, also, of the gradual shifting that
had been going on for days among the crews of the scows. A shifting
that indicated Vermilion was selecting the crew of his own scow with an
eye to a purpose--a purpose that had not altogether to do with the
scow's safe conduct through white-water. But Chloe had taken no note
of the personnel of the scowmen, nor of the fact that the freight of
the head scow consisted only of pieces that obviously contained
provisions, together with her own tent and sleeping outfit, and several
burlapped pieces marked with the name "MacNair." Idly she wondered who
MacNair was, but refrained from asking.
The long-gathering twilight deepened as the scows floated northward.
Vermilion's face lost its scowl, and he smoked in silence--a sinister
figure, thought the girl, as he crouched in the bow, his dark features
set off to advantage by his flaming head-band.
Into the stillness crept a sound--the far-off roar of a rapid. Sullen,
and dull, it scarce broke the monotony of the silence--low, yet ever
increasing in volume.
"Another portage?" wearily asked the girl.
Vermilion shook his head. "_Non_, eet ees de Chute. Ten miles of de
wild, fast wataire, but safe--eef you know de way. Me--Vermilion--I'm
tak' de scow t'rough a hondre tam--_bien_!"
"But, you can't make it in the dark!"
Vermilion laughed. "We mak' de camp to-night. To-mor', we run de
Chute." He reached for the light pole with which he indicated the
channel to the steersman, and beat sharply upon the running-board that
formed the gunwale of the scow. Sleepily the five sprawling forms
stirred, and awoke to consciousness. Vermilion spoke a guttural jargon
of words and the men fumbled the rude sweeps against the tholes. The
other three scows drifted lazily in the rear and, standing upon the
running-board, Vermilion roared his orders. Figures in the scows
stirred, and sweeps thudded against thole-pins. The roar of the Chute
was loud, now--hoarse, and portentous of evil.
The high banks on either side of the river drew closer together, the
speed of the drifting scows increased, and upon the dark surface of the
water tiny whirlpools appeared. Vermilion raised the pole above his
head and pointed toward a narrow strip of beach that showed dimly at
the foot of the high bank, at a point only a few hundred yards above
the dark gap where the river plunged between the upstanding rocks of
the Chute.
Looking backward, Chloe watched the three scows with their swarthy
crews straining at the great sweeps. Here was action--life! Primitive
man battling against the unbending forces of an iron wilderness. The
red blood leaped through the girl's veins as she realized that this
life was to be her life--this wilderness to be her wilderness. Hers to
bring under the book, and its primitive children, hers--to govern by a
rule of thumb!
Suddenly she noticed that the following scows were much nearer shore
than her own, and also, that they were being rapidly out-distanced.
She glanced quickly toward shore. The scow was opposite the strip of
beach toward which the others were slowly but surely drawing. The scow
seemed motionless, as upon the surface of a mill-pond, but the beach,
and the high bank beyond, raced past to disappear in the deepening
gloom. The figures in the following scows--the scows
themselves--blurred into the shore-line. The beach was gone. Rocks
appeared, jagged, and high--close upon either hand.
In a sudden panic, Chloe glanced wildly toward Vermilion, who crouched
in the bow, pole in hand, and with set face, stared into the gloom
ahead. Swiftly her glance travelled over the crew--their faces, also,
were set, and they stood at the sweeps, motionless, but with their eyes
fixed upon the pole of the pilot. Beyond Vermilion, in the forefront,
appeared wave after wave of wildly tossing water. For just an instant
the scow hesitated, trembled through its length, and with the leaping
waves battering against its bottom and sides, plunged straight into the
maw of the Chute!