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[Frontispiece: From the girl's revolver leaped forth a sudden spurt of
smoke and flame.]
THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
A STORY OF THE THREE RIVER COUNTRY
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF "THE RIVER'S END," ETC.
THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the
wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which
one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the
great white North. It is still Iskwatam--the "door" which opens to the
lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is
somewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because its
history is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romance
and tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easily
forgotten. Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty miles
north of Edmonton. The railroad has brought it nearer to that base of
civilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled
for a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into
the Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of the
real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the
sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpy
railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, and
with them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art of
printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfuls
of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands of miles away--"Do others as
they would do you." And with it, too, has come the legitimate business
of barter and trade, with eyes on all that treasure of the North which
lies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of the
polar sea. But still more beautiful than the dream of fortunes quickly
made is the deep-forest superstition that the spirits of the wilderness
dead move onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, the
ghosts of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily from
their graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther north.
For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his
Jeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened and
closed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for two
thousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing. South of
it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so many months
ago by boat.
It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and Jacqueline,
Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the blue and the
gray and the sometimes watery ones of a destroying civilization. And
there it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive mingles with their
age-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts over their forests; the
phonograph screeches its reply to le violon; and Pierre and Henri and
Jacques no longer find themselves the kings of the earth when they come
in from far countries with their precious cargoes of furs. And they no
longer swagger and tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild river
songs in the same old abandon, for there are streets at Athabasca
Landing now, and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of a
kind new and terrifying to the bold of the old voyageurs.
It seems only yesterday that the railroad was not there, and a great
world of wilderness lay between the Landing and the upper rim of
civilization. And when word first came that a steam thing was eating
its way up foot by foot through forest and swamp and impassable muskeg,
that word passed up and down the water-ways for two thousand miles, a
colossal joke, a stupendous bit of drollery, the funniest thing that
Pierre and Henri and Jacques had heard in all their lives. And when
Jacques wanted to impress upon Pierre his utter disbelief of a thing,
he would say:
"It will happen, m'sieu, when the steam thing comes to the Landing,
when cow-beasts eat with the moose, and when our bread is found for us
in yonder swamps!"
And the steam thing came, and cows grazed where moose had fed, and
bread WAS gathered close to the edge of the great swamps. Thus did
civilization break into Athabasca Landing.
Northward from the Landing, for two thousand miles, reached the domain
of the rivermen. And the Landing, with its two hundred and twenty-seven
souls before the railroad came, was the wilderness clearing-house which
sat at the beginning of things. To it came from the south all the
freight which must go into the north; on its flat river front were
built the great scows which carried this freight to the end of the
earth. It was from the Landing that the greatest of all river brigades
set forth upon their long adventures, and it was back to the Landing,
perhaps a year or more later, that still smaller scows and huge canoes
brought as the price of exchange their cargoes of furs.
Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their great
sweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone DOWN the river toward
the Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their still wilder crews,
had come UP the river toward civilization. The River, as the Landing
speaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its headwaters away off in the
British Columbian mountains, where Baptiste and McLeod, explorers of
old, gave up their lives to find where the cradle of it lay. And it
sweeps past the Landing, a slow and mighty giant, unswervingly on its
way to the northern sea. With it the river brigades set forth. For
Pierre and Henri and Jacques it is going from one end to the other of
the earth. The Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and the
Slave empties into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of that
Lake the Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.
In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears many
things. It is life. It is adventure. It is mystery and romance and
hazard. Its tales are so many that books could not hold them. In the
faces of men and women they are written. They lie buried in graves so
old that the forest trees grow over them. Epics of tragedy, of love, of
the fight to live! And as one goes farther north, and still farther,
just so do the stories of things that have happened change.
For the world is changing, the sun is changing, and the breeds of men
are changing. At the Landing in July there are seventeen hours of
sunlight; at Fort Chippewyan there are eighteen; at Fort Resolution,
Fort Simpson, and Fort Providence there are nineteen; at the Great Bear
twenty-one, and at Fort McPherson, close to the polar sea, from
twenty-two to twenty-three. And in December there are also these hours
of darkness. With light and darkness men change, women change, and life
changes. And Pierre and Henri and Jacques meet them all, but always
THEY are the same, chanting the old songs, enshrining the old loves,
dreaming the same dreams, and worshiping always the same gods. They
meet a thousand perils with eyes that glisten with the love of
adventure.
The thunder of rapids and the howlings of storm do not frighten them.
Death has no fear for them. They grapple with it, wrestle joyously with
it, and are glorious when they win. Their blood is red and strong.
Their hearts are big. Their souls chant themselves up to the skies. Yet
they are simple as children, and when they are afraid, it is of things
which children fear. For in those hearts of theirs is superstition--and
also, perhaps, royal blood. For princes and the sons of princes and the
noblest aristocracy of France were the first of the gentlemen
adventurers who came with ruffles on their sleeves and rapiers at their
sides to seek furs worth many times their weight in gold two hundred
and fifty years ago, and of these ancient forebears Pierre and Henri
and Jacques, with their Maries and Jeannes and Jacquelines, are the
living voices of today.
And these voices tell many stories. Sometimes they whisper them, as the
wind would whisper, for there are stories weird and strange that must
be spoken softly. They darken no printed pages. The trees listen to
them beside red camp-fires at night. Lovers tell them in the glad
sunshine of day. Some of them are chanted in song. Some of them come
down through the generations, epics of the wilderness, remembered from
father to son. And each year there are the new things to pass from
mouth to mouth, from cabin to cabin, from the lower reaches of the
Mackenzie to the far end of the world at Athabasca Landing. For the
three rivers are always makers of romance, of tragedy, of adventure.
The story will never be forgotten of how Follette and Ladouceur swam
their mad race through the Death Chute for love of the girl who waited
at the other end, or of how Campbell O'Doone, the red-headed giant at
Fort Resolution, fought the whole of a great brigade in his effort to
run away with a scow captain's daughter.
And the brigade loved O'Doone, though it beat him, for these men of the
strong north love courage and daring. The epic of the lost scow--how
there were men who saw it disappear from under their very eyes,
floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in the skies--is told
and retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose eyes are the smoldering
flames of an undying superstition, and these same men thrill as they
tell over again the strange and unbelievable story of Hartshope, the
aristocratic Englishman who set off into the North in all the glory of
monocle and unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war,
became a chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired,
little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.
But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are the
stories of the long arm of the Law--that arm which reaches for two
thousand miles from Athabasca Landing to the polar sea, the arm Of the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
And of these it is the story of Jim Kent we are going to tell, of Jim
Kent and of Marette, that wonderful little goddess of the Valley of
Silent Men, in whose veins there must have run the blood of fighting
men--and of ancient queens. A story of the days before the railroad
came.
CHAPTER I
In the mind of James Grenfell Kent, sergeant in the Royal Northwest
Mounted Police, there remained no shadow of a doubt. He knew that he
was dying. He had implicit faith in Cardigan, his surgeon friend, and
Cardigan had told him that what was left of his life would be measured
out in hours--perhaps in minutes or seconds. It was an unusual case.
There was one chance in fifty that he might live two or three days, but
there was no chance at all that he would live more than three. The end
might come with any breath he drew into his lungs. That was the
pathological history of the thing, as far as medical and surgical
science knew of cases similar to his own.
Personally, Kent did not feel like a dying man. His vision and his
brain were clear. He felt no pain, and only at infrequent intervals was
his temperature above normal. His voice was particularly calm and
natural.
At first he had smiled incredulously when Cardigan broke the news. That
the bullet which a drunken half-breed had sent into his chest two weeks
before had nicked the arch of the aorta, thus forming an aneurism, was
a statement by Cardigan which did not sound especially wicked or
convincing to him. "Aorta" and "aneurism" held about as much
significance for him as his perichondrium or the process of his
stylomastoid. But Kent possessed an unswerving passion to grip at facts
in detail, a characteristic that had largely helped him to earn the
reputation of being the best man-hunter in all the northland service.
So he had insisted, and his surgeon friend had explained.
The aorta, he found, was the main blood-vessel arching over and leading
from the heart, and in nicking it the bullet had so weakened its outer
wall that it bulged out in the form of a sack, just as the inner tube
of an automobile tire bulges through the outer casing when there is a
blowout.
"And when that sack gives way inside you," Cardigan had explained,
"you'll go like that!" He snapped a forefinger and thumb to drive the
fact home.
After that it was merely a matter of common sense to believe, and now,
sure that he was about to die. Kent had acted. He was acting in the
full health of his mind and in extreme cognizance of the paralyzing
shock he was contributing as a final legacy to the world at large, or
at least to that part of it which knew him or was interested. The
tragedy of the thing did not oppress him. A thousand times in his life
he had discovered that humor and tragedy were very closely related, and
that there were times when only the breadth of a hair separated the
two. Many times he had seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears
to laughter.
The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, amused him.
Its humor was grim, but even in these last hours of his life he
appreciated it. He had always more or less regarded life as a joke--a
very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whimsical and trickful
sort of thing played by the Great Arbiter on humanity at large; and
this last count in his own life, as it was solemnly and tragically
ticking itself off, was the greatest joke of all. The amazed faces that
stared at him, their passing moments of disbelief, their repressed but
at times visible betrayals of horror, the steadiness of their eyes, the
tenseness of their lips--all added to what he might have called, at
another time, the dramatic artistry of his last great adventure.
That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a
tremble into his voice. The contemplation of throwing off the mere
habit of breathing had never at any stage of his thirty-six years of
life appalled him. Those years, because he had spent a sufficient
number of them in the raw places of the earth, had given him a
philosophy and viewpoint of his own, both of which he kept unto himself
without effort to impress them on other people. He believed that life
itself was the cheapest thing on the face of all the earth. All other
things had their limitations.
There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so many
plains, so many square feet to live on and so many square feet to be
buried in. All things could be measured, and stood up, and
catalogued--except life itself. "Given time," he would say, "a single
pair of humans can populate all creation." Therefore, being the
cheapest of all things, it was true philosophy that life should be the
easiest of all things to give up when the necessity came.
Which is only another way of emphasizing that Kent was not, and never
had been, afraid to die. But it does not say that he treasured life a
whit less than the man in another room, who, a day or so before, had
fought like a lunatic before going under an anesthetic for the
amputation of a bad finger. No man had loved life more than he. No man
had lived nearer it.
It had been a passion with him. Full of dreams, and always with
anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he was
an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a worshiper
of the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his life, and who
had fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the last--to yield it up
without a whimper when the fates asked for it.
Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the fiend
he was confessing himself to be to the people about him. Sickness had
not emaciated him. The bronze of his lean, clean-cut face had faded a
little, but the tanning of wind and sun and campfire was still there.
His blue eyes were perhaps dulled somewhat by the nearness of death.
One would not have judged him to be thirty-six, even though over one
temple there was a streak of gray in his blond hair--a heritage from
his mother, who was dead. Looking at him, as his lips quietly and
calmly confessed himself beyond the pale of men's sympathy or
forgiveness, one would have said that his crime was impossible.
Through his window, as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could see
the slow-moving shimmer of the great Athabasca River as it moved on its
way toward the Arctic Ocean. The sun was shining, and he saw the cool,
thick masses of the spruce and cedar forests beyond, the rising
undulations of wilderness ridges and hills, and through that open
window he caught the sweet scents that came with a soft wind from out
of the forests he had loved for so many years.
"They've been my best friends," he had said to Cardigan, "and when this
nice little thing you're promising happens to me, old man, I want to go
with my eyes on them."
So his cot was close to the window.
Nearest to him sat Cardigan. In his face, more than in any of the
others, was disbelief. Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave of absence
of the superintendent, was paler even than the girl whose nervous
fingers were swiftly putting upon paper every word that was spoken by
those in the room. O'Connor, staff-sergeant, was like one struck dumb.
The little, smooth-faced Catholic missioner whose presence as a witness
Kent had requested, sat with his thin fingers tightly interlaced,
silently placing this among all the other strange tragedies that the
wilderness had given up to him. They had all been Kent's friends, his
intimate friends, with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty
had borrowed for the occasion. With the little missioner he had spent
many an evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and
mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north
beyond the forests. O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of the
brotherhood of the trails. It was Kent and O'Connor who had brought
down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and the
adventure had taken them fourteen months. Kent loved O'Connor, with his
red face, his red hair, and his big heart, and to him the most tragic
part of it all was that he was breaking this friendship now.
But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest and
wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an unusual
emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over his heart which
the surgeon had told him might occur at any moment. On his death-bed
his mind still worked analytically. And Kedsty, since the moment he had
entered the room, had puzzled Kent. The commander of N Division was an
unusual man. He was sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost colorless
eyes in which one would search long for a gleam of either mercy or
fear, and a nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly disturbed. It
took such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according to law, for N
Division covered an area of six hundred and twenty thousand square
miles of wildest North America, extending more than two thousand miles
north of the 70th parallel of latitude, with its farthest limit three
and one-half degrees within the Arctic Circle. To police this area
meant upholding the law in a country fourteen times the size of the
state of Ohio. And Kedsty was the man who had performed this duty as
only one other man had ever succeeded in doing it.
Yet Kedsty, of the five about Kent, was most disturbed. His face was
ash-gray. A number of times Kent had detected a broken note in his
voice. He had seen his hands grip at the arms of the chair he sat in
until the cords stood out on them as if about to burst. He had never
seen Kedsty sweat until now.
Twice the Inspector had wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He was
no longer Minisak--"The Rock"--a name given to him by the Crees. The
armor that no shaft had ever penetrated seemed to have dropped from
him. He had ceased to be Kedsty, the most dreaded inquisitor in the
service. He was nervous, and Kent could see that he was fighting to
repossess himself.
"Of course you know what this means to the Service," he said in a hard,
low voice. "It means--"
"Disgrace," nodded Kent. "I know. It means a black spot on the
otherwise bright escutcheon of N Division. But it can't be helped. I
killed John Barkley. The man you've got in the guard-house, condemned
to be hanged by the neck until he is dead, is innocent. I understand.
It won't be nice for the Service to let it be known that a sergeant in
His Majesty's Royal Mounted is an ordinary murderer, but--"
"Not an ORDINARY murderer," interrupted Kedsty. "As you have described
it, the crime was deliberate--horrible and inexcusable to its last
detail. You were not moved by a sudden passion. You tortured your
victim. It is inconceivable!"
"And yet true," said Kent.
He was looking at the stenographer's slim fingers as they put down his
words and Kedsty's. A bit of sunshine touched her bowed head, and he
observed the red lights in her hair. His eyes swept to O'Connor, and in
that moment the commander of N Division bent over him, so close that
his face almost touched Kent's, and he whispered, in a voice so low
that no one of the other four could hear,
"KENT--YOU LIE!"
"No, it is true," replied Kent.
Kedsty drew back, again wiping the moisture from his forehead.
"I killed Barkley, and I killed him as I planned that he should die,"
Kent went on. "It was my desire that he should suffer. The one thing
which I shall not tell you is WHY I killed him. But it was a sufficient
reason."
He saw the shuddering tremor that swept through the shoulders of the
girl who was putting down the condemning notes.
"And you refuse to confess your motive?"
"Absolutely--except that he had wronged me in a way that deserved
death."
"And you make this confession knowing that you are about to die?"
The flicker of a smile passed over Kent's lips. He looked at O'Connor
and for an instant saw in O'Connor's eyes a flash of their old
comradeship.
"Yes. Dr. Cardigan has told me. Otherwise I should have let the man in
the guard-house hang. It's simply that this accursed bullet has spoiled
my luck--and saved him!"
Kedsty spoke to the girl. For half an hour she read her notes, and
after that Kent wrote his name on the last page. Then Kedsty rose from
his chair.
"We have finished, gentlemen," he said.
They trailed out, the girl hurrying through the door first in her
desire to free herself of an ordeal that had strained every nerve in
her body. The commander of N Division was last to go. Cardigan
hesitated, as if to remain, but Kedsty motioned him on. It was Kedsty
who closed the door, and as he closed it he looked back, and for a
flash Kent met his eyes squarely. In that moment he received an
impression which he had not caught while the Inspector was in the room.
It was like an electrical shock in its unexpectedness, and Kedsty must
have seen the effect of it in his face, for he moved back quickly and
closed the door. In that instant Kent had seen in Kedsty's eyes and
face a look that was not only of horror, but what in the face and eyes
of another man he would have sworn was fear.
It was a gruesome moment in which to smile, but Kent smiled. The shock
was over. By the rules of the Criminal Code he knew that Kedsty even
now was instructing Staff-Sergeant O'Connor to detail an officer to
guard his door. The fact that he was ready to pop off at any moment
would make no difference in the regulations of the law. And Kedsty was
a stickler for the law as it was written. Through the closed door he
heard voices indistinctly. Then there were footsteps, dying away. He
could hear the heavy thump, thump of O'Connor's big feet. O'Connor had
always walked like that, even on the trail.
Softly then the door reopened, and Father Layonne, the little
missioner, came in. Kent knew that this would be so, for Father Layonne
knew neither code nor creed that did not reach all the hearts of the
wilderness. He came back, and sat down close to Kent, and took one of
his hands and held it closely in both of his own. They were not the
soft, smooth hands of the priestly hierarchy, but were hard with the
callosity of toil, yet gentle with the gentleness of a great sympathy.
He had loved Kent yesterday, when Kent had stood clean in the eyes of
both God and men, and he still loved him today, when his soul was
stained with a thing that must be washed away with his own life.
"I'm sorry, lad," he said. "I'm sorry."
Something rose up in Kent's throat that was not the blood he had been
wiping away since morning. His fingers returned the pressure of the
little missioner's hands. Then he pointed out through the window to the
panorama of shimmering river and green forests.
"It is hard to say good-by to all that, Father," he said. "But, if you
don't mind, I'd rather not talk about it. I'm not afraid of it. And why
be unhappy because one has only a little while to live? Looking back
over your life, does it seem so very long ago that you were a boy, a
small boy?"
"The time has gone swiftly, very swiftly."
"It seems only yesterday--or so?"
"Yes, only yesterday--or so."
Kent's face lit up with the whimsical smile that long ago had reached
the little missioner's heart. "Well, that's the way I'm looking at it,
Father. There is only a yesterday, a today, and a tomorrow in the
longest of our lives. Looking back from seventy years isn't much
different from looking back from thirty-six WHEN you're looking back
and not ahead. Do you think what I have just said will free Sandy
McTrigger?"
"There is no doubt. Your statements have been accepted as a death-bed
confession."
The little missioner, instead of Kent, was betraying a bit of
nervousness.
"There are matters, my son--some few matters--which you will want
attended to. Shall we not talk about them?"
"You mean--"
"Your people, first. I remember that once you told me there was no one.
But surely there is some one somewhere."
Kent shook his head. "There is no one now. For ten years those forests
out there have been father, mother, and home to me."
"But there must be personal affairs, affairs which you would like to
entrust, perhaps, to me?"
Kent's face brightened, and for an instant a flash of humor leaped into
his eyes. "It is funny," he chuckled. "Since you remind me of it,
Father, it is quite in form to make my will. I've bought a few little
pieces of land here. Now that the railroad has almost reached us from
Edmonton, they've jumped up from the seven or eight hundred dollars I
gave for them to about ten thousand. I want you to sell the lots and
use the money in your work. Put as much of it on the Indians as you
can. They've always been good brothers to me. And I wouldn't waste much
time in getting my signature on some sort of paper to that effect."
Father Layonne's eyes shone softly. "God will bless you for that,
Jimmy," he said, using the intimate name by which he had known him.
"And I think He is going to pardon you for something else, if you have
the courage to ask Him."
"I am pardoned," replied Kent, looking out through the window. "I feel
it. I know it, Father."
In his soul the little missioner was praying. He knew that Kent's
religion was not his religion, and he did not press the service which
he would otherwise have rendered. After a moment he rose to his feet,
and it was the old Kent who looked up into his face, the clean-faced,
gray-eyed, unafraid Kent, smiling in the old way.
"I have one big favor to ask of you, Father," he said. "If I've got a
day to live, I don't want every one forcing the fact on me that I'm
dying. If I've any friends left, I want them to come in and see me, and
talk, and crack jokes. I want to smoke my pipe. I'll appreciate a box
of cigars if you'll send 'em up. Cardigan can't object now. Will you
arrange these things for me? They'll listen to you--and please shove my
cot a little nearer the window before you go."
Father Layonne performed the service in silence. Then at last the
yearning overcame him to have the soul speak out, that his God might be
more merciful, and he said: "My boy, you are sorry? You repent that you
killed John Barkley?"
"No, I'm not sorry. It had to be done. And please don't forget the
cigars, will you, Father?"
"No, I won't forget," said the little missioner, and turned away.
As the door opened and closed behind him, the flash of humor leaped
into Kent's eyes again, and he chuckled even as he wiped another of the
telltale stains of blood from his lips. He had played the game. And the
funny part about it was that no one in all the world would ever know,
except himself--and perhaps one other.