Kent had not forgotten that he was an outlaw, but he was not afraid.
Now that he had something new and thrilling to fight for, he fell back
again upon what he called "the finesse of the game." He approached
Chippewyan cautiously, although he was sure that even his old friends
at the Landing would fail to recognize him now. His beard was four or
five inches long, and his hair was shaggy and uncut. Picard had made
him a coat, that winter, of young caribou skin, and it was fringed like
an Indian's. Kent chose his time and entered Chippewyan just before
dusk.
Oil lamps were burning in the Hudson's Bay Company's store when he went
in with his furs. The place was empty, except for the factor's clerk,
and for an hour he bartered. He bought a new outfit, a Winchester
rifle, and all the supplies he could carry. He did not forget a razor
and a pair of shears, and when he was done he still had the value of
two silver fox skins in cash. He left Chippewyan that same night, and
by the light of a Winter moon made his camp half a dozen miles
northward toward Smith Landing.
He was on the Slave River now and for weeks traveled slowly but
steadily northward on snowshoes. He avoided Fort Smith and Smith
Landing and struck westward before he came to Fort Resolution. It was
in April that he struck Hay River Post, where the Hay River empties
into Great Slave Lake. Until the ice broke up, Kent worked at Hay
River. When it was safe, he started down the Mackenzie in a canoe. It
was late in June when he turned up the Liard to the South Nahani.
"You go straight through between the sources of the North and the South
Nahani," Marette had told him. "It is there you find the Sulphur
Country, and beyond the Sulphur Country is the Valley of Silent Men."
At last he came to the edge of this country. He camped with the stink
of it in his nostrils. The moon rose, and he saw that desolate world as
through the fumes of a yellow smoke. With dawn he went on.
He passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose sulphurous
fogs. Mile after mile he buried himself deeper in it, and it became
more and more a dead country, a lost hell. There were berry bushes on
which there grew no berries. There were forests and swamps, but without
a living creature to inhabit them.
It was a country of water in which there were no fish, of air in which
there were no birds, of plants without flowers--a reeking, stinking
country still with the stillness of death. He began to turn yellow. His
clothing, his canoe, his hands, face--everything turned yellow. He
could not get the filthy taste of sulphur out of his mouth. Yet he kept
on, straight west by the compass Gowen had given him at Hay River. Even
this compass became yellow in his pocket. It was impossible for him to
eat. Only twice that day did he drink from his flask of water.
And Marette had made this journey! He kept telling himself that. It was
the secret way in and out of their hidden world, a region accursed by
devils, a forbidden country to both Indian and white man. It was hard
for him to believe that she had come this way, that she had drunk in
the air that was filling his own lungs, nauseating him a dozen times to
the point of sickness. He worked desperately. He felt neither fatigue
nor the heat of the warm water about him.
Night came, and the moon rose, lighting up with a sickly glow the
diseased world that had swallowed him. He lay in the bottom of his
canoe, covering his face with his caribou coat, and tried to sleep. But
sleep would not come. Before dawn he struck on, watching his compass by
the light of matches. All that day he made no effort to swallow food.
But with the coming of the second night he found the air easier to
breathe. He fought his way on by the light of the moon which was
clearer now. And at last, in a resting spell, he heard far ahead of him
the howl of a wolf.
In his joy he cried out. A western breeze brought him air that he drank
in as a desert-stricken man drinks water. He did not look at his
compass again, but worked steadily in the face of that fresh air. An
hour later he found that he was paddling again a slow current, and when
he tasted the water it was only slightly tainted with sulphur. By
midnight the water was cool and clean. He landed on a shore of sand and
pebbles, stripped to the skin, and gave himself such a scouring as he
had never before experienced. He had worn his old trapping shirt and
trousers, and after his bath he changed to the outfit which he had kept
clean in his pack. Then he built a fire and ate his first meal in two
days.
The next morning he climbed a tall spruce and surveyed the country
about him. Westward there was a broad low country shut in fifteen or
twenty miles away by the foothills. Beyond these foothills rose the
snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. He shaved himself, cut his hair, and
went on. That night he camped only when he could drive his canoe no
farther. The waterway had narrowed to a creek, and he was among the
first green shoulders of the hills when he stopped. With another dawn
he concealed his canoe in a sheltered place and went on with his pack.
For a week he picked his way slowly westward. It was a splendid country
into which he had come, and yet he found no sign of human life. The
foothills changed to mountains, and he believed he was in the Campbell
Range. Also he knew that he had followed the logical trail from the
sulphur country. Yet it was the eighth day before he came upon a sign
which told him that another living being had at some time passed that
way. What he found were the charred remnants of an old camp-fire. It
had been a white man's fire. He knew that by the size of it. It had
been an all-night fire of green logs cut with an axe.
On the tenth day he came to the westward slope of the first range and
looked down upon one of the most wonderful valleys his eyes had ever
beheld. It was more than a valley. It was a broad plain. Fifty miles
across it rose the towering majesty of the mightiest of all the Yukon
mountains.
And now, though he saw a paradise about him, his heart began to sink
within him. It seemed to him inconceivable that in a country so vast he
could find the spot for which he was seeking. His one hope lay in
finding white men or Indians, some one who might guide him.
He traveled slowly over the fifty-mile plain rich with a verdure of
green, covered with flowers, a game paradise. Few hunters had come so
far out of the Yukon mountains, he told himself. And none had come from
out of the sulphur country. It was a new and undiscovered world. On his
map it was a blank space. And there were no signs of people. Ahead of
him the Yukon mountains rose in an impenetrable wall, peak after peak,
crested with snow, towering like mighty watchdogs above the clouds. He
knew what lay beyond them--the great rivers of the Western slope,
Dawson City, the gold country and its civilization. But those things
were on the other side of the mountains. On his side there was only the
vast and undisputed silence of a paradise as yet unclaimed by man.
As he went on into this valley there grew upon him a strange and
comforting peace. Yet with it there was a steadily increasing belief
that he would not find that for which he had come in search. He did not
attempt to analyze this belief. It became a part of him, just as his
mental tranquillity had grown upon him. His one hope of success was
that nearer the mountains he might find white men or Indians.
He no longer used his compass, but guided himself by a cluster of three
gigantic peaks. One of these was taller than the other two. As he
journeyed, his eyes were always returning to it. It fascinated him,
impinged itself upon him as the watcher of a million years, guarding
the valley. He began to think of it as the Watcher. Each hour of his
progress seemed to bring it a little more intimately to his vision.
From his first night's camp in the valley he saw the moon sink behind
it. Within him a voice that never died kept whispering to him that this
mountain, greater than all the others, had been Marette's guardian. Ten
thousand times she must have looked at it, as he had looked at it that
day--if her home was anywhere this side of the Campbell Range. A
hundred miles away she could have seen the Watcher on a clear day.
On the second day the mountain continued to grow upon Kent. By
mid-afternoon it began to take on a new character. The peak of it was
in the form of a mighty castle that changed as he advanced. And the two
lesser peaks were forming into definite contours. Before the haze of
twilight dimmed his vision, he knew that what he had seen was not a
whimsical invention of his imagination. The Watcher had grown into the
shape of a mighty human head facing south. A restless excitement
possessed him, and he traveled on long after dusk. At dawn he was on
the trail again. Westward the sky cleared, and suddenly he stopped, and
a cry came from him.
The Watcher's head was there, as if chiseled by the hands of giants.
The two smaller peaks had unveiled their mystery. Startling and weird,
their crests had taken on the form of human heads. One of them was
looking north. The other faced the valley. And Kent, his heart
pounding, cried to himself,
"The Silent Men!"
He did not hear himself, but the thought itself was a tumultuous thing
within him. It came upon him like an inundation, a sudden and thrilling
inspiration backed by the forces of a visual truth. THE VALLEY OF
SILENT MEN. He repeated the words, staring at the three colossal heads
in the sky. Somewhere near them, under them,--one side or the
other--was Marette's hidden valley!
He went on. A strange joy consumed him. In it, at times, his grief was
obliterated, and it seemed to him in these moments that Marette must
surely be at the valley to greet him when he came to it. But always the
tragedy of the Death Chute came back to him, and with it the thought
that the three giant heads were watching--and would always watch--for a
beloved lost one who would never return. As the sun went down that day,
the face bowed to the valley seemed alive with the fire of a living
question sent directly to Kent.
"Where is she?" it asked. "Where is she? Where is she?"
That night Kent did not sleep.
The next day there lay ahead of him a low and broken range, the first
of the deeper mountains. He climbed this steadily, and at noon had
reached the crest. And he knew that at last he was looking down into
the Valley of Silent Men. It was not a wide valley, like the other. On
the far side of it, three or four miles away, rose the huge mountain
whose face was looking down upon the green meadows at its foot.
Southward Kent could see for a long distance, and in the vivid sunlight
he saw the shimmer of creeks and little lakes, and the rich glow of
thick patches of cedar and spruce and balsam, scattered like great rugs
of velvety luster amid the flowering green of the valley. Northward,
three or four miles away the range which he had climbed made a sharp
twist to the east, and that part of the valley--following the swing of
the range--was lost to him. He turned in this direction after he had
rested. It was four o'clock when he came to the elbow in the valley,
and could look down into the hidden part of it.
What he saw at first was a giant cup hollowed out of the surrounding
mountains, a cup two miles from brim to brim, the end of the valley
itself. It took him a few moments to focus his vision so that it would
pick up the smaller and more intimate things half a mile under him, and
yet, before he had done this, a sound came up to him that set aquiver
every nerve in his body. It was the far-down, hollow-sounding barking
of a dog.
The warm, golden haze that precedes sunset in the mountains, was
gathering between him and the valley, but through this he made out
after a time evidences of human habitation almost straight under him.
There was a small lake out of which ran a shimmering creek, and close
to this lake, yet equally near to the base of the mountain on which he
was standing, were a number of buildings and a stockade which looked
like a toy. He could see no animals, no movement of any kind.
Without seeking for a downward trail he began to descend. Again he did
not question himself. An overwhelming certainty possessed him. Of all
places in the world this must be the Valley of Silent Men.
And below him, flooded and half-hidden in the illusive sun-mist, was
Marette's old home. It seemed to him now that it belonged to him, that
he was a part of it, that in going to it he was achieving his last
great resting place, his final refuge, his own home. And the thought
became strangely a part of him that a welcome must be waiting for him
there. He hurried until his breath came pantingly between his lips and
he was forced to rest. And at last he found himself where his progress
was made a foot at a time, and again and again he was forced to climb
back and detour around treacherous slides and precipitous breaks which
left sheer falls at his feet. The mist thickened in the valley. The sun
sank behind the western peaks, and swiftly after that the gloom of
twilight deepened. It was seven o'clock when he came to the edge of the
plain, at least a mile below the elbow which shut out the cup in the
valley. He was exhausted. His hands were bruised and bleeding. Darkness
shut him in when he went on.
When he rounded the elbow of the mountain, he did not try to keep back
the joyous cry that came to his lips. Ahead of him there were lights. A
few of them were scattered, but nearest to him he saw a cluster of
them, like the glow that comes from a number of illumined windows. He
quickened his pace as he drew nearer to them, and at last he wanted to
run. And then something stopped him, and it seemed to him that his
heart had risen into his throat and was choking him until he could not
breathe.
It was a man's voice he heard, calling through the twilight gloom a
name. "Marette--Marette--Marette--"
Kent tried to cry out, but his breath came only in a gasp. He felt
himself trembling. He reached out his arms, and a strange madness
rushed like fire into his brain.
Again the voice called, "Marette--Marette--Marette--"
The cup in the valley echoed the name. It rolled softly up the
mountainside. The air trembled with it, whispered it, passed it on--and
suddenly the madness in Kent found voice, and he shouted,
"Marette--Marette--"
He ran on. His knees felt weak. He shouted the name again, and the
other voice was silent. Things loomed up out of the mist ahead of him,
between him and the glowing windows. Some one--two people--were
advancing to meet him, doubtfully, wonderingly. Kent was staggering,
but he cried the name again, and this time it was a woman's cry that
answered, and one of the two came toward him swift as a flash of light.
Three paces apart they stood, and in that gloom of the after-twilight
their burning eyes looked at each other, while for a space their bodies
remained stricken in the face of this miracle of a great and merciful
God.
The dead had risen. By a mighty effort Kent reached out his arms, and
Marette swayed to him. When the other man came up, he found them
crumpled to their knees on the earth, clasped like children in each
other's arms. And as Kent raised his face, he saw that it was Sandy
McTrigger who was looking down at him, the man whose life he had saved
at Athabasca Landing.