Part 9

“A Montagnais,” Lemaire answered after a pause, some trouble in his voice. “About the oldest old Indian I’ve ever seen; they aren’t long-lived. . . . . . He seems a bit wrong in the head. He doesn’t seem to know his name or where he comes from. But—he says he’s going to a big encampment many day’s journey west. He says he’s been following us. He says he’s a friend of mine.”

“Is he?”

“I never saw him before. . . That’s all I can get out of him. He’s probably been cast off by his tribe. Why? Oh, too old to be useful.”

“Cruel brutes.”

“Not so cruel as some white men,” said Lemaire, half to himself. He had come back to the firelight, and was rummaging among their stores, none too plentiful. He returned to the old Indian, carrying food; and presently Barrett heard snapping sounds, as of a hungry dog feeding. Lemaire came again to his nook under the tent; and Barrett smoked out his pipe in silence. Then, as he knocked the ashes, fizzling, into a little pool of rain, he said gently, “Bob, what makes you so uncommonly good to the Indians?”

Quiet Lemaire did not attempt to evade the direct question. But a rather shy flush rose to his dark, lean cheeks as he said diffidently, “I suppose—because I feel my family—any one of my name—owes ’em something.”

“The grandfather again, eh?”

“Yes. . . . Men had no souls in those days, Barrett. I think the tremendous loneliness—the newness—the lack of responsibility—something killed their souls. . . . . . Wait.”

Leaning forward, he flung more wood on the fire. And the red light flickered on his strong and gentle face. He glanced at his friend, and went on abruptly. “I’ve my grandfather’s maps and journals, you know—what my father called the shameful records of his fame. He was absolutely explicit in ’em. I never saw them in father’s lifetime, but he left them to me, saying I could read them or not, as I liked. I was very proud of them. I read them. And upon my word—though from them I got the hints that may lead us to the rediscovery of the Lost Babiche—I’m almost sorry I did. It leaves a bad taste in the mind, if you know what I mean, to think that one’s father’s father was such a heroic scoundrel.”

“A bad record, Bobby?”

“Bad even for those days. Listen to me. While he was on this very expedition we’re on now, he was taken sick. He was very sick, and going to be worse. He knew what it was. He was near the big summer camp of a tribe of Indians that had been very kind to him, coast Indians, come inland for the caribou hunting; he went to them. He was sick, and they took him in, and nursed him. And all the time he knew what it was he had. It was the smallpox.

“You know what La Picotte is in the wilds. They’ve a song about it still, down along the Lamennais. . . For of all that tribe, only one family, they say, escaped. All the others died; they died as if the Angel of Destruction had come among them with his sword—they died like flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees stood for years, ragged, blowing in the winds. And then the skins rotted, and the bare poles stood, gleaming white, over the rotting bones that covered an acre of ground, they say. No one ever went to that place any more. It was cursed. . . because of my grandfather.”

“Monsieur Forbes made his get-away?”

“Yes, or I shouldn’t be telling you about it.” Lemaire summoned a smile, but his eyes were sombre. “And so I guess—that’s one reason why. One among many.”

“You’re a likeable old freak,” murmured Barrett affectionately, “but—_you_ ain’t responsible, you know!”

“As I look at it, we’re all responsible.”

“Well—anyway, I wouldn’t give that old scarecrow too much of our grubstake, old man. We’ve none too much, if the Babiche doesn’t turn up according to schedule.”

“Probably we won’t see any more of him. He’ll be gone by the morning.”

He was gone with the morning. But as day followed weary day, and there was still no sign of the lakes narrowing to the long-sought river, Barrett was increasingly conscious that the old man was close upon their trail. Sometimes, in the brief radiance of the September dawns, he would see, far and far behind on the wrinkled silver water, a warped canoe paddling feebly. They always hauled away, by miles, from that decrepit canoe. But always, some time in the dark hours, it crept up again. Sometimes, he would see, in the sunset, a wavering thread of smoke arising from the site of their last-camp-but-one. It irritated him at last; the thought of that ragged, cranky canoe, paddled by the ragged, dirty, old imbecile, forever following them—creeping, creeping, under the great gaunt stars, creeping, creeping, under the flying dawns, the stormy moons; when he found Lemaire leaving little scraps of precious tobacco, a pinch of flour in a screw of paper, or a fresh-caught fish beside the trodden ashes of their cooking-place, he exploded.

“I can’t help it,” Lemaire apologized, “I _know_ I’m all kinds of a fool, Barrett. But the poor old wretch is nearly blind—from long-ago smallpox, I should think. He can’t catch things for himself much.”

Barrett, aware that wisdom was on his side, yet felt sorry for his explosion. He said nothing more. Soon he forgot the matter, having much else to think about.

For the Lost Babiche, the once-discovered river, did not “turn up according to schedule.”

The chain of lakes they had been following turned due south. They left them, and, after a terrible portage, launched the canoe in a stream that ran west. Here their progress was very slow, for there were rapids, and consequent portages, every mile or so. This stream, instead of feeding another lake, died out in impassable quaking mosses. They saw a range of low hills some four or five miles ahead; so again they left the canoe and struck out for them on foot, half-wading, half-walking. It was exhausting work. At last they climbed the barren spurs and saw beyond, under a flaring yellow sunset, a world of interlacing waterways, unvisited and unknown, that seemed then as if they smoked under the vast clouds and spirals of wildfowl settling homeward to the reeds. The two men watched that wonderful sight in silence.

At last, “They’re gathering to go south,” said Lemaire briefly. And Barrett answered, “D’you know what date it is? It’s the day on which we said we’d turn back if we hadn’t found the Lost Babiche. It’s the fifteenth of September.”

“Well. . . are we going back?”

“Not till we’ve found our river,” cried Barrett, with half a laugh and half a curse. They gripped hands, smiling rather grimly. They made a miserable, fireless camp, and went back the next day, carrying canoe and supplies, in four toilsome trips, across the hills; repacking and relaunching the second day on a new lake, where in all probability no white man—but one—had ever before dipped paddle.

They had been in the wilderness so long that they had fallen into the habit of carrying on conversations as if the lapse of two or three days had been as many minutes. Barrett knew to what Lemaire referred when he said abruptly, “After all, it isn’t as if you were ignorant of the risks.”

“I guess I know just as much about them as you,” said Barrett, cheerily. “We’re taking chances on the grub, aren’t we? If we find the Lost Babiche before the game moves, we’ll be alright, though our own supplies won’t take us there. Once there, Bob, we’re pretty sure to find friendly Indians when we link up with the Silver Fork—which we do seventy miles down the P’tite Babiche if your grandpa’s map’s correct. Well there are a good many ‘if’s’ in the programme, but don’t you worry. We’ll get through or out, somehow. There’s always fish. I’ve a feeling that this country _can’t_ go back on a Lemaire!”

They went on to a pleasant camp that night on a sandy islet overgrown with dwarf willow, and a wild-duck supper. The current of these new lakes went west with such increasing strength that Lemaire thought they were feeling the “pull” of some big river into which the system drained; and if so, it could be no river but the lost Babiche. They slept, all a-tingle with the fever of discovery and re-made maps in their dreams.

Behind them many miles, a wandering smoke arose from the ashes of their last camp. The old Indian, about whom they had almost forgotten, had gained on them while they packed their supplies over the hills. Now he was close upon them again.

The life of that old savage seemed thin and wavering as the smoke of the fire he made. All night he sat in the ashes, motionless as a stone. Only once, just before the fierce dawn, he rose to his feet with an inarticulate cry, stirred to some instinctive excitement. For in a moment the vast, chill dusk was filled with a musical thrill, a tremendous clamour and rush of life, as thousand by thousand after their kinds, teal and widgeon, mallard and sheldrake, lifted from the reeds and fled before the coming cold. As the old man dimly watched, two delicate things fell and touched his face; one was a feather, the second was a flake of snow.

In those few delicate flakes, Lemaire and Barrett seemed to feel for the first time the ever-present hostility of nature; with such a brief, exquisite touch were they first made aware of the powers against which they strove. The new waterways seemed to stretch interminably. Each time they cleared one of the deep-cut channels which linked lake with lake as regularly as a thread links beads, they looked ahead with the same question. Each time they saw the same expanse of gray water, low islets, barren shores; the country passed them changing and unchanging as a dream. They seemed to be moving in a dream, conscious of nothing but the pressure of the current on their paddles.

Then came the mist.

It shut them into a circle ten feet wide, a pearl-white prison. Outside the circle were shadows, wandering voices, trees as men walking. For two days they felt their way westward through this fog; two nights they shivered over a damp-wood fire, hearing nothing but water beading and dripping everywhere with a sound of grief. It strangely broke Lemaire’s steel nerve. On the second night he said, restlessly, “We must turn back to-morrow.”

“Bob!”

He flung out a tanned hand passionately. “I know. . . . But can’t you feel it? Things have turned against us. These things.” He pointed at the veiled sky, the milky water. “I daren’t go on. If we don’t find the river to-morrow, we’ll go back. And then. . . . the land will have done for me what it never did for my grandfather.”

“What, Bob, old fellow?”

“Beaten me,” said Lemaire, and rolled into his blankets without another word.

He woke next morning with the touch of clear sunlight on his eyelids. He leaped to his feet silently, without waking Barrett, and as he did so, ice broke and tinkled like glass where the edge of the blankets had lain in a little pool of moisture. The last of the fog was draining in golden smoke from the low, dark hills. He strode to the edge of the water, and stopped, shaking suddenly as if he were cold. Then he went to Barrett, and stooped over him.

“Hullo, Bob, is it morning?” Then, as he saw Lemaire’s face, “My God, what is it?”

Twice Lemaire tried to speak. Then he pointed eastward to three high rocky islands which lay across the water, exactly spaced, like the ruined spans of a great bridge which once had stretched from shore to shore.

“Barrett,” he said huskily, “We entered the Lost Babiche yesterday in the fog, and never knew. Those islands are ten miles down the river on Forbes Lemaire’s map.”

They faced each other in silence, too much moved to speak. Their hands met in a long grip. Then Barrett said suddenly, “Anything else.”

“Yes. It’s freezing hard.”

“But. . . we’ve won, Bob, we’ve won!”

“Not yet,” said the man whose fathers had been bred in the wilderness, and wed to it. “Not yet. It’s still against us.”

But there was no talk now of turning back.

The Lost Babiche—lost no more—was a noble river; a gray and ice-clear stream winding in generous curves between high cliffs of slate-coloured rock. These cliffs were much cut into ravines and gullies, where grew timber of fine size for that country. But as their tense excitement lessened a little, they were struck by the absence of all life; even in the deep rock-shadows they saw no fish. Of human life there was not a sign; though in Forbes Lemaire’s days the country had supported many Indians. And now—“Not a soul but ourselves,” said Barrett, in an awed voice; “not a living soul. . .”

Yes. One soul yet living. Far behind them, in the staggering old canoe, the old Indian paddled valiantly on their trail. But he had forgotten them now, as they had long forgotten him. He stopped no more for the offal of their camps. A stronger instinct even than that of hunger was drawing him on the way they also went; down the Lost Babiche. Had they looked, they would not have seen him. And soon, between him and them, the clouds which had been gathering all day dropped a curtain of fine snow.

The first sting of the tiny balled flakes on his knuckles was to Lemaire like the thunder of guns, the opening of a battle.

He had no need to speak to Barrett. They bent over the paddles and the canoe surged forward. It was a race; a race between the early winter and themselves. If the cold weather set in so soon, if they found no Indians on the little-known Silver Fork—there were a dozen “ifs” in their minds as, mile after mile, they fled down the P’tite Babiche. Even as they fled from the winter, so that other white man long ago had fled from the sickness; seen those stark bluffs unrolling; viewed perhaps those very trees.

They made a record distance that day. “We’re winning, Bob, we’re winning,” said Barrett over the fire that night. Lemaire had not the heart to contradict him; but Lemaire’s instincts, inherited from generations, told him that the wilderness was still mysteriously their enemy. He sat smoking, silent, hearing nothing but the faint, innumerable hiss of the snowflakes falling into the flames.

The snow was thickening in the morning, and by noon a bitter wind arose, blowing in their faces and against the stream. Soon the canoe was smack-smack-smacking on the waves, and the snow was driving almost level. The continual pressure of wind and snow drugged their senses. They never heard the voice of the rapids until, rounding an abrupt bend, the ravelled water seemed to leap at them from under the very bow of the canoe.

There was only one thing to be done, and—“Let her go!” yelled Lemaire, crouching tense as a spring above the steering paddle.

Now for the trained eye, the strong hand—the eye to see the momentary chance, the hand to obey without a falter.

Now for the sleeping instincts of a brain inherited from far generations of wanderers and voyageurs. Flash on flash of leaping water, the drive of spray and snow, the canoe staggering and checking like a thing hurt, but always recovering.

Barrett, in the bows, paddled blindly. His life lay in Bob Lemaire’s hands, and he was content to leave it there during those roaring moments. But those hands failed—by an inch.

They were in smooth water. Barrett would have paused to take breath, but Lemaire’s voice barked at him from the stern. He obeyed. The canoe drove forward again—forward in great leaps, towards the point of a small island ahead, dimly seen through the snow—something wrong, though, thought Barrett, grunting; he could get no “beef” on the thing—it dragged; you’d have thought Bob was paddling against him. Then, suddenly, he understood. He called up the last of his strength, drove the paddle in, once, twice—again—heard a shout, flung himself overside into water waist-deep, and just as the canoe was sinking under them, he and Lemaire caught it and ran it ashore. Then, dripping, they looked each other in the face, and each seemed to see the face of disaster.

“It was a rock,” said Lemaire at last, very quietly, “a few inches below the surface. It has almost cut the canoe in two.”

“What’s to be done?”

“Find shelter, I suppose.”

They were very quiet about it. There was no shelter on their islet but a few rocks and a dead spruce in the middle. Here they set up their tent as a wind-break. It was bitterly cold; the island was sheathed with white ice, for the spray from the rough water froze now as it fell; everything in the canoe was wet; they were wet to their waists. They tried to induce the dead tree to burn, but the wood was so rotted with wet it only smouldered and went out. They had a little cooking-lamp and a few squares of compressed fuel for it; they lighted this, and Lemaire made tea with numbed hands. It renewed the life in them, but could not dry them. They huddled against the little lamp in silence, waiting—waiting.

After some time Lemaire heard a curious sound from Barrett; his teeth were chattering. Lemaire saw that his face had taken a waxy white hue. He spoke to him, and Barrett looked up, but his eyes were dim and glazed. “It’ll be all right,” he said, thickly, “we’ll get through, somehow. I’ve a feeling that this country can’t go back on a Lemaire.”

They were the first symptoms of collapse. Lemaire groaned. He got to his feet, and staggered across the slippery rocks. He shook his fist in the implacable face of the desolation. He shouted, foolish rage and defiance, caught back at his sanity; shouted again. . . . This time he thought he heard a faint cry in the snow. It whipped him back to self-control. He splashed out into the curdling shallows, shouting desperately.

Out of the gray drive of snow loomed the ghost of a canoe, paddled, as it seemed, by a ghost. It was the old Indian, whom Lemaire had long forgotten; the weather had not hindered him, the rapids had not wrecked him. At Lemaire’s cry he raised his head, and the canoe put inshore, waveringly. Lemaire splashed to meet it, met the incurious gaze of the half-blind old eyes under the scarred lids, and read into the wrinkled, foul old face, a sort of animal kindness.

Five minutes later he was desperately trying to rouse Barrett. Barrett looked at him at last, and Lemaire saw that the brief delirium was past. “What is it, Bob?” he asked, weakly. And Lemaire broke into a torrent of words.

“The old Indian—the old Indian you said was a hoodoo—don’t you remember? He’s here. He has caught us up, God knows how. He says his canoe’ll hold three. He says that a very little way on there’s a big camp, and that he’ll take us there—in a very little while. He says his tribe is always kind to strangers, to white men. . . . I can’t make out all he says, he’s queer in his head. But he’s dead sure of the encampment. He says it’s always there. .”

Still talking eagerly, Lemaire snatched together a few things, got an arm round Barrett, lifted him up to his feet, got him reeling to the canoe, laid him in the bottom, and helped the old Indian push off. There was no second paddle. There was no need of it. The current took them at once.

The cold was increasing, as the wind died and the snow thinned. Lemaire ceased to be conscious of the passing of time, but within himself the stubborn life burned; he was strongly curious to know the end, to discover what it was the wilderness had in store for him after five years, to read the riddle of that relationship with himself which had called him from the cities to this.

He was aware, at last, of a vast, golden light. The clouds were parting behind the snow, and the sunset was gleaming through. It turned the snow into a mist of rose and molten gold. The old Indian feebly turned the canoe. It crept toward the shore.

“The lodges of my people,” muttered the old Indian. He stood erect, and pointed with his bleached paddle. “They are very many—a very strong tribe.”

Lemaire also looked, and saw.

Silently, the canoe took the half-frozen sand. Silently, very slowly, Lemaire stepped out. The old Indian waited for him. It seemed that the whole world was waiting for him.

He, like a man in a dream, moved slowly into the midst of a level stretch of sand, and stood there. All about him, covering the whole level, were the ridgepoles of wigwams, but the coverings had long fallen away and rotted, and the sunset glowed through the gaunt poles. Lemaire stretched out his hand, and touched the nearest; they fell into dust and rot. . . . Under his feet he crushed the bones of the dead—the dead, who had died fifty years before, and had waited for him here ever since, under the blown sand and the ground willows . . . . “They’ve a song about it, down along the Lamennais. For of all that tribe, only one family, they say, escaped. All the others died . . . . they died like flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees stood for years . . . . No one ever went to that place any more. It was cursed . . . . because of my grandfather . . . .”

He went back to the canoe. Whining like an old animal, the old Indian was busied above Barrett. “The lodges of my people,” he muttered, “a very strong tribe, and kind to the white men.”

Very gently, Lemaire put aside the blind old hands that touched Barrett’s unconscious face. “Don’t wake him,” he said.

THE GIRL ON THE OTHER SIDE

As Dick Lewis went up the steps, the front door opened and old Jaffray’s moved face showed against the dark of the hall. Lewis noticed, with his new and wondering appreciation for the beauty of common things, that it was finely carved as ivory against the shadow. Then, he was shaking the old man’s hand.

“I’m glad to see you, Mr. Lewis. Glad from my ’eart, sir, if you’ll allow me. We were all very glad to hear of your safety. Miss Guida, she’s waiting for you. . . Yes, in the library, sir.”

“Thank you, Jaffray.”

He went to the familiar door and opened it, and the woman who had been sitting for an hour listening for his step and the sound of the opening door, rose and went forward swiftly to meet him. She said only “Dick!” Then, as they clasped hands: “I need not tell you our joy and relief when we heard.”

“Thank you, Guida. You had my letter?”

“Yes, I kept it to myself—greedy me! The others don’t know you’re here yet. And you’ve come—?”

“Just on my way back. To say good-bye.”

She smiled, summoning that light speech so many use for a shield and buckler. “Don’t! No good-byes between friends! I shall say ‘Au ’voir’ as usual.”

But he did not respond to her mood. He said gently, “I think good-bye—and all it stands for—is a good thing to say between friends.” And instantly something alert and frightened stood up in the woman’s soul, crying “He’s changed, he’s different. Something’s happened. This is not Dick. . .”

She met his eyes, resting on her with a sort of abstract delight. From her pale crinkled hair to her slender feet, she was good for eyes to rest on; many eyes had told her so. But Dick Lewis seemed for the first time to see her at a very far distance; and the dumb fear at her heart spread to her body, so that she pressed her hands hard together to prevent them shaking.

“I—want to hear about your escape, Dick,” she said aloud.

There was a long pause. At last he turned to her with a simplicity as strange as it was new. “And I—want to tell you, Guida. I—came to tell you. But I don’t quite know how to do it without hurting you.” His eyes were infinitely kind. “You’ve been so good to me, you see.”

She looked at him. “Don’t think of me,” she said clearly; “I knew from your letter there was something you wanted to tell me. Don’t think of me, except that I want to listen. And always want to—help, if I can. . . Wait till I get settled comfy. There. Go on.”

He leaned forward and touched her hand an instant. “You’re a dear,” he said, rather huskily; “you’ve been listening to my tales for—five years or so, isn’t it? Well, listen to the last. Your friendship’s been the best thing those five years have known.”

Her eyes were like steel as she said with careful lightness, “But why speak of it in the past tense, Richard?”