Part 16

His purpose failed him. He caught up her hand and pressed it hard to his cheek with an abrupt, odd motion. Dropping it, he turned away. "All right," he said shortly. His eyes fell on Etzeeah. "Get up!" he cried scornfully. "This is old woman's talk! If he can send sickness through the air, why doesn't he strike _me_ down, who bound him, and blinded, and gagged him?"

Etzeeah, struck by the reasonableness of this, ceased his frantic lamentations.

In an hour they were ready for the trail again. Jack sent Mary and Davy on ahead with Etzeeah and the pack-horses. It was arranged that as soon as they reached the site of the former Indian camp, where Etzeeah said Jean Paul had turned Garrod adrift, they were to drop the baggage and go in search of the missing man.

As soon as the others had ridden out of sight, Jack removed the blind and the gag from Jean Paul and cut the cord that bound his ankles and his wrists together. He freed his wrists; his ankles he left bound. The half-breed stretched out, and rolled on the ground in an ecstacy of relief. Finally he sat up, and Jack put the food that had been left for him where he could reach it. Jack stood back, watching him grimly, a hand on the butt of his revolver.

"Are you goin' to shoot me?" Jean Paul demanded coolly.

"I wouldn't waste good food on you if I were," returned Jack. "Hurry up and put it away."

"You not got the nerve to shoot me," sneered Jean Paul.

"Try to hypnotize me and you'll see," Jack said with a hard smile. "I'd be glad of an excuse."

"Why don' you shoot me now?" Jean Paul persisted, with a look like a vain and wilful child, experimenting to see how far he can go against a stronger force.

"I'd rather see you hang," said Jack.

"The police can't touch me. I do not'ing against the law, me."

"There's a thing called treason in this country," said Jack. "You can hang for that."

Jean Paul laughed. "Fort Cheever long way," he said. "You not bring me there, never."

"Then I'll bury you on the way," said Jack with his grim start of laughter.

When Jean Paul had eaten, Jack bound his hands in front of him this time, and liberated his feet.

"Get on," he said, pointing to the horse.

"You can't make me," Jean Paul said with his sidelong look.

"Shan't try," said Jack coolly. "You can run along at my horse's tail if you'd rather."

Jean Paul scowled at the suggested indignity, and climbed on without more ado. Jack tied his hands to the saddle horn.

It was seventeen miles down the forested valley back to the site of the former Indian camp. This, the ancient route between Forts Cheever and Erskine, was a good trail, and they covered the distance without stopping. Jean Paul rode ahead, Jack following with his revolver loose in its holster. It may be said that he almost hoped the breed would try to escape, to give him a chance to use it, but perhaps Jean Paul guessed what was in his mind. At any rate he rode quietly.

Issuing out of the forest at last, the Spirit River valley was spread before them, with the big stream winding among its wide, naked bars. The abandoned camp lay below them, a village of bare tepee poles in a rich meadow surrounded by an open park of white-stemmed poplars. As they approached it a fresh anxiety struck at Jack's breast, for he saw the three pack-horses picketed to the trees with their packs on their backs. He knew that only an emergency would have taken Mary and Davy away without unloading them. The animals had been rolling, to the no small detriment of their baggage. Jean Paul laughed at the sight.

Jack had no recourse but to possess his soul in patience until they came back. Meanwhile he unpacked the horses, and pitched their four little tents, two on each side of the fire. He bound Jean Paul securely as before, and put him in his own tent. He hung the gag from the ridge-pole with significant action. Jean Paul's lips were already bruised and blue as a result of the previous application.

Not until late afternoon was Jack's anxious breast relieved by the sight of the three horses single-footing it across the meadow. Davy rode first, then Etzeeah, looking crestfallen and sullen, and Mary bringing up the rear, her rifle across her arm, and determination making her girl's face grim. Evidently there had been trouble; but the three of them, and uninjured! Jack could have shouted with relief.

"He ran away," Mary explained briefly. "Davy and I had hobbled two of the riding horses, when he suddenly jumped on the third and headed north. He got a couple of minutes' start before we could get the hobbles off and after him. When he got in the timber, he turned the horse adrift, and we lost more time following its tracks. But I guessed he would make back to the trail as soon as you had passed, so we patrolled it, and we nabbed him at last."

"Good work!" said Jack briefly. It did not occur to him that there was something rather extraordinary in a mere girl and boy bringing in the headman of the Sapi Indians by themselves. He expected it of their white blood.

There seemed to be nothing for it now but to bind Etzeeah hand and foot also, and to convert Jack's tent into a cell for him. The two prisoners lay in their separate shelters on one side of the fire, while their captors watched them from the other. Jack was to sleep with Davy, and except for Mary's rifle, all the weapons in camp were stowed in that tent. The long-threatened rain set in steady and cold, and the night threatened to be as dark as winter.

They ate their supper inside Davy's tent, while the fire sputtered and sulked in the rain. A heavy silence prevailed; for one thing, they were dead weary, and their difficulties were pressing thick upon them. The rain did not lighten them. Jack, looking at Mary and Davy, thought with softening eyes:

"They're clear grit! But if I only had another man!"

The instant they had finished eating he ordered the two youngsters to bed. "I'll feed the two of them," he said, nodding across the fire, "and clean up. It will help keep me awake."

"You need sleep more than either of us," Mary objected.

"If I once let myself go I'd never wake," he said with a laugh. "I'll call you at midnight." It was tacitly understood between them that Davy was not to keep watch.

His work done, Jack sat down inside the door of Davy's tent to smoke, and if he could, to keep the fire going in spite of the rain. He found that it required too great a blaze to be proof against the downpour. He had not nearly enough wood to last throughout the night, so he let it out in order that Mary might enjoy what remained of the fuel. When the fire went out he could no longer see into Jean Paul's tent, so he crossed over and sat down beside him. Throughout the weary hours he sat smoking to keep himself awake, until his mouth was raw. From the adjoining tent issued the reassuring sound of Etzeeah's snores; Jean Paul, too, never stirred, and his breathing was deep and slow.

Midnight had passed before Jack had the heart to waken Mary. He first took advantage of a lull in the rain to start the fire again. As he threw back the curtain of her little tent, the firelight shone in her face, rosy and serene in sleep, her cheek pillowed on her round arm. The sight stirred him to the very core of his being. He knelt, gazing at her breathlessly. He forgot everything, except that she was lovely. He suddenly bent over her with a guilty air, and lightly kissed her lips.

She opened her eyes. He sprang away in a panic at the thought of her scorn. But she awoke with an enchanting smile. "Jack I dreamed----" she began, as if it were the sweetest and the most natural thing in the world for her to find him bending over her at night--and caught herself up with a burning blush. Jack hastily retreated outside. Neither of them referred to it again.

Jack was asleep as soon as he stretched himself beside Davy. The next thing he knew, something had happened, what it was he could not tell. He staggered to his feet, and out into the open, drunken, paralyzed with sleep, and fighting for consciousness.

"Jack, he's gone!" cried Mary.

That awakened him. He saw her on her knees before Jean Paul's tent, and ran to her. The tent was empty. The rain poured down on their heads unheeded. The fire was out.

Mary was in great distress. "My fault," she said. "It rained harder than ever, and the fire went out. I could not bear to sit beside him as you did. It made me sick to be so near him! I thought I could watch from my tent. The wind came up and it was hard to see. He fixed the blanket to look as if he was still under it. He must have slipped out of the back!"

"But tied hand and foot!" cried Jack.

"The cords are here," she said, displaying them.

"But how?" demanded Jack.

Mary's searching hand found two small stones in the blanket that she showed Jack; one had a sharp, jagged edge, and the explanation was clear. Throughout the hours when Jack sat beside him, and he seemed to be so sound asleep, the wily breed had been patiently rubbing at the cords until they frayed apart.

"No more your fault than mine," said Jack grimly.

Simultaneously the thought of Etzeeah occurred to them, and they sprang to look under the adjoining shelter. At first glance in the darkness, the Indian seemed to be safely there, but when Jack put out his hand the puffed-up blanket collapsed, and there was nothing under it. At that, for the first, their strong young breasts were shaken by awe.

"Good God!" Jack gasped. "He's got him, too! How could he? With you not twenty feet away. And not a sound. Is it a man or a devil?"

The pegs that held down the back of Jack's lean-to were drawn, showing how Jean Paul had entered, and how he had removed his prey.

"Etzeeah--" said Mary tremblingly, "do you suppose Jean Paul has--

"He would hardly take him alive," said Jack grimly, "without a sound."

"But he had no weapon, we know that."

"His hands!"

They were silent.

"But if he did," faltered Mary, "why would he take--take the body away?"

Jack shook his head. "They are always mysterious," he said.

"He may be near," whispered Mary. "What's to be done?"

"He's not dangerous to us until he gets a weapon," said Jack. "Wake Davy, and you two watch our guns. I'll bring in the horses."

It was near four, and beginning to be light. The rain ceased, and a thick white mist clung to the river-meadows. It was not easy to find the horses. Jack satisfied himself that two of them were missing. Why two? he thought. He did not find the body of Etzeeah, as he half expected.

He had to wait for better light before he could look for tracks. He found them at last, leading back up the Darwin valley, the fresh hoof-prints of two horses superimposed on the confusion of tracks they had made coming and going. The horses had been ridden at a gallop. Jack returned to tell Mary.

"He's gone all right," he said. "And alive or dead, he's taken Etzeeah with him. The second horse carried a load too. He's gone back to the Sapis for grub and a gun."

Mary searched Jack's face with a poignant anxiety to see what he intended to do. "Let him go," she suggested. "We know that Garrod is near here somewhere."

Jack stood considering with bent brows and clenched hands. He finally shook his head. "He could come back to-night, and pick us off one by one around our fire. We'll have no peace or security until I get him, Mary. I'll have to leave Garrod to you and Davy. You know how much finding him means to me!"

"But you," she faltered, her eyes wide with terror for him, "you can't go back alone to the Sapis. They shot at you!"

Jack's uncertainty was gone. He raised a face, transfigured.

"Pshaw! That mongrel crew!" he cried. "They're the least of my difficulties. I'll drop on them before Jean Paul can work them up to mischief. _I've got to get that breed_! No murder can be done in my camp, and the murderer get away! No redskin shall ever live to brag of how he bested me! I'll get him if I have to ride to hell and drag him out!"

XVIII

THE END OF ASCOTA

Two hours later Jack rode into the Sapi village for the second time, and flung himself off his tired and dripping mount. The horse stood with hanging head, and feet planted wide apart, fighting for breath. This time Jack's arrival created little visible sensation. The people were otherwise and terribly preoccupied. A strange silence prevailed, extending even to the children and the dogs. Many of the people were gathered around the entrance to Etzeeah's lodge. They merely turned their heads with a scowl, and the men drew on the walled look they affect in the presence of whites. In the faces of the women and children awe and terror were painted.

"Ascota, where is he?" Jack demanded.

Hands were silently pointed up the valley.

"How long?"

"Half an hour," one said.

Outside the square Jack saw two more dead weary horses still wet from their punishing ride.

"Where is Etzeeah?" he asked.

There was no answer. All the heads turned as one toward the tepee.

Jack threw back the blind that hangs over the entrance, and, stooping, entered. He was prepared for what he saw. The body of the old man sprawled on its back beside the fire. All around the tepee squatted his wives and his sons in attitudes of sullen mourning. Etzoogah, the best-beloved, eyed the body askance with scared eyes, and chewed the tassel of his red sash. Etzeeah was not a comely sight. Death was in his face, but none of the majesty of death. His grimy, wrinkled skin was livid and blackened. The marks on his scrawny throat showed how he had met his end.

Stooping, Jack picked up his hand, and let it fall. It was significantly cold and stiff. He decently composed the dead man's limbs, and signed to one of the women to cover the body with her shawl.

Rising, he looked grimly around the circle. "This is murder!" he said.

None showed in any way that they heard.

"Who will ride with me to catch the murderer?" he demanded.

None moved. The faces of the women showed a start of terror.

Jack went outside again, and looked over the silent crowd. Seeing Charlbogin, one of the deserters, among them, he went to him.

"Did Ascota speak?" he demanded.

The sulky boy could not resist the command. "Ascota throw Etzeeah on the ground, so!" he said with a striking gesture. "He say: 'This is a man who betrayed me! Bury him!'"

A shudder passed through the crowd. Children wailed and whimpered.

"Then what?" asked Jack.

"He take a gun and a blanket, and moose meat from the fire; he catch a horse and ride west."

"And you let him go!" exclaimed Jack.

"Ascota is not a man like us," the young man muttered. "He does what he likes."

"More woman's talk!" cried Jack. "Are there any men among you? Come with me, and I'll show you stronger magic than Ascota's."

Some of the men affected to smile contemptuously as at an idle boaster. None moved to follow him. The obstinacy of their terror faced Jack like a wall, and he saw the futility of trying to move it.

He cursed them roundly. "I'll go alone then," he cried. "Bring me the best horse there is. I'll pay."

They shrugged as much as to say: "Let him, as long as he pays." One went to get the horse. In five minutes Jack was pounding the trail again.

Beyond the village the valley narrowed, and the roar of the plunging stream rose from the bottom of it. The bordering hills rapidly became steeper and higher. The trail did not follow the course of the river, but found an easier route along the face of the hills a hundred feet or so above. The sides of the hills had been burned over, here, and the forest was only a wilderness of naked, charred sticks. Many of these had fallen in the trail, making slow going for the horse. Occasionally the little river paused for a while in its headlong descent to wander back and forth through a green meadow. The trail came down to cross these easy places, and it was only here that Jack could extend his horse.

The plain tracks of Jean Paul's horse led him on. Jack could read that the breed was riding recklessly and distancing him steadily mile by mile, but he would not on that account risk his own horse's legs through the down timber. "I'll get him," he said to himself coolly, with the terrible singleness of purpose of which he was capable. In such a mood he was no longer a man, but an engine.

Jack had come across the mountains from Fort Erskine by this trail, and he knew it well. It was evidently for Fort Erskine, where he was not well known, that Jean Paul was making. Ahead, through the forest of bare sticks that hemmed him in, Jack could see the gateway to the mountains, the magnificent limestone pile of Mount Darwin on the right. He had worked around the base of Darwin, and all this was familiar ground.

It was about noon when Jack and his horse, rounding a spur of the hill, were brought up all standing by the sight of a dark body lying in the trail ahead. Dismounting, and tying his trembling animal to a tree, Jack went forward to investigate. It was a horse, Jean Paul's horse, with a broken foreleg, and abandoned to its fate. Jack's heart beat high with hope; the end of this thing was in sight now. The poor brute raised agonized eyes to him. Jack could not put a bullet through its head without betraying his whereabouts, but he mercifully cut its throat.

He proceeded warily. He was covered from above by the very steepness of the hill and the impenetrable barriers of the fallen timber. The prints of Jean Paul's moccasins led him ahead. The trail dropped steeply to a little stream that he knew well; it drained the easterly slope of Mount Darwin. It marked the edge of the burned-over tract, and on the other side the trail plunged into virgin forest again.

Jack went forward as cautiously as an Indian, taking advantage of every scrap of cover. At the brook he lost Jean Paul's tracks. It was clear the breed had waded either up or down. Jack was pretty sure he would not be far away, for the redskin of Jean Paul's type has no love for long journeys afoot. But it promised to be a somewhat extended stalk and his horse was no use to him. He therefore went back, cached his saddle, and turned the beast out hobbled, trusting that it would find its way back to the last river-meadow they had passed. Blanket and grub Jack strapped on his back, and his gun he carried under his arm.

He spent an hour searching up and down the shores of the creek for tracks, without success. Neither was there any evidence of Jean Paul's having returned to the trail farther along. If Jack was well skilled in reading tracks, the breed was adept in hiding them. Jack's only recourse was to climb. There is a little eminence abutting on the base of Mount Darwin and on the top of it a knoll of naked rock that overlooks the valley for miles up and down. Knowing the natives' deep-rooted aversion to drinking cold water, Jack guessed that Jean Paul would have to build a fire, and from this point of vantage a fire, however small, would almost surely betray his whereabouts.

Taking his bearings, he made a beeline up the steep slope through the heavy, old timber that reached up from the valley, and through a dense light growth of poplar above. This part of the mountain offered no special difficulties in climbing, and in half an hour he threw himself down on the flat top of the knoll, with the valley spread before him.

Mount Darwin reaches a long promontory down the valley it has given its name to. The promontory consists of seven little peaks in a row, each one rising over the head of the one in front, and the seventh is the actual summit of the mountain. It was on number one of these little summits that Jack now lay, looking down the valley up which he had ridden that morning. A mile or so away was a patch of green with a black dot upon it, that he guessed was his horse.

Off to his left, hidden in the forest, the creek came tumbling down from the snows above; on his right hand the river washed the rocky base of the monarch. The easiest way to the summit is right on up over the succeeding peaks; indeed on this side there is a mountain goat trail direct to the top. Darwin can also be climbed, but not so easily, by ascending the creek for a couple of miles, thence up a steep slide to a long hogback that leads back to the sixth peak. On the river side the rocky cliffs tower six thousand feet into the air, sheer and unscalable. Such was the theatre of the pursuit of Jean Paul Ascota.

In all the wide space opened to Jack's eye there was not a sign of life, except the black pin-point that he supposed was his horse, and a pair of eagles, sailing and screaming high above the forest. Nowhere in the brilliantly clear air was there the least sign of smoke. He ate some of his bread and meat while he watched, and smoked his pipe. He marked a place around to the right below where the trail passed over a rocky spur. On the other side it was open to him through the down timber; so that Jean Paul could not pass either way on the trail without his seeing him.

It was hard on the engine of retribution to be obliged to sit and wait. When his pipe went out he moved restlessly up and down his little plateau or shelf of rock. Behind him, the forest grew close and high, hiding the rest of the mountain. He never knew quite how it happened, but at one end of the rock, near the place where he had come up, he suddenly found himself staring at the perfect print of a moccasined foot in a patch of moss! His breast swelled with satisfaction at the sight; at the same time he frowned with chagrin to think of the valuable time he had wasted sitting within twenty feet of Jean Paul's trail.

Jean Paul's path up through the thickly springing poplar saplings was not more than two yards from Jack's own. Such are the caprices of the Goddess of Chance! He had crossed the rock, and continued on up the mountain by the mountain goat trail, which first became visible here. Evidently believing that he had shaken off pursuit, and that no one would dream of looking for him on the mountain, he was no longer taking any care to cover his tracks.

Jack hastened after, as keen and determined as a high-bred hound whom nothing short of a cataclysm could divert from his purpose. The rough track followed the top of a stony ridge, which dropped steeply to the river on one side, and sloped more gradually into a forested hollow on the other. A thick growth of pines afforded him perfect cover. Like all animal paths, the trail wound like a tangled string among the trees. The growth ended abruptly on the edge of a shallow rocky cut athwart the ridge. On the other side of the cut rose the steep face of the second little peak in the series.

Jack paused within the shelter of the trees to reconnoitre. The great slope of rock opposite, with its wide, bare ditch, made a well-nigh perfect natural fortification. He watched the top of it lynx-eyed, and presently he was rewarded by the sight of a wisp of smoke floating over the edge. Jack drew a long breath and grimly smiled. So that was where he was!

He had chosen admirably. The growing timber ended at the spot where Jack was, but up above there was enough down timber to keep the breed in fire until the judgment day, if he wished to stay, and his fire would be invisible from any point in the valley. For water, all the ledges and hollows on the northerly side were heaped with snow; for food there were mountain goats and ptarmigan; for defence he had only to roll a stone down on the head of any one who tried to climb to his aerie.