Part 17

While Jack watched, carefully concealed, Jean Paul suddenly showed himself boldly on the edge of the cliff. The distance was about three hundred yards, a possible shot, but at a difficult angle. Jack held his hand. It was all important not to put the half-breed on his guard just yet. Jean Paul carelessly surveyed the approaches to his position, and went back out of sight.

Any attack from in front was out of the question. Only one thing suggested itself to Jack: to climb the mountain by the other possible route, and come down on Jean Paul from above. As soon as it occurred to him he started to retrace his steps, without giving a thought to the enormous physical exertion involved. This way was beset with difficulties; the bed of the creek was heaped with the tangled trunks brought down by the freshets. But Jack set his teeth doggedly, and attacking these obstacles, put them behind him one after another.

The sun was three hours lower before he stood at the edge of the timber line on the other great spur of the mountain. He hesitated here. Above him extended a smooth, steep slide of earth and stones at least two thousand feet across, and without so much as a bush or a boulder for cover. At the top of this slide was the hogback that led back to the sixth peak. If Jean Paul was watchful he could scarcely fail to see Jack mounting the naked slope. True, nearly half a mile separated them, but a moving black spot, however small, would arrest his attention if he saw it. He would not mistake it for an animal, for the only animal on the upper slopes is the snowy mountain goat.

However, Jack had to chance it. His principal fear was that Jean Paul, seeing him, might climb down from his rock and gain a long start of him to the valley. But he reassured himself with the thought that the Indian could not guess but that there were others waiting below. It would require a stout heart to climb down that rock in the face of possible fire from the trees.

Jack started his climb. Occasionally he could see Jean Paul moving around on his distant rock. Sometimes he thought the black spot seemed to stand and watch him, but this was his fancy. However, when he was halfway up, he saw him without doubt begin to climb the face of the third peak, and Jack knew that he had been discovered. Jean Paul was going up instead of down. "I'll get him now," Jack told himself.

Thus began a strange and desperate race for the summit of the mountain. Until near the end it was anybody's race; Jean Paul was the nearer, but he had the steeper way to go; he was also the fresher of the two, but Jack was insensible of fatigue. The Indian kept himself out of sight for the most part, but occasionally the configuration of the rocks obliged him to show himself, and Jack marked his progress keenly. Meanwhile his own climb was nearly breaking his heart. He found that it was only a heart after all, and not a steam-chest. One cannot run up a mountain with impunity.

Jean Paul mounted the fourth peak about the same time that Jack reached the hogback, and threw himself down to ease his tortured breast for a moment. Jack had now to turn at right angles, and every step brought them nearer to each other. Jack had cover behind the summit of the ridge all the way to the foot of the last climb. It was impossible for either to guess the outcome. Jean Paul was still the nearer, but Jack was making better time. He ran along the slope on a level line and gained a hundred yards.

When he looked over the top again he was encouraged to see that Jean Paul was labouring hard. He had often to throw himself down in full sight to give his heart a chance. Meanwhile they were coming very close. They were already within gunshot when the peak they were both striving for intervened between them. The breed was aiming for one side, Jack for the other. Jack wondered, should their heads rise over the top simultaneously, which would have the strength to lift his gun.

Toward the base of the peak of rock the ridge became steep and broken. Excruciating pains attacked Jack's legs, and his sinews failed him. He dropped to his hands and knees, and crawled on. He had almost reached the little peak, when suddenly a dark face looked down on him from over the top, and he had just time to drop behind a jutting shoulder of rock to escape the bullet that whistled overhead. The race had gone to Jean Paul.

Jack lay debating his next move. Meanwhile it was grateful to rest, and to feel the strength steal back. His case was not yet hopeless, he decided. The rounded cone of rock that Jean Paul held was easily accessible from any point of the arc visible to Jack, and from the speed with which the breed had gained the summit, he guessed that it must be even easier from the other side. With darkness to aid him he ought to be able to surprise his enemy. The sun was setting now. At close quarters Jack's revolver would give him an advantage.

But this same train of reasoning must have passed through the breed's mind, for later, upon peeping around his rock, Jack saw that Jean Paul had retreated from his peak, and was running off to the right across the flat battlement that connected it with the slightly higher cone that was the true summit of Mount Darwin. He had started to scramble up the face of the rock. Springing up, Jack fired at him, but it was too far, and there was cover behind the jutting ledges. Jean Paul gained the top in safety.

Jack promptly seized the position he had abandoned. Rising cautiously over the side farthest from Jean Paul, he built himself, stone upon stone, a little parapet upon the summit, behind which he could lie and watch his enemy through the interstices. Presently he saw that Jean Paul was following suit, covering himself behind his wall while he raised it. A shot or two was exchanged, but without effect, and as if by mutual consent they left off. Their lead was too precious to be splashed on the rocks.

So they watched, each holding alone, as it were, a heaven-piercing tower of the same castle, with the battlement between. It was a dizzy perch. The whole world was spread beneath them, a world of confused gray, and brown mountain peaks like vast stalagmites pointing fingers toward heaven. It was like a nightmare sea suddenly petrified with its waves upheaved. In the whole vast wilderness there was no suggestion of mankind or of life. Up there the thin, cold air sharpened the senses; one seemed to become aware of the great roll of our planet to the east, and instinctively clung to the rock to keep from being flung off into space.

About two hundred yards separated the white man and the breed. Jean Paul's position was some fifty feet higher than Jack's, and Jack had therefore to build the higher parapet. Nevertheless Jack's heart beat strong; he had him trapped now. At the same time it was a well-defended trap, and there he might sit watching him until starvation took a hand in the fight. Jack had only full rations for one day more; he suspected Jean Paul might be better provided. A red man starves slower than a white. Each could reach plenty of snow to quench his thirst, but there was nothing to burn up there. Jack looked through his peepholes, and considered how he might bring matters to an issue.

On his right in the corner between the hogback and the final peak there was a bowl a thousand feet deep or more, with a little lake in the bottom of a colour between sapphire and emerald. The sides of the bowl were steep slopes of rubble. Jack could not see all this from where he lay, but he had marked it on the way up. After dark he thought it might be possible to crawl around the rim of the bowl to the base of Jean Paul's tower of rock, and scale it from that side. This he could see, and he scanned it hard. It was a staggering climb--say, two hundred feet of precipitous limestone. But it was scarred and ridged and cracked by centuries of weather; and it was not absolutely perpendicular. It might be done.

Having made up his mind, he coolly rolled up in his blanket to sleep behind his parapet until dark. Small chance of Jean Paul's venturing across the battlement.

When he awoke it was as dark as it would get. He fortified himself with bread and meat washed down by snow-water. He left his gun rolled in the blanket--the revolver would serve better--and he propped his hat an a stone so that the crown would peep above his little wall. If it should become light before he reached him, it might serve to occupy Jean Paul's attention for a little. If he succeeded in knocking it off its stone, so much the better.

The passage around the rim of the bowl offered no special difficulty, except the danger of starting a miniature avalanche down the slope, and putting the breed on his guard. He took it a foot at a time. In an hour he drew himself up the first steps of his rocky tower, with the stars looking over his shoulder. Stars, too, seemed to be glancing up at him out of the depths of the black gulf. He would not let himself look down. With the faculty he had, he closed his brain to any thought of failing or of falling. "I'm going to get him! I'm going to get him!" it beat out like a piston, to the exclusion of everything else. Darkness aided him in this, that it prevented the awful hazard from forcing itself on him through his eyes.

His hands had to serve him for eyes, groping, feeling for the ledges and cracks like the antennae of an insect. He gave himself plenty of time; he did not wish to arrive at the top until there was light enough to make sure of his man. He had it figured out in his odd, practical way: three hours, a hundred and eighty minutes; a foot and a half a minute was ample. He could afford to rest and to steady himself on every wide enough ledge.

The face of the rock unrolled itself like a map under the eyes of his hands, and he remembered each foothold as he put it behind him. When he came, as he did more than once, to a smooth, blind face of rock that barred further progress, he patiently let himself down again, and hit off at another angle. His aim was to work himself gradually around to the back of Jean Paul's tower of rock, and fall on him squarely from the rear.

He became aware of the approach of dawn through a slight change of colour in the rock on which his eyes were stubbornly fixed. He could not tell how far he had yet to climb, but he had confidence in his calculations. Only once was his nerve shaken. A ptarmigan suddenly flew out from a cranny above his head with a soft whirring of wings. He wavered for a second, and the sweat sprung out all over his body. But he gripped the rock hard, and grimly forced the rising tide of hysteria down. "Twenty feet more and I'll have him!" he told himself.

At last, above his head, the face of the rock receded under his exploring hand, and he knew he had come to the top. This was the difficult moment, for how was he to know upon drawing himself over the edge that he would not find himself looking into the grinning face of his enemy. A little push back would be enough! He paused for a while, listening. Suddenly his heart was gladdened by the sound of a shot. Jean Paul had fallen into his trap, and was popping at the hat. Jack called on all the forces of his body, and with a great effort drew himself silently over the rounded edge of the rock.

Jean Paul was ten yards away, and a few feet above him. His back was turned. He was exposing himself boldly over the top of his parapet, wondering perhaps why his shots had drawn no reply. Against the vast expanse of sky the silhouette still had the neat and ministerial outline; the Testament still peeped out of the side pocket. Jack sprang over the rock. Jean Paul turned, and Jack had an impression of blank eyes, fixed as by a blinding flash at night. Jack's rush bore him down before he could raise his arms; the gun exploded in the air. Jack wrenched it out of the man's hands and sent it spinning over the edge. They never heard it fall.

Drawing his revolver, Jack got up from the breed. Jean Paul lay motionless. Jack watched him warily. It was dimly borne in on him that after all he had been through his difficulties were only now beginning. He had got his man and so kept his vow to himself; but, richly as he deserved death, he couldn't shoot him disarmed. What was he to do with him then?

"Get up," he said harshly, "and over the wall with you."

Jean Paul raised himself to a sitting position. He had not yet fully recovered from the shock of surprise. He stared at Jack with a kind of stupid wonder. "In a minute," he muttered.

Jack was willing enough to take the breathing-space himself. Both men were near the point of physical exhaustion. After the excitement of the chase the actual capture was tame.

"Well, 'ere we are," said Jean Paul with an odd start of laughter. "W'at you goin' to do?"

"I've told you," said Jack. "I'll take you to the fort or bury you on the way. I keep my word."

There was a silence between them. They were motionless on their little platform of rock, remote in the great spaces of the upper air. Jean Paul looked straight ahead of him with his hard, flat black eyes, in which there lurked something inhuman and inexplicable, and he idly plucked bits of moss from between the stones. What thoughts were passing through his head only God who made the redskins knows. When he turned his eyes again to Jack, it was with the old vain, childish, sidelong look.

"You t'ink you one brave man, huh, to climb up the rock las' night?"

"Never mind that," said Jack coolly. "You don't know yet what white men can do."

Jean Paul sprang up with an extraordinary display of passion. "White men!" he cried, flinging up his arms. "You are not the only men! I am a man as much as you! I am half white and I hate the whites! My fathers were white as well as yours. They beget us and they spit on us. Is it my fault that my blood is mixed? Am I your brother? No, your dog that you kick! Very well. I will do something no pure white man ever did. You go back and tell them!"

On the side of the river, the rock they were on ran up and ended in a row of jagged points like the jaw of a steel trap, overhanging a well nigh bottomless void. With his last words Jean Paul ran out on one of these points of rock, and stood there, with arms flung up, like a diver before he makes his cast.

Jack's heart contracted in his breast. "Come back!" he gasped.

"Come and get me, white man!" cried Jean Paul over his shoulder. Exaltation was in his face.

Jack put up his revolver and, crouching, made to seize the man's legs. Jean Paul, with a strange, loud cry, stepped off, and was no more. No sound of any fall came up. Jack had not the stomach to look over.

Four hours later he found the thing below. He had no tools to dig a grave, and he heaped a cairn of stones over it. On the face of a great boulder that overlooked the cairn he scratched an epitaph with the point of his knife:

JEAN PAUL ASCOTA Killed by leaping from the summit of Mount Darwin August -- 19-- A bad man and a brave one.

Then Jack lay down and slept around the clock.

XIX

AN OLD SCORE IS CHARGED OFF

Drawing near to the Sapi village on his return, Jack first came upon a group of children picking wild strawberries in the meadow, who fled screaming in advance of him into the compound. There, every task was dropped, and every dark face turned toward him. Fairly startled out of their affectation of stolidity, they streamed toward him from under the sun shelters and from out of the tepees with cries of astonishment. Jack was not deceived by the apparent warmth of their welcome; they were not glad to see him, only amazed that he should have come back at all.

He pulled up his horse in the centre of the square, and remembering the last time he had addressed them, looked them over with a kind of grim scorn. Just now he was unable to feel any of the kindness for these feather-brained children of the woods that Mary had. He knew the value of scant speech with them, and he made them wait for his announcement.

At last he said: "Ascota is dead!"

They stirred, and softly exclaimed, but one man laughed. His example was infectious; incredulity showed openly in their faces.

"Big talk!" one said insolently. "Where's the proof?"

Jack quietly untied a little bundle from the back of his saddle, and unrolling the flour bag in which he had carried his grub, produced a little book and held it up. It was Jean Paul's Testament, that they all knew. There was a dark and swollen blotch on the leather cover. The absolute silence with which it was received was more impressive than their cries.

Jack handed it to the man who had spoken. It opened in his hands. There was a crimson stain around the edges of the printed page--wet crimson. The man who held it started back, and those looking over his shoulders gasped. The book was passed among trembling hands. Finally it came back to Jack.

"I will tell you where his body is hidden," said Jack. "A mile beyond the crossing of the creek out of Mount Darwin there is a big spruce on the right-hand side of the trail. On it I made a blaze with the sign of the cross in it. One hundred and ten paces from that tree as you walk toward the mountain he lies under a pile of stones. There is a big rock above, with his name and his story cut upon it."

It was very clear that none of them had any desire to seek out the spot; indeed, from that time the Fort Erskine trail was closed to the Sapis by reason of Ascota's grave being upon it.

"Who is the head man now?" Jack demanded.

They turned toward Etzeeah's eldest son, a sullen broad-shouldered brave, the best physical specimen among them.

"Take warning," said Jack clearly, "you and your people! Ascota was a bad man, a big mouth, a trouble-maker, who tried to stir you to evil, while he kept himself clear. He dared to speak against the great white father across the sea. It was the chickadee piping at the eagle. He is dead. We are all the children of the white father; his children and his servants. His police are now at the fort. You will do well to ride in and make your peace, before they come to punish you. That is all I have to say."

One silently brought him the horse he had left there, and, leading it, he rode through the quadrangle and away by the trail, without looking back. There was no demonstration against him now. The awe that Ascota had inspired in them was transferred to the man who had brought about his death.

Three hours later, as Jack's horse sidled down the hill into the Spirit River valley, his rider looked with a beating heart for the four little tents he had left in the meadow below. They were not there. A great disappointment filled him, and a sharp anxiety. What he had been through had made greater inroads on his reserve forces than he knew, and in Mary's deep eyes his weary spirit was unconsciously seeking harbourage.

However, as he rode up to the ashes of their fire he saw that he had not been forgotten. In the forks of two little sticks driven into the ground was laid a peeled wand roughly shaped like an arrow, and pointing northeast. On it had been printed with a piece of charcoal: "7 miles."

Riding in the direction it pointed he found a freshly blazed trail through the trees. It led him among the poplars along the foot of the bench to the opening of a coulee, up which it turned. It took him north through a narrow valley wooded with great spruce trees. Through openings in the trees on either hand he could see the steep, naked, uncouth forms of the foothills that hemmed the valley in. A trickle of water flowed musically in the bottom of it.

It was difficult going for the horses over the fallen and rotting trunks of the untrodden forest, with its treacherous, moss-hidden pitfalls. The seven miles seemed to stretch out into thrice that distance before he came to the end of his journey. He smelled the smoke of a campfire long before he could see it. Finally the trail turned at right angles, and started to climb. He issued out of the trees, and there on a terrace of grass above him he saw the little tents and the fire; he saw Mary turning toward him with harassed, expectant face.

A little cry escaped her, and she came flying to meet him. Jack slipped off his horse. A little way from him she caught herself up, and her body stiffened. The action brought to Jack's mind all that he had forgotten, and he turned a dull red. It had been in his heart to seize her in his arms. A horrible constraint descended on them both. They did not touch hands; they could not meet each other's eyes; speech was very difficult and painful.

"You are all right?" she murmured. "Not hurt?"

"Not a scratch."

"And Jean Paul?"

"He is dead."

She started with horror, and in spite of herself glanced at Jack's hands.

"He killed himself," Jack added quickly.

Her hands betrayed a movement of relief. There was a silence.

"What about you?" mumbled Jack, scowling. "What are you doing up here? Where is Davy?"

"I have something to show you," she said, with a strange look.

He followed her up the slope. He wondered why there were three tents pitched. The third was Jean Paul's A-tent. Mary threw back one of the flaps, and he saw a blanketed form inside.

"The kid!" he murmured, full of anxious concern. But even as he said it, he saw that it was not Davy. Stooping, and looking farther within, he saw a gaunt travesty of the face of Frank Garrod. The eyes were closed.

Something clutched at Jack's heart. He fell back. "Good God!" he muttered. "You've got him! Is he dead?"

She shook her head. "Sleeping," she said. "Come away a little."

They sat on the other side of the fire. "Davy has gone back to the cache," she said, taking care to avoid Jack's eyes, "for milk powder, if there is any, and whiskey, and any medicines he can find. He will be back before dark."

"Has he said anything?" asked Jack, looking toward the tent.

Mary shook her head. "Nothing you could understand. He is very low. We will not get him back to the fort. He was four days in the bush. He had only berries."

"Then it's too late after all," said Jack apathetically.

"Who can tell?" said Mary. "They say often they get their full senses back for a little while before they die."

Jack shrugged. "Who would believe what he said at such a time?"

Mary was silent. Her capacity for silence was greater perhaps than Jack's.

"Tell me about finding him," Jack said.

"We started out as soon as you left," she said, carefully schooling her voice. "It was clear Jean Paul would take him among the hills to lose him, so we struck up the coulee at once. Too many days had passed for us to find their tracks, and it had rained. But I was sure we would find him in the valley. The hills were too steep; besides, even a madman stays by the water. We looked all day without finding anything until near dark. Then we came on some tracks in the mud by the stream. We camped right there the first night. There were many coyotes on the hills, both sides, and I thought he must be near and they were--waiting." She shuddered.

"In the morning we found him," she went on in a low voice. "Just below here. He had fallen down beside the water. His face was in the mud, but the mosquitoes had not left him. So I knew he was not dead. Davy and I carried him up here where it was dry. I fed him a little bread soaked in water. Davy went back for the other horses and the dunnage, and to leave a sign for you. That was yesterday. This morning Davy went to the cache."

"Oh, Mary! what a woman you are!" Jack murmured out of the deeps of his heart.