Part 11

At noon the echoes of axe-strokes died away and the hut was thatched with balsam, blue side skyward. By three o’clock a spike buck, a yearling, lay across a log on the ridge, and at four o’clock Skeene had satisfied his hunger.

He sat on the shore under the ridge, pensively picking his white teeth with the enjoyment of the abandoned. Across the lake the mountains turned to sapphire and ashes; a pale sky deepened into flame colour; the sun hung a globe of crimson in gilded mist.

One by one the last sunbeams reddened the trunks of the trees to the eastward, the foliage burned, the shore line glimmered. Like changing hues on a bubble, the colours deepened, and played over the placid lake. A single snowy bank of cloud, piled up in the east, glowed where the sun stained its edges. The midges danced above the sedge; the lake-wash rocked the swales, to and fro, to and fro. A trout broke in shallow water, flapped up and splashed again, and the red sky crimsoned the widening rings, spreading slowly shoreward.

In the days that followed, Skeene learned to talk to himself. When he did this he forgot that he had killed Sebato; after a while he forgot it altogether.

When the August afternoons were ablaze with brazen sunlight and the lake glistened like a sheet of steel, Skeene sprawled on a log in the shade and watched the great blue herons. When they “drove stakes” he mocked them with the same note until they answered “Ke-whack! Ke-whack! Ke-whack!” The red squirrel’s thin treble he imitated; he called the chipmunks with a tsip! tsip! and laughed until his white teeth glistened when a carrion-jay alighted on his knee for a shin-joint half hacked. The great belted kingfishers knew him, the sheldrake, stringing along the creek at evening, turned their bright eyes to his, the osprey who lived above the ledge, wheeled above him for hours, knowing that he also was a savage thing and hunted when hungry.

He was hungry several times between sunrise and sunset. The swift water of the Little Misery gave him a trout to every set-line; the deeper pools by the sedge gave him pleasure.

On the Little Misery deer swarm at evening, and he had meat for the price of a cartridge.

The white nights of August brought that vague unrest that all forest creatures feel. The deer girdled the roots of the ash-trees and the spike bucks grew bolder; the great blue herons danced their contre-dance, evening after evening, at first solemnly, advancing, retreating in stately quadrilles, lifting their slim shins high in the sedge; but, as the month ended, the contre-dance lost dignity and gained in abandon, until the lone loon out on the lake shook the silence with his demon’s laughter. As the moon waned, the forest world stirred; its attitude was expectant; it waited. The cow-moose began to cast evil oblique glances on her calves, now turned darker; and the little bull-moose-calf, frisked until his tiny bell swung like the wattle on a turkey.

An impatience, almost a sadness fell upon Skeene. And with sadness came fear. He covered his lean-to and built a smoke-hole through which blue haze rose in the calm morning air. But, like wild things in winter, he was wary, and the steam-hole of a beaver’s house might be more easily located than the chimney of Skeene’s hut.

When September came a hush fell over the forest; land and water were silent; the trout no longer broke water or leaped full length in the afterglow; the deer picked a silent path along the shore; the herons stood all day, heads stretched heavenward; the loon’s maniac laughter was stilled. Silent and more silent the woods grew as the new moon, a faint tracery above the hills, rose in the evening sky. At its first quarter the silence deepened, at its half, the stillness was intense. Then one black night the Full Moon of September flashed in the sky, and before the last shore ripple had caught its glitter, a gigantic black shadow waded out into the lake and a roar shook the hills.

The first bull-moose had bellowed, and the rutting season had begun.

Instantly the forest, the lake, the shore, the stream were alive; the meat-birds cried from every cedar; the deer barked from the sedge; a lynx howled and miauled in the second growth. Everywhere plumage and fur were growing glossy and gay. Even Skeene sewed porcupine quills into his boot-moccasins, and sang fragments of a song he had heard in Quebec.

III.

Now there is a season for all things; in the fall the black moose grows blacker and sleeker; in the fall the red buck rubs the tattered velvet from every prong; in the spring the mewing catbird whistles dreamily as a spotted thrush; in the spring the snowbird changes its feathers, chameleon like, as the snow drifts or melts; and the dry chirring of the red squirrel grows sweeter.

“Each after its kind,” says the quaint Book, and so the spruce-grouse drums in the long summer days, and the crested wood-duck ruffles its rainbow plumes, and the painted trout hang over the gravel beds in September, and the antlered moose barks at the September moon.

As for Skeene, he sewed porcupine quills in a semicircle over the instep of his moccasins, laced a string of scarlet trout-flies across his slouch hat, and listened to the bull-moose, bellowing out on the moonlit ridge.

At times he sang his Quebec song, at times he sighed. Twice he spared a yearling buck,—he could not tell why. He caught a big red sable, bigger than the coon-cat at the Carry House. It scratched and bit him, but he was very good to it. A lazy beaver, driven from the colony by his industrious relatives, bored a hole in the bank under Skeene’s shanty. Beaver-tail and hindquarters are good, cold boiled, but Skeene let him live in peace and even piled enough poplar saplings at his door to last any lazy beaver a year. And all this time he was sorry he killed Sebato at the wing-dam; he wished he had shot him a year before in the bog-country,—it was a good chance and nobody would have been the wiser.

When the September moon waxed full and the water lapped softly along the lake ledge, Skeene’s heart grew full, and the blood in his neck and cheeks ebbed and surged like moon-tides. So, on the second night, he took his rifle and dragged the canoe to the beach. But his heart failed him and he feared the Carry House, and he went back to his camp and rolled and grunted through a sleepless night. On the third evening he started on foot, but he hesitated when the lamp in the Carry House broke out, a red beam in the night. He stood, wretched, wistful, undecided, fingering his rifle butt, and his heart beat to suffocation. Something near him stirred and moaned among the rocks,—a miserable gluttonous fisher-cat, its head bristling with porcupine quills. And Skeene, sick with self-compassion, trailed the wounded creature to the water’s edge and killed it,—pitying it as he pitied himself. Then, worn out with the fever in his veins, he slept openly where he lay, wondering if he should wake on Red Lake shore or on the shores of a redder lake.

On the fourth night of the full of the moon, he went swiftly across the ridge, unarmed, and the miles of woodland and shore sped away like mist, so eagerly he ran. On that night he heard the moose-cows calling the barking bull, and the whoof! of the dun doe in the sedge. Far on the shore the red beam of the Carry lamp signalled him and his blood flamed the answer in his face. And, as he strode up to the house, he saw a woman on the shore looking out into the night across the spectral lake. It was Lois, servant at South Carry. He had danced with her two years ago at Foxcroft Landing, he had sent her six otter pelts a month before he shot Sebato.

She was the girl he had come for.

Is it possible she expected him? The restlessness of September had drawn her to the lake and something had led him to her.

The moon, a silver lamp, traced a shining trail across the shadowy waters; his canoe grated softly on the shoal, a string of bubbles followed the paddle sweep, the foam whispered secrets to the clustered sedge-grass.

* * * * *

And so, together, they glided away on a trail of silver water to the strange country, drained by strange streams, stirred by strange winds. The red spark of the Carry lamp died out in the night, the little grey stars twinkled over the dead waters, pale sparks from phantom nuptial torches flaring in the north.

At dawn the sky crimsoned the Little Misery. They slept. At sunrise a moose roared a salute to the coming day.

They awoke and kissed each other.

IV.

When the public-spirited citizens of Foxcroft offered $500 reward for the capture of Skeene, Placide L’Hommedieu scratched his greasy chin, licked his lips, and went out to buy cartridges. Placide had trapped in the Province and thought he could trap as well in Maine.

“Monsieur L’Hommedieu what will you do with $500?” asked the Mayor of Foxcroft.

“Le Hommydoo won’t need it,” observed a grizzled portage guide who had once shot a match with Skeene. And he was right for they found L’Hommedieu a week later peacefully floating down Moose River in his canoe, with a bullet in his brain.

When Skeene paddled away with Lois, there was trouble in Foxcroft. Hale left sluice, drain, and chain, and wired the Sheriff at the Landing to meet him at Moosehead Inn. The Mayor went also, and next morning the reward was doubled for “James Skeene, Murderer, dead or alive.”

Hale had never forgiven the blow at the cut-off, but a busy man would scarcely have left his sluice to hunt another man to death for that alone. No, Hale had other reasons, and they concerned neither Billy Sebato nor Placide L’Hommedieu. They concerned Lois, servant at South Carry; for when she left with Jim Skeene she took Hale’s betrothal ring with her.

After Skeene had set Placide L’Hommedieu afloat, with mud on his face and a bullet in his skull, he shoved the canoe into swift water at Moose River, broke both paddles, splintered the setting-pole, and solemnly watched the canoe out of sight.

Lois, waiting for him when he poled into the Little Misery, looked at his knife in the scolloped leather sheath, then at his rifle, and finally into his sombre eyes.

“I heard,—only one shot. Was it a deer?”

He nodded muttering that he had missed; but that night she caressed him, taking his curly head into her arms, and wept over him till daybreak crimsoned the world.

After that they were almost gay. He notched logs and built a hut and rammed moss into the cracks. Lois brought clay from the sweet water, and cut balsam until her little hands were stained to the palm. Twice he passed the three carrys to the C. P. R. and hung to a freight as far as Sainte Croix. They knew nothing and cared less in the Dominion, and he bought salt and pork and flour and cartridges with the proceeds of Hale’s ring. The third trip he walked on the C. P. fearing the train, and he got his price for ten pelts, including musk-rat.

They knew that happiness that is bred in haunting fear, that fierce, that intense love whose roots are imbedded in terror. Lois had been to school and these were the things she knew;—that two and two make four, that Moose-calves are born in May, that bark peels best in June, that Moose-calves are weaned in September. She knew also how to use Skeene’s knife, and when he found beaver above swift water and told her so in the evening, she cut saplings and whittled trip-sticks and notched chokers while he hewed out the bed-pieces for the traps, and sharpened enough young ash to build the fences for winter traps. Mink traps, too, were no mystery to Lois, and they talked long and wisely concerning standards and cubbies and spindles while the embers died under the simmering tins and the deer whistled on the windy ridge.

Snow came, a phantom flurry through the pale sunshine, and Skeene lugged more deer hides into his hut. A hot week followed, sending the trout to the bottom-sands and the deer to the shallows; then came the ice; at first a brittle, glittering skin, encasing stem and reed, and wrinkling hidden stagnant pools. The wind in the grasses grew harsher, the reeds rattled at evening; vast flocks of little birds circled high in the sky for the winds of the South called them, and the geese were drifting overhead.

One day the snow came again, and at evening it had not ceased falling. A week later the lake froze and Skeene dragged his canoe into the hut and daubed it with white-lead, while Lois crept close to his side and strung snowshoes. At times she sang. He listened, lying beside the canoe. When she had sung the same song until evening he taught her the song he had learned in Quebec;

“Mossieu Meenoose Mossieu Meenoose Mon dieu que tu as Un villain chat la.”

And she sang it and sewed scarlet braid across her moccasins.

During these weeks Hale was busy in Foxcroft. When the smaller lakes froze he leered sideways at the Sheriff and ordered a dozen pairs of snowshoes. Once or twice he went back to his sluice and cursed, but the River Drivers regarded him with evil eyes, and the sluicers drove their props sullenly until he went away leaving a string of oaths in his wake. There were men of the stamp he wanted on the Province side of the C. P. R.; there was Achille Verdier, one-eyed and idle; there was greasy little Armand Fleury, dirtier for his fox-skin cap, dingier for the red braid on the tail. There also resided Wyombo, pigeon-toed, furtive, aboriginal. Much could be done with these gentlemen and $1000. The value of Hale’s ring was $150, therefore the people of Foxcroft gossiped.

Snow fell on the frozen lake; the Little Misery was mantled, the carrys choked. All day long the meat-birds whined in the fir-trees and at night the sleet pelted the frozen snow. The deer yarded on the ridge, the moose on the slope above; the black bear buried his feeble nose in his stomach and dreamed, and the otters frisked over their slide. As for Lois, she was learning things; she learned that the fur on the belly of a young panther is wavy, she learned that men are brutes, and that Skeene was all the world to her; she learned that she also had her value, for she saw him swim the swift water of the Little Misery when she screamed affrighted by an impudent lynx. She learned that he sometimes preferred solitude to company, that he sometimes preferred sleep to caresses. She learned that he went hungry that she might eat, that he shivered while she slept under skin and blanket.

Sometimes they played together, Skeene and this slender girl, like young foxes in the snow. She would often hide, too, in the hollow of a great swamp-oak, and when he came home she would call: “Jim! Jim! find me!”

But God lives, and the world spins, and the hare turns white in winter, and the routine of the beginning and the end never varies.

And so it came about that Skeene, laughing up at Lois in the hollow swamp-oak, glanced over his shoulder and saw six black dots clustered upon the frozen lake to the southward. He said nothing but looked into the north. There were more dots there, more also on the ice in the west. For a moment he thought the east was still open; after a while he heard the scrape of a snow-shoe very near. Lois also heard and her face was like death as she reached down and took the rifle from Skeene’s hand.

When he had climbed up into the hollow tree beside her and looked out from the hole above the great branch, he saw Hale peering at him from a dead-fall.

“Come down,” said Hale.

Skeene clapped his rifle to his cheek and fired.

“Come down,” repeated Hale from behind his dead-fall. Lois, trembling at Skeene’s feet, shrank at the sombre voice from the woods. Skeene bent and kissed her and caressed her, muttering things she could not understand, but she caught his hand in hers and tore off the fur mitten and pressed it to her hot lips, moaning and sobbing.

“Come down for the last time, Jim Skeene,” said Hale slowly. Suddenly a rifle shot rang through the frozen forest. The hand that Lois held tightened against her lips, quivered, relaxed. Something outside fell clinking and clattering to the ground at the foot of the tree. It was Skeene’s rifle; and Skeene sank forward, hanging half out of the hole in the tree, head downward, like a dead squirrel.

And beside him, the other wild thing sobbed and whimpered and moaned among the branches while below the swift axes bit into the tree from which the dead game hung, head downward.

“Look in the hut for the woman!” bawled Hale.

The tree swayed and crackled and fell crashing into the snow.

“Where’s that woman?” shouted Hale from the hut;—“G—d d—n her!”—

But when at last he found her he changed his mind and let her stay with Skeene there in the snow.

ENTER THE QUEEN.

“Votre amour me ferait dieu. M’aimez-vous, mademoiselle? Soupirez un mois, dit-elle. Un mois! C’est la mort! Adieu!”

ENTER THE QUEEN.

Souvenir cher à mes pensées! Grâce à la fraîcheur qu’il leur rend, Je souris aux heures passées, Je m’arrange du jour mourant.

BERANGER.

I.

The middle of the studio was occupied by a rug. The middle of the rug was occupied by Clifford. He sat on the floor playing a dirge on a brass cornet. Around him lay bureau drawers, empty trunks and satchels, flanked by cabinets and chests littered with palettes, underclothes, colour-tubes, pipes, and paint-rags.

When Elliott came in, an hour later, he found Clifford still performing on the cornet. He played “Hark! from the Tomb,” and “Death and The Maiden”; and while he played he winked ominously at Elliott.

Now, when Clifford played on his cornet, something was amiss. Elliott knew this and watched him sideways, sullenly removing overcoat and gloves. Every dismal bleat of the brass prophesied calamity. The hollow studio echoed with forebodings of disaster.

“Stop that,” said Elliott, flinging his hat on a chair; “what’s the matter with you?”

“O Commander of the Faithful,” said Clifford, “behold the end of the world! J’ai beau cherchai—je n’en trouve point—”

“Money?” asked Elliott, sitting down; “stop blowing into that cornet.”

“I know of no other way to raise the wind,” said Clifford,—“get your cornet and we’ll play duets.”

“You mean we are actually without means?”

Clifford threaded his way through an abatis of easels, canvasses, books, and bird-cages to the Japanese tea-table.

“Have some tea?” he inquired.

“No, I won’t,” snapped Elliott, “and you can tell me where our funds have gone.”

Clifford poured himself a cup of tea, raised his eyes piously, sipped it, and looked at Elliott over the edge of the cup.

“Where’s our money?” repeated Elliott; “you had charge of the common account for the last three months—”

Clifford sighed, unrolled a sheet of paper, shoved it toward his confrère, and offered himself more tea. Elliott examined the figures anxiously.

“You hopeless ass!” he blurted out. “Why didn’t you draw the purse strings?”

“I can deny you nothing, my son,” protested Clifford, casting furtive glances toward his cornet again.

“But we’re ruined!” bawled Elliott in sudden fright.

“Utterly,” admitted Clifford pleasantly.

Through the broad glass roof the pale winter sunlight fell over piles of rugs and weapons on the floor; in the garden the sparrows chirped unceasingly around the frozen fountain. Elliott sat motionless, hypnotised by the column of figures before him. Clifford regarded his canary birds with vague reproach.

At last Elliott broke the silence:

“We had enough,—more than enough to live on decently; we threw our money away! Ass that I am, I didn’t realise I was such an ass.”

“I didn’t either,” said Clifford.

“Oh, you didn’t?” sneered Elliott: “who was it that spent five hundred francs on those idiot birds?”

They frowned at the two dozen canaries. The birds hopped aimlessly from pole to perch and from perch to pole.

“I didn’t buy a coupé for a lady,” retorted Clifford.

“No, but you gave garden parties with fireworks and Chinese lanterns, and the company broke windows and set the curtains ablaze, and the police fined us for shooting rockets without a permit—”

“Accidents,” observed Clifford; “our social position in the Latin Quarter required us to entertain.”

“Our social position on this planet will also require us to eat,—occasionally.”

“There’s the furniture.”

“I won’t! I won’t! You hear me, Clifford! I’ll not sell a chair. Isn’t there any money in any of those bureau drawers?”

“No,—look for yourself,” replied Clifford cheerfully.

“Now I’ll not mortgage our furniture,” said Elliott; “so you needn’t finger my carved chairs. We must pull through,—I don’t know how,—but we must pull through. I shall cut down my tobacco, I shall drink cheap wine, I shall see Colette at once—”

“Do you think she can stand the blow?” inquired Clifford.

“Your wit is unseasonable,” said Elliott haughtily; “how much can you get for your canaries?”

Clifford flatly refused to sell the birds and played a dirge on his cornet. Then the horror of poverty laid hold of Elliott and drove him out into the Luxembourg where he sat in the fading sunshine until the drums boomed from the southern terrace and the challenge of the sentinels, droning, monotonous, sounded and resounded across the windy park.

There was a hint of snow in the air as he passed out into the Place de Medici. He clinked the few gold pieces in his pocket as he walked. This appalled him, and he stepped more quickly.

On the Boulevard, a slim white-browed girl, exquisitely gowned, called to him from a coupé. When he motioned the coachman to stop and stepped to the curb, she buried her nose in a bunch of violets and laughed.

“Colette,” said Elliott gloomily, “Mr. Clifford and I are compelled to retire for the space of three months. Therefore, most charming and most wise Colette,—therefore—”

He raised one hand and opened his fingers as though releasing a butterfly.

II.

All that week Clifford roamed about the studio blowing melancholy blasts from his cornet. Elliott sold a picture to Solomon Moritz for twenty francs, regretted it, tried to get it back, beat Mr. Moritz with a mahl-stick and resisted an officer. To his horror the French Government insisted on entertaining him for a week at Mazas, whither Clifford visited his comrade daily until Saturday and freedom arrived.

“This is a hell of a country,” observed Elliott as he shook the dust of Mazas from his heels in company with Clifford. “It’s no place for the breadwinner; the Jews have the country by the throat.”

“They said,” observed Clifford, “that you had Moritz by the throat.”

“I did; the ruffian refused me thirty francs for my ‘Judgment of Solomon.’”

“Dear me!” exclaimed Clifford with an impudent gesture, “wasn’t it worth it?”

“You will refrain,” said Elliott furiously, “from poking me in the ribs,—now and hereafter.”

Half an hour later they entered the studio and sat down opposite each other in silence. The canaries filled the room with their imbecile twittering, and hopped and hopped until Elliott jumped up and seized his hat.

“Is this studio a bird-cage?” he demanded bitterly.

Clifford said something about jail-birds and picked up his cornet. For an hour he played “’Tite Femme” and “Place aux Gosses.” But when he attacked “The Emperor’s Funeral March,” Elliott seized him.

“Let go,” said Clifford sullenly.

“No. See here, Clifford, let’s be friends and let’s try to be practical. We’ve got to make our living for the next three months. Let’s stop squabbling and hold a conference. Will you?”

“Yes,” replied Clifford amiably.

“Then where do we dine?”

“We haven’t lunched yet.”

“This is awful,” muttered Elliott, staring at the canaries; “do you suppose we could eat those birds?”

In the silence that ensued a piano began in the studio above, and a voice sang:

“Et qu’elle est folle dans sa joie, Lorsq’elle chante le matin,— Lorsqu’en tirant son bas de soie, Elle fait; sur son flanc qui ploie, Craquer son corset de satin!”