Chapter 19

THE LONG TRAIL

Each day that passed set its seal deeper into the heart and soul of David Drennen. His eyes grew harder, his mouth sterner. There came into his face the lines of his relentless hatred. Sinister and morose and implacable, biding his time and nursing his purpose, he grew to be more than ever before the lone wolf. His lips which had long ago forgotten how to smile were constantly set in an ugly snarl. His purpose possessed him so completely that it had grown into an obsession. It became little less than maniacal.

He seemed a man whose emotions were gone, swallowed up in a cool determination. There came no flush to his face, no quickened beating of his heart when the trail seemed hot before him, no evidence of disappointment when again and again he learned that he had followed a false scent and that he was no nearer his prey than he had been at the beginning. He was still unhurrying as when he had ridden out of MacLeod's Settlement. He would find what he sought to-day or ten years from to-day. His vengeance would lose nothing through delay. On the other hand, it would fall the heavier. Of late he had become endowed with an infinite patience.

The last thought in his brain at night was the first thought when he woke. It was unchanging day after day, week after week, month after month. If he must wait even longer it would remain unaltered year after year.

His eyes had grown to be keener than knives, restless, watchful, bright with suspicion. Nowhere throughout the breadth of the land did he have a friend. What he felt for others was paid back to him in his own currency: distrust, dislike, silence.

But, through whatever far distances he went, he was generally known by repute and inspired interest. Men stood aloof but they watched him and spoke of him among themselves. No longer did they call him No-luck Drennen. He came to be known as Lucky Drennen. Word had gone about that it was indeed true that he had rediscovered the old, lost Golden Girl and that he had made a fortune from its sale to the Northwestern people. The mine was operating already; experts said that it was greater than the Duchess which electrified the mining world in 1897 when Copworth and Kennely brought it into prominence; and the Golden Girl was paying a royalty to David Drennen. Drennen himself did not know how his account at the Lebarge bank took upon itself new importance every third month when Marshall Sothern deposited the tenth share of the net receipts.

Seeking Ygerne Bellaire and those with her, Drennen had gone from Fanning into Whirlwind Valley, across the Pass and into the forests beyond Neuve Patrie. He had followed rumours of three men and a woman and after six or seven weeks came upon them, trappers and the wife of one of them. He showed nothing of his emotions as he stared at them with cold, hard eyes. He went back to Fanning, crossed the MacLeod to Brunswick Towers and to the new village of Qu' Appelle. Spring had passed into summer and he had had no clue which was not a lie like the first. In all seeming the earth had opened to receive those whom he followed.

Since he so seldom spoke, since when he did it was to ask concerning three men and a woman, those who knew anything of him at all knew that he was seeking Sefton, Lemarc, Garcia and a girl whom those who had heard of her from the men of MacLeod's Settlement, called "the Princess." A figure of interest already, Drennen gained double interest now.

"He'll find them one day, _mes chers_," grunted the big blacksmith at St. Anne's. "He'll do anything, that man. _Le bon Diable_ is his papa. _Hein_? _Voyez, mon petit stupide_! Last week, because he needs no more and because the devil likes him, he finds gold again in the Nez Cassé! _Nom d'un gros porc_! But who has dreamed to find gold in the Nez Cassé? Oho! Some day he comes up with three man and _la princesse_. And then . . ."

He broke off, plunging his hot iron into his tub of water, so that the hissing of the heated metal and the angry puff of steam might conclude in fitting eloquence the thing he had in mind.

Once, just after Drennen had for the second time in six months found gold, he heard the new epithet which had been given him: Lucky Drennen. He turned and stared at the man who had spoken the name so that the fellow fell back, flushing and paling under the terrible eyes. Then, with his snarling laugh, Drennen passed on.

Until the winter came to lock the gateways into the mountains he was everywhere the adventurous were pushing in the land of the North Woods. He was the last man to take the trail from Gabrielle to the open.

But though winter lifted a frozen hand to drive him back he did not for a single day give over his search. He went then down to the railroads. Banff knew him and came to know just as much of his story as it could guess from the eternal question in his heart and now and then on his lips, and from the fact that he had money. Vancouver knew him, coming and going where a man might search such quarry as his, in gambling halls, high and low, in cafes, at hotels. For he had had a hint that perhaps Ygerne and the men with her had gone on to Vancouver.

In January he drew heavily against his account in the bank of Lebarge. The money, or at least a great part of it, went to a detective agency in Vancouver, another in Victoria, another even as far east as Quebec. Money went also to New Orleans and brought him no little information of the earlier lives of Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc, together with the assurance that neither of them had returned to the South.

Thus he learned the story which he had refused to hear from her own lips, the reason of her flight from New Orleans. Having no parents living, she had lived in the household of her guardian, a merchant named Jules Bondaine. She had had trouble with Bondaine, the cause of the affair not being clearly understood except by Bondaine himself, the girl and, perhaps, Marc Lemarc, her cousin. The confidential agency in the southern city to which Drennen had turned apprised him of these facts and let him draw his own deductions: It was known that Lemarc was a suitor for the girl's hand; that Bondaine had seemed very strongly to favour Lemarc; that Bondaine was high-handed, Ygerne Bellaire high-tempered; that, at a time when Mme. Bondaine and her two daughters were away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hot dispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shot her guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it not been for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the household servants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleans and had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.

"Appearances would indicate," ran a little initialled note at the end of the report, "that Bondaine and Lemarc had been in some way trying to coerce Miss Bellaire and that she had shot her way out of the discussion. It is to be inferred, however, that she made up with her cousin, as he disappeared the same night and (merely rumoured) was seen with her upon the night train out of Baton Rouge."

Throughout the winter Drennen pressed the search as his instinct or some chance hint directed. No small part of his plan was to keep in touch with the movements of Lieutenant Max of the Northwest Mounted. He knew that the young officer was almost as single purposed and determined as himself; he learned that as the winter went by Max had met with no success. From Max himself, encountered in February in Revelstoke, he learned why the law wanted Sefton and Lemarc. There were in all five complaints lodged against them, four of them being the same thing, namely, the obtaining of large sums of money under false pretences. The fourth of these complaints had been lodged by no less a person than big Kootanie George.

"They came to George with a cock and bull story about buried treasure," grunted Max. "A gag as old as the moon and as easy to see on a clear night! It's rather strange," and he set his keen eyes searchingly upon Drennen's impassive face, "that they didn't take a chance on you."

"I'm called Lucky Drennen nowadays," answered Drennen coolly. "Maybe my luck was just beginning then."

The fifth charge lay against Sefton. He had brought an unsavory reputation with him from the States, and there would be other charges against him from that quarter. He had mixed with a bad crowd in Vancouver, had gotten into a gambling concern, "on the right side of the table," and had "slit his own pardner's throat, both figuratively and literally, making away with the boodle."

"Ten years ago they might have got away with this sort of thing," said Max. "It's too late now. The law's come and come to stay. I'm going to get them, and I'm going to do it before snow flies again."

Drennen shrugged. Max wouldn't get them at all; he, David Drennen, was going to see to that. This was just a part of Max's duty; it was the supreme desire of Drennen's life.

Although, during the cold, white months, Drennen was much back and forth along the railroad, he avoided Fort Wayland which was now the headquarters of the western division of the Northwestern Mining Company. Since the late spring day when he had left Lebarge to return to MacLeod's Settlement, he had not seen Marshall Sothern. Once, in the late autumn, he had found a letter from Sothern waiting for him at the bank In Lebarge. He left a brief answer to be forwarded, saying simply:

"I want to see you, but not now. After I have finished the work which I have to do, perhaps when next spring comes, we can take our hunting trip."

When the spring came it brought Drennen with it into the North Woods. He knew that the three whom he sought, the four counting Garcia whom he had not forgotten, might have slipped down across the border and into the States. But he did not believe that they had done so. The law was looking for them there, too, and they would stay here until the law had had time to forget them a little.

Again came long, monotonous months of seeking which were to end as they had begun. He pushed further north than he had been before, taking long trails stubbornly, his muscles grown like iron as he drove them to new tasks. He skirted the Bad Water country, made his way through Ste. Marie, St. Stephen, Bois du Lac, Haut Verre, Louise la Reine, and dipped into the unknown region of Sasnokee-keewan. He caught a false rumour and turned back, threading the Forest d'Enfer, coming again through Bois du Lac and into Sasnokee-keewan late in August. Disappointment again, and again he turned toward the Nine Lakes. At Belle Fortune, the first stop, the last village he would see for many days, he met Marshall Sothern.

Sothern was standing in front of the village inn, his hand upon the lead-rope of a sturdy pack mule. The two men looked at each other intently, Drennen showing no surprise, Sothern experiencing none. It was the older man who first put out his hand.

"I've been looking for you, Dave," he said quietly. "I'm taking my vacation, the first in seven years. I've followed you from the railroad. We're going to take our trip together now."

Drennen nodded.

"I'm glad to see you, sir," he answered quietly.

"Which way are you headed now?" asked Sothern.

"It doesn't matter. I am in no hurry. I was going toward the Nine Lakes, but . . ."

"You think that they have gone that way?"

Again Drennen nodded; again he failed to manifest any surprise.

"I am not sure," he said. "But the only way to be sure is to go and find out."

So together father and son packed out of Belle Fortune, headed toward the Nine Lakes in the heart of the unknown land of Sasnokee-keewan. Unknown because it is a land of short summers and long, hard winters; because no man had ever found the precious metals here; because there is little game such as trappers venture into the far out places to get; because it is broken, rough, inhospitable. But, for a thousandth time, a vague rumour had come to Drennen that those whom he sought had pushed on here ahead of him and methodically he was running down each rumour.

Perhaps not a hundred men in a hundred years had come here before them. The forests, tall and black and filled with gloom, were about them everywhere. Their trail they made, and there were days when from sunrise to sunset they did not progress five miles. Their two pack animals found insecure footing; death awaited them hourly upon many a day at the bottom of some sheer walled cliff. They climbed with the sharp slopes on the mountains, they dropped down into the narrow, flinty cañons, they heard only the swish of tree tops and the quarrelling of streams lost to their eyes in the depths below them. And they came in two weeks to Blue Lake having seen no other man or other trail than their own.

They were silent days. Neither man asked a question of the other and neither referred to what lay deepest in his own breast. There was sympathy between them, and it grew stronger day by day, but it was a sympathy akin to that of the solitudes, none the less eloquent because it was wordless. Sothern informed Drennen once, out of the customary silence about the evening camp fire, that he was taking an indefinite vacation; that there was a man in his place with the Northwestern who was amply qualified to remain there permanently if Sothern did not come back at all.

They sought to water at Blue Lake, so little known then and now already one of the curiosities of the North and found its waters both luke warm and salty. Although the lake is less than a quarter of a mile long they were two hours in reaching the head. The mountains come down steeply on all sides, the timber stands thick, boulders are scattered everywhere, and it was already dark.

This is the first of the Nine Lakes when one approaches from the south. Less than a hundred yards further north, its surface a third of that distance above the level of Blue Lake, is Lake Wachong. It has no visible connection with Blue Lake except when, with the heavy spring thaw, there is a thin trickle of water down the boulders. Here they camped for the night.

"We would have seen a trail if they had gone ahead of us this year, Dave," Sothern remarked, referring for the first time in many days to the matter which was always in Drennen's mind.

"There's another way in," Drennen told him. "They'd have gone that way. It's north of here and easier. But we save forty or fifty miles this way."

There had been a recent discovery of gold at a little place called Ruminoff Shanty, newly named Gold River. This, lying still eighty miles to the north, was Drennen's objective point. The old rumour had come to him a shade more definite this time. In the crowd pushing northward had been three men and a woman, one of the men looked like a Mexican and the woman was young and of rare beauty. But that had not been all. A man named Kootanie George with another man wearing the uniform of the Royal Northwest Mounted had followed them. These had all gone by the beaten trail; Drennen saw that if he came before Kootanie George and Max to the four he sought he must take his chances with the short cut.

The next night they camped at the upper end of the fourth of the string of little lakes. And that evening they saw, far off to the westward, the faint hint of smoke against the early stars, the up-flying sparks, which spoke of another campfire upon the crest of the ridge.

The old man bent his penetrating gaze upon his son. Drennen's face, as usual, was impassive.

"My boy," said Sothern very gently, "you are sure that you have made no mistake? The girl is no better than her companions?"

"They merely kill a man for his gold," returned Drennen steadily. "She plays with a man's soul and kills it when she has done."

There were deep lines of sadness about Sothern's mouth; the eyes which forsook Drennen's face and turned to the glitter of the stars were unutterably sad.

"The sins of the father . . ." he muttered. Then suddenly, an electric change in the man, he flung himself to his feet, his hands thrown out toward his son.

"By God! Dave," he cried harshly; "they're not worth it! Let them go! We can turn off here where the world is good because men haven't come into it. The mountains can draw the poison out of a man's heart, Dave. There is room for the two of us, boy, for you and me on a trail of our own. Leave them for Max and Kootanie George. . . . Come with me. Do you hear me, Dave, boy? We don't need the world now we've . . . we've got each other!"

Drennen shook his head.

"I've got my work to do," he said quietly. "I think it'll be done soon now. And then . . . then we'll go away together, Dad. Just the two of us."