Lords of the North

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The Mute's eyes were back on the snow.

"Now," said I, "I'll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the
place where he's hiding."

Paul's eyes looked up with the question of how much.

"Five pounds a day." This was four more than we paid for the cariboo
hunts.

Again he stood thinking, then darted off into the forest like a hare;
but I knew his strange, silent ways, and confidently awaited his return.
How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five
minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous
half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods; but he was back again
all equipped for a long tramp, and as soon as I had laced on the
racquets, we were skimming over the drift like a boat on billows. In the
mazy confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Paul would have found
and kept that tangled, forest path. Where great trunks had fallen across
the way, Paul planted his pole and took the barrier at a bound. Then he
raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot
common to the _coureurs-des-bois_. The encased branches snapped like
glass when we brushed past, and so heavily were snow and icicles frozen
to the trees we might have been in some grotesque crystal-walled cavern.
The _habitant_ spoke not a word, but on we pressed over the brushwood,
now so packed with snow and crusted ice, our snow-shoes were not once
tripped by loose branches, and we glided from drift to drift. In vain I
tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, and I
noticed that my guide was keeping his course by following the marks
blazed on trees. At one place we came to a steep, clear slope, where the
earth had fallen sheer away from the hillside and snow had filled the
incline. First prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid,
Paul promptly sat down on the rear end of his snow-shoes, and, quicker
than I can tell it, tobogganed down to the valley. I came leaping
clumsily from point to point with my pole, like a ski-jumping Norwegian,
risking my neck at every bound. Then we coursed along the valley, the
_habitant's_ eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a
gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up
sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were over a
prospect of sugaring-off in the maple-woods, or at some foolish
_habitant_ who had tapped the maple too early. How often had I known my
guide to exhaust city athletes in these swift marches of his! But I had
been schooled to his pace from boyhood and kept up with him at every
step, though we were going so fast I lost all track of my bearings.

"Where to, Paul?" I asked with a vague suspicion that we were heading
for the Huron village at Lorette. "To Lorette, Paul?"

But Paul condescended only a grunt and whisked suddenly round a headland
up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the
mountains and might have sheltered any number of fugitives. In the gorge
we stopped to take a light meal of gingerbread horses--a cake that is
the peculiar glory of the _habitant_--dried herrings and sea biscuits.
By the sun, I knew it was long past noon and that we had been traveling
northwest. I also vaguely guessed that Paul's object was to intercept
the North-West trappers, if they had planned to slip away from the St.
Lawrence through the bush to the Upper Ottawa, where they could meet
north-bound boats. But not one syllable had my taciturn guide uttered.
Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, we found ourselves in
the upper reaches of a mountain, where the trees fell away in scraggy
clumps and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the hill-crest.
Paul grunted, licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to
the hill-top. The dark peak of a solitary wigwam appeared above the
snow. He pointed again to the fringe of woods below us. A dozen wigwams
were visible among the trees and smoke curled up from a central
camp-fire.

"_Voila, Monsieur?_" said the _habitant_, which made four words for that
day.

The Mute then fell to my rear and we first approached the general camp.
The campers were evidently thieves as well as hunters; for frozen pork
hung with venison from the branches of several trees. The sap trough
might also have belonged to them, which would explain Paul's laugh, as
the whole paraphernalia of a sugaring-off was on the outskirts of the
encampment.

"Not the Indians we're after," said I, noting the signs of permanency;
but Paul Larocque shoved me forward with the end of his pole and a
curious, almost intelligent, expression came on the dull, pock-pitted
face. Strangely enough, as I looked over my shoulder to the guide, I
caught sight of an Indian figure climbing up the bank in our very
tracks. The significance of this incident was to reveal itself later.

As usual, a pack of savage dogs flew out to announce our coming with
furious barking. But I declare the _habitant_ was so much like any
ragged Indian, the creatures recognized him and left off their vicious
snarl. Only the shrill-voiced children, who rushed from the wigwams;
evinced either surprise or interest in our arrival. Men and women were
haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the
savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as
much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they
sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting
for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women
were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the
circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, lay
in all variety of lazy attitudes on buffalo robes and caribou skins.

I had known, as every one familiar with Quebec's family histories must
know, that the sons of old seigneurs sometimes inherited the adventurous
spirit, which led their ancestors of three centuries ago to exchange the
gayeties of the French court for the wild life of the new world.
I was aware this spirit frequently transformed seigneurs
into bush-rangers and descendants of the royal blood into
_coureurs-des-bois_. But it is one thing to know a fact, another to see
that fact in living embodiment; and in this case, the living embodiment
was Louis Laplante, a school-fellow of Laval, whom, to my amazement, I
now saw, with a beard of some months' growth and clad in buckskin, lying
at full length on his back among that villainous band of nondescript
trappers. Something of the surprise I felt must have shown on my face,
for as Louis recognized me he uttered a shout of laughter.

"Hullo, Gillespie!" he called with the saucy nonchalance which made him
both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the
prophets?" and he sat up making room for me on his buffalo robe.

"I'll wager, Louis," said I, shaking his hand heartily and accepting the
proffered seat, "I'll wager it's prophets spelt with an 'f' brings you
here." For the young rake had been one of the most notorious borrowers
at the seminary.

"Good boy!" laughed he, giving my shoulder a clap. "I see your time was
not wasted with me. Now, what the devil," he asked as I surveyed the
motley throng of fat, coarse-faced squaws and hard-looking men who
surrounded him, "now, what the devil's brought you here?"

"What's the same, to yourself, Louis lad?" said I. He laughed the merry,
heedless laugh that had been the distraction of the class-room.

"Do you need to ask with such a galaxy of nut-brown maidens?" and Louis
looked with the assurance of privileged impudence straight across the
fire into the hideous, angry face of a big squaw, who was glaring at me.
The creature was one to command attention. She might have been a great,
bronze statue, a type of some ancient goddess, a symbol of fury, or
cruelty. Her eyes fastened themselves on mine and held me, whether I
would or no, while her whole face darkened.

"The lady evidently objects to having her place usurped, Louis," I
remarked, for he was watching the silent duel between the native woman's
questioning eyes and mine.

"The gentleman wants to know if the lady objects to having her place
usurped?" called Louis to the squaw.

At that the woman flinched and looked to Laplante. Of course, she did
not understand our words; but I think she was suspicious we were
laughing at her. There was a vindictive flash across her face, then the
usual impenetrable expression of the Indian came over her features. I
noticed that her cheeks and forehead were scarred, and a cut had laid
open her upper lip from nose to teeth.

"You must know that the lady is the daughter of a chief and a fighter,"
whispered Louis in my ear.

I might have known she was above common rank from the extraordinary
number of trinkets she wore. Pendants hung from her ears like the
pendulum of a clock. She had a double necklace of polished bear's claws
and around her waist was a girdle of agates, which to me proclaimed that
she was of a far-western tribe. In the girdle was an ivory-handled
knife, which had doubtless given as many scars as its owner displayed.

"What tribe, Louis?" I asked.

"I'll be hanged, now, if I'm not jealous," he began. "You'll stare the
lady out of countenance----" But at this moment the Indian who had come
up the bank behind us came round and interrupted Laplante's merriment by
tossing a piece of bethumbed paper between my comrade's knees.

"The deuce!" exclaimed Louis, bulging his tongue into one cheek and
glancing at me with a queer, quizzical look as he unfolded and read the
paper.

If he had not spoken I might not have turned; but having turned I could
not but notice two things. Louis jerked back from me, as if I might try
to read the soiled note in his hand, and in raising the paper displayed
on the back the stamp of the commissariat department from Quebec
Citadel.

Neither Laplante's suppressed surprise, nor my observations of his
movement, escaped the big squaw. She came quickly round the fire to us
both.

"Give me that," she commanded, holding out her hand to the French youth.

"The deuce I will," he returned, twisting the paper up in his clenched
fist. Half in jest, half in earnest, just as Louis used to be punished
at the seminary, she gave him a prompt box on the ear. He took it in
perfect good-nature. And the whole encampment laughed. The squaw went
back to the other side of the fire. Laplante leaned forward and threw
the paper towards the flames; but without his knowledge, he overshot the
mark; and when the trader was looking elsewhere the big squaw stooped,
picked up the coveted note and slipped it into her skirt pocket.

"Now, Louis, nonsense aside," I began.

"With all my soul, if I have one," said he, lying back languidly with a
perceptible cooling of the cordiality he had first evinced.

I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every wigwam for trace
of the lost woman and child. He listened with shut eyes.

"It isn't," I explained in a low voice, eager to arouse his interest,
"it isn't in the least, Laplante, that we suspect these people; but you
know the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to your people----"

"Oh! Go ahead!" he interjected impatiently. "Don't beat round the bush!
What do you want of me?"

"To go through the tents with me and help me. By Jove! Laplante! I
thought at least a spark of the man would suggest that without my
speaking," I broke out hotly.

He was on his feet with an alacrity that brought old Paul Larocque round
to my side and the squaw to his.

"Curse you," he cried out roughly, shoving the squaw back. For a moment
I was uncertain whether he were addressing the woman or myself. "You
mind your own business and go to your Indian! Here, Gillespie, I'll do
the tents with you. Get off with you," he muttered at the squaw,
rumbling out a lingo of persuasive expletives; and he led the way to the
first wigwam.

But the squaw was not to be dismissed; for when I followed the
Frenchman, she closed in behind looking thunder, not at her abuser, but
at me; and The Mute, fearing foul play and pole in hand, loyally brought
up the rear of our strange procession. I shall not retail that search
through robes and skins and blankets and boxes, in foul-smelling,
vermin-infested wigwams. It was fruitless. I only recall the lowering
face of the big squaw looking over my shoulder at every turn, with
heavy brows contracted and gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious
challenge. I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory
handle in the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his
beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole.

Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the
fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the
child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the
squaw on the other.

"And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked
Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill.

The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence
among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching.
Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest
attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him
suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether
he would or no, just as she had mine.

"Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting
possession of me. "Why don't you answer?"

The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face
accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with
downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.

"You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should
have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't
lead you into it."

"Well?" I demanded.

"Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the
squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and
we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why
we're all here. You must go. It is not safe."

"Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand
when I made to take leave.

"Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on
the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of
the valley.

Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have
no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this
century. The _habitant_ is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and
accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to
the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried
down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I
remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a
skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled
that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this
disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If
the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within a mile of
the pest tent? It would be more like Indian character to reverse
Samaritan practises and leave the victim to die. This man might, of
course, be a French-Canadian trapper, but I would take no risks of a
trick, so I ordered Paul to lead me back to that tepee.

The Mute seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers.
He skirted round the base of the hill till we were on the side remote
from the tribe. Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he
scrambled up the cliff to reconnoitre. I knew he received a surprise as
soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank; for he curled
himself up behind a snow-pile and gave a low whistle for me. I was
beside him with one bound. We were not twenty pole-lengths from the
wigwam. There was no appearance of life. The tent flaps had been laced
up and a solitary watch-dog was tied to a stake before the entrance.
Down the valley the setting sun shone through the naked trees like a
wall of fire, and dyed all the glistening snow-drifts primrose and opal.
At one place in the forest the red light burst through and struck
against the tent on the hill-top, giving the skins a peculiar appearance
of being streaked with blood. The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh
of moving air-currents peculiar to snow-padded areas, came up from the
woods with far-away echoes of the trappers' voices. Perhaps this was
heard by the watch-dog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of
my half-wild _habitant_ guide; for it sat back on its haunches and
throwing up its head, let out the most doleful howlings imaginable.

"Oh! _Monsieur_," shuddered out the superstitious habitant shivering
like an aspen leaf, "sick man moan,--moan,--moan hard! He die,
_Monsieur_, he die, he die now when dog cry lak dat," and full of fear
he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent gestures for me to
follow.

For a time--but not long, I must acknowledge--I lay there alone,
watching and listening. Paul's ears might hear the moans of a sick man,
mine could not: nor would I return to the Chateau without ascertaining
for a certainty what was in that wigwam. Slipping off the snow-shoes, I
rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the
dog with my pole; but I was suddenly arrested by the distinct sound of
pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and
with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a
vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper,
popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect
English--"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!"

"Who has smallpox?" I bawled back.

"A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it
on the snow and I'll come for it."

As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not
particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man
from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and
hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change
towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the
big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a
significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions
like those of my _habitant_ guide, which instinctively put out feelers
with the caution of an insect's antennae for the presence of vague,
unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the
incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding
information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition
to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one
missing factor--Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante
had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the
novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly
and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not
a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and
Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed
learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips
on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when
he opened his lips to me.

CHAPTER IV

LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN

"You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated
Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my
experience with the campers; and was recounting how the man put his head
out of the tent and warned me of smallpox. But my uncle was a gentleman
of the old school and had a fine contempt for quarantine.

"Knocked his head off, knocked his head off, Sir," he continued,
explosively. "Make it a point to knock the head off anything that stands
in your way, Sir----"

"But you don't suppose," I expostulated, about to voice my own
suspicions.

"_Suppose!_" he roared out. "I make it a point never to _suppose_
anything. I act on facts, Sir! You wanted to go into that wigwam; didn't
you? Well then, why the deuce didn't you go, and knock the head off
anything that opposed you?"

Being highly successful in all his own dealings, Mr. Jack MacKenzie
could not tolerate failure in other people. A month of vigilant
searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Miriam and the child;
and this fact ignited all the gunpowder of my uncle's fiery
temperament. We had felt so sure Le Grand Diable's band of vagabonds
would hang about till the brigades of the North-West Company's tripmen
set out for the north, all our efforts were spent in a vain search for
some trace of the rascals in the vicinity of Quebec. His gypsy
nondescripts would hardly dare to keep the things taken from Miriam and
the child. These would be traded to other tribes; so day and night, Mr.
MacKenzie, Eric and I, with hired spies, dogged the footsteps of
trappers, who were awaiting the breaking up of the ice; shadowed
_voyageurs_, who passed idle days in the dram-shops of Lower Town, and
scrutinized every native who crossed our path, ever on the alert for a
glimpse of Diable, or his associates. Diligently we tracked all Indian
trails through Charlesbourg forest and examined every wigwam within a
week's march of the city. Le Grand Diable was not likely to be among his
ancestral enemies at Lorette, but his half-breed followers might have
traded with the Hurons; and the lodges at Lorette were also searched.
Watches were set along the St. Lawrence, so no one could approach an
opening before the ice broke up, or launch a canoe after the water had
cleared, without our knowledge. But Le Grand Diable and his band had
vanished as mysteriously as Miriam. It was as impossible to learn where
the Iroquois had gone as to follow the wind. His disappearance was
altogether as unaccountable as the lost woman's, and this, of itself,
confirmed our suspicions. Had he sold, or slain his captives, he would
not have remained in hiding; and the very fruitlessness of the search
redoubled our zeal.

The conviction that Louis Laplante had, somehow or other, played me
false, stuck in my mind like the depression of a bad dream. Again and
again, I related the circumstances to my uncle; but he "pished," and
"tushed," and "pooh-poohed," the very idea of any kidnappers remaining
so near the city and giving me free run of their wigwams. My reasonless
persistence was beginning to irritate him. Indeed, on one occasion, he
informed me that I had as many vagaries in my head as a "bed-ridden
hag," and with great fervor he "wished to the Lord there was a law in
this land for the ham-stringing of such fool idiots, as that _habitant_
Mute, who led me such a wild-goose chase."

In spite of this and many other jeremiades, I once more donned
snow-shoes and with Paul for guide paid a second visit to the campers of
the gorge. And a second time, I was welcomed by Louis and taken through
the wigwams. The smallpox tent was no longer on the crest of the hill;
and when I asked after the patient, Louis without a word pointed
solemnly to a snow-mound, where the man lay buried. But I did not see
the big squaw, nor the face that had emerged from the tent flaps to wave
me off; and when I also inquired after these, Louis' face darkened. He
told me bluntly I was asking too many questions and began to swear in a
mongrel jargon of French and English that my conduct was an insult he
would take from no man. But Louis was ever short of temper. I remembered
that of old. Presently his little flare-up died down, and he told me
that the woman and her husband had gone north through the woods to join
some crews on the Upper Ottawa. From the talk of the others, I gathered
that, having disposed of their hunt to the commissariat department at
the Citadel, they intended to follow the same trail within a few days. I
tried without questioning to learn what crews they were to join; but
whether with purpose, or by chance, the conversation drifted from my
lead and I had to return to the city without satisfaction on that point.

Meanwhile, Hamilton rested neither night nor day. In the morning with a
few hurried words he would outline the plan for the day. At night he
rode back to the Chateau with such eager questioning in his eyes when
they met mine, I knew he had nothing better to report to me, than I to
him. After a silent meal, he would ride through the dark forest on a
fresh mount. How and where he passed those sleepless nights, I do not
know. Thus had a month slipped away; and we had done everything and
accomplished nothing. Baffled, I had gone to confer with Mr. Jack
MacKenzie and had, as usual, exasperated him with the reiterated
conviction that Adderly and the Citadel writing paper and Louis Laplante
had some connection with the malign influence that was balking our
efforts.

"Fudge!" exclaims my uncle, stamping about his study and puffing with
indignation. "You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head
off!"

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