For Jingoss had been awaiting eagerly this fall of snow, as this immediate change of direction showed. He was sure that now they could no longer follow him. It was for this he had lured them farther and farther into the wilderness, waiting for the great enemy of them all to cover his track, to throw across his vanishing figure her ultimate denial of their purposes. At once, convinced of his safety, he turned to the west and southwest.
At just what moment he discovered that he was still followed it was impossible to determine. But very shortly a certain indecision could be read in the signs of his journeying. He turned to the south, changed his mind, doubled on his tracks like a rabbit, finally, his purpose decided, he shot away on the direct line again for the frozen reaches of desolation in the north.
The moment's flicker of encouragement lighted by the success of the dog, fell again to blackness as the three faced further incursion into the land of starvation. They had allowed themselves for a moment to believe that the Indian might now have reached the limit of his intention; that now he might turn toward a chance at least of life. But this showed that his purpose, or obstinacy or madness remained unchanged, and this newer proof indicated that it possessed a depth of determination that might lead to any extreme. They had to readjust themselves to the idea. Perforce they had to extend their faith, had to believe in the caribou herds. From every little rise they looked abroad, insisting on a childish confidence in the existence of game. They could not afford to take the reasonable view, could not afford to estimate the chances against their encountering in all that vastness of space the single pin-point where grazed abundance.
From time to time, thereafter, the snow fell. On the mere fact of their persistence it had litle effect; but it clogged their snow-shoes, it wore them down. A twig tripped them; and the efforts of all three were needed to aid one to rise. A dozen steps were all they could accomplish without rest; a dozen short, stumbling steps that were, nevertheless, so many mile-posts in the progress to their final exhaustion. When one fell, he lay huddled, unable at once to rally his vital forces to attempt the exertion of regaining his feet. The day's journey was pitifully short, pitifully inadequate to the imperious demands of that onward-leading Trail, and yet each day's journey lessened the always desperate chance of a return to the game country. In spite of that, it never again crossed their minds that it might be well to abandon the task. They might die, but it would be on the Trail, and the death clutch of their fingers would still be extended toward the north, where dwelt their enemy, and into whose protective arms their quarry had fled.
As his strength ebbed Dick Herron's energies concentrated more and more to his monomania of pursuit. The round, full curves of his body had shrunken to angles, the fresh tints of his skin had turned to leather, the flesh of his cheeks had sunken, his teeth showed in the drawing back of his lips. All these signs spoke of exhaustion and of ultimate collapse. But as the case grew more desperate, he seemed to discover in some unsuspected quality of his spirit, or perhaps merely of his youth, a fitful and wonderful power. He collapsed from weakness, to be sure; but in a moment his iron will, apparently angered to incandescence, got him to his feet and on his way with an excess of energy. He helped the others. He urged the dog. And then slowly the fictitious vigour ran out. The light, the red, terrible glare of madness, faded from his eye; it became glazed and lifeless; his shoulders dropped; his head hung; he fell.
Gradually in the transition period between the darkness of winter and the coming of spring the world took on an unearthly aspect. It became an inferno of light without corresponding warmth, of blinding, flaring, intolerable light reflected from the snow. It became luminous, as though the ghosts of the ancient days of incandescence had revisited the calendar. It was raw, new, huge, uncouth, embryonic, adapted to the production of tremendous monsters, unfit for the habitation of tiny men with delicate physical and mental adjustments. Only to the mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And low in the sky danced in unholy revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping feebly amid phantasmagoria.
The great light, the dazzle, the glitter, the incessant movement of the mirages, the shining of the mock suns, all these created an impression of heat, of light, of the pleasantness of a warmed land. Yet still persisted, only modified by the sun, the cold of the northern winter. And this denial of appearance sufficed to render unreal all the round globe, so that at any moment the eye anticipated its crumbling like a dust apple, with its cold, its vastness, its emptiness, its hunger, its indecently many suns, leaving the human soul in the abyss of space. The North threw over them the power of her spell, so that to them the step from life to death seemed a short, an easy, a natural one to take.
Nevertheless their souls made struggle, as did their bodies. They fought down the feeling of illusion just as they had fought down the feelings of hunger, of weariness, and of cold. Sam fashioned rough wooden spectacles with tiny transverse slits through which to look, and these they assumed against the snow-blindness. They kept a sharp watch for freezing. Already their faces were blackened and parched by the frost, and cracked through the thick skin down to the raw. Sam had frozen his great toe, and had with his knife cut to the bone in order to prevent mortification. They tried to talk a little in order to combat by unison of spirit the dreadful influence the North was bringing to bear. They gained ten feet as a saint of the early church gained his soul for paradise.
Now it came to the point where they could no longer afford to eat their pemmican. They boiled it, along with strips of the rawhide dog-harness, and drank the soup. It sufficed not at all to appease the pain of their hunger, nor appreciably did it give them strength, but somehow it fed the vital spark. They endured fearful cramps. So far had their faculties lost vigour that only by a distinct effort of the will could they focus their eyes to the examination of any object.
Their obsessions of mind were now two. They followed the Trail; they looked for the caribou herds. After a time the improbability became tenuous. They actually expected the impossible, felt defrauded at not obtaining it, cried out weakly against their ill fortune in not encountering the herd that was probably two thousand miles away. In its withholding the North seemed to play unfairly. She denied them the chances of the game.
And the Trail! Not the freezing nor the starvation nor the illusion were so potent in the deeper discouragement of the spirit as that. Always it led on. They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all. Tireless it ran on and on and on. For all they knew the Indian, hearty and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them, gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day. This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact. They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength, with swiftness, with the sustenance of life. Yet never for a moment did it occur to them to abandon the pursuit.
Sam was growing uncertain in his movements; Dick was plainly going mad. The girl followed; that was all one could say, for whatever suffering she proved was hidden beneath race stolidity, and more nobly beneath a great devotion.
And then late one afternoon they came to a bloody spot on the snow. Here Jingoss had killed. Here he had found what had been denied them, what they needed so sorely. The North was on his side. He now had meat in plenty, and meat meant strength, and strength meant swiftness, and swiftness meant the safety of this world for him and the certainty of the next for them. The tenuous hope that had persisted through all the psychological pressure the North had brought to bear, the hope that they had not even acknowledged to themselves, the hope based merely on the circumstance that they did not know, was routed by this one fact. Now they could no longer shelter behind the flimsy screen of an ignorance of their enemy's condition. They knew. The most profound discouragement descended on them.
But even yet they did not yield to the great antagonist. The strength of meat lacked them: the strength of despair remained. A rapid dash might bring them to grapples. And somewhere in the depths of their indomitable spirits, somewhere in the line of their hardy, Anglo-Saxon descent, they knew they would find the necessary vitality.
Stars glittered like sparks on polished steel. On the northwest wind swooped the chill of the winter's end, and in that chill was the breath of the North. Sam Bolton, crushed by the weight of a great exhaustion, recognised the familiar menace, and raised his head, gazing long from glazed eyes out into the Silent Places.
"Not yet!" he said aloud.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
But the next morning he was unable to rise. The last drop of his vitality had run out. At length the connection between his will and his body had been severed, so that the latter was no longer under his command. After the first moment he knew well enough what this meant, knew that here he must die, here he must lie crushed finally under the sheer weight of his antagonist. It was as though she, the great North, had heard his defiant words the night before, and thus proved to him their emptiness.
And yet the last reserves of the old man's purpose were not yet destroyed. Here he must remain, it is true, but still he possessed next his hand the human weapon he had carried so far and so painfully by the exercise of his ingenuity and the genius of his long experience. He had staggered under its burden as far as he could; now was the moment for launching it. He called the young man to him.
"I cannot go on," said he, in gasps. "Leave the sledge. Take the dog. Do not lose him. Travel fast. You must get him by to-morrow night. Sleep some to-night. Travel fast."
Dick nodded. He understood. Already the scarlet hate, the dogged mad glare of a set purpose was glazing his vision. It was the sprint at the end of the race. He need no longer save himself.
He took a single blanket and the little shreds of dog meat that remained. Some of the pemmican, a mere scrap, he left with Sam. Mack he held in leash.
"I will live five days," went on Sam, "perhaps six. I will try to live. If you should come back in that time,—with meat—the caribou—you understand." His voice trailed away, unwilling to mock the face of probability with such a chance.
Dick nodded again. He had nothing to say. He wrung the old man's hand and turned away.
Mack thrust his nose forward. They started. Sam, left alone, rolled himself again in his thick coverings under the snow, which would protect him from the night cold. There he would lie absolutely motionless, hoarding the drops of his life. From time to time, at long intervals, he would taste the pemmican. And characteristically enough, his regret, his sorrow, was, not that he must be left to perish, not even that he must acknowledge himself beaten, but that he was deprived of the chance for this last desperate dash before death stooped.
When Dick stepped out on the trail, May-may-gwán followed. After a moment he took cognisance of the crunch of her snow-shoes behind him. He turned and curtly ordered her back. She persisted. Again he turned, his face nervous with all the strength he had summoned for the final effort, shouting at her hoarsely, laying on her the anger of his command. She seemed not to hear him. He raised his fist and beat her, hitting her again and again, finally reaching her face. She went down silently, without even a moan. But when he stared back again, after the next dozen steps, she had risen and was still tottering on along the Trail.
He threw his hands up with a gesture of abandonment. Then without a word, grim and terrible, he put his head down and started.
He never looked back. Madness held him. Finesse, saving, the crafty utilising of small advantages had had their day. It was the moment for brute strength. All day he swung on in a swirl of snow, tireless. The landscape swam about him, the white glare searched out the inmost painful recesses of his brain. He knew enough to keep his eyes shut most of the time, trusting to Mack. At noon he divided accurately the entire food supply with the animal. At night he fasted. The two, man and dog, slept huddled close together for the sake of the warmth. At midnight the girl crept in broken and exhausted.
The next day Dick was as wonderful. A man strong in meat could not have travelled so. The light snow whirled behind him in a cloud. The wind of his going strained the capote from his emaciated face. So, in the nature of the man, he would go until the end. Then he would give out all at once, would fall from full life to complete dissolution of forces. Behind him, pitifully remote, pitifully bent, struggling futilely, obsessed by a mania as strong as that of these madmen who persisted even beyond the end of all things, was the figure of the girl. She could not stand upright, she could not breathe, yet she, too, followed the Trail, that dread symbol of so many hopes and ideals and despairs. Dick did not notice her, did not remember her existence, any more than he remembered the existence of Sam Bolton, of trees, of streams, of summer and warm winds, of the world, of the devil, of God, of himself.
All about him the landscape swayed like mist; the suns danced indecent revel; specks and blotches, the beginning of snow-blindness, swam grotesquely projected into a world less real than they. Living things moved everywhere. Ordinarily the man paid no attention to them, knowing them for what they were, but once, warned by some deep and subtle instinct, he made the effort to clear his vision and saw a fox. By another miracle he killed it. The carcass he divided with his dog. He gave none of it to the girl.
By evening of the second day he had not yet overtaken his quarry. But the trail was evidently fresher, and the fox's meat gave him another chance. He slept, as before, with Mack the hound; and, as before, May-may-gwán crept in hours later to fall exhausted.
And over the three figures, lying as dead, the North whirred in the wind, waiting to stoop, triumphing, glorying that she had brought the boasts of men to nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The next morning was the third day. There was no delay in getting started. All Dick had to do was to roll his blanket. He whirled on, still with his impetuous, fictitious vigour unimpaired. The girl staggered after him ten feet, then pitched forward. He turned uncertainly. She reached out to touch him. Her eyes said a farewell. It was the end.
Dick stood a moment, his eyes vague. Then mechanically he put his head down, mechanically he looked for the Trail, mechanically he shot away alone, alone except for the faithful, gaunt hound, the only thing that remained to him out of a whole world of living beings.
To his fevered vision the Trail was becoming fresher. Every step he took gave him the impression of so much gained, as though the man he was in pursuit of was standing still waiting to be taken. For the first time in months the conviction of absolute success took possession of him. His sight cleared, his heart beat strong, his whole being quivered with vigour. The illusion of the North faded away like a mist. The world was a flat plain of snow, with here and there a stunted spruce, knee-high, protruding above it, and with here and there an inequality of hidden bowlders and rounded knolls. Far off was the horizon, partially hidden in the normal snow-fog of this time of year. All objects were stationary, solid, permanent. Even the mock suns were only what was to be expected in so high a latitude. Dick was conscious of arguing these things to himself with extraordinary accuracy of logic. He proved a glow of happiness in the clarity of his brain, in the ease of his body, in the certainty of his success. The candle flared clear before its expiration.
For some moments he enjoyed this feeling of well-being, then a disturbing element insinuated itself. At first it was merely an uneasiness, which he could not place, a vague and nebulous irritation, a single crumpled rose-leaf. Then it grew to the proportions of a menace which banked his horizon with thunder, though the sun still shone overhead. Finally it became a terror, clutching him at the throat. He seemed to feel the need of identifying it. By an effort he recognised it as a lack. Something was missing without which there was for him no success, no happiness, no well-being, no strength, no existence. That something he must find. In the search his soul descended again to the region of dread, the regions of phantasmagoria. The earth heaved and rocked and swam in a sea of cold and glaring light. Strange creatures, momentarily changing shape and size, glided monstrous across the middle distance. The mock suns danced in the heavens.
Twice he stopped short and listened. In his brain the lack was defining itself as the lack of a sound. It was something he had always been used to. Now it had been taken away. The world was silent in its deprivation, and the silence stifled him. It had been something so usual that he had never noticed it; its absence called it to his attention for the first time. So far in the circle his mind ran; then swung back. He beat his forehead. Great as were the sufferings of his body, they were as nothing compared with these unreal torturings of his maddened brain.
For the third time he stopped, his head sidewise in the attitude of listening. At once easily, without effort, he knew. All these months behind him had sounded the crunch of snow-shoes. All these months about him, wrapping him so softly that he had never been conscious of it, had been the worship of a great devotion. Now they were taken away, he missed them. His spirit, great to withstand the hardships of the body, strong to deny itself, so that even at the last he had resisted the temptation of hunger and divided with his dog, in its weakened condition could not stand the exposure to the loneliness, to the barren winds of a peopleless world.
A long minute he stood, listening, demanding against all reason to hear the crunch, crunch, crunch that should tell him he was not alone. Then, without a glance at the Trail he had followed so long, he turned back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The girl was lying face down as he had left her. Already the windrow of the snow was beginning to form, like the curve of a wave about to break over her prostrate body. He sat down beside her, and gathered her into his arms, throwing the thick three-point blanket with its warm lining over the bent forms of both. At once it was as though he had always been there, his back to the unceasing winds, a permanence in the wilderness. The struggles of the long, long trail withdrew swiftly into the past—they had never been. And through the unreality of this feeling shot a single illuminating shaft of truth: never would he find in himself the power to take the trail again. The bubbling fever-height of his energies suddenly drained away.
Mack, the hound, lay patiently at his feet. He, too, suffered, and he did not understand, but that did not matter; his faithfulness could not doubt. For a single instant it occurred to the young man that he might kill the dog, and so procure nourishment with which to extricate himself and the girl; but the thought drifted idly through his mind, and so on and away. It did not matter. He could never again follow that Trail, and a few days more or less—
The girl sighed and opened her eyes. They widened.
"Jibiwánisi!" she whispered.
Her eyes remained fixed on his face, puzzling out the mere facts. Then all at once they softened.
"You came back," she murmured.
Dick did not reply. He drew her a little closer into his arms.
For a long time they said nothing. Then the girl:
"It has come, Jibiwánisi, we must die," and after a moment, "You came back."
She closed her eyes again, happily.
"Why did you come back?" she asked after a while.
"I do not know," said Dick.
The snow sifted here and there like beach sand. Occasionally the dog shook himself free of it, but over the two human beings it flung, little by little, the whiteness of its uniformity, a warm mantle against the freezing. They became an integral part of the landscape, permanent as it, coeval with its rocks and hills, ancient as the world, a symbol of obscure passions and instincts and spiritual beauties old as the human race.
Abruptly Dick spoke, his voice harsh.
"We die here, Little Sister. I do not regret. I have done the best in me. It is well for me to die. But this is not your affair. It was not for you to give your life. Had you not followed you would now be warm in the wigwams of your people. This is heavy on my heart."
"Was it for this you came back to me?" she inquired.
Dick considered. "No," he replied.
"The south wind blows warm on me," she said, after a moment.
The man thought her mind wandered with the starvation, but this was not the case. Her speech had made one of those strange lapses into rhetoric so common to the savage peoples.
"Jibiwánisi," she went on solemnly, "to me now this is a land where the trees are green and the waters flow and the sun shines and the fat deer are in the grasses. My heart sings like the birds. What should I care for dying? It is well to die when one is happy."
"Are you happy, May-may-gwán?" asked Dick.
For answer she raised her eyes to his. Freed of the distraction of another purpose, clarified by the near approach of death, his spirit looked, and for the first time understood.
"May-may-gwán, I did not know," said he, awed.
He meant that he had not before perceived her love for him. She thought he had not before realised his love for her. Her own affection seemed to her as self-evident as the fact that her eyes were black.
"Yes, yes," she hastened to comfort what she supposed must be his distress, "I know. But you turned back."
She closed her eyes again and appeared to doze in a happy dream. The North swooped above them like some greedy bird of prey.
Gradually in his isolation and stillness Dick began to feel this. It grew on him little by little. Within a few hours, by grace of suffering and of imminent death, he came into his woodsman's heritage of imagination. Men like Sam Bolton gained it by patient service, by living, by the slow accumulations of years, but in essence it remained the same. Where before the young man had seen only the naked, material facts, now he felt the spiritual presence, the calm, ruthless, just, terrible Enemy, seeking no combat, avoiding none, conquering with a lofty air of predestination, inevitable, mighty. His eyes were opened, like the prophet's of old. The North hovered over him almost palpable. In the strange borderland of mingled illusion and reality where now he and starvation dwelt he thought sometimes to hear voices, the voices of his enemy's triumph.
"Is it done?" they asked him, insistently. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is your stubborn spirit at last bowed down, humiliated, crushed? Do you relinquish the prize,—and the struggle? Is it done?"
The girl stirred slightly in his arms. He focussed his eyes. Already the day had passed, and the first streamers of the aurora were crackling in the sky. They reduced this day, this year, this generation of men to a pin-point in time. The tragedy enacting itself on the snow amounted to nothing. It would soon be over: it occupied but one of many, many nights—wherein the aurora would crackle and shoot forth and ebb back in precisely the same deathful, living way, as though the death of it were the death in this world, but the life of it were a thing celestial and alien. The moment, to these three who perished the most important of all the infinite millions of millions that constitute time, was absolutely without special meaning to the wonderful, flaming, unearthly lights of the North.
Mack, the hound, lay in the position he had first assumed, his nose between his outstretched forepaws. So he had lain all that day and that night. So it seemed he must intend to lie until death took him. For on this dreadful journey Mack had risen above the restrictions imposed by his status as a zoological species, had ceased to be merely a dog, and by virtue of steadfastness, of loyalty, of uncomplaining suffering, had entered into the higher estate of a living being that has fearlessly done his best in the world before his call to leave it.
The girl opened her eyes.
"Jibiwánisi," she said, faintly, "the end is come."
Agonized, Dick forced himself to consciousness of the landscape. It contained moving figures in plenty. One after the other he brought them within the focus of scrutiny and dissolved them into thin air. If only the caribou herds—
He looked down again to meet her eyes.
"Do not grieve. I am happy, Jibiwánisi," she whispered.
After a little, "I will die first," and then, "This land and that—there must be a border. I will be waiting there. I will wait always. I will not go into the land until you come. I will wait to see it—with you. Oh, Jibiwánisi," she cried suddenly, with a strength and passion in startling contrast to her weakness. "I am yours, yours, yours! You are mine." She half raised herself and seized his two arms, searching his eyes with terror, trying to reassure herself, to drive off the doubts that suddenly had thronged upon her. "Tell me," she shook him by the arm.
"I am yours," Dick lied, steadily; "my heart is yours, I love you."
He bent and kissed her on the lips. She quivered and closed her eyes with a deep sigh.
Ten minutes later she died.
CHAPTER THIRTY
This was near the dawn of the fourth day. Dick remained always in the same attitude, holding the dead girl in his arms. Mack, the hound, lay as always, loyal, patient to the last. After the girl's departure the wind fell and a great stillness seemed to have descended on the world.
The young man had lost the significance of his position, had forgotten the snow and cold and lack of food, had forgotten even the fact of death which he was hugging to his breast. His powers, burning clear in the spirit, were concentrated on the changes taking place within himself. By these things the world of manhood was opened to him; he was no longer a boy. To most it comes as a slow growth. With him it was revelation. The completeness of it shook him to the foundations of life. He took no account of the certainty of his own destruction. It seemed to him, in the thronging of new impressions, that he might sit there forever, a buddha of contemplation, looking on the world as his maturity had readjusted it.
Never now could he travel the Silent Places as he had heretofore, stupidly, blindly, obstinately, unthinkingly, worse than an animal in perception. The wilderness he could front intelligently, for he had seen her face. Never now could he conduct himself so selfishly, so brutally, so without consideration, as though he were the central point of the system, as though there existed no other preferences, convictions, conditions of being that might require the readjustment of his own. He saw these others for the first time. Never now could he live with his fellow beings in such blindness of their motives and the passions of their hearts. His own heart, like a lute, was strung to the pitch of humanity. Never now could he be guilty of such harm as he had unthinkingly accomplished on the girl. His eyes were opened to human suffering. The life of the world beat through his. The compassion of the greater humanity came to him softly, as a gift from the portals of death. The full savour of it he knew at last, knew that finally he had rounded out the circle of his domain.
This was what life required of his last consciousness. Having attained to it, the greater forces had no more concern with him. They left him, a poor, weak, naked human soul exposed to the terrors of the North. For the first time he saw them in all their dreadfulness. They clutched him with the fingers of cruel suffering so that his body was wracked with the tortures of dissolution. They flung before his eyes the obscene, unholy shapes of illusion. They filled his ears with voices. He was afraid. He cowered down, covering his eyes with his forearms, and trembled, and sobbed, and uttered little moans. He was alone in the world, alone with enemies who had him in their power and would destroy him. He feared to look up. The man's spirit was broken. All the accumulated terrors which his resolute spirit had thrust from him in the long months of struggle, rushed in on him now that his guard was down. They rioted in the empty chambers of his soul.
"Is it done?" they shrieked in triumph. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is your spirit crushed? Is the victory ours? Is it done?"
Dick shivered and shrank as from a blow.
"Is it done?" the voices insisted. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is it done?"
The man shrieked aloud in agony.
"Oh, my God!" he cried. "Oh, yes, yes, yes! I am beaten. I can do nothing. Kill me. It is done."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
As though these words were a signal, Mack, the hound, who had up to now rested as motionless as though frozen to his place, raised himself on his haunches and gazed earnestly to the north.
In the distance Dick seemed to make out an object moving. As he had so often done before, by an effort he brought his eyes to focus, expecting, as also had happened so often before, that the object would disappear. But it persisted, black against the snow. Its outlines could not be guessed; its distance could not be estimated, its direction of travel could not be determined. Only the bare fact of its existence was sure. Somewhere out in the waste it, moving, antithesised these other three black masses on the whiteness, the living man, the living animal, the dead girl.
Dick variously identified it. At one moment he thought it a marten near at hand; then it became a caribou far away; then a fox between the two. Finally, instantaneously, as though at a bound it had leaped from indeterminate mists to the commonplace glare of every day, he saw it was a man.
The man was moving painfully, lifting each foot with an appearance of great effort, stumbling, staggering sideways from time to time as though in extreme weakness. Once he fell. Then he recovered the upright as though necklaced with great weights. His hands were empty of weapons. In the uncertainty of his movements he gradually approached.
Now Dick could see the great emaciation of his features. The bones of his cheeks seemed to press through his skin, which was leathery and scabbed and cracked to the raw from much frosting. His lips drew tight across his teeth, which grinned in the face of exhaustion like the travesty of laughter on a skull. His eyes were lost in the caverns of their sockets. His thin nostrils were wide, and through them and through the parted lips the breath came and went in strong, rasping gasps, audible even at this distance of two hundred paces. One live thing this wreck of a man expressed. His forces were near their end, but such of them as remained were concentrated in a determination to go on. He moved painfully, but he moved; he staggered, but he always recovered; he fell, and it was a terrible labour to rise, but always he rose and went on.
Dick Herron, sitting there with the dead girl across his knees, watched the man with a strange, detached curiosity. His mind had slipped back into its hazes. The world of phantasms had resumed its sway. He was seeing in this struggling figure a vision of himself as he had been, the self he had transcended now, and would never again resume. Just so he had battled, bringing to the occasion every last resource of the human spirit, tearing from the deeps of his nature the roots where life germinated and throwing them recklessly before the footsteps of his endeavour, emptying himself, wringing himself to a dry, fibrous husk of a man that his Way might be completed. His lips parted with a sigh of relief that this was all over. He was as an old man whose life, for good or ill, success or failure, is done, and who looks from the serenity of age on those who have still their youth to spend, their years to dole out day by day, painfully, in the intense anxiety of the moral purpose, as the price of life. In a spell of mysticism he sat there waiting.
The man plodded on, led by some compelling fate, to the one spot in the white immensity where were living creatures. When he had approached to within fifty paces, Dick could see his eyes. They were tight closed. As the young man watched, the other opened them, but instantly blinked them shut again as though he had encountered the searing of a white-hot iron. Dick Herron understood. The man had gone snow-blind.
And then, singularly enough for the first time, it was borne in on him who this man was, what was the significance of his return. Jingoss, the renegade Ojibway, the defaulter, the maker of the dread, mysterious Trail that had led them so far into this grim land, Jingoss was blind, and, imagining himself still going north, still treading mechanically the hopeless way of his escape, had become bewildered and turned south.
Dick waited, mysteriously held to inaction, watching the useless efforts of this other from the vantage ground of a wonderful fatalism,—as the North had watched him. The Indian plodded doggedly on, on, on. He entered the circle of the little camp. Dick raised his rifle and pressed its muzzle against the man's chest.
"Stop!" he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across the stillness.
The Indian, with a sob of mingled emotion, in which, strangely enough, relief seemed the predominant note, collapsed to the ground. The North, insistent on the victory but indifferent to the stake, tossed carelessly the prize at issue into the hands of her beaten antagonist.
And then, dim and ghostly, rank after rank, across the middle distance drifted the caribou herds.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was beyond the middle of summer. The day had been hot, but now the velvet night was descending. The canoe had turned into the channel at the head of the island on which was situated Conjuror's House. The end of the journey was at hand.
Dick paddled in the bow. His face had regained its freshness, but not entirely its former boyish roundness. The old air of bravado again sat his spirit—a man's nature persists to the end, and immortal and unquenchable youth is a gift of the gods—but in the depths of his strange, narrow eyes was a new steadiness, a new responsibility, the well-known, quiet, competent look invariably a characteristic of true woodsmen. At his feet lay the dog, one red-rimmed eye cocked up at the man who had gone down to the depths in his company.
The Indian Jingoss sat amidships, his hands bound strongly with buckskin thongs, a man of medium size, broad face, beady eyes with surface lights. He had cost much: he was to be given no chance to escape. Always his hands remained bound with the buckskin thongs, except at times when Dick or Sam stood over him with a rifle. At night his wrists were further attached to one of Sam's. Mack, too, understood the situation, and guarded as jealously as did his masters.
Sam wielded the steersman's paddle. His appearance was absolutely unaffected by this one episode in a long life.
They rounded the point into the main sweep of the east river, stole down along the bank in the gathering twilight, and softly beached their canoe below the white buildings of the Factory. With a muttered word of command to their captive, they disembarked and climbed the steepness of the low bluff to the grass-plot above. The dog followed at their heels.
Suddenly the impression of this year, until now so vividly a part of the present, was stricken into the past, the past of memory. Up to the very instant of topping the bluff it had been life; now it was experience.
For the Post was absolutely unchanged from that other summer evening of over a year ago when they had started out into the Silent Places. The familiarity of this fact, hitherto, for some strange reason, absolutely unexpected, reassured them their places in the normal world of living beings. The dead vision of the North had left in their spirits a residuum of its mysticism. Their experience of her power had induced in them a condition of mind when it would not have surprised them to discover the world shaken to its foundations, as their souls had been shaken. But here were familiar, peaceful things, unchanged, indifferent even to the passing of time. Involuntarily they drew a deep breath of relief, and, without knowing it, re-entered a sanity which had not been entirely theirs since the snows of the autumn before.
Over by the guns, indistinct in the falling twilight, the accustomed group of voyageurs and post-keepers were chatting, smoking, humming songs in the accustomed way. The low velvet band of forest against the sky; the dim squares of the log-houses punctuated with their dots of lamplight; the masses of the Storehouse, the stockade, the Factory; the long flag-staff like a mast against the stars; the constant impression of human life and activity,—these anodynes of accustomedness steadied these men's faith to the supremacy of human institutions.
On the Factory veranda could be dimly made out the figures of a dozen men. They sat silent. Occasionally a cigar glowed brighter for a moment, then dulled. Across a single square of subdued light the smoke eddied.
The three travellers approached, Sam Bolton in the lead, peering through the dusk in search of his chief. In a moment he made him out, sitting, as always, square to the world, his head sunk forward, his eyes gleaming from beneath the white tufts of his eyebrows. At once the woodsmen mounted the steps.
No one stirred or spoke. Only the smokers suspended their cigars in mid-air a few inches from their faces in the most perfect attitude of attention.
"Galen Albret," announced the old woodsman, "here is the Ojibway, Jingoss."
The Factor stirred slightly; his bulk, the significance of his features lost in obscurity.
"Me-en-gen!" he called, sharply.
The tall, straight figure of his Indian familiar glided from the dusk of the veranda's end.
"To-morrow at smoke time," commanded the Factor, using the Ojibway tongue, "let this man be whipped before the people, fifty lashes. Then let him be chained to the Tree for the space of one week, and let it be written above him in Ojibway and in Cree that thus Galen Albret punishes those who steal."
Without a word Me-en-gan took the defaulter by the arm and conducted him away.
Galen Albret had fallen into a profound silence, which no one ventured to break. Dick and Sam, uncertain as to whether or not they, too, were dismissed, shifted uneasily.
"How did you find him?" demanded the Factor, abruptly.
"We went with old Haukemah's band down as far as the Mattawishguia. There we left them and went up stream and over the divide. Dick here broke his leg and was laid up for near three months. I looked all that district over while he was getting well. Then we made winter travel down through the Kabinikágam country and looked her over. We got track of this Jingoss over near the hills, but he got wind of us and skipped when we was almost on top of him. We took his trail. He went straight north, trying to shake us off, and we got up into the barren country. We'd have lost him in the snow if it hadn't been for that dog there. He could trail him through new snow. We run out of grub up there, and finally I gave out. Dick here pushed on alone and found the Injun wandering around snow-blind. He run onto some caribou about that time, too, and killed some. Then he came back and got me:—I had a little pemmican and boiled my moccasins. We had lots of meat, so we rested up a couple of weeks, and then came back."
That was all. These men had done a great thing, and thus simply they told it. And they only told that much of it because it was their duty; they must report to their chief.
Galen Albret seemed for a moment to consider, as was his habit.
"You have done well," he pronounced at last. "My confidence in you was justified. The pay stands as agreed. In addition I place you in charge of the post at Lost River, and you, Herron, in charge of the Mattágami Brigade."
The men flushed, deeply pleased, more than rewarded, not by the money nor the advancement, but by the unqualified satisfaction of their commander.
They turned away. At this moment Virginia Albret, on some errand to her father, appeared outlined in slender youth against the doorway. On the instant she recognized them.
"Why, Sam and Dick," she said, "I am glad to see you. When did you get back?"
"Just back, Miss Virginia," replied Sam.
"That's good. I hope you've had a successful trip."
"Yes," answered Sam. The woodsman stood there a little awkwardly, wishing to be polite, not sure as to whether they should now go without further dismissal.
"See, Miss Virginia," hesitated Sam, to fill in the pause, "I have your handkerchief yet."
"I'm glad you kept it, Sam," replied the young girl; "and have you yours, Dick?"
And suddenly to Dick the contrast between this reality and that other came home with the vividness of a picture. He saw again the snow-swept plain, the wavering shapes of illusion, the mock suns dancing in unholy revel. The colour of the North burned before his eyes; a madness of the North unsealed his lips.
"I used it to cover a dead girl's face," he replied, bluntly.
The story had been as gray as a report of statistics,—so many places visited, so much time consumed. The men smoking cigars, lounging on cushioned seats in the tepid summer air, had listened to it unimpressed, as one listens to the reading of minutes of a gathering long past. This simple sentenced breathed into it life. The magnitude of the undertaking sprang up across the horizon of their comprehension. They saw between the mile-post markings of Sam Bolton's dry statements of fact, glimpses of vague, mysterious, and terrible deeds, indistinct, wonderful. The two before them loomed big in the symbolism of the wide world of men's endurance and determination and courage.
The darkness swallowed them before the group on the veranda had caught its breath. In a moment the voices about the cannon raised in greeting. A swift play of question and answer shot back and forth. "Out all the year?" "Where? Kabinikágam? Oh, yes, east of Brunswick Lake." "Good trip?" "That's right." "Glad of it." Then the clamour rose, many beseeching, one refusing. The year was done. These men had done a mighty deed, and yet a few careless answers were all they had to tell of it. The group, satisfied, were begging another song. And so, in a moment, just as a year before, Dick's rich, husky baritone raised in the words of the old melody. The circle was closed.
"There was an old darky,
and his name was Uncle Ned,
And he lived long ago, long
ago—"
The night hushed to silence. Even the wolves were still, and the giddés down at the Indian camp ceased their endless quarrelling. Dick's voice had all the world to itself. The men on the Factory veranda smoked, the disks of their cigars dulling and glowing. Galen Albret, inscrutable, grim, brooded his unguessable thoughts. Virginia, in the doorway, rested her head pensively against one arm outstretched against the lintel.
"For there's no more work
for poor old Ned,
He's gone where the good darkies
go."
The song finished. There succeeded the great compliment of quiet.
To Virginia it was given to speak the concluding word of this episode. She sighed, stretching out her arms.
"'The greatness of my people,'" she quoted softly.