CHAPTER X
Nee-tah-wee-gan's Revenge
Astounded though he was at Nee-tah-wee-gan's disclosure, Millington's mind leaped instantly to its possible results—not as they affected Donald or Corrigal but as they might determine his own future.
He believed what Nee-tah-wee-gan had said. He knew how hate swayed the woman, how it had so ruled her in that moment that she had spoken unconsciously, wholly unmindful of his presence.
"See here," he exclaimed, as he grasped her shoulder and whirled her toward him, "does Norton know that, or Corrigal? Do they suspect it?"
"Know what?"
"That Corrigal is his father?"
"Is he?"
"You can't fool me. You said so. Hate drove it out of you."
"You do not mean that I hate my own son?"
"Of course you hate him, and Corrigal, too. But does anyone else know? Do they suspect it?"
"Why is the white man so interested? It is none of his affair. Surely you do not hate Corrigal, or——" she paused a moment and looked at him shrewdly—"or Wen-dah-ban."
Millington hesitated. Then he took a chance.
"I have a reason to hate Norton," he said harshly.
"The white girl at Fort Bruce, eh? I have heard. As the traders wish to know the hearts of the hunters, so we know the desires of the white people. There was not an Indian who went to Fort Bruce with the brigades but knew you wished the white girl for your woman—the white girl who looked only at Wen-dah-ban."
"See here!" Millington broke in harshly. "Do Corrigal and Norton know this?"
"How could they know if it is not true?"
Millington was rapidly losing his temper. He saw that Nee-tah-wee-gan was perfectly self-controlled now and was only baiting him.
"They will know it!" he exclaimed. "I'll tell Corrigal. I'll write him a letter."
It was more than fear that flashed in her eyes. It was despair and Millington knew he was on the right track.
"I'll write to Corrigal," he repeated, "and when Corrigal knows, and Norton knows, Norton won't be kicked out as you wish. Corrigal will be glad. For thirty years he has been lonely. He has mourned for the son who died in the fire. Now Norton can take the place of that son and when Corrigal becomes old Norton will be the 'big trader.'"
But Nee-tah-wee-gan laughed scornfully.
"Yes," she said, "Wen-dah-ban will become the 'big trader' and he will get the white girl. You will tell Corrigal so that can happen."
She drew her shawl over her head and walked out of the trade shop.
For several days Millington considered the situation. From the first he had believed the old Indian woman spoke the truth when she watched Corrigal departing for Fort James, understanding how hate had forced the revelation. But if hate had stirred the savage wrath he saw how it might have done so in the past—how under somewhat similar circumstances Donald could have heard the same thing.
He was tempted to talk to Philip Collinge. He knew the bond that existed between him and Donald and took it for granted that Donald, if he knew, would have told his friend. But, though he had only scorn for Collinge, Millington was afraid of his fellow countryman. He sensed his integrity and good breeding.
Millington was repeating his secret raids on Donald's territory. He had planned them cleverly and believed he could escape detection but he saw that it would be folly to continue them if there were a chance that Corrigal should learn Donald was his son.
In desperation he sought Nee-tah-wee-gan, visiting her cabin at night. He was subtle now. The old woman had bested him in the first battle of wits and he determined that the keener mind of the white man should triumph. Purposely he avoided the subject of Donald's parentage, tried to ingratiate himself with presents and to worm his way into her confidence, to establish a common purpose between them. But Nee-tah-wee-gan had nursed her solitary hate too long and met every effort with inscrutability or taunting laughter.
Meanwhile the winter was passing. Millington had delayed further raids until he could extract more information from Nee-tah-wee-gan. He knew that if he were to discredit Donald with Corrigal he must act quickly and he did not dare venture until he had the facts of their relationship and could determine how far he might go. It was thus that when he went to visit the old woman one stormy night he carried a bottle of Scotch with him.
He did not offer her a drink but depended upon the Indian's uncontrollable craving for alcohol to open the way. For a while he sat and talked, gossiping aimlessly, occasionally putting the bottle to his lips and always unmindful of Nee-tah-wee-gan's contemptuous attitude.
At last, as he sat the whisky down, she suddenly reached forth a hand.
"The company does not allow that," he said as he placed it behind him.
"What does the company know or care about an old woman?" she retorted.
He ignored her and went on talking of something else, but Nee-tah-wee-gan, with a pretext of getting wood for the fire, snatched the bottle. He pretended that he wished to recover it but did not succeed until she had filled a tin cup and resumed her seat.
As Nee-tah-wee-gan drank, with slow sips at first, then greedily, the effect was not what he had expected. She crouched beside the little fire. There was no light except the red glow from the open hearth and this brought out in strong relief the old woman's fierce, hate-distorted features. Millington, sitting back in the darkness, waited impatiently for some change—for some indication that her reticence was giving way before the liquor.
But none came. Her brown, deeply-lined face was touched with the red of the coals on the hearth, the deep wrinkles appearing to be even deeper in the sharp shadows. Behind her and on either side was only the black darkness of the room. Even the lower part of her body was invisible. She sat there, immovable, like a sharply silhouetted bust of savagery suspended in midair. Not a muscle moved. Only her eyes, glittering viciously, seemed alive.
Millington did not speak for a long time. At last he took a drink from the bottle and then set it before him. Apparently Nee-tah-wee-gan had not seen but as he leaned back a hand shot out and again she filled her cup.
She drank slowly now but with growing satisfaction. Her eyes became brighter and at last, so suddenly and so unexpectedly that Millington shrank back in the darkness, she burst into diabolical laughter. Whisky had freed the repressions of thirty years.
"To his own son!" she cried. "To his own son!"
Millington was tense with expectancy. He did not speak and hardly moved lest he drive back the revelation he felt was coming. Nee-tah-wee-gan sat there as if alone with the vengeful spirit which had so long possessed her, dwelling on the triumph which was to be hers, talking as she must have talked to herself through many a cold winter night.
"To his own son!" she repeated gloatingly. "He will do that. He will kick him out, drive him back to a wigwam, tell him he is an Indian and no good. Wen-dah-ban won't know. But after it is done, after Wen-dah-ban is again an Indian, then I will tell the 'big trader,' then he will know what Nee-tah-wee-gan has done to him."
"They don't know now?" Millington asked softly.
She turned toward him. "They do not dream it. In all the world no one suspects but you. And you would not have known if my hate had not driven it from me when I saw him for the first time in nearly thirty years. Only it does you no good to know," she added shrewdly. "You have no proof and I would say you lied."
She grinned at him maliciously and then lifted the cup to her lips with a gesture intended to be mocking but which was so uncertain that Millington exulted because she was losing self-control.
"They will never learn until Norton is again in a wigwam?" he demanded.
"Never!" she cried. "It is for that I have waited."
Millington had learned what he wished to know. His own plans could be carried out. He understood Corrigal well enough to see that another bad year for Donald would mean his transfer from the district—a disgrace which would end him forever with the Layards. Yet he must be certain that hate could keep her silent.
"Why do you wait?" he asked.
"To make Corrigal suffer!" Nee-tah-wee-gan screamed, and she rocked back and forth in sudden frenzy.
"Suffer?" Millington persisted, for he saw her tongue has been loosened at last. "How would that make him suffer?"
"Because the son he lost and has always wanted would have been within his reach all these years if he had only known."
"But he would not care," Millington taunted. "He has no use for a half-breed."
"Who is talking of a half-breed?"
"Norton is one."
"Would I do such a thing to my own son?" she countered. "Would I use my own flesh and blood to gain my revenge?"
Millington stared without comprehension.
"You're mad!" he exclaimed at last.
"Mad!" and her voice rose to a shrill scream. "Wen-dah-ban is no son of mine. He is not even an Indian. He is the son of the 'big trader' and his white wife. He is the son Corrigal believes died in the fire."
Dumfounded though he was, Millington realized what this statement meant to him. If Donald was white and well-born, nothing would be denied him. The Englishman visioned his rival's swift climb upward, with love and life before him, and he hated as he had never known he could hate.
Then the preposterous nature of Nee-tah-wee-gan's statement struck him. Such a thing could not be true. It existed only in the malign imagination of this old squaw. He laughed in his relief.
"You couldn't make Corrigal or anyone else believe such a thing," he sneered. "They would say you dreamed it, and you did."
Nee-tah-wee-gan glared at him from the floor. Millington's contempt removed the last restraint. Her body swayed a little. The madness of liquor had been added to the madness of hate. Primitive passion had been freed from the bonds of lifelong purpose. The vanity of the savage demanded expression.
"Dreamed it!" she cried. "I will tell you how I dreamed it, white man—how I have repaid the 'big trader' who cheated and lied to me. Then you will believe, as Corrigal will believe when I tell him—when I remind him of the girl he knew in the mission when he was the trader at Fort James. He was big and handsome and always laughing then. The white people said he was a great man and some day would be chief of all the district.
"In the beginning he did not see me. Always he talked to the white men, laughing and joking, and he never seemed to know there were women. One day I saw him alone and I walked to meet him. I smiled and said 'bo' jou',' but he only said 'bo' jou',' and went on.
"But the next time he smiled and the time after that he stopped and soon we began to talk and laugh together. I was in the mission school then, learning the ways of the white people. My clothes were well made and clean. I was half white and pretty.
"But he only laughed and joked when he saw me. He never touched me. Yet I could wait. I knew what the long, lonely winters do to the white man. He would think of me, many, many times. I would grow more beautiful in his eyes and when he came back the next summer he would look at me differently.
"It was as I thought, when summer came. His eyes were not the same and his voice had changed. The long winter had done what I knew it would. Still he did not say anything with words—only with his eyes. Yet I was content. No matter what the color of her skin, a woman always knows some things, and no matter what the color of his skin there are some things a man can never hide from a woman. Yet a woman knows, too, that words must be said and that the words must be true.
"So one night I walked down the shore just before dark. I knew he would see me go and I did not have to wait long. He did not speak when he found me there in the night. He just put his arms around me so that I could not breathe and he kissed me so that it hurt and then he let loose of me and he said, 'Nee-tah-wee-gan, how would you like to go to Fort James with me and be my woman?'
"It was what I wanted. It meant that I could live in a big house and have servants, that I would not have to work, to scrape hides or set snares for rabbits or paddle a canoe or carry burdens on the portages. It meant that of all the hundreds of Indians at Fort James I would be the highest. I said 'yes.'
"Then we walked back quickly, for I wanted to tell my friends at the mission."
She stopped and her eyes blazed with hatred. Her voice was shrill as she plunged on with her story.
"That night a canoe came from the great salt sea to the north. In it was a woman from England, come to teach the children of the post manager at Fort Bruce. She was young and she was white. When Corrigal saw her the next morning he forgot he had ever seen me. He never came near me again. He never saw me when we passed. All the time he was with the white woman and two weeks after she came they went to the mission and were married."
Nee-tah-wee-gan became speechless for a moment. The blind passion of the primitive overcame her. Hatred flared afresh and she cast aside all restraint.
"I followed them to Fort James!" she cried. "There was a tripper, a half-breed who had come with the Fort James brigade, and my friends were laughing at me. I smiled at him and when he went back I was his woman. The missionary married us. Corrigal knew, but he did not seem to notice. When he saw me at Fort James he smiled like a fool. 'It is best,' he said. 'We will both be much happier.' And I smiled and said 'yes'—and I waited.
"I could speak English then and Corrigal's wife often talked to me because there were no others who could understand her language or teach her Ojibwa. She made me the cook in the dwelling house and I lived in the room back of the kitchen.
"Sometimes when I was alone I laughed. I had thought I would go to Fort James and be the chief woman of the post—that I would live in the dwelling house. I went but I had no servants. I lived back of the kitchen. I was the cook. I worked while the white woman did nothing, and I would laugh, not because of what was but because of what would be.
"A year went by after Corrigal brought his white woman to Fort James and then she had a child, a boy. It was Wen-dah-ban, the one you call Norton. About the same time, I, too, had a child, also a boy. Because I was an Indian I got up the second day and cooked the meals but because she was white she lay in bed for a long time. She was very thin and she suffered and when I brought her food I smiled and said soft things but inside I was laughing. For thirty years I have laughed that she suffered so."
Nee-tah-wee-gan paused and stared at the coals on the hearth. Then she suddenly drained the cup and plunged again into her story.
"After that she was always sick. A year went by and she became very ill and while she lay in bed Corrigal had to go to an outpost, two days' journey away. It was spring and he said he would hurry back. The chance for which I had always waited, to be alone there with the white woman, had come, but I did not see it. I was thinking of something else—of my own child which had never been well and which now I believed was going to die.
"I had asked Corrigal for medicine but he would not give it to me. He said the baby was too young, that he did not dare give it medicine, that the child might die if he did. He went away, for he was in a great hurry to get back to his wife, and the night after he left my baby died."
Nee-tah-wee-gan ceased talking and her bent body straightened. She stared straight before her and Millington, awed by her fiendish expression and well aware of what her savage, pitiless spirit may have driven her to, waited breathlessly.
"For an hour I cursed Corrigal," she began at last, and a tigerish exultation forced out the words with an ominous sibilation. "I forgot all I had planned. I knew only hate. Then suddenly I saw that I could do more than I had ever planned, more than I had hoped. I saw that I could make him suffer for a lifetime and that at the end I could make him think his past suffering had been only joy.
"I took the dead body of my child and went to the white woman's room. She was asleep and I picked up her baby from beside her and put mine in its place. And then I emptied the oil lamp over the bed and the floor and touched a match to it. I ran to my room back of the kitchen with her baby—with Wen-dah-ban—and got into bed and laid there until I heard shouts. Men came and told me the dwelling house was burning and to take my child and run."
Nee-tah-wee-gan rocked back and forth on the floor as if in ecstacy. The very curve of her bent old back seemed to denote a transport of joy and a dry, harsh cackle burst from her lips. Millington, horror-stricken, did not move or speak.
"Corrigal came back after three days," she continued. "I watched him when his dog team stopped at the post. He was like a man who dies inside and only his body moves. He did not stay at Fort James. An hour after he came he took another dog team and drove away to Fort Bruce. I never saw him again until he came this winter.
"That," and she looked up at Millington, "is what I did to John Corrigal. But it is not all I had planned. I was going to make an Indian of his son and soon I, too, left Fort James and no one saw that I carried a white child. For I was going to make an Indian of him and, when it was too late, when he could never be anything else, I was going to find Corrigal and tell him. Then I would be ready to die."
Millington had recovered sufficiently from his horror to begin to doubt. He knew Nee-tah-wee-gan was capable of such a diabolical act, that the primitive hate and the Indian's lust for revenge would carry her to any lengths, but he saw, too, how thirty years of venom and brooding could have affected her mind and how she could have come to believe something that existed only in her imagination.
"You have thought of this so long you believe it is true," he said. "You have dreamed it. You can never prove it."
Nee-tah-wee-gan did not answer. Not only the hatred but the liquor seemed to have been burned out of her by the relation of her fiendish story. Her eyes were dull. Her savage features sagged grotesquely.
"You can never prove it," Millington repeated, convinced now that he was right.
"I do not worry about that," she said dully. "I know. When the time comes I will show one tiny thing to Corrigal and he will believe."
Unconsciously she reached one hand toward her breast and clutched her woolen waist. Millington saw a leather thong tighten about her neck as she did so.
Silently he passed the bottle to her. His face was still in the dark and she could not see the sudden gleam in his eyes but she thrust the whisky from her.
"Go home," she commanded harshly. "I am sleepy—sleepy from the telling of fairy tales to foolish children."