CHAPTER XVI
Fate Saves a Crook
Layard went in search of his wife and daughter and when all three had entered his room Corrigal arranged chairs for them and began at once to speak.
"You know what happened out there a few minutes ago," he said. "An old Indian woman, Nee-tah-wee-gan by name, was waiting for me outside the office. In the presence of a number of clerks and post managers she made the charge that I am the father of her son, Donald Norton.
"Yesterday Norton made the same charge in my office. I am satisfied that he never suspected such a thing before and though his statement was like a thunderbolt to me I believe he was as greatly stunned by what he considered a revelation.
"That is all the evidence against me—a man's sudden suspicion and a woman's accusation, but against such evidence I can do nothing. By mid-winter all the north country will hear it, and all the north country will believe. I could harness the wind more easily than suppress or even slightly discredit this thing and I will make no attempt to do so."
He paused and looked at each of the three in turn.
"Only to you will I tell my story," he continued slowly. "For a year I have lived in your home and I feel that I owe it to you. As for myself, I do not care, but I do value your good opinion and I wish to remain here.
"I know I am considered hard and ruthless, that it is believed I live only for the Hudson's Bay. It is true, the last of it. The Hudson's Bay has been everything to me for thirty years, wife, family, religion, my whole life, and because I have made it so, because I had to—to—to forget."
Emotion had crept into his voice and it wavered slightly at the end. All fur land knew what had driven Corrigal out of the Fort Bruce district so long ago but this was the first time any of the three had heard him speak of it. When he began again he was calm but it was easily seen that he achieved calmness at great effort.
"I am the father of one child only," he said, "and he is dead. Merton remembers me when I was a young post manager. During my apprenticeship and in the first years that followed I was absorbed in the Hudson's Bay and the life of a fur trader. It was all sheer romance to me then, a great adventure, and I lived only for the one thing, with the one thought.
"Then when I was twenty-three I suddenly discovered that I had grown up. The romance began to fade enough to permit me to think things out. I was at Fort James then and for the first time a trading post seemed lonely. I came to Fort Bruce in the summer and here I saw a half-breed girl, Ojibwa and French. She was pretty. Her voice was soft. She lived in the mission and she was above the average. Her name was Nee-tah-wee-gan, which means in Ojibwa 'growing ripe.'
"You have spent your lives in the north and all of you know what the loneliness of the long winters does to the white men who come here. Since fur land began it has been the same story, inevitable and inescapable. I'll grant it is a terrible thing and spawns countless tragedies but it is nevertheless a fact. And I, young and unthinking, gnawed by the solitude, was ready to be a victim.
"I say I didn't know, that I didn't think. I didn't. I talked to Nee-tah-wee-gan, laughed with her, and one night in the moonlight when I saw her go down the shore alone I followed her. When I found her I put my arms around her and kissed her and suddenly I knew that I could not go back to another long winter without her. I asked her if she would like to go to Fort James with me. She was in a transport of joy and she hardly more than said 'yes' before she ran back to the mission to tell her friends.
"You know how it is with the Indian woman. It is the easy life in the dwelling house, the servants and the prestige, that she wants. Nee-tah-wee-gan believed she had won them. But I am not defending myself. I would have taken her except that——"
He paused for a moment and each of his three listeners saw the effort with which he got hold of himself.
"The next day a canoe arrived from York Factory. In it was a white woman, a girl who had come to Fort Bruce as governess for the post manager's children. Two weeks after she arrived we were married in the mission and went away to Fort James together.
"I can't tell you the rest," and his voice broke. "When she died, she and our infant son, something in me died."
He had been looking at the floor and for a moment he continued to do so. When at last he glanced up Evelyn's and Janet's eyes were wet.
"You believe me?" he asked, and for the first time in thirty years there was a pleading note in John Corrigal's voice.
But no one spoke. Layard's face was hard. Corrigal looked from one to another.
"Good God!" he cried. "I wish it were true! Don't you see? If I had a son! If I had anyone! For more than half my life I've lived alone. People say I'm hard but it's only a mask. I had to hide my loneliness. I had to forget."
In the last year Evelyn had penetrated farther behind that mask than even Corrigal suspected. She felt that he was telling the truth and his own suffering moved her.
"I believe you," she said simply and held out her hand.
Corrigal grasped it eagerly. He tried to speak but could only mutter brokenly, and then he looked at Layard. The post manager did not hesitate. He, too, had been moved by this revelation of a hard man's soul, but when Corrigal turned to Janet she drew away.
The girl was aflame with eagerness. She seemed to have reacted to the story in only one way.
"Then you will call Donald back! You will keep him on at Fort James!" she cried.
"Call him back!" Corrigal repeated.
"What else can you do? You didn't give him a chance. You were unfair."
The district manager was silent. There came to him a picture of the infuriated young man who had leaned across the desk and defied him—who had promised to make him pay.
"I am going to prove to you before Millington that you were wrong," Layard broke in upon his thoughts.
"But don't you see what will happen if I do?" Corrigal protested. "I am responsible for the company's success in this district."
"Then call back the best post manager you have," Janet interrupted.
"But don't you see? If I do it will be construed that what Nee-tah-wee-gan charged is the truth and that I am favoring him because of it."
"If it is because you don't trust him and are afraid he will take advantage of the situation——" Layard began, when Janet stepped forward.
"As for trusting him," she cried furiously, "mixed race or not, I would believe him before I would believe you. Mother and father may accept your story if they wish. I will not."
Evelyn laid a restraining hand on her daughter's arm but Janet shook it off.
"You! You, too!" she accused. "A year ago when he came to talk to you, you drove him away!"
She whirled back upon Corrigal. Rage ruled her but she was not hysterical. Her eyes were dry, her head was high, her body tense with resolve.
"You talk of what people will think and say and you try to hide behind what you call your duty to the company. You have always forced your way. You have never heeded what happened to others. You have posed as a loyal servant of the Hudson's Bay.
"But I know you. It's nothing but vanity—a false, empty pride. At heart you're guilty. You know it. You haven't hidden from sorrow but from remorse. And now to save that hollow shell you've made of yourself you are willing to ruin your own son—the man for whom you alone are responsible."
She glared at Corrigal with such utter contempt that his eyes fell. Then she turned and walked from the room.
The three were silent for a moment and then Corrigal whispered, "Good God! Is it that way with her?"
"But you will change your mind," Layard urged quickly.
"You must!" Evelyn pleaded. "Don't you see that you are ruining a man's life?"
It was evident that Corrigal was wavering and she pressed the advantage.
"Donald has been like a son to me."
The district manager's reaction was instantaneous.
"That's not a reason!" he exclaimed. "You are putting this whole thing on a basis of sentiment. But I notice that when it affected you in another way you acted differently. You wouldn't accept him as a son-in-law."
Evelyn drew back with an expression of loathing.
"You are contemptible!" she cried. "And as for sentiment, what else makes the Hudson's Bay live? There never can be any success without sentiment. And you! You in your blindness and hardness and false vanity! You didn't have the strength to lift yourself above tragedy and sorrow. It is better to be a sentimentalist than a hypocrite.
"As for Donald, I would be glad to have him for a son-in-law. I have only one objection to him. I don't care if Nee-tah-wee-gan is his mother. You may be his father!"
Like Janet, she turned abruptly and left the room. Layard followed.
That afternoon Corrigal had quarters fixed up in the rear of the district office and moved into them. Thereafter he took his meals in "Bachelors' Hall" with the apprentice clerks and post managers. This move was the one thing needed to confirm the belief of all fur land that Nee-tah-wee-gan had shouted the truth that day. Everyone knew the relationship between the Layards and Donald Norton and they took Corrigal's removal from the dwelling house as proof that the Layards believed the old Indian woman and refused to permit the district manager to remain in their home.
But neither from the Layards nor from Corrigal did anyone ever obtain a shred of direct information. Corrigal never denied Nee-tah-wee-gan's story or made any reference to it. The Layards conducted their lives exactly as before so far as anyone could see and Janet, whom all watched for some sign of sorrow, maintained a front impervious to the most curious inspection.
Millington alone served to keep Donald's dramatic departure from Fort Bruce alive for the people of fur land. Nee-tah-wee-gan and her little tent had disappeared the next morning and no one heard of her again that summer. But the young Englishman with his bruised and swollen face was forced to remain for two weeks.
That first afternoon Corrigal listened to the evidence which Layard presented in the form of direct statements by Fort James hunters.
"Never mind getting out that marked fox skin," Corrigal said, when the Indians had finished. "I've heard enough. What have you to say, Millington?"
"Nothing," was the surly answer.
"Neither have I!" Corrigal snapped. "If there were anyone I could put in your place I'd do it. But with Norton gone I can't make another change this late in the season. Go on to Fort James for this winter."
Layard was on his feet in an instant.
"You let a yellow crook have another chance when he admits he is a crook and you kick out a real man and the best fur trader you have because you think that some day he might possibly fail you!" he cried scornfully.
"That question is dead," Corrigal answered coldly, as he turned to some work on his desk.
"It is not dead!" Layard retorted. "You're saying so can't end it and the fact that you keep Millington on doesn't mean you haven't any real men left in the district. 'Bachelors' Hall' isn't going to take this quietly."
"Luckily, 'Bachelors' Hall' doesn't control the district."
"No, but the success of the district depends upon it," Layard answered. "It's the loyalty of the post managers that has made this district what it is and you, with your unfairness, are killing that loyalty."
"The swashbuckler days are in the past, Layard, and the sooner some of you older men realize that modern business must prevail in the fur trade the better it will be for both you and the company," Corrigal retorted.
Layard did not reply. He knew only too well that no business can disregard the human element, and that when a company scatters a mere handful of men across four thousand miles of wilderness, isolates them in dreary, lonely posts, gives them great power but demands greater things of their manhood and exacts a loyalty unequaled in the history of any other commercial enterprise, it must give much in return if it is to endure.
He went to "Bachelors' Hall" to unburden himself and there he found a practical demonstration of his theory. Nicol MacKar, Sandy Hay and Harry Milner did not spare themselves in voicing opinions of their superior officer when they learned Millington was to go to Fort James to succeed Donald.
"He was with Corrigal in Saskatchewan and he knows something about the old devil," Sandy declared. "It's a fine spirit in which to send a man to a long winter alone. How do we know when we'll get a deal like Norton did?"
"Quiet," some one whispered. "Here's Millington."
"I don't care," the angry Scotchman retorted. "Say, how about it?" as Millington entered. "What have you got on Corrigal that he keeps you on after the way you were shown up this afternoon?"
Millington stopped and peered at him, his eyes glittering through the slits in his swollen face. Corrigal had not let him down easily. No sooner had Layard left the office than the district manager turned loose his wrath. Demoralization of the company's trade by one of its own servants was high crime in his eyes and there was the added pressure of recent events, none of which he was able to relieve.
The young Englishman, friendless now, bitter in his defeat, humiliated at every turn, was venomous.
"Guess you know the truth of that story about Norton being his son," Sandy sneered. "That's where you get your hold on him, eh?"
The Scotchman's contempt no longer stung Millington but he was still in a blind fury because of Corrigal's denunciation.
"Of course I knew it," he retorted. "I knew it long before Norton did. And more than that, I have proof. Do you suppose I've let Nee-tah-wee-gan hang around Whitefish Lake these last two years for nothing? I knew Corrigal was his father."
"You lie!" Layard cried as he sprang forward. "Nee-tah-wee-gan never talked until to-day. She wouldn't."
Millington's crafty mind saw his advantage.
"Of course she never talked to you or to anyone else," he retorted. "You didn't know how to make her. But she talked to me—and a bottle of Scotch."
Instantly Millington regretted what he had said. As one man the post managers crowded nearer. Sandy Hay, sputtering in his wrath, thrust his face close to the Englishman's battered countenance.
"Get out of here, damn you!" he shouted. "You're worse than anything Norton or any of the rest of us ever said about you. Go and heal up that face so I can give it another treatment. To take a poor old Indian woman who's been mad with hate for thirty years and get her drunk so you might hear a bit of dirty gossip you could use to——"
He turned as if to restrain himself from giving Millington a second thrashing and the object of his wrath hurried away to hide himself away in his room.
"And with that dirty taste in our mouths we've got to go back to a year of slaving," Nicol MacKar said.
"It makes me want to loaf on the job," Milner declared.
"Yes," Sandy agreed, "to hell with the Hudson's Bay if it's come to this!"
No one resented the sacrilege. Such statements are common wherever two or more servants of the great company are gathered. Men relieve themselves of grievances, generally fancied, in wrathful denunciations which are not unlike the outbursts of ten-year-old boys against the imagined tyrannies of a teacher. Yet those same men would turn with the defensive fury of zealots at criticism by an outsider.
Until the post managers departed for their distant stations Fort Bruce continued to seethe with discontent and denunciation. Millington was ostracized. Corrigal maintained his lonely, driving life.
Ten days after Donald's departure the two Indians who had taken him away returned. They could tell nothing except that they had paddled the deposed post manager as far as a fishing station on Lake Winnipeg and there had seen him board a tug bound south.
Late in the fall a packet from Winnipeg conveyed the information that Donald had appeared at the offices of the company and had drawn his salary and savings.
Winter came with its first packet from civilization and still there was no news of Donald. He had disappeared from the north country.