CHAPTER XXI
Millington's Plot Fails
The early darkness of mid-winter in the north had come while the two talked. After Donald's last despairing outburst both were silent. Philip could see the dim outline of his friend's body, slumped down in a chair and in that moment it was as expressive of utter defeat as his words had been.
In the past it had always been Norton who led, who furnished the defiance and the faith, who refused to admit failure. Unwittingly Philip had come to depend upon Donald for encouragement and inspiration and now he felt everything slipping. He did not even grasp at straws. He had complete faith in Donald's knowledge of fur land, had seen him battle against what appeared to be greater odds, and now when the young man saw no way out the other accepted his view for the moment.
Yet Philip was an Englishman. England's foes have always complained that the British are so blunt-witted they never know when they are whipped. Philip's own defeats had not brought this quality to the surface but now his friend's agony aroused the bulldog in him. He straightened in his chair and clenched his fists.
Meanwhile, down the shore, past the point of thick spruce behind which the Hudson's Bay post was so cleverly situated, Millington was talking to the hunters in the crowded Indian house.
"I know nothing of what Nee-tah-wee-gan has told you," he said. "I had not heard it before. But she has just come from Kenogami and what she says must be true for she says it of her own son. A mother would not say her son is a windigo if he were not."
"In the morning we will leave," a hunter said. "If I stay here and am eaten by a windigo my wife and children will starve in the bush."
"I know how you feel," Millington sympathized, "and if you wish to go back to your hunting camp I will help you. There is no need to take chances. Let me see your fur and I will grade it for you now."
The man brought his bundles of pelts to the light before the open stove door and dumped them at the trader's feet. Millington bent over them eagerly, sorting the pieces and laying them in piles.
He knew his chance had come. The panic-stricken hunters, anxious to get away, would accept any valuation he placed on the fur. In a few hours he would gather enough at a ridiculously low price to permit him to offset the false entries in his books.
But as he worked the crowd of hunters began to move uneasily.
"I have known Donald Norton for four winters and I have always thought of him as a white man," a bolder one declared. "He never seemed like an Indian."
"I cannot believe he is a windigo," another offered. "He has always acted like a white man. Perhaps an Indian could not conjure one who is so nearly white."
"Don't forget that Nee-tah-wee-gan is his mother," Millington interrupted. "And she, his own mother, declares he killed and ate a man at Kenogami only ten days ago."
"Perhaps Nee-tah-wee-gan lied," a voice came from the darkness behind the stove.
The presence of so many hunters and the comparative safety of the warm, crowded building was beginning to have an effect.
"She talks like an evil old woman," another said.
Millington straightened from the bales of fur.
"Listen to me," he commanded. "I am a white man but for many years I have been a trader and have heard stories of windigos until I, too, have come to know about these evil spirits. I am sorry for old Nee-tah-wee-gan. For a week before she told her people she sat in her cabin and wailed as if someone were dead. It was because her heart was sad, because she knew her son had died, that his spirit had gone from his body and a windigo had come to take its place.
"Yet she did not speak. Although she knew he had killed and eaten a man at Kenogami she still hoped that it might not be true. She wanted her son back. She loved him.
"But when you came to the post, when she saw so many of her own people gathered here, and Norton came, she could not keep silent any longer. She knew she must speak, that she must save you from this evil spirit.
"I think she was wise. She did what she should have done. But I cannot see my hunters suffer. As it was her duty to speak, so it is my duty to protect you. You know Norton is part white. Because he is, there is a medicine that will keep him away from here. It is a strong medicine and I can use it. So long as you remain at the Hudson's Bay you will be safe."
He turned again to the fur, added some figures on a piece of paper and then in a low tone announced the total to the hunter.
The man drew back with an exclamation of surprise. It was far below what he knew was being paid for fur.
"Kah-win!" he cried. "That is not fair!"
"It is all I can pay," Millington replied. "I have just received word that the people who buy fur are very poor. Their hunt has not been good and food is scarce. I cannot pay more when there is no one who will pay me so much."
The hunter began to gather up his pelts.
"Give me your fur now," Millington continued, "and in the morning you can have your goods and go to your hunting camp. Then you will be safe, many days' travel from the windigo."
Millington held out his hands and the hunter, divided between disappointment in the price and his fear of the danger which menaced him, gave up his pelts and retreated to the darkness behind the stove.
The trader hid his elation with difficulty. The scheme was working out exactly as he had planned.
"Is there anyone else who wishes to sell his fur now so that he can leave early in the morning?" he asked.
No one came forward but the discussion of the windigo broke out afresh. The low price had brought doubts and increased the desire of the hunters to question the truth of the story.
"I hunt a long way from here," a man said. "Near me is a hunter who trades at Kenogami. I talked to him only a week ago and he had just seen a man from the post. If he had heard of the windigo he would have told me."
"But Nee-tah-wee-gan has come from Kenogami," Millington said.
"She has been here a week," the man answered quickly. "She must have spent many days on the trail for she is old and a woman."
Others offered opinions and comments. Several spoke at once and the excitement grew. Men began to murmur to each other in the darkness. Millington, listening, judging the temper and the thoughts of the Indians, saw that they were slipping from his grasp.
But he no longer attempted to argue. He had planned for such action on their part and he smiled as he kicked the stove door shut and the room became dark except for a faint red glow near the hearth. A moment later the outer door opened and he was gone.
The hunters gave no heed to this. Some grew more vehement in their declarations that Donald was not a windigo. The more timid became silent. For half an hour the discussion absorbed their attention and the more they talked the less became their fear. One man even laughed in derision.
"The fire!" another cried. "It is hungry for wood. Some one bring it."
An Indian arose and went outside to the pile of fuel, leaving the door open. He had barely stepped across the threshold when a shriek pierced the stillness of the great clearing about the post.
It was sharp and quick and it was not a cry of anguish. Fierce and exultant, it came again and the man who had opened the door stood outside shivering with terror.
"The windigo!" an Indian whispered. "It is true."
Immobile, their very souls shaken, the hunters stared through the open door and as they looked across the great white clearing they saw two glowing eyes in the spruce on the point that separated the Hudson's Bay and Keewatin posts.
In that moment sheer terror filled the Indian house. No one moved. No one spoke. There was not a man who did not believe but that Donald, urged by the evil spirit that possessed him, had come to kill.
Numbers meant nothing. Human hands and human weapons were powerless. No medicine could prevail against this monster from the vague land of the savage's untamed demons.
Since infancy all the hunters had heard of this dread fiend. Their mothers had compelled good behavior with it. Their fathers had told strange tales of men who, conjured by an enemy, had become windigos and had wandered through the forest killing and eating their own kind.
In the mind of every Indian there, as clear and distinct as though it had been yesterday, was a picture of a hunter's camp as his friends had found it not many years before, with human bones scattered about, with human flesh in the kettle over the fire and a fiendish old man running and shrieking through the swamps.
Here, only two hundred yards away, was another of these diabolical creatures prowling in the spruce, eyes shooting fire, perhaps with jaws already dripping the blood of a victim at the other post.
Again a shriek pierced the still night air. Again the eyes glowed and moved forward. Hunters cowered back in the corners and watched through the open door in such terror they were barely conscious that it had been darkened for an instant and that a figure had slipped inside. All eyes were still directed toward those two glowing points of fire.
Suddenly the stove door was thrown open, flooding the space in front with a red light, and into that light walked Donald Norton. There was a gasp, a murmur and then the silence of terror. The Indians cowered back in the darkness, huddled together, wholly in the grip of savage, superstitious fear. Before them, only a few feet away, was the man they believed to be a monster, who had come to kill and devour.
For a moment there was not a sound and then the instinct that goes deepest of all—that inherent, ineffaceable desire to live—asserted itself. Contact with other bodies fanned it. The sense of companionship in death aroused the courage of despair.
A few started forward, grasping stove wood, clubbing trade guns, anything that would serve as a weapon.
Donald still stood there confronting them. The light shone full in his face and though he could not see anything in the darkness beyond the stove he turned his head as if looking at each hunter in turn.
But he could sense that movement, that gathering force of resistless, primitive terror, and at the right moment he lifted an arm and pointed to the door.
Outside in the spruce the shrieks continued, the huge eyes still glowed. The hunters hesitated, listened, looked at the flame-visioned monster on the point and then back to the man before them.
As they looked at Donald he grinned. Then he laughed. In the full glare of the red light he threw back his head and laughed—not a laugh of merriment, not of delight, but of ridicule, a biting, sneering, derisive outburst.
When he had laughed he turned and went out. He did not speak. He did not give the hunters a chance to speak. He left them with only the echo of that contemptuous laugh.
The windigo continued to scream out there in the spruce, the two eyes still glowed, but none of the hunters heard or looked. Each was a victim of Donald's clear understanding of the Ojibwa's mind and character. He had not given them an opportunity to cross-question or talk. He had simply stood there and laughed, had stung them as nothing else can sting an Ojibwa, for he had subjected them to ridicule and contempt, had made a mockery of their fear.
He had been gone only a minute when another figure entered and walked into the firelight.
"Did you not see?" Nee-tah-wee-gan began. "Did you not hear? Did I not tell the truth?"
Jeers and laughter drowned her questions. The hunters, released from their terror, crowded about and jostled her, grinning, sneering, openly contemptuous. In a blind rage she turned upon them, striking and shrieking, but they paid no heed.
One had shouted: "The windigo! Let us go and eat the windigo!" The cry was taken up and in a moment the hunters, laughing and talking, were crowding through the door. Once in the open they spread out, each running toward the spruce-covered point and the two glowing eyes, and in a few moments they had reached it and swept through.
Skilled hunters all, they quickly searched the narrow strip of forest and emerged on the other side, near the Keewatin post.
"It was dark and we missed him!" someone shouted. "We will look again." Back they went, more slowly, and when they had returned to the Hudson's Bay side they saw a dark shadow fleeing across the snow-covered clearing.
Silently and running swiftly, they started in pursuit. Their quarry ran straight toward the Indian house and the leading hunters were close enough to see it dash past, around the trade shop and on toward the dwelling house. On they went and the fastest were near enough, when the door was jerked open, to see Millington in the light as he sprang inside.
The hunters went back to the Indian house, where several who had searched more diligently in the spruce were just arriving. One carried a box that had two round openings on one side and a lantern within and another had a horn.
"The windigo!" one cried. "Who wants to eat the windigo?"
The roar of laughter which greeted this was quickly stilled. One of the older men had walked into the light before the open stove and held up his hands.
"Fools!" he shouted. "You laugh because of what you have found, but do you not see what it means? Do you not understand that you have been made like children? Who carried that thing into the forest? Who frightened you with so silly a toy? Who made you believe that Donald Norton was a windigo, Donald Norton whom we have all known and whom we can all trust, who has always spoken the truth and who is our friend?"
He paused for a moment and looked around at the suddenly silent and abashed Indians. He saw that his questions had swayed them and with the Ojibwa's love of words and their effect he launched into his discourse again, his mind inflamed by the power he knew he was exerting.
"Why was this thing done to you?" he demanded. "Why were you men who toil so hard to kill animals and take their pelts, you men who suffer and starve and are frozen through the long dark winters, why were you told that Donald Norton, our friend, is a windigo? It was to rob you of the fur for which you have worked so hard, to make you bring it to a liar, that he might pay what he pleases.
"And who was that man? Who would gain if you believed Donald Norton is a windigo? Who is it that we have always known is full of tricks and deceit? Who has made of you a joke and the object of laughter in all the wigwams for many winters to come?"
"Millington!" one of the hunters growled angrily. "I saw him when he ran into his house after I had chased him all the way from the forest."
"Millington!" cried another. "He carried this box into the spruce and tried to frighten us because we did not sell our fur as did Esh-quan-dam."
In a moment the Indian house was in an uproar and it was with difficulty that the first speaker was able to make himself heard. When order was restored he said:
"Now we know who is our friend and who would do us harm, know who it is that wishes to frighten us with this story of a windigo and then rob us of our winter's hunt. Are we going to let such a one go unpunished?"
Immediately Esh-quan-dam, the hunter who had sold his fur to Millington, was on his feet. "No!" he shouted. "I listened to this tale of a windigo and I was frightened. I had worked hard since the fall and had brought in many skins with which to buy things for my family. Now with the price he has given me we cannot live until spring. I shall have to leave my traps and hunt meat. This is how he cheated me because he knew I was frightened. Come! Let us leave the house of this robber and go to the house of one who is our friend. There we can talk of what we must do."
His fellow Indians began immediately to act upon his suggestion, loading their toboggans with pelts and equipment and streaming across the clearing, through the spruce and on to the Keewatin post.
Philip Collinge saw the dark line against the snow and met them at the Keewatin Indian house. A fire was burning and he had provided rations for all. But he did not ask questions or speak of what had happened nor did Donald appear. When all the Indians were inside he went back to the dwelling house.
"It jolly well worked!" he cried when he entered the living room. "They're back here to a man, all those who got 'debt' from the Hudson's Bay as well as our own Indians.
"Every man of them has brought his fur. They're too mad to talk or else they feel ashamed. Anyway, I cleared out. They acted as though they were going to hold a pow-wow and I thought their resolutions of censure might be more drastic if I didn't appear to be interested."
Donald did not comment. There was no elation in his manner and his eyes were dull and listless as he stared straight before him.
"Look here, old chap!" Philip exclaimed. "Pull yourself together. You've crawled out of the tightest hole I ever saw a man in. Give us a grin."
"Oh, I got out of that," Donald answered bitterly. "Luck and a pretty good knowledge of the fur game did it. I knew, of course, that Millington and Nee-tah-wee-gan had started the story between them and I guessed Millington might resurrect that old trick to make the story good. He overreached himself there, gave me the one chance, and it was easy to slip into the Indian house and laugh at those hunters while the fake windigo was howling out in the spruce.
"But," and he straightened in his chair and faced Philip, "don't you see where I stand? Don't you see what I'm up against all the time? I thought I could act like a white man, think like one, feel like one, and that I could be one. But no one will let me. No one will forget. No one will give me credit for anything except my parentage.
"So what's the use of going on? Why pretend? Why slave for something I can never have? I have failed to make the white people accept me. Now I have failed with the Indians themselves. They would have laughed at a report that you had turned windigo. They know a white man can't become one. But me! They believed it instantly. Sixteen years of effort to make myself white has made no impression on them."
"Here!" Philip commanded sternly. "Stop that! You have won. You've practically ruined the Hudson's Bay here at Fort James. Millington is done for. When Corrigal hears of it he'll kick him out. And Corrigal himself is done for. There'll be no stopping you from now on."
"There'll be no stopping my getting a little fur," Donald agreed harshly, "but what good will that do me if I have to go through life with everyone pointing his finger at me, everyone saying, 'He's an Indian,' when I turn my back?"
Donald sank back into his chair.
"Oh, I'm through," he said in a flat, empty voice. "There's nothing left for me but to go back to a wigwam. I'd rather be an out-and-out Indian than keep on trying to fool myself, working for something I can never have."
The agony in that voice and attitude held Philip dumb. He wanted to cry out in passionate protest. His affection mounted to new heights and demanded that he save his friend and yet he felt he could do nothing, that blow after blow had driven Donald back and down until only the wigwam remained.
He saw in that moment the turning point in the younger man's life. His fasting dream, his ceaseless efforts, his beliefs and ambition, all had come to nothing. In the crucial battle his parentage had won. It had forbidden him love, had driven him out of the Hudson's Bay, had denied him any close contact with his fellows. Now, in the reaction of the Indians, it had placed him irrevocably beyond the last hope.
Thus, in the lowest depths of despair, when he most needed help, Donald must depend upon himself alone. He must save himself or the courage and the youth through which Philip had lived again must die forever. Whether he would fight his way out, whether he would find something to take the place of his fasting dream, of the belief that he was white and the desire to prove it, could rest with no one else.
Philip would have sacrificed anything for his friend and yet he knew he could not talk away that insuperable wall, the barrier which had disclosed itself in the past but which now rose so high and so forbidding before Donald's eyes.
"Don't you see?" Donald cried in a final outburst of bitterness, "Millington couldn't beat me. Corrigal, the biggest of them all, couldn't do it. But Nee-tah-wee-gan, my own mother, she did. She waited thirty years for her chance and then she struck."
Philip turned away, sickened by this sight of a soul crushed by the ruthless power of inevitable fate. Then the door was flung open and one of the half-breed employes burst into the room.
"The hunters go back to the Bay!" he shouted.
"Back to the Bay!" Philip repeated in amazement.
"Yes. They talk, then they take their guns and go."
"What's this?" Donald cried as he sprang from his chair.
"Those Indians they take their guns and they say they going to burn down the Hudson's Bay. They say Millington he a bad man. He cheat them and they don't want him here any more. They going to show him what they think and burn down his place."
Donald started toward the door but Philip leaped in front and turned his back upon it.
"Where are you going?" he demanded.
"To stop that! Of course!"
"Are you mad? Millington brought this upon himself. He deserves anything they may do."
"But they'll do it."
"So much the better. That's the Hudson's Bay business, not yours."
Donald stared at Philip for a moment. His eyes were no longer dull.
"They can't do it!" he cried. "They must not burn Fort James!"
"They can if they want to. And it will be the making of you and the Keewatin Company."
"But to burn Fort James! Why, Phil, that was my post once. I've never forgotten the day old Duncan Mactavish told me——"
"Yes," Philip interrupted fiercely, "and have you forgotten how you left it, what Corrigal did to you, what they all did?"
Donald did not answer. His eyes were still glowing and he stood there, tense, alert, eager.
"The score's wiped clean," Philip rushed on. "You don't owe the Hudson's Bay anything."
"Perhaps not," and the passion was gone from Donald's voice. "No one ever owes the Hudson's Bay anything. It always demands, always takes. You never worked for it, Phil. You don't know. You never knew old Duncan Mactavish. You haven't any idea what it means to be a servant of the great company, to know that——"
He faltered, overcome by a complete realization of what the Hudson's Bay really had meant to him for so long, of what it could still mean when everything else had failed.
"Don't be a fool," Philip protested as he spread his arms across the door.
But Donald was gone. He had turned and run out through the kitchen.