CHAPTER XXIV
Nee-tah-wee-gan Dies
Donald had been gone half an hour when Millington returned to the dwelling house.
"Have a team ready to start for Fort Bruce early in the morning," Corrigal said as soon as he entered the living room.
"You mean I am no longer manager here?"
"Certainly. Those hunters would have burned the post and perhaps have killed you if it hadn't been for Norton."
"Yes," Millington retorted savagely, "and if it hadn't been for that one little slip I'd have finished Norton once and for all in this district."
"Only a fool would try such a trick on a man like him," Corrigal answered coldly. "You should have known you couldn't do it. He has enough influence over those hunters to make them walk on their hands the rest of the winter. But I don't want you here after daylight. While Norton has them calmed down now, they may change their minds."
"And when I get to Fort Bruce?"
Millington asked the question deliberately. He had been stung by Corrigal's contempt but most of all he wanted to make his trade, to sell Nee-tah-wee-gan's story for retention in the company's service, to save himself from disgrace.
"You can count on going right through to Winnipeg," Corrigal answered quickly. "I put up with your crookedness at Whitefish Lake because I thought it would be a lesson to you and that you would go straight. But I've been watching you closely this winter and I know how you've doctored your statements to make a showing. That's why I came back to-night. I was sure you would do something like this."
"I suppose you'll write a letter to the commissioner?" Millington insinuated.
Corrigal did not deign to answer and, squirming under the contempt of the district manager's glance, Millington rushed on.
"You do that to me and you'll regret it as long as you live!" he exclaimed savagely. "I've been talking to Nee-tah-wee-gan to-night. I've learned something, something I can prove, something that touches you and Norton. And if you send me out, if you blacken me before the commissioner——"
Corrigal leaped from his chair and across the room.
"Stop that!" he commanded in a tone so deadly Millington drew back. "You blackmailing cur! Do you think there is anything in that I don't know? I've let the north country ring with her story and have never denied it but I'll drive you out of the service if you try to use it."
"You're making a mistake," Millington sneered. "My information is something both you and Norton would like to have. And the proof is absolute."
"I've heard enough!" Corrigal cried furiously. "Neither you nor Nee-tah-wee-gan could prove anything to me, or to Norton either."
Millington knew he had to make terms then and there but as he strove to find an opening, some way of hinting at what he knew and yet of holding back its real import until he could exact a promise of immunity, Corrigal spoke again.
"And as for you, you've decided your fate with your threats. Out to Winnipeg you go and I'll write a letter that'll make the north country too hot to hold you."
"It's to your own good to listen," Millington whispered in a shaking voice. "You'll regret——"
Corrigal slapped him in the face with an open hand, slapped him again and again, sending his head rocking from side to side and straightening it when he ducked with a slap under the chin. There was something contemptuously deliberate in the way he did it, something so scornful of retaliation and so patently heedless of resistance it was more humiliating than the blows themselves. For a moment Millington staggered away against a wall and then he leaped clear and ran out of the room.
He did not stop until he had reached Nee-tah-wee-gan's cabin. His mind was inflamed with one thought, to obtain the single bit of evidence the old Indian woman had, to render her wild story valueless and ruin forever the one chance of happiness that lay open to Corrigal and Norton.
Donald he had always hated and since their fight at Fort Bruce he had sought constantly for some means of revenge. Now he hated Corrigal in the same way, for the district manager, with his humiliating open-handed blows, had exposed to Millington himself the raw sore of his physical cowardice—a wound that had never closed since the terrific beating he had received at Fort Bruce. In his blind rage he sought only to make impossible the one thing that would bring joy to these two.
When he peered through the small window of the cabin he saw Nee-tah-wee-gan crouched on the floor before the stove. The room was in darkness except for the thin streak of light that shone from the open draft.
The night was very cold. The post buildings, resting on solid clay, were groaning and cracking as the frost contracted their foundations. Waiting until a sharp sound would drown the lifting of the latch, Millington pushed the door open and leaped inside.
The rush of cold air aroused Nee-tah-wee-gan but not until Millington's hand had been thrust inside her waist and he had grasped the little leather bag that held the ring. He jerked sharply, breaking the worn thong around her neck, but before he could spring clear the old woman had thrown both arms around his legs.
He struggled, but her strength was amazing. She not only continued to hold his feet together but to pull herself upward, clasping him around the thighs, while with sharp, furious snaps of her jaws she drove her teeth into his legs.
Writhing with pain, beating her head with his fists, Millington tried desperately but in vain to free himself. Then he slipped the leather bag into a pocket and reached for her throat with both hands. As he choked her she became a raging fury, scratching at his face with her nails and clutching his clothing, while he tightened his hands in a death grip.
In a last frenzied effort he summoned all his strength and hurled her from him. He heard her body strike and then all was still. For a moment he stood there trying to restrain his heavy breathing, that he might catch any sound from his victim. When he failed to hear one, when there was no movement, the deathlike calm became an ominous thing. In sudden terror he turned and fled from the cabin without closing the door.
Long before dawn the next morning Millington was on his way to Fort Bruce. He did not see Corrigal again or anyone except the cook and his half-breed drivers. He rode in a cariole, while a second team carried robes and food, and all day he urged men and dogs to a killing pace.
It was after daylight that an Indian child, playing among the employes' cabins, looked through the open door of Nee-tah-wee-gan's home and saw her body in a corner. He ran to tell his mother and in a moment the post was in an uproar. But the employes, before they dared enter, went for Corrigal.
The district manager believed the woman was dead when first he saw her. Blood had dried below a cut on her forehead and she lay in a little heap on the floor beneath the sharp corner of a bunk. He had been told that the door was open and it did not seem possible that she could have lived through the cold night. But when he turned the body over he heard a slight moan and blood gushed from the woman's mouth. With each faint breath the thin red bubbles swelled and burst and he knew a rib had been broken and driven into a lung.
Corrigal had her carried to the warm cabin of one of the employes and then sent a messenger to Donald at the Keewatin post.
Nee-tah-wee-gan was still unconscious when the young man arrived. Corrigal met him beyond the trade shop and told what had happened.
"Millington did it," he concluded. "He was over there while we were talking and when he came back he tried to blackmail me with something Nee-tah-wee-gan had told him. He said it settled the question of your parentage and when he insinuated that I was implicated I cuffed his ears.
"He went out then and I saw him go down to the employes' cabins again. I went to bed before he came back and I did not see him before he left this morning. But he said something to me about proof and I think he returned and quarreled with her. I imagine he knocked her down and she lay there all night with the door open."
"There was something between them," Donald said. "They plotted together against me."
"And probably against me, too," Corrigal added. "But this is a plain case of murder and he must be caught. I'll have a team gotten ready and send out word at once."
"Never mind that," Donald said harshly. "I'll get him. After all, it's my job, no matter what sort of a mother she has been. Where is she?"
Corrigal led him to the door of the cabin and then turned away. Donald found that the Indian women were doing all they could. Nee-tah-wee-gan's hands and feet had been frozen and were being thawed out in cold water. Her waist was torn away, exposing a great bruise on one side and explaining, as Corrigal had surmised, the pink froth on her lips.
Donald stood at the head of the bed for a time. He did not believe she could survive the wounds, the frozen extremities and the exposure of the long winter night and as he looked down at the dark face, lined and twisted and stamped by a lifetime of hate, he wished that she would not recover consciousness, would not waken to the terrible agony that would be hers when the blood began to force its way into the thawed flesh.
All his life Donald had been mystified by the attitude of this woman toward him. Never had he been the object of the soft endearments and proud glances so universal in Indian homes. In his boyhood he had been tolerated. Later he had been persecuted and always his success had brought increased venom.
Yet he himself had seldom become bitter. He had looked upon Nee-tah-wee-gan as his one kin and when he had reached manhood and at last had faced the realities of his hybrid status in the world he realized that she must remain his only kin, the one person to whom he was tied or could hope to be tied.
Now when he saw that she was passing, that henceforth he must swing on through life's orbit, solitary and detached, his spirit cut off from intimate contact with any other spirit, he softened toward this woman who had never shown anything except enmity for him. He felt that she, too, had been lonely, isolated by her inexplicable hatred, and as never before he wondered what could have been at the bottom of it all, what injustice or ironical fate could have so perverted her.
Then the very thing he had dreaded occurred. The excruciating agony of thawing flesh pierced her dulled consciousness and its very intensity compelled recognition by a numbed brain. Her lips parted, pink froth gushed out and Nee-tah-wee-gan moaned and opened her eyes. For a moment she looked at the Indian women beside her and then with a convulsive movement of both hands she clutched at her breast.
"It is gone!" she cried in Ojibwa. "He took it! He took it! The only thing I had in the world!"
The harsh features of the ugly old face were grotesque in their unaccustomed expression of hopelessness and terror.
"Where is he?" she screamed. "Go bring him here! Make him give it back to me."
One of the Indian women explained that Millington had departed early in the morning and, repeating the gossip of a feverishly excited post, she added that he had gone out to Winnipeg, had left the north country forever.
"Forever!" Nee-tah-wee-gan repeated. "Did he see the 'big trader'? Did he talk to him after he had robbed me?"
"I heard the 'big trader' say he had not seen him," was the answer.
Despite her pain, Nee-tah-wee-gan lifted her head and glared at the woman beside her. The terror and the hopelessness were gone and there shone from her eyes a hatred so diabolical that the squaws drew back in alarm.
"Then Corrigal will never know!" she cried. "Some day I was going to tell him when——"
She had caught a glimpse of Donald standing at the head of the bed and as she stopped speaking her eyes blazed with a cruelty and a delight so malignant the young man was appalled.
"Keen nish-e-na-be!" she hissed. "Keen nish-e-na-be! Always you will be an Indian! Never can you be a white man! I told you when you fasted and dreamed. I have told you ever since but you would never listen to me. You did not listen until the parents of the white girl would not let you have her, until Corrigal threw you out of the great company, until even the Indians believed you were a windigo."
She sat up now but her face failed to indicate the agony she must have suffered. It was convulsed by passion, by a hatred so consuming her evil features were twisted into horrible, inhuman shape, while her eyes, unclouded by pain, blazed with a fury so terrible the Indian women retreated across the room.
Then she began to laugh. It was a fearsome thing, so cruel, so fiendishly exultant, so ruthlessly mocking, so expressive of the accumulated venom of a lifetime of hate, and through it sounded the high, shrill note of victory.
The last startled Donald. He recognized in it something new. Nee-tah-wee-gan had always been aggressive in her hate, often exultant, but now he sensed that in death she was triumphant, that even in her going she was able to crown her thirty years of persecution with achievement.
"Nee-tah-wee-gan!" he cried. "Think a moment! You are dying. I never harmed you. Why should you hate me so?"
She stared gloatingly, reveling in the sudden agony of spirit that had come to him.
"Keen nish-e-na-be!" she hissed. "Keen nish-e-na-be! Always you will be an Indian. There is no hope for anything else. Tell your father that. Tell Corrigal I said so. Ask him if he remembers me at Fort Bruce when I was young. Ask him if he regrets the promise he made but did not keep."
She choked and the blood flowed from her mouth but it did not drown the fiendish smile.
"I am going," she whispered as she sank back.
"Tell me!" Donald pleaded. "You must tell me!"
He was frantic in his despair. Corrigal had said the matter of his parentage was connected with Millington's actions.
"What is back of all this?" he cried. "What is there between Corrigal and me?"
There was another flash of that diabolical hatred mingled with the new, blazing light of triumph. The blood welled again to her lips as the venom to her eyes.
"Keen nish-e-na-be!"
And Nee-tah-wee-gan died.