# Pirates Of The Muskeg

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE—A STORY OF HIGH ADVENTURE IN THE CANADIAN WILDS WHERE THE LONE "MOUNTIE" IS THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW
SEARCHING for a spot to land and camp, Sergeant Scott peered ahead into the purpling twilight.
Like a fleeting mottled shadow on the water, his black canoe glided swiftly down stream between the walls of Keewatin pine. On the bosom of the river a little light still lingered, but the forest on either bank loomed over him dark and silent.
It was late October. With the setting of the sun a zero tang had crept into the air. A short "squaw winter" of heavy of heavy frosts and stormy weather had passed three weeks ago, and the mellow Indian summer was drawing to its close. Ptarmigan and snowshoe rabbit had changed to their white winter garb; the early migrants already had winged south. It was a question of days, now, and perhaps of hours until the first blizzard, yelping down from the Barren Grounds, would freeze the waterways and blanket the country in snow.
Handicapped with a dangerous prisoner in his canoe, two hundred miles from his patrol district and three hundred from the Mounted Police post; buried in a wilderness of woods and rivers that he knew only from crude maps of the Chippewyans, Scott should have been somewhat concerned about his predicament.
But he was softly whistling "Jolie Alouette," and picturing the commotion at barracks when he tramped out of the woods and kicked on the door and told the men to come take a square look at what he had bagged!
His prisoner, the coming blizzard, and the three hundred wilderness miles worried him not at all. He was at home in the Strong-Woods; he had yet to lose his first prisoner; and he knew that when lakes and rivers caught over, he could cache the canoe, and strike overland to the post as straight as the flight of a teal en travers.
To his ears came the throbbing swish of white waters around the next river bend. It sounded like a gentle rapids that he could shoot safely enough in spite of the owl-dusk.
His prisoner, lying bound in the prow of the canoe, heard the beating saut ahead, and sat up.
Scott guessed the man's thought. "Lie down, you!" he commanded in bush French. "You're figuring on upsetting us in the saut and scrambling ashore, and escaping in the dusk. Lie down!"
The prisoner lay back on the blanket packs, sullen and silent for a few moments. Then:
"Damn' accident!" he burst out savagely, his brute voice husky with thwarted anger. Damn' accident you got me, Yellow-Stripes! Splaa—you could not have taken me otherwise in a thousand years. I give you ten thousand to get my comrades!"
"My capturing you might have been accident," Scott agreed, "but there's going to be no accident between here and the post. Make up your mind you're going in peacefully—and you'll go in alive."
The gray-haired prisoner rose to an elbow. His flare of anger seemed to have passed. He spoke throatily, exultantly. There was a lurking threat in his voice like the sibilant, warning hiss of a snake.
"You will take me in, Yellow-Stripes. Without doubt. You and your black canoe have a mighty reputation. You are a terror to bush-loping bandits. You deserve the compliment of their fears. I salute you and your canot noir. I am manacled; you will take me in.
"But after you have got me there, what then? I lie here bound, your prisoner. You laugh now, you young fool; you think you have the whip hand. It is I who have that whip hand. I have a power over you, M'sieu' Scott, that you do not dream about.
"When you get me to the post, when my comrades find out what has happened to me, a whisper will come out of the Great Marsh. It will make you writhe. It will put gray hairs in that black poll of yours.
"You may struggle against that whisper for awhile, Yellow-Stripes, but in the end you will come to the butter tub some night and unlock the door of my cell and beg me to escape! You yourself!"
Scott laughed at the preposterous idea of unlocking a cell and begging a prisoner to escape. A dozen times that afternoon he had listened to this threat of a whisper coming out of the big muskeg.
He did not have the faintest notion what his prisoner was driving at. He did not greatly care; for his conscience, which alone could give any man a power over him, was as clean as the sheets of his service record.
He thought the words were mere empty bluffing—a cunning attempt to prey upon his fears by the threat of some intangible, mysterious power.
But the taunt of accident rankled, because it was true. In his own mind Scott admitted it was true. In a single lucky moment he had done what he had failed to do in long, arduous seasons of patrolling.
Not through superior prowess or neat-handed craftiness was he taking the prize prisoner in, but through sheer accident. His sporting soul revolted at the circumstances.
And he admitted, too, that unless another miracle happened, he would never capture the confederates of his prisoner. For two years, now, he had pitted all his man-hunting wizardry against them, and failed. He had tried every scheme, trick or stratagem he knew of. There was nothing left to try.
His job of capturing the fur pirates of the Great Marsh was more than a mere perfunctory duty with Scott. It had become a personal issue to him, and he had given all he had of brain and body to the task.
For one thing the brutal, murderous work of the band aroused his cold fury as nothing else had ever done. For another, his capturing them meant everything to him.
It meant the inspectorship which he would have got two years ago except for a jealous superior. It meant he would be lord of his own post at some station in the Strong-Woods, no longer tied down by an incompetent inspector, able at last to do things as he knew they ought to be done, settled permanently some place where he could build up a home.
It meant that the dwindling reputation of himself and the black canoe would be restored to where it had been before his superior cunningly detailed him to this hopeless task of capturing the fur pirates.
But in spite of all his zeal and his fury, and all that success would mean, he had failed utterly. Rendezvoused in the huge swamp land, the gang sallied out, murdered, escaped with their booty of furs, and laughed at his pursuit.
On the innumerable waterways of the Great Marsh, their canoes left no tracks he could follow. His whole bitter failure boiled down to just that: canoes leave no tracks.
II
THE swish of the rapids ahead grew louder. On his left the whitish gleam of birches appeared among the minaret pines. They meant firewood and a glade to camp in. Scott angled closer, and searched for a break in the twelve-foot bank.
As though a bullet had whizzed past his throat he started suddenly, paddle upraised for a stroke. From the dark bank not a hundred feet away, a voice broke the taut, frosty silence. A woman's voice clear, high pitched, and silvery.
"Le canot noir—noir! Mercy of Heaven, it is the black canoe!"
Scott sat dumfounded. A rifle shot and a bullet singing past would have galvanized him into action; they were part of the day's work. But a woman's voice from the blackness of the pines and spruces in that savage, lonely wilderness, two hundred miles from a white habitation—this cry of a woman stunned him.
She was no Indian girl, nor métisse—half-breed—but a white woman, her voice girlish. In her tones he heard an uncontrollable surprise at the sudden sight of his canoe; and her cry was vibrant with all the joy and devout thanksgiving of a woman's soul.
For a few seconds Scott could not think, much less act. He stared wide-eyed at the wall of darkness where the voice came from. The canoe drifted downstream, quickening its speed as the waters narrowed and swiftened for the saut.
From the grove of birches came a sound like a sob. Then the girl's voice rang out again, this time pleading with him, drawing him back to her.
"Scott! Sergeant Scott! Sergeant Brian Scott!"
"Hello!" he called, because he could think of nothing else. "I'm guiding in right now."
With a powerful back-stroke he stopped the canoe, and skirled it in toward the bank. Beneath the fringe of shadows he saw a jutting rock, a canoe tied there, and very dimly a path leading back into the forest.
As his own craft touched, and he stepped out, a slender, girlish figure appeared out of the blackness and glided toward him.
"Good Heavens!" he stammered. "What are you doing here, girl? Do you live here?"
The girl drew near him hesitantly, till she was looking up into his face and he caught the perfume of her hair. He stared at her, astounded, unable to see her clearly in the murky darkness.
And while he stared, bewildered and unable to think, she put her hands on his shoulders and half turned him so that the lingering light of the river touched his features. Intently she studied them, rising on tiptoe.
Yes," she said slowly, disregarding his questions and his bewilderment. "Yes, you are Brian Scott."
She pronounced it Bree-ahn, the French way, as only his intimate friends spoke it; but her accent was undoubtedly English. Her low voice sounded to him like the purl of waters. He stood wide-legged in front of her, trying to sort one question out of the dozen tumbling through his head.
In the name of the Lord, who was this girl? What was she doing there in that wilderness?
If she had faded to a shadow and vanished altogether he would not have been surprised. He actually reached out a hand and touched her hair.
"But who are you?"
“When I saw your canoe," she went on, with a strange throb in her voice, "I could not believe, Mr. Scott. And when it drifted on past I thought I was dreaming of what I wanted to see.
"But now—now I know you are Brian Scott. He has described you a hundred times to me, and shown me pictures of you."
A dozen fresh questions stampeded in Scott's brain. Heavens above him! Who was this girl? No trapper's wife or daughter talked like that—and, besides, no trapper had penetrated to that wilderness river almost at the edge of the Barren Grounds. She was no factor's daughter out roaming who lost her way; the nearest trading station was almost a week's travel distant.
"Who described me to you?" he blurted out. "What are you doing here on this river? How do you know who I am when I don't know you? Do you live here?"
"Our cabin is just a stone's toss back. It's dusk now; you'll have to camp soon—and won't you stay at my cabin to-night? I'll explain about myself then. Oh, you have a prisoner!"
The man had risen and stepped out upon the mud-smeared rock, and stood four paces away from them.
Scott glanced from his hulking old form to the slim lithe figure of this girl, trying to think, trying to shake off the spell of her hands upon his shoulders, and her face upturned so close to his. He choked back his questions and bewilderment, and reasoned what to do.
It was a queer situation that he suddenly found himself in. He remembered her cry, like a cry for help, drawing him in to her. Whoever this girl was or whatever she needed him for, he could not go on without finding out what her anxiety meant, and helping her if he could.
It was time to camp, anyway. The cabin she spoke of would be a safer place than the forest for his crafty prisoner that night.
But the mystery of this girl he had found there, the spell of her face upturned to his, the faint perfume about her, were a dozen times more powerful than the reasons he admitted to himself.
"I'll be glad to sleep under a roof to-night," he answered. "And I'll be mighty glad if I can be of any help or—or use to you."
He drew his belt-gun, and kept it in his hand as he spoke to the man.
"Get up the path, you, ahead of us. It's dark, but don't make the mistake of trying to pitch off into the bush—or I won't have that pleasure of unlocking your cell in the butter tub!"
III
HE lifted the canoe out upon the rock. With the prisoner in front of them, they started through the birch growth toward the cabin.
Scott took the girl's arm, and shielded her from brush swishing back. With all the bewildering questions hammering through his brain, he felt he surely must be walking in his sleep, and would wake up presently.
"What are you doing here, Brian?" The name slipped familiarly from her lips. "You're terribly far away from your patrol district. No wonder I didn't believe my own eyes when I saw the black canoe!"
Great snakes, this slip of a girl seemed to know all about him! There was friendship, intimacy even, in her tones. But nothing forward or assumed about her; she simply acted as though she had known him for years.
And she was counting dead certain on his helping her. By her eagerness, by the passion of her words, she showed that his coming had been a blessed miracle to her.
Though her voice was strange to him, he felt that surely he was acquainted with her, and would recognize her when he could see her features plainly. But what was she doing there in that wilderness? What did she want of him? The whole jumble of questions sprang to his lips again. Resolutely he swallowed them. She had promised to tell him at the cabin.
"Why are you over here, Brian?" she repeated.
"It's only fair for me to know your name; you know mine."
"It's Beatrice."
From the Landing to the Circle, from Fullerton to the Mackenzie, Scott was at least acquainted with every white girl near her age. And she was none of those five. None of them was named Beatrice. None of them was of her slender height or limpid voice.
"Mamselle Beatrice?" he asked. The question slipped out impulsively, before he could check it.
"Yes, Miss Beatrice. Now will you answer my question?"
"I was tracking some bandits out of the Red Loon district. More or less by guesswork I trailed 'em northeast to the edge of the tundra. There I lost all trace of 'em. I was on the headwaters of this river, so I followed it down to map some of the country.
"I catch a prisoner when I wasn't expecting to. Then at dusk some one calls out to me; I meet a girl at the landing; I find myself walking up a path with a—a girl, in a wilderness where there aren't any girls—Good Lord, I never walked in my sleep before!"
She laughed softly.
"But your prisoner?" she queried. "If you lost the trail of the bandits, how did you capture him? He isn't one of them, then?"
"Yes, he is, and I caught him by pure luck. I was ashore this noon cooking a mug-up. He danced around a bend, and I had a clean drop on him.
"I didn't know he was within a hundred miles of me. I guess we were both knocked pop-eyed. I jumped behind a rock, but he was in a canoe on the open water. So I got him."
"Who is he?" she asked quickly, dropping her voice to a whisper.
"Don't you know about the fur-pirate outfit?"
"Not—not much."
Good gracious! A girl living there unsuspectingly within striking distance of that infamous outfit! It was high time she was being warned.
He lowered his voice so that the man could not hear.
"My prisoner's name probably wouldn't mean much to you, then. I'll explain. Up north of here beyond the tree line there's a muskeg half as big as all Saskatchewan. The métis call it Le Gros Marais, or the Great Swamp.
"It's a place where a muskrat has to look sharp to find enough mud for a house. It's a wonder to me how humans can live there. But a gang of five men are hiding somewhere in it. Fur pirates, you might call 'em.
"They strike at isolated trading posts, and hijack sled parties bringing peltry down from the Arctic coast. They've got about as much mercy as a pack of February wolves. They don't make their victims walk a plank, maybe; they use a knife, and a hole in the ice.
"They're not the usual run of bush-sneaks, but intelligent men and cunning as owls. They're expert bush-lopers and water-doggers, every one of them. That's what makes them such tough customers. And they're a vile lot; that's why I'm warning you.
"They call themselves 'marsh harriers,' after the marsh hawk. It's a fitting name, for that's the only hawk that kills when he isn't hungry—for the sake of killing.
"Their leader is called the Harrier, or Le Busard. He's fifty or better. A criminal as old as he is is always case-hardened and crafty. Le Busard is more he's diabolic. He's the shrewdest, blackest-hearted man I ever bumped into."
Distinctly he felt her quiver as he pronounced the name of Le Busard.
"Do you know him?" he broke off.
"No, no! Go on—please!"
"The rest is short and sorry. I've been after the bandits for two years. They were my special job, and I've flunked it."
"But how can that be? If all the stories of you and le canot noir are true, Brian—"
"You've never seen the Great Marsh, girl! I'm only human, in spite of those tall tales. I can't track a canoe on a river, and men of their kidney are wise enough not to leave signs on the tote-paths."
"Oh, I see."
She was silent a long moment.
"But if they should leave signs on the portages," she asked presently, "you could follow to their hiding place?"
"I maybe could follow to the edge of the Great Marsh. But once inside of that, ahead there aren't even portages. It's a world of crisscross waters where a man can travel for weeks and not step out of his canoe."
"But suppose they should leave signs on the portages, and you followed and caught sight of their canoes as they were entering the Marsh. Couldn't you shadow them on to their hiding place? I mean, couldn't you follow them by sight, Brian, keeping hidden yourself?"
He wondered at her strange persistence. "I might be able if I was real lucky."
"And your prisoner, Brian—you said he was one of the band."
"My prisoner," Scott said slowly, "is their leader, Le Busard himself."
IV
IN the narrow pathway the girl had pressed close against him, and he felt her now go suddenly tensed and rigid. Her breath came short and quick, and she tightened her lips upon a little cry.
She had told him she did not know Le Busard; and Scott swore that if he knew what sincerity meant, her voice had been sincere when she said that.
Then what under heaven did her strange excitement mean? The mere mention of the prisoner's name a few moments ago had shaken her like an aspen leaf; and now, when she learned who the man ahead of them actually was, she had barely kept from crying out.
With an effort he forced back his questions, and gave his attention to Le Busard. He would find out everything at the cabin.
A light twinkled through the birches presently. The dim outline of a split-log dwelling rose up before him. They passed around it to the door on the east side. Flinging it open, Scott ordered his hand-cuffed prisoner to go in. Then he turned to the girl.
She stood in the shaft of light that streamed through the open door, and he saw her plainly. And he saw at a first glance that she was completely and utterly a stranger to him.
For a moment or two he could not look away from her eyes. They were brown, dark-brown, shaded by heavy dark lashes, and sparkling with buoyant health.
They were inscrutable eyes—behind those heavy lashes—but Scott thought he saw a wistfulness there, and a brooding worry.
They were searching his face intently again as she looked up at him, and he knew she was studying him, making her own estimate of his traits, good and bad.
Purposely he drew back to escape the witchery of those brown eyes. Arm's length from her he saw the sylphlike grace of her girlish body—so graceful and beautifully proportioned that she appeared more than medium-tall though she could have walked under his outstretched arm.
He saw her rich, warm, brown waves of hair, and her exquisitely molded oval face. The frost tang had brought roses to her cheeks, and the streaming light played in soft, golden spangles in her hair.
She was dressed, he thought, like jolie Alouette, that song-sweetheart of voyageurs on lonely, spruce-buried waters. She wore a fillet like an Indian girl's around her forehead to hold that marvelous luxury of hair in place. Her jacket and skirt were of some chestnut-brown corded material.
A ceinture fléchée or broad sash belt of a dozen interwoven colors was wound about her slender waist, its quilled ends dropping to her knees. On her feet were a pair of bottes sauvages, fur trimmed and dainty.
Her prettiness, the fact she was a stranger, the mysteries that she held for him, awoke Scott's interest and curiosity. She broke through all his habitual indifference, and his slightly sardonic attitude toward women.
He was used to thinking of them collectively, not as individuals. But now, for almost the first time in his life, he was aware of a girl's personality. She rose out of the generality of womankind and stood before him as an individual, bewitching and sweet and mysterious.
His bewildered and slightly awed glance went back to her wavy hair, and her lips, and firm little jaw. Something beside the beauty of her fascinated him. At first he was at a loss to say what that puzzling factor was Then very gradually it dawned upon him.
This girl's features were familiar to him—faintly and very vaguely, but yet familiar.
Had he seen her once? He debated that a moment. No. The habits of long service years had made him note and remember people. He knew that if ever he had laid eyes on her lovely face, he would never have forgotten.
The impression of her familiarity was misty and dreamlike. He might have dreamed he thought of such a girl as she. But no! His sober, cool-headed sense checked him up sharply.
Dreams do not materialize in flesh and blood before a man!
He ransacked his memory for a clew to that haunting familiarity. He tried to make himself believe it was just a crazy, senseless notion. But it persisted; he could not shake it off.
"You haven't changed, Brian," she broke into his puzzled thoughts. *Your eyes are a little sterner, from all you've seen and done since then, and there are tiny crowfeet of worry underneath them. But you have not changed much."
It sounded to Scott as though she had finished her study of him and was saying: "He will do!"
Her air of quiet intimacy was even more pronounced than before. There was no art or subtlety to it; she was frank and candid. And Scott, for all his bewilderment, was quite willing to accept that intimacy as an established, if somewhat puzzling fact.
"Look here," he demanded, as sternly as he could. "You seem to know everything about me, past and present. I'm going to know something about you.
"Can't you understand how I'm floundering around in a mire of puzzles at meeting a girl like you here—and at all these other circumstances? You promised."
She nodded slowly and thoughtfully.
"Yes, I promised, Brian. But not now. I want to—to think first. Afterward, when we have a few minutes alone—"
He started to object. But then his mind leaped forward to the time when his prisoner would be safely stowed for the night, and the moonlight would be filtering down through the spruces, and they would be talking outside the cabin, where Le Busard could not hear.
He agreed to wait.
They went into the cabin together. Half a dozen goose-tallow candles made it bright and cheerful. Le Busard, in the center of the room, turned to them.
V
VIVIDLY Scott remembered the queer, stunned expression on Le Busard's face six hours ago, upriver, when the handcuffs clicked. But the sight of this slender girl there in the candlelight struck the bandit ten tirnes as dazing a blow as that very capture.
His eyes opened wide and round, and he stared at her as if she were an apparition. The blood ebbed from his face, leaving it white and drawn.
He took a step forward, toward her; his manacled hands went up to his throat; he swore a blasphemous French oath that even the fluent métis would rarely utter.
Then, with a great effort, he gripped himself, and was cool and impassive again. Astounded at this strange action, Scott looked quickly at the girl. She was gazing steadily at Le Busard, and did not flinch from him. But Scott saw a thing or two. He saw her small fist clench till the knuckles were white. He saw her eyes dart fire, and her body grow tense and rigid.
Whatever her emotion was, she clamped it down as an Indian girl would have done. With half an eye Scott saw that something stood between those two—something beyond his fathoming—something deep rooted in human passions and the most powerful human emotions.
It seemed to him that her sudden flare of emotion was bitterest hatred. But Le Busard's—no doubt in the world of that—his emotion had been livid fear.
It was inconceivable, it astounded him, that this slender, beautiful girl of scarcely twenty should have anything, even a bitter enmity, in common with this crime-calloused man of fifty. But the fact remained; he read it in their faces.
By the accident of the capture he had brought them together, and now was a bewildered spectator until the girl should explain it all. In his days his work had involved him in many a queer situation, but never one so baffling as this.
Was Beatrice lying—Scott asked himself sharply—when she said she did not know Le Busard? He believed what she had told him. In spite of the scene he had just witnessed, he believed her. He would have staked his reputation upon her sincerity.
He had to depend at times upon his ability to judge a strange face and voice; it was as valuable to him as his deepwood's cunning and his water-dogging skill. Seldom did his judgment go wrong; and it kept repeating to him now that the girl had been truthful with him.
Her cry, pleading with him to come to her, rang in his ears yet. Even before she knew he had a prisoner she had called to him. She wanted his help. She would clear up this whole dark puzzle. There had to be some sound explanation of it.
Impatient to have her alone and hear her story, Scott thought a moment, planning how to bring that about quickly.
The packs had to be fetched from the canoe. He could take Le Busard along with him; but coming back, carrying the two heavy packs on his shoulders, he might lose his prisoner along that trail through the dark buckbrush.
There was some amount of risk in leaving so dangerous a prisoner for a girl to guard, but it was distinctly the lesser of two dangers.
She must have guessed his thoughts.
"I'll guard your prisoner," she offered, "while you bring your packs from the landing."
Reluctantly Scott passed her his heavy belt gun.
From the way she handled it she was plainly no novice with a Colt. It reassured him to see that.
"Be very, very careful with this man," he warned.
"I can shoot, Brian. Not so well as you, perhaps, but well enough if he tries to escape. I'll keep the gun pointed at him every second you are away."
Scott hurried down the dark path, lifted the canoe from the muddy rock to the moss, took out the packs, and loped back. toward the cabin. As he passed the window he glanced inside.
Beatrice was standing just as he had left her. True to her promise, the heavy Colt still pointed like a menace of death at Le Busard.
But she was leaning toward the man, talking.
The sight jarred Scott as though he had been struck a blow. Brushing his scruples aside, he drew near the window and listened.
She was speaking earnestly, in quick, incisive tones, but so low that he caught only the murmuring flow of her voice. As she spoke she kept looking anxiously toward the door. She did not want Scott to return unexpectedly and discover her talking to the prisoner!
In a moment she finished, and seemed to be waiting for Le Busard's reply. The man's evil face twisted slowly into an exultant grin. He nodded, as if in agreement.
VI
As Scott stepped back from the window a riot of warring emotions surged through him. With her innocent loveliness no longer in front of his eyes, his cold reason for a moment persuaded him that she must be an ally of the bandit.
That would explain many sore puzzles; her living there on that lonely river; the tremor that ran through her when she learned who his prisoner was; the play of passion between them—put on for his benefit; and this conversation he had witnessed by sheer accident.
It would explain another puzzle which he had wrestled with all that afternoon—what was Le Busard's mission in coming down that river alone, a hundred miles from his men, risking capture, breaking all the caution habits of the bandit gang? He might have been coming down to visit her!
But there a stark question checked Scott's suspicions. If the girl were an ally of Le Busard's, why had she not allowed him to escape while his captor was gone after the packs? Surely they both realized that such a clean-cut chance would not come again.
There was no answer to that except that she was innocent. And when he stepped inside the cabin again and she handed back his gun, with a smile, Scott's doubt vanished.
He swore savagely at himself for mistrusting his judgment and for thinking the girl could be an ally of this black-hearted outlaw. His suspicion of her appeared to him like a crime. Without doubt she would explain this conversation, too.
In a corner of the cabin he trussed up Le Busard, and made him as comfortable as possible on a blanketed seat. Then, in spite of her protests he helped Beatrice get supper ready.
There were things to laugh at in this unexpected and odd situation he had met up with. He had counted on camping in the bush that night, on cooking a quick, tasteless meal over a handful of ash-heart fire, and here he was in a cheery cabin setting a table with a cloth on it, and chatting with a girl whose eyes laughed at his clumsiness, and whose smile sent his blood galloping, and who assumed more intimacy with him in their first hour together than he had ever achieved with any other girl in his twenty-eight years!
While she finished his table-setting job, he fed Le Busard, and lit a pipe for him. Then he sat down with her to a supper of roasted willow ptarmigan, and the dainty biscuit she had made, and Arctic cranberry sauce, and steaming coffee.
He wished just then that the bandit were a thousand miles away. His roving eyes watched them like the hawk he was named after, and his presence was a black shadow. Scott tried to push him out of his mind, and give his thoughts and attentions to the girl.
The candlelight gleamed softly in her velvety treasure of hair, spangling it, touching it to a living glory. When her small hand met his, Scott colored, and a quiver leaped through him. She did not resent his gaze, but she was conscious of it, and her own color heightened.
Again and again that dreamlike feeling of her familiarity came to him, stronger than before. And some of her tricks of speech and little mannerisms seemed oddly familiar to him. He knew now positively that the feeling was not a mere crazy notion of his. But to explain it, to place her, he gave it up.
The queerest part of it all—so queer it was uncanny he was beginning to feel as if he had known her a long time.
Her quiet assumption of intimacy might explain it partly, through the power of suggestion; but it would not explain that vague familiarity of her features, and voice, and manner.
During the meal their eyes met now and then, but neither spoke. Scott finally realized how uncivilized his gaze was. He looked away from her, and glanced around the room.
Her words "our cabin" he remembered distinctly; and now he saw she did not live there alone. On the wall beside her own small pairs were a man's snowshoes, and heavy ash skiis.
There were fur clothing, new and unused, a gum-pot for mending birchrind canoes, and creels of bake-apple berry as a tart against a meat diet when the heavy snows came. From the rafters hung wooden pails of food, and strips of moose "jerky" for the winter at hand.
But his glance went back to the man's possessions. Several things that he saw—small articles and little gewgaws of this and that indicated that the man was of Scott's own age or younger; young enough at least to be still interested in his personal appearance.
She had told him that her name was Mam'selle Beatrice; but he could not reason out who the man could be that lived there with her. The mere fact of a man there was a stab of pain to him. He resented that big footgear, and the heavy clothing. They mocked him.
She leaned forward, and startled him with a question.
"Have you finished your scrutiny, Brian? What does it tell you?"
She was smiling; but he flushed at being caught.
"Yes, I've finished. It tells me several things. You—and whoever the man is—came here early last spring. You came in by way of the Pas, where you bought your equipment.
"That pair of beaver-tail racquets was made there by Charlo Anglier; I use his racquets myself when I can get 'em."
She held her breath, her brown eyes marveling at his shrewd guesses.
"You're prepared to stay here all winter," Scott went on. "You—and the man—aren't chechahcos; you've seen the ice go out. You're both thoroughly at home in the Strong-Woods, and know how to take care of yourself.
"But you at least have been Outside. You've shuffled off the thick burr of the north. Your voice is soft, but your accent is crisp as a Yank's. Am I right in all this?"
"But—but why should I tell you anything, Brian Scott, when you can use your eyes like that?"
"Because I stop there. The big questions are all dark mysteries. You promised to tell me everything. Won't you tell me now—outside where that carcajou can't listen?"
She put down her cup of coffee untasted, and slowly nodded. Scott raised his voice—for Le Busard's benefit.
"If you'll show me the pile of wood, I'll pack in enough for the night."
She led him out the door, and they stepped a few yards away from it.
VII
THE cold, coppery moon was just rising over the spruces. It was circled by three great mist rings. Upriver a wolf howled, and from a dozen points other wolves answered. It seemed that all the loneliness and wild beauty and the very soul of the Strong-Woods were packed into that long crescendo wail.
Scott had known folk who shivered whenever they heard a wolf howl; but to him the sound was always a challenge that set the blood leaping redder in his veins, and brought up memories of his thousand lone night camps with the aurora borealis swishing overhead.
A high V of migrating cranes winged south across the face of the moon, gabbling like a troupe of witches on Hallowe'en.
A white rabbit in his winter pelage drifted up the path toward them and leaped frightened into the junipers just as a snowy owl, tilting and banking in the pines overhead, darted down at him.
Up against the face of the heavens they heard a bird's call; the note was like the ring of a silver bell, faster and faster, till the strokes blended in one silvery tone.
Incredibly swift the bird was out of hearing, but Scott knew it was the rare Eskimo curlew, the rarest, swiftest, most beautiful-toned bird on the continent.
Though no whisper of breeze seemed stirring, the browned dead leaves still clinging to the birches rattled like the dead husks of summer. The very air had a tensed, waiting feel in it; a hushed, cowering expectancy.
They stopped with the moon shining over Scott's shoulder, and full on the girl's upturned face. In the wan, cold moonlight she seemed fragile and unreal and fairy-like. He wanted to reach out and touch her hair again, and reassure himself she was a girl of flesh and blood.
Her beauty, her nearness to him, and that unspoken intimacy surged like high wine through his blood. She was rousing more than his curiosity and his interest. Deep and powerful emotions were stirring in him and awakening. They were so strange and new that he had no word for them.
They were a discovery to him, his own personal discovery of something profound and ineffable; and therefore they seemed. to him like something new in the world.
She was looking past him, up at the great mist circles. A note fraught with anxiety crept into her question.
"That is the eye of the buck, Brian. It means a blizzard. But how soon?"
"I don't know," he answered absently. "Maybe to-night or to-morrow. But I'd guess it's a couple of days off.”
He was thinking of the man living there in the cabin with her. Who? The question throbbed dully in his brain. He tried to fashion it into words aloud, but his tongue felt wooden and he did not dare.
She must have divined the cause of his gloomy reverie. Her hand crept out and rested on his arm. Her words were low, but very frank; and there was a terrible earnestness in her voice.
"Those things you saw in the cabin, those things of a man's, Brian—they aren't a bar to your—to our friendship. You are mistaken. There is no bar to our friendship, Brian Scott—if only you will help me."
He stared a blank moment into her unwavering eyes. Gradually he realized all that her words implied. She needed his help; needed it desperately. She was giving him a right to her friendship if he would help her.
He burst out impetuously. "Is there anything under heaven that I wouldn't do, girl?"
"Oh, but there is! You may think not, you may say not; but there is! Your code is a stern, inexorable code, Brian. You put it above all other things—as you should. But I'm not asking you to violate it; I'm not asking something impossible of you. It's only a very, very little favor that I want now."
"What is it?"
"I promised to tell you about—myself. But now I can't; I must not. Won't you release me from that promise, Brian? You'll understand very soon why I'm asking it. That's all the favor I'm begging from you."
Scott looked down at her incredulous, doubting if he had heard her aright. The thing she begged of him seemed utterly without sense, or purpose, or reason. What earthly difference did it make whether she told him then or later?
"Why can't you tell me now?" he demanded. "You promised."
"You'll understand why not, Brian. Heaven knows I want to tell you, but I must not. When you know everything, you will admit I'm acting wisely. Yes, I promised; and if you'll not release me, I'll I'll make good my word."
With those questions fairly burning his brain, to be put off now was the one thing in the world Scott was loath to do for her. He had counted dead certain upon her telling him everything. For almost two hours. he had been fighting down questions that cried to be answered.
Who was she? Why were her features dreamily familiar to him? What was a girl like her doing there on that wilderness river? Why had she called him in to her? What did she expect of him? What was between her and Le Busard?
"But I can't help you, girl," he objected, "if I'm all in the dark. I can't work blindfolded, can I? What's your reason for not telling me?"
"You, Brian!"
"Me—"
"Yes, you. Your service habits have too powerful a hold upon you. I sometimes think you are the prototype of all the Northwest Mounted. And it's because of your code that I can't tell you."
What under the moon, stars and vaulted heaven did his Mounted habits have to do with her not telling him? It was clear over his head and hands; another puzzle milling around in his brain!
Did the girl mean she had done some criminal thing, and that his sworn duty would force him to arrest her? It was the only explanation he could think of, and he knew it was a lie.
He swore to himself he was not going to release her from her promise; he had to know. But the next instant, as he looked steadily into her eyes, his determination wavered.
She was sternly set against telling him. If he insisted, she would make good her word. But he could foresee her drawing back from him, and see the fire in her dark-lashed eyes, and hear the stinging reproach of her lips:
"Even that small favor you refuse me!"
He debated hotly for a moment. He was convinced that she was not putting him off because of some mere whim; there was a purpose, a sensible purpose, in what she asked. She seemed to know what she was doing.
"Beatrice," he said earnestly, "I don't want to pry into your affairs. I'm only wanting to help you. If you'll answer a single question-"
She nodded hesitantly.
"I want to know," he went on, "what's between you and Le Busard. You quivered when you found out he was my prisoner.
"When he first saw you there in the candlelight, that thick-skinned brute turned white and nearly dropped. While I was gone you talked to him, and he nodded to whatever you said."
She shrank back from him in sudden bitterness.
"You were spying on me, Brian Scott! Did you think I was a confederate of that—of that—"
"I did just what was my duty, my code as you said," Scott answered honestly. For a moment I did think—something very wrong of you. But I cursed myself for it afterward. That is Gospel truth."
His sincerity and his candor disarmed her. Her hand crept back to his wrist, and lay lightly upon it.
"I know you had to do it, Brian," she said contritely. "Forgive me. You were going to ask me a question—"
"Yes. When and where and how did you meet this man Le Busard?"
"We never met. I never laid eyes upon him. He never saw me before to-night."
Her words staggered Scott. Desperately, in spite of them, he clung to his faith in her truthfulness.
"Wh-aa-t! But look here! I saw with my own eyes—"
"We never met face to face before," she repeated simply. "I've heard of him. I'm aware of several things about him that even you, Brian, do not know. That explains why I was excited when you said so calmly, 'My prisoner is Le Busard.'
"Then, there in the cabin, when he turned and saw me, he took me for—for another person. He was mistaken, ghastly mistaken for a moment.
"You surely noticed how quickly he gripped himself again when he saw his mistake. That explains his agitation. This too is Gospel truth, Brian. Now are you going to release me from that promise?"
She was on tiptoe again, begging him, pleading with her eyes. Her hand crept down to his, and her clasp tightened.
In that roil of bewildering questions a couple of facts were beginning to stand out clear to Scott. The girl was in trouble, desperate trouble, and was trusting him.
Another thing: Le Busard was a factor in that trouble. Her words might be true enough; she might never have met the bandit leader; but all her agitation and the man's livid fear at sight of her—all that meant something.
Just now she had evaded the real question. She might never have met Le Busard, but that did not answer the question of what stood between them.
Scott debated whether to make her tell him everything then and there. She had hinted that the crisis of her trouble was very near. He would know all about it soon enough—if he stayed there at the cabin.
The first blizzard was at hand; he would need toboggan and racquets for the overland trip; he could make them easier at her cabin than on the trail. It was in fact his duty to stay, under the circumstances.
He went on piling up reasons; his real one he did not admit even to himself. But he came to his decision; he would stay and find out her trouble, and see her through it.
"Will you release me from my promise, Brian?" she pleaded.
"Yes!"
The next moment was overwhelmingly confused, and ecstatic, and blurred with Scott. It was gone in one wild beat, but the memory of it lingered with him all the rest of his days.
It was only afterward, when Beatrice had gone out of his life as suddenly as she had come into it and she seemed a beautiful vision he was hopelessly following—it was only afterward in lonely, anguished hours that Scott realized the sweetness of that moment.
Later all the details came trooping back to him one by one. How—when he released her from the promise—her arms went impulsively around his neck, and she drew his head down, and her slender body pressed for an instant against his own, and her lips, meeting his in a warm, clinging kiss, were murmuring, "Oh, but I knew you would!"
Another thing he remembered afterward, though in that moment it was lost in the surge of his emotions and the madness of their kiss. When her body pressed against his he felt the unmistakable form and hard outlines of a small automatic revolver carried in the ceinture fléchée around her waist.
It was a trifling circumstance, overshadowed by a dozen impressions then; but later the merciful memory of it saved Scott from despair.
VIII
SHE slipped away from him into the cabin. With a big armload of split blocks, he followed. She had disappeared.
For the first time he saw that a door opened beside the great hearth, leading back into a very tiny room—her room. Mechanically, with the madness still in his blood, he began preparing for the night.
In a few minutes she came out into the hearth room, bringing him an extra pair of fluffy, white H.B. blankets, and a glossy musk-ox robe to lie on.
She had been combing out her hair. It dropped in wavy lustrous beauty to her knees, and almost hid her. To Scott it was a marvel how she could carry that treasure of heavy hair, and keep her head poised so proudly.
He noticed the smirking smile on Le Busard's face, and the coarse look in his eyes as he stared at the girl. The look made Scott see red. It reminded him of a brute licking his chops. If Le Busard had not been his prisoner and bound, Scott would have knocked him down.
When she bade Scott good night, and closed the door of her room again, his preparations were short and swift, for he was paddle-weary, and somehow very sleepy. He spread the musk-ox robe on the floor in the middle of the room, arranged her blankets and his own, and led Le Busard to the pallet.
Her words about his Mounted habits being strong with him were pretty much the truth, he thought. He had to smile at the way he was proving what she had said. One of those habits was to get his man; another, even stronger than the first, was to keep him after he was captured. He meant to take no chances with the bandit that night.
Snuffing out all the candles except the two longest ones over the hearth, and then lying down beside his prisoner, he locked Le Busard's ankle to his own ankle and Le Busard's wrist to his wrist.
On long trips like that, a man could not stay awake at night and travel by day; it was physically impossible. The double manacle binding prisoner and captor solved that difficulty; it allowed the latter to sleep peacefully all night without fear of losing his man. Any considerable stir of either would wake up the other.
Instead of putting the key in his pocket where Le Busard might conceivably get hold of it during the night, Scott tossed it twelve feet away upon the hearth mantel-piece. Then he closed his eyes.
He wanted to stay awake awhile and think over the strange circumstances he had been suddenly flung into. There was some explanation, some sensible explanation, behind all the queer puzzles. They all hung together, and he believed that a little quiet thinking would show him the peg they hung on.
He wanted to live over again that moment outside in the moonlight, and hear Beatrice's voice again as she told him there would—be no bar to their friendship; and to figure out this strange new thing which had come into his life so suddenly.
It was always like that, he thought; the great, significant things, as if preparing hidden and unseen, burst upon us in a moment—not like the long ordinary days. and seasons and years when a person's life runs along on a prosaic level, but in high-pitched moments, in sudden revelations Scott's thoughts wandered so badly that the sentence was never completed. He was sleepy, terrifically sleepy. It was because of those endless, toiling portages of the last twelve hours, he believed.
A refrain of the day's work beat in his brain as he dropped off:
White water, tote-path, embarque—
Hours later Sergeant Scott came slowly back to consciousness. It was not his usual clear-headed awakening, but seemed instead like fighting endlessly upward through dark waters to the surface.
He was first aware of a parched throat, and a throbbing headache, and slight nausea. He opened his eyes. The two candles. still burned on the mantel. The hearth fire had sunk to a bed of glowing coals. He twisted his head, and looked to his left.
He laughed. He blinked his eyes and laughed again, as though the delusion were a good joke. Then he touched the crumpled blankets beside him to prove his vision was lying.
His face turned suddenly white, his laugh ended in an oath, he wiped his hand across his eyes, and sat up with a jerk. The blankets beside him were empty! He was on his feet like a shot. The fog cleared out of his brain. He steeled himself against the panic which gripped him at sight of the empty blankets. With the manacles still dangling from his own ankle and wrist, he took a first swift look around. Le Busard was not in the outer room. One glance told that. Before making his getaway he had lain for several hours on the musk-ox robe, for the fur showed the plain impress of his body.
Scott whirled and leaped past the hearth into the other room. A candle burned there, too; and he saw that Beatrice was gone.
The wall bunk was disarranged, she had slept in it part of the night; but she was gone. The blankets, the little hollow where she had lain, were warm yet to his touch; but she had vanished into the night.
A clammy sweat broke out on Scott. He stumbled back into the hearth room, and stood rocking in the middle of the floor, trying desperately to realize what had happened.
The glittering key lying on the musk ox robe caught his eye. Le Busard could never have dragged him over to the hearth. and secured that key, even though his captor were sleeping a drugged sleep.
He knew from his parched throat and reeling senses that he had been drugged. He remembered now that she had left her coffee untasted, and that the bandit had refused his too, claiming he wanted to sleep.
They had prearranged all that during their talk! In the night she had come out and unlocked the prisoner, and escaped with him!
In a blind daze Scott freed himself from the empty manacles, and lit the other candles. As they spluttered and then burned steadily, he saw something sticking against the heavy door.
He stumbled across to it. A deerfoot knife pinned a note there for him, a note in Le Busard's bold print:
FOLLOW US TO LE GROS MARAIS, YELLOW-STRIPES, IF YOU ARE MAN ENOUGH. THE DOGS ARE HUNGRY.
Above the taunt and the sinister threat of the hungry dogs, one single word of the message stood out significant:
Us!
Slumped down at the block table, with his face in his hands, Scott sat fighting till the worst of the dazing blow passed, and he could think again.
He could not realize that Beatrice had duped, and drugged, and betrayed him. There were the stark facts; his being drugged, her unlocking the prisoner, her disappearance.
But he could not put them together and realize their totality. He could not believe what the brutal facts said of her.
He cursed himself for his weakness. He wrestled it more bitterly than with his own black despair at losing his prisoner. He tried to anathematize her as traitress. It was a futile, an impossible task.
He could smell the perfume of her hair yet, and feel her arms around his neck; and the sweetness of her kiss still lingered on his lips.
Always when he finished damning her in his sober mind, a small insistent voice kept saying that the facts lied. It seemed to him that if she were faithless, then there was no faith or honor or innocence in the whole world.
One thing he remembered which helped him believe in her. Before she knew that Le Busard was his prisoner, before she even knew he had a prisoner, she had called to him, and had wanted his help.
His help for what? She had told him nothing; he could not remotely guess. And why had she gone away with the bandit? It was all beyond his power to fathom.
Gradually a belief grew upon him. It was a lame and halt and blind belief, but it grew to a certainty with him. The something which stood between her and Le Busard had driven her to do what she had done. Behind it all some dark mystery lurked.
Still dazed by the blow, he did not know which way to turn, or what to do, or where to take up the problem. But she had been counting on his help, and he would do all that lay in his power, however blinded and puzzled he was, to save her—to save, or to avenge her terribly.
He jumped to his feet. The note said they had headed for the big muskeg. With the blizzard coming, Le Busard would take the most direct path. That was upriver.
He looked at his watch—an hour till dawn. They had not been gone much over an hour; he might overtake them before his enemy could gain the first tributary.
He caught up his rifle and belt-gun, buckling this on while he ran like a deer down the path to the landing. Groping in the willows he found his canoe; but as he felt along its side he groaned.
In three places it had been ripped from gunwale to keel by a knife. The other birchrind was gone; his own useless; his chances of overtaking Le Busard completely spiked. The bandit had expected him to make a mad dash in pursuit!
IX
SCOTT sat down in the darkness, wrestling with the demons of despair. The bandit leader had escaped—escaped clean. With all those forks and portages upriver there was no hope of pursuing him now and saving Beatrice.
The logical thing was to go back to the post, report, and take his medicine. Though it meant his reputation, the hard-won stripes on his arm, and all that he had built up through long years of service, at least he would not be branded as a deserter.
But chevrons, reputation, and the loathed stigma of desertion counted for little in his grim debate now. They were rough-and-ready, worldly things; Beatrice was apart from them and beyond them.
She seemed to have come to him out of the Strong-Woods like a beautiful vision, and vanished into nothingness again. She had come as an answer to a hidden desire and need of his.
All his fierce energy, which arduous patrolling could not snub, an unsettled restlessness which work could not down, a vague but profound feeling of something lacking in his life—she was the answer to all them.
Now that she had gone out of his life, he realized that his desire, and hopeless longing, and his reverence for her was love, and that returning to the post without her, without knowing what had happened to her and avenging her, was utterly impossible.
His despair passed finally and gave way to a grim determination. Not to head south without Beatrice, leaving her in the hands of Le Busard. But north! North to Le Gros Marais.
He had been absent from duty for two weeks now; he would be absent all winter. Through the Moons of Hardening Ice and Hoar Frost and Big Snows, till the Moon of the Brown Eagle came again in the spring, he would comb that huge muskeg country in blizzard and still cold like a stalking vengeance; and if Arctic storm or the white wolf pack got him, at least it would never be known at the post that he had lost his prisoner.
Slowly he lifted the black canoe to his shoulder and carried it back to the cabin, where he set grimly to work with gum-pot and canvas to mend it.
Into his packs, when he buckled them up again, went heavy winter clothing from the wall pegs, and extra cartridges, and twenty pounds of robibbo, a concentrated food made of moose pemmican, flour and pea-meal pounded together.
Before leaving the cabin finally, he looked around for map, or piece of writing, or clew that might help him.
The outer room yielded nothing at all save the initials J. H. on a rifle stock. He broke the rubber endplate to look inside the hole, and found some matches in a waterproof case, a tiny luminous compass, a bottle of pain-killer; but no name, or clew.
He went into her room, and for the first time had a good look around. It was a very tiny little niche, scarcely ten feet by eight. In spite of the rough, split-log walls, the room was snug and cozy, and exquisitely feminine.
A faint perfume like that in her hair pervaded it. Her nightgown hung on a wall peg; beneath it a pair of fur slippers for house wear. Her bunk was mattressed with spruce-tips woven together as only a sourdough knows how; and over these were several white, soft blankets.
Shamefacedly he searched through the room, and through her clothing. On a shelf he found a copy of the Mounted Police reports for the preceding year. A leaf was turned down at the place where Inspector Donaldson reported the failure of Sergeant Scott's patrols against the fur bandits of the Great Marsh.
It occurred to Scott that she might have got her information about him from that pamphlet. But no! She had mentioned pictures and descriptions, and had showed an intimate knowledge of him which she never could have gleaned from that terse, unfriendly report. She knew him from some other—some very personal—angle.
In a jacket pocket he found a picture of her in sport skirt and tennis slippers and a sweater, and in the background were a palm tree and a giant cactus.
By holding the card to the light he made out the watermark of a photography company in Los Angeles. It astonished him; he had thought of her as a living part of the Strong-Woods. He would have sworn she had been born and reared to them.
The picture was so clear, it caught so much of her laughter and zest that it seemed almost alive. He could see her lips moving; could hear her saying—" Oh, but I knew you would!"
Between the leaves of the Mounted report he found another thing which astounded him. It was a picture of a girl dressed in the clothes of a quarter century ago—a wasp-waisted skirt that swept the ground, a pair of button slippers peering out from under it, and yards upon yards of airy laces and frills. But what struck him all amaze the picture was a likeness of Beatrice!
At first he thought she had taken it as a jest—dressing the part. But the picture was as old as the costume, a tin-print faded and browned with age.
He thought then that it could not be a picture of Beatrice; but he held the two prints side by side, and swore the old tin plate was a likeness of her.
"Good Lord!" he breathed, utterly stumped. "When that picture was taken, she couldn't have been born yet. But—but it's her!"
Again, as he gazed at the things in his hand, the feeling of her unreality crept over him. In his thoughts the evening before he had likened her half jestingly to jolie Alouette, the fur voyageur's mythical sweetheart for two long centuries.
The comparison now come back to him in a different sense, a serious and odd and other-worldly sense.
The raucous scolding of a whisky jack outside recalled him from his bewildered groping for an explanation. He slipped the pictures into an inner pocket, lest they were all he would ever have of her.
He cut his search short, for her clothes, and the faint violet perfume, and the laughing picture of her in the sport clothes brought back the poignant memories of last evening.
And they reminded him, too, that she was in Le Busard's power now, being taken to the rendezvous in the big muskeg.
If it had been any other man who held her, Scott would have cherished some hope that her own sweet girlishness and the Strong-Woods chivalry which many a time had amazed him in rough, shaggy-barked men, would have been protection enough for her.
But he knew Le Busard too well to hope that. He had traced the man back two or three years before the time he became leader of the bandits. He knew of several deeds at lonely cabins, vivid commentaries on the man's evil abandon, deeds that no métis or woods-born Canuck would ever perpetrate.
It seemed to him that Le Busard, for all his craftiness in forest or on the water-ways, was alien to certain codes, a foreigner. And the man's physical make-up, as Scott studied him the day before, bore out that impression.
The gray dawn broke while he carried the canoe and then the packs down to the river.
As he set the black canoe to water, he saw a thing there on the mud of the landing that brought his heart into his mouth. A few words, traced with the toe of a small botte sauvage.
X
Two of the letters had been trampled out by his own boots, and the last portion of the message had been blotted out by the smear of the other canoe being slid into the water.
Only four words remained:
FOLLOW C NOE TR CKS. WATCH
Like a man petrified Scott stared at the message for a moment; and then, as all that those mud letters meant came flooding in upon him, he yelled aloud. A wild elation swept over him.
She had left a message for him! Over and over and over again that thought quivered through him like a flash of fire. She had been watched in the cabin; she dared not, there; but here on the river under cover of darkness she had left him a token! A pledge of faith, of her honor, of their comradeship in the battle with the fur pirates!
He thanked Heaven that when cold, sober reason called her "traitress," he had clung to his faith in her.
For a little while Scott could realize nothing but that she had left him this message, and that his judgment of her face and voice was upheld and that his deepest instincts as a man had been justified.
But then he began to think of the message itself. Follow canoe tracks. Lord, he had spent two futile years trying to follow canoe tracks! Without the rest of her message, the words were mockery.
Watch—watch what? She had given him some directions, some help to guide him, but that was irrecoverably blotted out. He would have given his three stripes cheerfully to know what the mud smear had cut off.
He crouched down and searched till his eyes ached to discover if a faint impression or a word were traceable yet. But all save the first four words were destroyed.
One thing stood out clear. Whatever lay behind her action, whatever desperate thing she had attempted, she was counting on his help in her whole scheme. She was trusting to him, banking on him.
From her first cry out of the spruce blackness last night to this message on the mud landing, he saw now she had been expecting him to aid her.
She was relying on him to follow. Vaguely at first, then more and more clearly as he recalled her words and her anxious questions, he began to see at least the rough outlines of what she wanted him to do. For a moment the prospect unnerved him. What she expected of him seemed utterly impossible.
Her faith in his powers was colossal. She had heard so many tall stories about him that she thought he could do any thing. It was a superman's task even if luck broke his way at every turn.
He shuddered at the thought of failing. She had gambled upon his ability, staking the fearful wager of her own self. It seemed to Scott that she had simply flung herself away on a desperate and utterly hopeless gamble.
But the thought of her in the evil power of Le Busard, in the rendezvous of the bandits, nerved him as inspectorship or reputation could never have done, and he rose in grim determination to the work ahead.
Swiftly balancing the packs, he stepped in, took up the paddle and skirled the canoe upstream toward the north.
At the first portage three miles above the cabin Scott drove his canoe ashore and sprang out to examine the tote-path. It was a game trail worn by hoof and pad, and leading close along the water edge. He walked the length of it, bent over, looking for signs.
A band of caribou had passed there during the early night, and trampled the path into mud. If a human had used that trail, the tracks would have been as plain to him as if laid down in new-fallen snow.
But there were no signs. A hundred times on portages like that he had searched carefully for clews, and found none. The bandits were all too wise for that. Always they circled back through the spruces, walking over the carpet of moss; and hit the river above the embarque.
As Scott pondered that and looked upstream, a white object fluttering a bowshot away in a juniper caught his glance. Impetuously he broke through the buckrush, and pulled it from the juniper.
A portion of a woman's handkerchief—dainty, violet-scented, Beatrice's! The faint odor of it set the blood pounding madly in his veins.
He had guessed her plan! Guessed it in spite of the message blotted out! His mind jumped to what the rest of that message must have been. Watch—watch for signs on the portages!
He remembered her anxious questions about his ability to trail the bandits, remembered how insistent she had been about telltale tracks, and her anxiety about the blizzard swooping.
He could fill in the outlines of her plan now. She was trying to lead him to the hidden rendezvous. She was going to leave signs on the portages.
For that superbly cunning reason she had "played up" to Le Busard and given herself into his power, and pitched off with him. If her plan worked, for the first and only time in his two years' futile chase Scott would have signs to guide him!
But it was a fearful question with Scott whether she could carry that plan through. The bandit leader had passed there with her while it was still dark. It had been easy enough then to leave that bold sign.
But when daylight came and he would be watching her, and the river began forking into its dozen headwater branches, how under heaven would even this quick-witted little bush-loper be able to leave sure, plain clews to guide the man following? Scott knew that he himself could never do a thing like that!
Racing back to his canoe, he loped with it over the tote-path, splashed knee-deep into the water, gave the boat a shove, and leaped in.
As he darted upstream, swiftly as a Chippewyan woods-runner in the frailest birch-rind craft, he took stock of his chances. One lone thing was in his favor; he could paddle faster than Le Busard.
But he would have to stop on every portage and search. The minutes, the quarter-hours lost when river forks and white water came thick and fast, might more than offset his greater speed. And the canoe ahead had two and maybe three hours' lead on him.
He had to whittle that lead down to nothing. At the marsh edge all signs would cease. By to-morrow afternoon Le Busard would be entering the huge swampland.
Before the trail was lost in the thousand channels and creeks of the Great Marsh, he had to catch sight of that canoe. Now and then he glanced at the sky, noting the ominous signs, praying for the storm to hold off. Grayish clouds were scudding down from the Barren Grounds. In the northeast sky hung a brick-dust sheen, sure herald of a savage woolly- whipper roaring down from higher latitudes. Overhead his ears heard the shrill, incessant whining of angry winds preparing; and the wind that brushed his face was as keen as the lash of a whip.
Gradually, very gradually, the clouds were thickening and growing darker of color. When that overhead overhead whining dropped to earth, blanketing the country with snow, the signs she had left would be blotted out in half an hour.
On the second portage ten miles above the cabin he found another portion of her handkerchief. Crumpling it into his jacket pocket be darted on upstream. On the next two sauts there were no signs at all.
No tributary streams came in along those reaches; there was but one canoe route. He wondered if Le Busard had been watching her, or if she purposely had left no signs.
Without stopping he whipped on up the spruce-buried river.
Twice that morning he passed the rotting skeleton poles of a cluster of old wigwams. Once he came to an Indian encampment so fresh that smoke still spiraled from the tepees.
A Chippewyan's stalwart paddle in the prow of his canoe and a pair of keen black. Chippewyan eyes on the portages would have been a godsend to him. Yesterday when he passed, the Indians had still been there; but the tepees were empty now.
His shouts flounced back at him from the walls of spruce, and a lone "cracky" howling dismally on the bank told that Scott's dusky friends had left southwest for the trading posts to "get debt" for the long white winter.
On higher he passed an occasional bear-skull stuck up on a sapling, Manitou offering of the primitive savages. He passed old fish weirs and a spot where a great heap of caribou antlers and skulls showed that the Chippewyan spearing-surround had taken heavy toll of the dun herd.
He passed through an immense drift of migrating caribou, where countless thousands of the animals, gathered together from the Barren Ground wastes, were swimming the river and working en travers on southward to the snow-padded depths of the Strong-Woods where they yarded.
But thereafter the caribou failed, and even the Indian signs stopped, and he entered into a no-man's land of appalling loneliness.
At noon, because it was wisdom to do it, he stopped twenty minutes to eat, and to rest briefly. An hour after that he came to a great Y-fork of the river.
Here was the first stark test of Beatrice's ability to leave signs.
There was no portage at the fork; both channels were deep canoe-water; she had no chance under the sun to leave a clew there. But Scott had thought of such a dilemma, and laid his plans beforehand.
Whipping up the left branch to the first saut, he searched the river bank thoroughly for signs. There were none. Dropping back to the fork, shooting up the right branch, he landed at the first portage, and crept on hands and knees along the water-edge.
The mud shingle showed nothing at all; there was no evidence of a canoe having touched. Hardly ten feet from where he started searching a line of rocks looking for all the world like stepping stones led from the knee-deep water back to the mossy bank. These were granite stones, clean-scoured and innocent of signs.
But between two of them—so faint that it was all but invisible—he made out the light impress of a small botte sauvage!
XI
How she had managed that under the sharp eyes of the bandit leader himself was a miracle of miracles to Scott. Perhaps she had been talking to him when she made that track; smiling her bewitching smile at him; fanning the man's passion till he forgot caution and suspicion! However she managed it, there was her footprint pointing the way!
Half a dozen times that afternoon at forks where the trail would have been hopelessly lost otherwise, Scott came across the signs she had left to guide him, a footprint on the mud, freshly broken sticks, juniper boughs twined together, and once a portion of her handkerchief in the cleft of a tree. He marveled at her woods-cunning. She was matching wits with the shrewdest man Scott had ever come up against, and was beating him at every turn! There was not a man in the Mounted Service who could do what she was doing.
Toward four o'clock he came upon a footprint so fresh that it made him jump. They were not more than half an hour ahead of him. He reached for his rifle, and laid it beside him in the canoe, and at the river windings he searched the stretches ahead before skirling out upon the open water.
But it was not part of his plan to catch up with them and force a battle with Le Busard. He believed now that he could follow to the rendezvous and capture the whole gang.
At the next fork his confidence was staggered. Whipping up the left branch to the first portage, as he had done repeatedly that day, he searched and found no signs. The right branch showed nothing at all, though he searched there for half an hour. A cold despair swept over him.
Had Le Busard detected her at last, and stopped the telltale signs?
He went back to the left portage and examined the water edge on both sides, up and across and down, holding himself grimly to a careful job, wasting an hour that seemed a dozen years to him.
And he found her sign just before twilight, a stick lying on a rock, with another stone on top to weigh it down and to catch his eye.
While Le Busard had been reloading the canoe, she had managed that! But they were an hour and a half in the lead again, and the early twilight was shutting swiftly down. In another hour Scott was forced to stop at a place where the river branched in three directions.
He felt reasonably sure that Le Busard would stop too. Except for the blizzard, the bandit had no particular cause to hurry; he did not know he was being followed. Besides, the canoes had covered two full days' travel in that one day; and flesh and blood has its limit of endurance.
Yanking two fat connies out of the river and pulling up some potatolike bulbs of the bracken fern, Scott dug a pit under a tamarack, put in hot stones from his cone of fire, piled wet moss on them, laid on his fish and bulbs, and covered the pit over with moss and clay.
While the meal cooked he climbed a tall white spruce to its swaying top, and hung up there an hour, searching the dark stretches up the channels for a glint of a camp fire.
He saw none; he had had small hope of seeing any, for the bandits always made fire holes. That was one of their cautious habits.
After eating his meal he lashed his packs to the tops of pliant saplings and flipped them up out of reach of prowling bears or carcajous. Then, setting the lightened canoe to water again, he paddled silently away up the middle channel.
If Le Busard had camped near the river, the taint of his camp fire smoke would be hanging on the taut, crisp air, and could be detected. Or a fox might be barking at the human intruders, or their voices might be audible.
He worked ten miles up the middle channel without finding a trace of their camp; and while the moon climbed to zenith and started slipping down the western sky, he worked the other two branches for miles above the forks, all to no purpose.
At two o'clock, back at his camp, he rolled up in his blanket and fought for sleep. He needed it for what lay ahead of him the next day. The great test would come then. Tree line was but thirty miles away; the edge of the Great Marsh was twenty odd miles beyond that.
Within fifty miles he would have to unravel all the portage puzzles, and cut down nearly a two hour lead, and be within sight of the other canoe when it entered the huge swamp land.
But he was too keyed up, in too anguished a suspense, to sleep. With the blanket wrapped around his shoulders he sat on the dark river bank, thinking.
Moon and starlight had been blotted out by the lowering pall of clouds. As he looked up at the velvety black heavens a single flake of snow fell wet and cold upon his face.
The overhead whining had dropped lower, till it was whipping now through the tops of the columnar spruces. Keechee Keewatin, Chippewyan god of the North Wind, was untying his bag of caribou leather and letting loose his first storm.
During those long dark hours while he sat waiting for the dawn, Scott's mind went back to the time, two years ago, when the fur bandits first started their depredations down in the Strong-Woods near Fort Resolution. That was before Le Busard came.
They were crafty bush sneaks and skillful water doggers, those three métis and the white man with them; far shrewder than the average bush-loping criminals. But Scott knew he would have caught them speedily if they had stayed there in the timbered country, his own beloved Strong-Woods.
Then Le Busard appeared out of nowhere and became their leader, and took them northeast to Le Gros Marais, where nothing short of a fleet of airplanes could ever have discovered their rendezvous.
It was a master stroke, but only the first of Le Busard's stratagems, for he stood head and shoulders above even his crafty band.
Under his leadership they became supremely cunning and merciless and efficient. They stopped their smaller depredations, and robbed only when they could make a big scoop of peltry.
In winter time they struck during a raging blizzard, on a jour à poudre, or "powder day," when the wind was full of whipping snow spume and hoarfrost, and their tracks were wiped out in a twinkling.
In summer time they escaped through the network of waterways to their retreat in the swamp land. They left no survivors to follow or to describe them; a human life to them meant less than an otter's skin. Only a few stray glints of information had Scott found out about them.
In those two whole years Le Busard had made but one false step. That was in coming down the river alone by daylight. It was a puzzle to Scott; he could not begin to figure out what the man's purpose had been.
But that mystery was small and inconsequential compared with the dozen others.
During the silent hours, Scott tried to work out an explanation of all that had happened last night in the cabin. No theory he could concoct would explain everything.
He tried to figure out why Beatrice's features seemed vaguely familiar to him, for that might possibly be a key to many things. One by one he groped back through the years clear to his boyhood days in Montreal, but was utterly unable to place her.
The mystery of the two pictures, each of the same girl, but taken a quarter century apart, was too much for his mind even to grapple with; he simply pushed it aside.
It was very clear that she had some deep purpose in leading him to the rendezvous. Her reason was something more than a mere desire to see him capture the bandits.
What was so terribly vital a thing with him could be only of mild interest to her. She would never have staked herself on so wild a gamble unless some powerful reason of her own had driven her to it.
Whatever that reason was, it was bound up with the mystery of what stood between her and Le Busard. The more he thought of it, the more incredible it seemed to Scott that her life could ever have touched that of such a man, even remotely. But it was so; it had to be so. Back of it all there was some explanation.
He was no longer worried about that explanation. His job was not to harass himself with puzzles now, but to throw himself with every atom of strength and brain into that chase, and cling to that trail. His fight and her fight were one now, to reach that rendezvous.
The thought of her camped somewhere only a few miles away with Le Busard was maddening to him. For the first time he remembered the belt-gun hidden beneath her ceinture fléchée. It was some comfort to know she was secretly armed.
XII
MORNING broke slowly, a somber gray. When he set the canoe to water, he had to break scum ice reaching out from the bank. In the middle of the stream the surface was covered with candle ice, peculiar crystal daggers which had formed on the bottom during the night, and were rising to the surface now.
He remembered the Chippewyan saying that candle ice forms only once each year; that the next night all the waters would catch over solidly. The overhead whining was low and ominous; little snow flurries fell at times; by night, without the ghost of a doubt, the blizzard would be roaring down across the wastes.
In the middle one of the three channels he found her token at the first portage, and flung himself on north upon the trail. At every fork where he searched in feverish haste, he found the signs she had left to guide him.
They were bolder now, as if Le Busard no longer was watching her closely; but even so, every fork meant a handful of precious minutes wasted in searching both branches.
For all his desperate haste on the open reaches, the trail seemed to get no fresher. He was twelve or fifteen miles behind. Le Busard, too, was hurrying—to reach home before the blizzard struck.
All that morning the river climbed steadily toward a low watershed, and branched till it was a mere creek. The Strong-Woods rapidly were breaking up into scattered patches of wind-gnarled balsams.
The moss was giving way to lichens and Eskimo grass and cranberry shrubs. As the watershed loomed up closer and closer, the creek finally dwindled to nothing, ending abruptly in a tiny lake.
With the black canoe on his shoulder, Scott raced up the mile-long slope, over the crest, and down to the next paddle water, following the tracks of Le Busard and Beatrice.
He had reached the edge of the Barren Grounds; the Great Marsh lay twenty miles north. Night was less than five hours away, and the blizzard—only the Keechee Keewatin knew when that would swoop.
He had to catch sight of that canoe before it entered the Great Marsh!
Goading himself to the last supreme dash, he started down that unknown river leading into the huge swamp. He whipped through lakes where once there had been forests; where groups of dead and blackened trees, lifeless for centuries, still held their arms above the water for the herons to build their rookeries upon.
He whipped past little mud volcanoes whose magnetic masses underneath spun his compass needle crazily. He whipped past a dozen portages, reading Beatrice's signs as he sped by.
At mid afternoon even the groups of blackened trees stopped. The creek he followed had swelled into a river, deep and blue and without a current.
An hour later, eight miles north of the last portage sign, he ran squarely into a star-shaped lake where five channels branched off in every direction.
He had reached the edge of the Great Marsh—and had not overhauled the other canoe! There were no more portages, no more signs; he had come to the end of the chase, had lost.
On the opposite side of the lake a mud volcano stood up a hundred feet above the tundra. In a cold sweat of despair and defeat, Scott drove his canoe across to it, and climbed to its cup-shaped peak. His last hope was to sight them with his service glasses from the eminence.
He gazed out over an amphibious country, neither land nor water; a weird and desolate world of leaden waters under leaden skies, stretching to the remotest gray distance, a far-flung labyrinth of flat lakes and dead channels, of rivers and creeks that hardly knew which way to flow, of muskeg—an illimitable, wild and lonely expanse of it—where only willows and the rank, high marsh reed grew, and where the soil gurgled and quivered under a footstep.
Though the earlier migrants already had left, the swamp was still the home of water-fowl in teeming myriads. Marsh harriers, cruel and murderous, beat on hungry wing over the tall flag; higher up, whole colonies of black tern and inland gulls circled and whined like lost souls.
Flocks of teal and white wavies, pintails and golden plovers, the snowy crane and the brown pelican, skittered from lake to lake, restless and anxious to be gone.
A thousand swift-flying wedges of the gray goose, the mallard, and shoveler, and widgeon were penciled in big V's against the low-scudding clouds.
The little granite ridges sticking up like backbones out of some of the lakes were covered with countless colonies of birds.
The gusts of wind swept up to Scott a strange babel of noises: the booming thunder of the bitterns, the gabble of geese, the sonorous trumpet call of the swan, the loon's loud laugh, the flacker, squawk, and honking of the migrant myriads in confused uproar. They were waiting to be swept south on the wings of the blizzard. By morning they would all be gone.
From where he stood on the volcano Scott could see a dozen different snow flurries sweeping here and there across the Great Marsh, and see the flags waving like a brown loping sea. At his elevation the wind whistled around him laden with snow pellets that stung like tiny daggers.
Methodically, one by one, for all his agony of suspense, he swept his service glasses up each of the channels leading out of the star-shaped lake, and followed them back as far as his vision reached.
And one by one, as the channels showed him nothing of Le Busard's craft, his hopes were snuffed out. In all the wilderness of waters that his glasses covered he caught no glimpse of a canoe.
It was then, when his glasses came slowly down, and he groaned in the bitterness of despair, it was then that his bare eyes were drawn to a strange spectacle scarcely two miles north of him.
A great flock of white wavies, ten or twelve thousand of them, were rising out of the flags there, looking at that distance like a huge puff of feathers exploding.
Something more than ordinary had frightened them.
Scott whipped up his glasses. The weaving layers upon layers of wavies cut off his vision for a few seconds; but quickly they breasted high up over the flags, and wheeled west in a heavy white cloud.
At his first glance Scott saw nothing save a little creek connecting one of the channels with another lake system to the north. But at his second glance, as he focused again and drew the creek up close to him, and probed through the screen of the highest reeds, he saw a canoe gliding up the creek—a canoe with two human occupants—Le Busard, and a slender, girlish figure in the prow.
XIII
IN his desperate haste he had come faster than he thought, covering two miles that afternoon to his enemy's one. While he had been searching the marsh miles away to the gray horizon, they had been almost beneath him, hidden by the flags along the creek.
They were so very near that it startled him, and he crouched down lest his enemy should look back and see him.
For a moment or two he watched the canoe. As it passed a spot where the creek bank was free of reeds, he saw Beatrice turn slightly, and look back toward the star-shaped lake.
He could guess the fearful question trembling on her lips. Had he fulfilled his part and followed, and was he watching her at that moment?
Looking down at the crisscross watways, Scott mapped them indelibly in his mind, and planned what to do. He had to keep very close to that canoe from now on. It might cut aside into one of a thousand canoe paths, and be lost in three minutes.
The blizzard and the early night were only a couple of hours away. But he dared not follow directly behind the enemy canoe and close enough to keep it in sight, or Le Busard would look back on the straight channels and creeks, and see him.
And if he scared up any waterfowl, the bandit leader would see that as surely as he himself had seen the white wavies flush.
He thought out the problem quickly, for the canoe ahead was traveling swiftly to reach home before the blizzard struck in its fury.
Down the slope in a dozen jumps, he cut off an armful of willow sticks, laced them together crudely in the form of a barrel, set them in the canoe, and placed reeds around them till he had a blind that totally concealed him.
Darting up the channel to the creek mouth, he followed a mile behind the enemy canoe, watching the water birds that it flushed.
When Le Busard reached the next lake to the north and entered another channel, Scott whipped aside into a waterway paralleling the one his enemy had taken; and then, overhauling the bandit at every stroke, he cut down the lead till he was up even.
The shoals of waterfowl that he paddled through merely swam aside or skittered out of the canoe's path. But out of the other channel, barely six hundred yards away, ducks and geese and wavies, flushing and whirling away over the flags, told him at every rod just where his enemy was!
Out of one lake system into another, through a maze of creeks and rivers and lakes, he followed steadily north, never once glimpsing the other canoe, but guided unerringly by the flushing birds.
The overhead whining dropped lower and lower as evening came on. Heralding, club-like blasts swept over the marsh. Sleet showers, raw and savage, splaated across the water, and flailed the dry reeds.
An hour after dark the waterfowl, as if by some signal, broke into a wild commotion that outdid all their previous babel. From the lordly swan to the little jack-snipe it seemed that every feathered thing of the marsh was suddenly piping, gabbling, quacking, trumpeting, booming in a rackety uproar.
By pairs, and V's, and colonies of thousands they began rising out of the muskeg, to circle higher and higher in swift spiraling, and finally to disappear into the clouds.
In a little while more they failed Scott; he could no longer rely upon them to guide him. But that mattered little now, for the twilight was thickening, and gloomy night was beginning to settle down, and his canoe was a blurred and indistinguishable mottle of shadow at five hundred yards.
He cut across a creek, dropped in behind Le Busard, and trailed him by sight, following boldly in the long V-wake of the other craft.
He knew what an anguish of doubt Beatrice must be enduring up there ahead of him in the darkness. Whatever her purpose was in leading him to the rendezvous, she was banking upon him not only to fulfill that purpose, but to save her.
A wise little bush-loper like her surely must have realized all along what a superhuman task it was for a man to follow the slight signs she had left. She could not possibly know he was only a few dozen strokes behind. He ached to communicate with her, but there was no way.
While the chase led north through a four-mile channel, across a wind-tossed lake, and into another waterway, he gradually closed up till he was less than fifty yards in the rear. At the distance the other canoe was barely visible through the murky owl-dusk, and he knew that his own craft was a part of the night itself.
He thought out a plan of action. The goal had to be very near; a night camp on those quivering bogs was an utter impossibility, and no person, besides, could be abroad that coming night without heavy fur clothing and shelter.
The very first instant he caught sight of that goal he would glide up silently, overpower or kill Le Busard, and so have one less enemy to deal with.
To attack four men in their own strong-hold, whatever it turned out to be, to meet the savage menace of hungry, wolfish dogs, and grope around in a place where unknown dangers were waiting for him, and get the drop on the bandits; to capture single-handed and tie up four such bloody-handed and desperate men as they were that was dubious enough a prospect without having their leader's devilish cunning and quick wit and deadly gunwork to overcome also.
To locate the rendezvous beforehand he kept peering into the darkness on ahead of the lead canoe, watching for lights, or some sign of human habitation. Once he thought he saw the flicker of a light far away to the north, and he strained his eyes till he knew it had been a delusion.
But then, when he looked again for the canoe ahead, it had suddenly vanished!
For a moment the blow stunned him. He could not think. His arms were paralyzed. But he shook off the rigor, and choked back a cry of rage, and drove ahead at the spot where he had last seen that moving blur. A creek led off to the right.
Le Busard had taken that; it explained his sudden disappearance. Scott darted into it, the canoe leaping under his strokes. His enemy could be only a hundred yards away.
And then, staring ahead into the blackness for a sight of the other craft, he came suddenly to a place where the creek forked—in four directions.
XIV
THE next few minutes were confused despair to Scott, and he hardly realized what was happening save that the canoe he had been following was swallowed up in the blizzard night, taking Beatrice to the rendezvous he would never find.
Dimly he was aware of hurtling his own craft up one of the creeks; of whipping back to the forks and up another and another; of his leaping to his feet and shouting hoarsely, hoping that she might hear and realize what had happened and guide him to her with an answering cry; of the savage wind flinging his voice down the gale; of his sinking down in the canoe, cursing himself for not killing Le Busard and saving Beatrice while that lay in his power.
How long he crouched there he never knew. It was a wolfish howl, somewhere far away in the northwest, that made him raise his head. Another and another howl, hardly distinguishable from the screaming of the blizzard.
What was a wolf pack doing there in the heart of the huge swamp? They never penetrated it—they could not comb through it till the waterways were frozen over, and snow buried the treacherous muskeg. He listened again, doubting his own senses; and again he heard the long crescendo bowling.
This time he caught the direction more exactly, and took it on his luminous compass.
Into the teeth of the blizzard, up one of the creek forks, through a last dark channel, out upon a lake that was whipped to a seething, foaming fury, he drove the black canoe till he saw across at the far lake edge, a great yellow eye gleaming through the night, and a door open in some human habitation, and close again.
He knew that the howling had been the howling of wolfish dogs at Le Busard's homecoming, and that he had reached at last the rendezvous of the fur pirates.
For a little while the reaction from the blackest half hour of his life unnerved Scott; he lay in the bottom of his canoe, and let the blizzard toss him as it would.
The blasts flung spindrift clear over his craft, and sheathed it in ice, and battered it with smashing waves till it quivered like a thing fear stricken. But it took the mauling stanchly, and bobbed and spun as lightly as a cork.
It was a patient labor of love, that black canoe; made by old Manatobee, wizened old sagamore of the Otter Yellow-Knives, and presented as a token of esteem to the yellow-striped "horseman without a horse."
Into its making had gone the canoe wisdom of long generations, the wisdom of a water-roaming people whose boats could live through the ferocious squalls on Great Slave Lake, and yet were so fragile they could be carried one handed over the tote-path.
The strange color of it was not an affectation on Scott's part, but a positive help to him. At night on the dark rivers. of the Strong-Woods he had many a time stalked and caught his man unseen, as he had followed Le Busard that evening.
But of greater import still, the black canoe was a tangible thing that the criminal mind could lay hold of; a symbol of the stern justice that came unseen in the night and struck heavy handed. It was inseparably connected with Sergeant Scott and all his uncanny abilities at man hunting.
Among the métis and red men his real name was seldom spoken; he himself was called Le Canot Noir.
He was exultant as he lay there in the canoe, planning, glancing up now and then to make sure the great yellow eye was still in sight; exultant, and a little too flushed with his success at following Le Busard to the hiding place of the bandits.
He decided, indeed, to go about the rest of the job with caution and deliberate thoroughness a good resolution if only he had kept it; but his spirit was one of confidence instead of keen awareness of the dangers he was running into.
It seemed to him a thing impossible that he, Sergeant Scott, was lying there a few hundred yards from the rendezvous that he had searched two whole years to find, that a girl's strategy and desperate gamble had won where all his man-hunting wizardry had failed.
He admitted to himself, giving Beatrice only her due credit, that by no other trick or plan under heaven could that hiding place ever have been discovered.
He resolved, as he lay thinking, that there must be no hasty blunder, no single mis-step, and no reluctant trigger-finger in dealing with Le Busard and his outfit. They slept on their guns; they faced the noose if taken alive.
He foresaw gunplay before he got them. They were the five most vicious and crafty outlaws he had ever gone after. His very reputation would not disarm them, as it did the usual criminal.
Defeat this time would mean more than a slip of justice. It meant his own quick death, and Beatrice left in the power of their leader.
Wondering what kind of hiding place the bandits could have in that swamp, Scott battled on across the lake, fighting every inch of the way against the blizzard that tried to hurl him back.
It was like butting into a wall of blackness. His canoe suddenly touched something; touched with a sharp jolt, and swung sidewise. He reached out his hand, and discovered that the shore was a flat rock standing a couple of feet above the swamp levei.
He paddled to his right, exploring. The mystery of how the bandits could live in the heart of a muskeg where a muskrat could hardly find a home, was plain enough. The granite bed rock underlying the whole Barren Grounds cropped up there to form a little platte a few hundred yards across, a tiny, chance oasis of rock in a desert of water and soup-thin muskeg. One could pass within a short rifle shot of the platte and never see it.
Landing on the north side, and lifting the canoe ashore, Scott crouched there in the darkness, waiting, listening. There was a purpose in his landing on that windward side.
Presently he heard a blood curdling, wolfish snarl twenty steps inland; then another, then half a dozen. Dimly he saw a semicircle of gaunt big forms creeping upon him, almost within springing distance. The wolfish howling of half an hour ago had forewarned him. He knew they were dogs with so much of the wolf in them that they never barked; dogs that would tear him to pieces. But he had handled savage huskies before.
As he tossed them the robibbo from the bag, their snarls at him changed to snarls at one another. Throwing the food closer and closer, he gradually drew them up toward him. By the time he got to the bottom of the bag, he was pounding their huge leader on the flank, and twisting their pointed ears!
"Le Busard was right in that message of his!" Scott laughed grimly. "His huskies are hungry. If he'd fed them a little better they might not have accepted my peace offering."
Inland twenty paces the low squat out lines of a building rose up before him. Cautiously he circled and examined it. It was round and domed, like an Eskimo igloo. The massive walls were of turf and granite stone. There were no windows.
On the north side was a door, heavily barred against the huskies, and in front of that stood a fur-press. He concluded that the building was their fur magazine, the cache where they stored their stolen peltry.
Unwilling to have any unknown element behind him, he lifted the heavy crossbars from their notches, opened the door, closed it behind him, and lit a double match.
The sight that met his eyes when the matches flared up took his breath away. All along he had known, to his own bitter chagrin, that the bandits were making a rich haul, but even so he was not prepared for what he saw.
The cache was only twenty-five feet across, with three aisles down through the piled-up peltry; but it was stacked with every bale it would hold. They were not bales of the ordinary run of furs; the bandits had thrown away the cheap, or heavy, or common peltry, and kept only the light, precious skins.
He counted twenty odd bundles of marten pelts, silky-brown spruce martens, each pelt worth a little more than its own weight in gold.
He saw not one bale nor one stack of bundles, but a whole row of baled skins of the big Keewatin otter. In the flare of his match the rich, black fur gleamed with an oily iridescence.
There were fisher and mink and Arctic ermine, and half a dozen musk-ox robes of the dark Melville animal. There was a row of white-fox peltry, and another of patch or cross fox.
There were three corded bales of beautiful prime silvers, worth several times their weight in gold, and two bundles of ordinarily good black fox.
On a stone platform at the far end of the magazine lay a bundle of something wrapped carefully in a huge white wolf skin. He pried open a corner of it, and found it contained the cream and the pick of the whole cache, an even score of marvelous black fox pelts, the most exquisite and priceless furs he had ever seen brought together.
He guessed, even before he looked, that all trace of ownership on the various pelts had been done away with. A small part of them, perhaps, could be identified by their owners, in those instances when the owners had not been murdered; but the big majority of them—it struck him suddenly that they would be treated according to the law of property in derelictum.
He himself, being an officer of the law, could claim nothing; but if he proved that the property had been recovered through Beatrice's strenuous and hazardous endeavor, without fee or obligation to do so, one-fourth of it would go to the crown, and three-fourths would be hers! It was a fortune, it was several fortunes, for her.
In spite of all that stunning wealth of furs, he spent hardly two minutes in the cache before backing out and barring the door again. Holding himself sternly as yet to his plan of knowing the whole lay of the land, knowing just where and how to strike, he crept on inland.
Another building, identical with the fur magazine, loomed up in front of him. A couple birch toboggans and several ivory-shod komatiks—long, pliant sleds—stood against the wall outside. From within came the acrid smell of fresh meat.
It was their storehouse, he concluded, and for their winter meat supply the bandits had taken toll of the caribou foule he had met down at the edge of the Strong-Woods. He stood there a moment, flattened against the building, and peering into the blackness around him. The yellow eye he had seen from across the lake was the window of a building fifty yards to his left. About that same distance to his right was another gleam.
Leaning against the blizzard he crept up to this second building, and very cautiously rose at the window. Holding his head back so that he could not easily be seen from within, he gazed down inside—at Le Busard and Beatrice.
XV
THE but was a single small room, scarcely fifteen feet across, but snug and comfortable, and fitted up with a barbaric luxury of furs.
The floor was carpeted with pelts of the big white wolf from Dease Straits. The walls themselves were covered with lynx and beaver and carcajou skins to keep out the cold when the thermometer stood at sixty below and the "powder days" were roaring.
The bunk against the wall had a magnificent, golden-white rug of a water bear for a mattress, and a coverlet of wolf skins stitched together.
A glance or two took in the rest of the but, several rifles, a display of ivory-hafted Eskimo knives, some leather bottles on a shelf, and chairs of woven, red-willow withes.
By sheer chance Scott's eyes were drawn to a small object lying on the shelf beside the leather bottles. He looked at it twice before he made out what it was. A small automatic revolver, ivory mounted and ornamented with gold!
So very small a gun, so plainly a woman's weapon, that Scott guessed it was the gun which Beatrice had carried hidden beneath her ceinture fléchée.
Le Busard had discovered she was armed, and had taken the weapon from her!
She was standing tensed in the middle of the hut, half turned away from Le Busard, not daring to meet his sinister eyes.
Her hair, dampened by the lashing spin-drift of the last hour's travel, was a glistening, wavy sheen in the candlelight. Her face was pale, and Scott could see the tremble on her lips.
Again and again her frightened glance went toward the door, and once she set his heart pounding by glancing up at the window.
He knew that she was waiting—waiting in an agony of suspense and doubt; praying that the door would fling suddenly open and the man in whom she trusted—trusted her life and more than her life—would burst in.
Outside in the blizzard night, scarcely ten feet from her, Scott could see the despair that crept into her eyes and deepened on her face each time she glanced in vain hope at the door.
The bandit stood in front of her in the middle of the floor, leaning toward her, talking. His face was flushed, as if he had been drinking heavily since reaching the rendezvous.
His stupefaction at his first sight of her in the cabin down in the Strong-Woods was gone now. It had changed to a brute, possessive air that made Scott's fingers tighten over the butt of his belt-gun.
He pressed his ear against the wall of the cabin to hear what was being said, but the howling of the blizzard drowned out every other sound.
Whatever Le Busard was telling her, he was deriving a gloating satisfaction from it. Scott guessed it had something to do with the mystery which stood between the two of them.
But there was more than gloating satisfaction and triumph on Le Busard's brutal face; there was an ugly, anticipating look.
In the last two years Scott had come to hate the bandit leader with a personal hate for his cold-blooded murders and his baffling, evil cunning; but now, at the look on the man's face, he wanted to fling his gun away and kill him barehanded.
He debated whether he should then and there answer the prayer on her lips. Without moving from his tracks he could blow Le Busard's brains out. Or he could crash through the door and batter him senseless. It was a sore temptation. He wanted to see Le Busard's gloating, lustful expression change to fear and terror at his Nemesis bursting in upon him.
The anguish and doubt and despair on Beatrice's features tore at Scott. She believed he had failed her; believed she was alone and helpless.
But caution checked Scott still. The other lighted hut, where the other four bandits undoubtedly were, lay directly lay directly down wind, a very short arrow flight away. A shot or a loud noise would be fatal. The bandits would hear it and be warned.
They would surround Le Busard's hut, stand off unseen in the darkness, and shoot through the door and window. He and Beatrice might escape by quick work; but escape out on the muskeg that night would only be trading one kind of death for another.
Her safety, not the capture of the bandits nor his own life, was his chief, harassing thought. Did he dare leave her alone there, weaponless, with that half drunken beast, even for a few short minutes?
It was Beatrice herself who decided the question for him.
XVI
TURNING away from her, Le Busard swaggered over to the shelf and reached down a leather bottle. Scott suddenly pressed his face against the pane, and moved his hand rapidly across it.
The gesture caught her attention. She glanced up. For a moment or two they looked into each other's eyes.
In her passionate leap of soul, in her wordless gratitude that flashed out to him, Scott found his reward for all the black hours that had been his in the last two days; and a thought which had come to him once or twice the thought that she was merely using him for her purpose—was dispelled by the look she gave him.
He saw, or thought he saw, more than gratitude, more than a woman's reliance and trust in him. He thought it was a woman's love that stood in her eyes.
He gestured toward Le Busard. She understood; for her lips fashioned the word "wait," and she pointed toward the other hut. She meant for him to go there first and attack the bandits, but her eyes begged him in the name of Heaven's mercy to hurry.
The next moment, when Le Busard turned toward her, she was looking down at the floor. The faint flush that touched her cheeks was not enough to betray her. Her calmness after that fateful moment was the most remarkable show of will power Scott had ever witnessed.
Goaded by the vision of her staving off Le Busard, he leaped across the platte to the other lighted window. The hut was like the one he had just left, though twice as large. In the center of the room stood a table with a leather bottle, some babiche thongs, and a pack of cards upon it, and around the table stood four men.
One of them was a nondescript white. The other three were métis, tricked out with gaudy ribbons and tassels like the fur traders of past generations.
One of the métis, Raoul Lacroix, a huge hulking Cree 'breed with a body like a wedge, and muscled like a grizzly bear, belonged to Scott's mental rogue's gallery. He had arrested the man once five years before for playing carcajou to another man's trap line.
Some issue was at stake between the four men. They were drinking a round just as Scott looked in upon them; but when the bottle was set back on the table, they cut the cards. Whatever the issue was, the white man lost, for his oath was visible on his mouth.
He dragged out his belt-gun, twirled the cylinder to make sure it was loaded, and stumped across to the shadows at the far end of the hut.
For the first time Scott saw there was a fifth person in the room; a man sitting with bowed head in the shadows. The discovery startled him, and he watched a second longer, fighting back his desperate haste.
The white bandit grasped the fifth man by the arm, pulled him roughly to his feet, and jerked a thumb toward the door.
As the pair came out into the full candlelight, Scott saw that the lone man's wrists were bound behind him, and that he staggered from weakness. A prisoner of the bandits! Inhuman treatment and days of imprisonment—he could hardly walk!
They were going to kill him. The lots they had just cut, their grinning, evil faces, their utterly calloused indifference—
And then Scott's glance went up to the lone man's pale, drawn face. At the sight of that square jaw, those blunt, rugged features, that mat of curly brown hair, Scott staggered like a hit buck; and a hoarse cry, drowned in the blizzard's uproar, burst from his lips.
"Jim Haydon! Lord God, it's young Haydon they've got. It's Jimmy!"
XVII
His mind flashed back seven years, and out across two thousand miles of wilderness to the Cassiars in British Columbia; to the day when Jim stumbled into his patrol camp bleeding and nearly frozen and wounded from a lone-handed battle with a pack of Tunahlin half-breeds who had been stealing foxes from the Haydon range.
And in a flash that was quicker than thought he remembered vividly how he had nursed the young stranger back to strength, how they had gone after the bush sneaks together, and hung to their trail for three weeks when the temperature stood at fifty below, and snow was piled to the first limbs of the spruces; and how they had met and killed the five men with belt-guns and rifle butts one midnight on the nose of a high glacier, with the Aurora lighting up the grim work; and how a slug had got him in the chest, and young Haydon, wounded himself, had made a toboggan and dragged him sixty miles back to the patrol camp. With his brain working at dream speed, he suddenly realized then what Le Busard had meant by the whisper that would come out of the Great Marsh. The bandit knew of that partnership between them, stronger than ties of blood. He had meant that when Scott heard of young Haydon being held captive, the sergeant would unlock the cell of the butter-tub and release him as a trade to save his partner's life!
And with his brain afire, Scott understood two other things in that split second he stood watching the tragic face of his partner, that vague, haunting feeling that Beatrice's features were somehow familiar to him—good Heavens, no wonder he had utterly failed to connect her delicate and fragile beauty with the rough, rocky features of Jim Haydon!
Jim had mentioned a sister and a father living, a mother dead; but beyond that he had been strangely silent about his family.
Her name, her identity clear to him now, Scott leaped to the reason for all she had done. She had known or guessed her brother was a prisoner of the outlaw band, and knew that she herself was powerless to save him.
Therefore her cry of joy and devout thanksgiving when she saw the black canoe of his old partner on the river; and her tremble when she learned who his prisoner was; and all her intimate knowledge about Scott himself!
Playing a desperate game, she had tricked Le Busard, tricked him with a promise of her own person if he would spare her brother's life! There in the cabin she had told him that.
Keeping Scott himself all in the dark, she had given herself into the bandit's power and escaped with him, escaped so that Scott could follow her signs to the hiding place and save Jim.
Le Busard had been coming down that river to capture her and bring her back, when he himself was captured. There in her cabin he had nodded to her desperate proposal—to save himself.
And now when he had her safely at his hut in the Great Marsh, he was laughing scornfully at his promise, and had given orders at his first coming to have Jim Haydon murdered!
The whole bewildering and senseless puzzle—from her first cry at the sight of his canoe to her plea a moment ago that he should attack the bandits without wasting a second to save her—the whole puzzle was clear and rational to him now, save why she had kept him in the dark, and why her brother had been taken prisoner, and what deep, passionate thing stood between her and Le Busard.
Scott brushed the questions aside. For once his fury got the upper hand, and made him forget caution, and betray himself. And his mind flung back, besides, to Beatrice in the hut a bowshot away.
Instead of waiting till Haydon and his intended murderer came outside, then braining the outlaw with a silent blow, arming Jim, and the two of them attacking the three men—instead of that, he leaped around to the door, threw it suddenly open, and jumped inside, belt-gun drawn.
XVIII
THEY stood like men petrified, speechless and stunned, staring at the yellow-striped sergeant whom the blizzard had flung into their hut. It was the hulking big métis Lacroix who first found his tongue, and then the words were jerked from him by his amazement.
"Le Canot Noir! Nom de nom, it is he, Le Canot Noir!"
"Élève!" Scott ordered sharply. "The trick's mine. You there with the gun-drop it. Damn you, drop it!"
The weapon fell to the floor. Four pairs of hands went up. Scott did not so much as glance at young Haydon; he did not dare.
But cut of the tail of his eye he saw his partner stagger a step toward him, and heard the throaty, unbelieving cry of a man dragged back from death by a miracle.
"Yes, it's me, partner," Scott steadied him. "Your eyes aren't lying. But I didn't get here any too soon!"
The muzzle of his gun swerved slightly, and pointed at the white bandit.
"You're wearing a frog-sticker. Step up and cut Haydon loose. Don't get behind him. Stay in the clear-where I can kill you if you make a wrong move. Reach out arm's length when you use that blade."
The man stepped up to Haydon, drew his knife, and cut the babiche thongs.
"Now, then, line up! Couple paces apart. Keep 'em high! And keep looking straight at me!"
They lined up as he ordered, the white man still on the right, then big Lacroix, then the other two breeds.
Watching them across the table, Scott could fairly see the four bandits thinking. They had recovered from their daze; they were itching for a split-wink grab at their guns. Three steps behind them half a dozen rifles leaned against the wall.
If they jumped at the same instant they could get their guns and cut him down before he could kill the four of them. But forced to look him straight in the eye, they had no chance to give each other a signal for concerted action.
They each knew that the first man to make a move would be sure to die, and none of them wanted to be that man. They were waiting for a break in their favor.
Scott knew that the trick was not his, not till he had them hog-tied and piled on the floor, and Jim Haydon was guarding them with a rifle. He was conscious of the door standing open behind him, throwing its great rectangular glare out into the night.
Le Busard might see it. If he did, he would surely investigate, for a door standing open to that blizzard meant something was wrong.
But Scott dared not move to close it. At the least quaver of his gun the four men would jump for their rifles. He thought, besides, that in a couple of moments more he would be running back across the platte to save Beatrice, and to settle with Le Busard for good and all.
"Jim," he directed coolly, get that babiche. "Buck up, partner, and help me. You there on the left, bring your hands down easy and hold 'em behind you."
Young Haydon bent and picked up the thongs, walked unsteadily toward the end man, and tied him up.
"Now you!" Scott ordered the next métis. "Tie him tight, Jim. For the Lord's sake, hurry, partner!"
Haydon bound the second 'breed. Lacroix and the white man remained.
In spite of his grogginess of body and brain, Haydon had kept behind the bandits in order that Scott could watch them.
The babiche which had been taken off his feet a few minutes ago so that he could walk out to his death was lying on the table. He had to lean forward to get it. In his weakness he overbalanced himself, staggered, and lurched almost against the big métis.
With lynxlike quickness for all his bulk, Lacroix ducked down, seized Haydon, and held him as a shield in front of his body.
In that same instant, while Scott was trying to get in a shot without killing his partner, the white man bent and grabbed the gun he had dropped. Scott shot at him, shot to kill him; but the bullet struck the man's elbow, shattering it, knocking the gun out of his hand.
The big breed was backing toward a rifle, sheltering himself with Haydon's body. The white man, cursing and writhing in pain, was fumbling on the floor with his left hand, trying to find the gun.
Scott flung himself forward, and literally tore Haydon from the métis's grasp. He had time for one clean shot. Lacroix grunted as the bullet plowed through him.
But his arm shot out and seized Scott's gun hand, and wrenched it so savagely that the weapon dropped. Haydon flung aside, he drew Scott to him, hugging him like a furied bear, yelling for the white man to get the gun and jump in.
With a feint and a dexterous hip thrust Scott toppled Lacroix. They crashed over backward to the floor, locked in a brutal struggle.
It was a death fight, barehanded, between two powerful men, a fight that was too savage and furious to last long.
As they crashed to the floor, grappling like a panther and a bear, the big métis's fingers clutched Scott's throat. Scott tried to tear them loose, but they clung and tightened into a stranglehold.
In his frenzed efforts to break that grip, he twisted and heaved till he was on top. But the death grip still clung.
The two métis whose hands Haydon had bound jumped in. They kicked Scott savagely, kicked him in the head, tried to break him loose. He could not shield himself from that murderous punishment. He had to take it.
With short, smashing blows he hammered at the 'breed's face, trying to batter him unconscious. His lungs were bursting, and a paralyzing numbness was spreading over his body. He beat at Lacroix's blood-smeared face; hammered him with the maddened frenzy of a doomed man. But the death grip clung.
With all the remaining strength of his body he clutched his enemy by the hair, jerked his head from the floor, and banged it down.
Though all his senses reeled, he knew that the blow had told heavily. The death grip suddenly tightened into a grip of steel, as if to kill him before he could repeat that blow.
Again and again, while he fought to keep himself from sinking into the dark, he banged his enemy's head against the floor, till the death grip weakened and suddenly broke, and the big 'breed went limp beneath him.
He staggered to his feet, shook himself together, and looked around. The other two métis, expecting quick death, shrank against the wall.
The white man had found the gun, but Haydon had gone after him before he could use it, and was clinging with all his pitifully shattered strength to the man's left arm. The bandit was kicking and mauling him, struggling to shake free.
Scott jumped in. He struck but once, a long-swinging, murderous blow that caught the man on the jaw, lifted him bodily, and sprawled him on the floor.
Grabbing a babiche thong, he stooped, rolled him over, and bound him hand and foot. With Lacroix's own sash belt he hog-tied the big métis.
As he straightened up from this to recover his gun and leap across to the other hut, he heard a cry from Haydon, and the ear-jarring snick of a trigger being cocked.
He whirled and saw Le Busard standing in the open door, covering him with a rifle.
XIX
His enemy's eyes went to the bandits lying bound on the floor, and to the other pair cowering against the wall. Then they came back to Scott. For a couple of moments Le Busard said nothing. An ugly grin spread slowly over his face.
He enjoyed his triumph silently for a moment.
"I said my dogs were hungry, Yellow-Stripes," he growled finally. "Before they are fed I want to know how you found out our rendezvous-so that we can guard against your successor finding out likewise."
Scott glanced at his gun. It was eight feet away, the nearest rifle still farther.
He felt rather than saw that Haydon was inching toward the revolver lying on the floor.
"I asked a question!" Le Busard repeated.
"I followed your canoe tracks," Scott answered, sparring to give Haydon a few seconds.
Le Busard laughed. "Canoe tracks? Not even you can follow canoe tracks. Do you think I'm a fool? I asked a question. I want an answer."
"I told you the truth," Scott said doggedly. He gestured with his hands as he talked, to keep his enemy's eyes upon him. "I guessed you were staying clear of the tote-paths and swinging around them-like this in the bush. So I looked back in the bush for your signs."
"You're lying. I left no signs."
He knew that his partner must be almost near enough to stoop and grab up the revolver.
"But I got here," he insisted. "I've tracked men over moss before."
"You're lying. There were no portages, even, for the last four hours."
"I followed by sight," Scott started to explain. "When you were leaving that star-shaped lake at the edge of the swamp, I was standing on top of that mud hill watching. Do you remember that big flock of white wavies?"
He was interrupted by a growl from one of the métis leaning against the wall, a growl of warning to Le Busard.
"Watch that other man! He's going to grab-"
Le Busard swerved his rifle toward Haydon.
"I was wrong, you puppy," he snarled, "in ordering my men to kill you. It's my own privilege. You've hounded me for six years, you and your p'tite sister.
“You thought you trailed us here, puppy! We lured you in-to get rid of you. Your p'tite sister, I'll keep her awhile; but you-"
Scott groaned. It seemed their last hope on earth had been snuffed out by that growl of warning. Even in that moment his anguish was not for himself nor his partner, but for Haydon's sister.
He turned his eyes away from Le Busard, and looked at his partner. He wanted to say a word of farewell-before he tensed and made that hopeless leap for his belt-gun.
But a strange expression stood on Haydon's face. Not fear or despair, but a look like that which he had seen in Beatrice's eyes when she glanced up at the window and saw him there. Haydon was staring at the door, staring not at the bandit leader, but on past, and out into the blizzard night.
And before Scott had even time to wonder what his partner was looking at, a gun barked outside. Le Busard lurched against the doorway, his rifle started slipping from his hands. He jerked erect again, whirled around toward the enemy outside, and whipped up his rifle.
But Haydon was too quick for him. Stooping, seizing the gun at his feet, he poured five bullets into Le Busard; and as the latter fell and thrashed about on the threshold, Haydon staggered up and put the sixth bullet cleanly through his heart. Still dazed by the nearness of the call, Scott went toward the doorway. He was bewildered; he did not understand the sudden shot that came out of the blizzard night outside.
But then, in the shaft of light streaming out of the door, he saw Beatrice standing in the swirling snow, a smoking gun in her hand.
She broke down utterly in her brother's arms, and her slender body shook with sobs. Scott knew they had to get her away from there where she could not see the grotesque huddled thing lying half inside the door.
It was a marvel to him that after all she had gone through, after all her superb courage and her anguished doubt, she should break down and sob now.
It struck him a queer, odd blow that she had not even looked at him, but had flung herself into her brother's arms. It seemed to him as though she had forgotten him now that her brother was saved, as though-his old doubt crept back-as though he had been merely useful to her purpose.
She would be grateful-grateful all her life to him, no doubt. She had pledged her friendship if he would help her; but glancing at her in Jim Haydon's arms, he swore savagely at the thought of being merely her friend.
They were whispering to one another; young Haydon trying to calm her. Through all his doubt and keen jealousy it struck Scott what a splendid pair of fighters that brother and sister were.
From the bandit's snarling words he knew they had been together on a man-hunt of years, and he looked forward to hearing the whole fraught story of it.
His Mounted habits recalled him to the business at hand. He tied and double tied the bandits; bandaged the bleeding wound of the white man, and saw that Lacroix was but slightly hurt.
Outside the door he picked up Beatrice's tiny, ivory-mounted gun where it had fallen from her hands. Twenty steps beyond in the blackness he saw a half circle of gleaming eyes that were creeping closer and closer toward the blood odor on the threshold.
They sent a shiver through Scott. He stooped and lifted Le Busard's body into the safety of the hut.
"Get a rifle, Jim," he bade. "You maybe aren't able to take her across to the other hut; so I will. These men can't stir hand or foot, but we'll make doubly sure. I'll come back shortly and relieve you."
She came to him, and he wrapped his jacket about her shoulders. Half carrying her, he went out the door, and carefully drew it shut behind him to keep out those hungry gleams, and fought his way through the blind, swirling, savage night toward the hut which had been Le Busard's.
The platte already was covered with three inches of snow that seethed and crawled. The blizzard at last had loosed all its pent-up fury. Its clubbing blasts beat at them and nearly swept them off their feet.
It lapped them, engulfed them in blankets of swirling, smothering spindrift. It stung them with icy shot that rode level on the furious gale.
It strung its whipping, mile-long banners of snow over the granite platte, and beat at them from above with wings of darkness, and howled around them like legion hungry-throated wolves yelping down from the Arctic.
Before they had gone a dozen yards, Scott picked her up in his arms, leaning against the blizzard as he walked.
XX
HER frailty and the memory of all she had gone through tugged at him. He did not expect this sudden helplessness, after her courage and fighting soul on the long canoe chase; after her braving the savage dogs to cross the platte; after her shot that saved him and her brother and herself from death. But he understood it and he would have had it that way.
Her head lay in the hollow of his arm and breast, and her arm was about his neck. He wanted to believe that she was his own; that out of all that storm and grim fighting and the appalling desolation of the Great Marsh, he had won the most precious thing of life.
But he dared not think of her so. He wanted to believe it but natural that she had flung herself into her brother's arms after their separation, after her anguished days of knowing he was a prisoner. But the old doubt lingered.
They passed between the storehouse and the magazine where all the wealth of peltry lay cached. He was aware that on both sides of them a few yards away a dozen long, gaunt, wolfish shadows moved with them, keeping their distance, accompanying them like a bodyguard of specters; and Scott shuddered at the terrible peril she had been in when she crossed the platte.
He carried her inside the hut and laid her on the golden-white rug of the bunk, and found a blanket for her. Then he drew up a chair, and waited till her sobs quieted, and she was brushing furtively at her tears with a strand of her hair.
"Beatrice."
She looked up at him, trying to smile cheerfully again.
"If you want to, Beatrice, I'd like I'd like for you to tell me. I've waited patiently-"
An anguish flitted across her face for a moment, but she fought it down.
"Yes, I promised, and you fulfilled your trust, and I'll tell you everything. Only-"
She turned her face away from him for a little while. He waited, knowing she was gathering strength and courage for her story. He drew his chair closer, when she looked at him again.
At times as she spoke her voice broke, and he had to soothe her back to calmness before she could take up her narrative once more.
It was a story of passion, and brute force and vengeance, and a six-year man hunt; a story that surpassed any he had ever heard, though he himself had hunted men. from the Landing to the Circle, and had been witness to brutish deeds and raw, elemental passions through the length and breadth of the north wilderness.
It was a story of two men and a girl twenty-four years ago on the Charlotte Islands off the British Columbia coast; of John Haydon, sturdy young timberman, and of Le Busard, whose hot blood traced back to Cossack promyshleniki, and exiled convicts of the old Russian-American days.
The story told of the girl's love for Haydon, of Le Busard's fierce passion and jealousy, and of her dread fear of him; of her marrying John Haydon; of her fear making them leave their island; of their working north and east to the Cassiars, and building a wilderness home, and starting a fur ranch and rearing their boy and girl.
Then Beatrice went on to tell how Le Busard, discovering John Haydon and his wife ten long years after, let his passion and brute jealousy flare out, and hid in the Tunahlin range till he saw a chance to seize John Haydon's wife and take her back to his hiding place; and how she met her tragic death by her own hand.
Of her husband, Beatrice's father, the girl told, hunting the murderer year after year, and dying of grief and baffled vengeance; of her son, Beatrice's brother, taking up the pursuit, sending his sister to relatives three thousand miles down the coast, selling the ranch, turning his last possession into cash for the man hunt.
Then the story went on, of his trailing Le Busard from post to post through the Northwest Territories Mackenzie, Keewatin, and Franklin-never quite losing him, never quite locating him till he read the Mounted report, and knew the bandit leader was his blood enemy.
Beatrice had come out that spring to The Pas, and had gone north with him to the wilderness river, where Jim lay in wait all through that summer at the marsh edge, watching the canoe paths, and sighted a bandit canoe one day by sheer luck, and followed it miles into the swampland, on his last trip from which he never returned.
"I was standing in the spruce shadows watching upriver-waiting, though I knew he had been captured," she added. "And when I saw your black canoe, it was like a miracle, Brian. I knew you would help me. And then, while we were walking up the path to our cabin, the whole plan sprang into my head.
"Le Busard told me he had tortured information from my brother, and had been coming down the river to take me when you captured him, Brian.
"When he saw me in the cabin he must have thought the dead had come to life again, for I look so much like my mother that my father's old friends who knew her stare at me as if I am a ghost."
Scott sat in silence, trying to see in its fullness this story running down through a quarter of a century to the grim finale of ten minutes ago.
"But why," he asked at last, "why didn't you and Jim come to me? We would have gone after your enemy together. Jim knew I'd have done that."
"We talked of that many a time, Brian, especially when we were hopeless of ever finding him ourselves. But it was our hunt, not the law's. You could not have helped us kill our enemy. We did not want it. We did not want it so. I thank God," she added passionately, with a fighting sparkle again in her eyes. "I thank God it was Haydon bullets that killed him."
"I can see that, I can understand," Scott said softly. "But down in the cabin, why didn't you tell me everything then? When we stood outside there together, you knew, surely you knew there was nothing in the world I wouldn't have done for you."
"Oh, but there was, Brian! You would not have released your man-never Le Busard! It was against all your training and your code. You would never have allowed him to escape.
"And because you-because you were my friend, you would never have agreed to my dangerous plan. Maybe now when the whole story is written and he is dead, and the bandits are your prisoners, maybe you think you would have done it."
In his deepest solemn conscience Scott admitted that she spoke the truth. She had known him better than he knew himself.
XXI
But he wanted to sweep aside all that and forget the past. There was something of the present, of that moment, that he wanted to speak about.
But it seemed to him that if he spoke of that now, it would be like asking payment for his helping her, like demanding her because he had done her a great service.
Besides, the old, gnawing doubt which had surged up in him a quarter hour ago still possessed him and sealed his lips.
Her hand had crept out and found his, and he quivered at the slight clasp of her fingers. Her eyes were studying him intently; she seemed puzzled at his silence. She rose to an elbow, and moistened her lips to add something more.
He felt that surely she had guessed why he said nothing, why he had to recoil from anything that seemed like asking payment. Was she going to free him, was she going to open up a chance for him to speak?
And then she was speaking again, not the words he ached to hear, but speaking of her pledge of friendship, and of her life-long gratitude to him.
Scott sat listening dully, never answering, hardly hearing what she said. Friendship—gratitude—when he had to grip himself fiercely to keep from kneeling and clasping her, and telling her passionately that he had won her, and she had to be his!
She must have noticed his struggle, and wondered at it and his silence. Her words became broken, and finally she grew silent, still watching him curiously.
A little while later he rose, and told her he must go back to his prisoners. He wanted to get out of her presence. His steeled control was breaking. Out in the blizzard night he could get a fresh grip upon himself.
When he told her he was leaving, he saw a quiver run through her slender body.
She looked up at him startled, and utterly unbelieving.
He saw that his words and his action had deeply wounded her, and that her eyes were suddenly misty with tears. He did not understand why he had startled her, or why she was looking up at him in such utter disbelief.
Not till she flung out her arms toward him, and he heard her sobbing whisper, "Brian—are you actually going—going away—without—without—"
And then, because he was bending down toward her, Scott read the reproach and the tenderness that stood in her eyes; and like the heavens opening up he did understand at last.
In a moment that left him dazed and trembling he understood why she had utterly disbelieved his words, and why his actions had been a mortal wound, and understood why she was reproaching him. for not taking the heart that had all the time been his to take.
And he saw that his doubt of her love had been utterly beyond her belief!
In awe of her beauty and her sweet girlishness he knelt down, trembling, and felt her arms go round his neck, and her lips seek his. And while her wet cheek rested against his own, and his arms stole around her shoulders with his gentle strength, it seemed that all the long years of his life had been but a preparation for that single moment.
"You will marry me, darling!" he breathed.
And her "Yes" was another kiss.
THE END