# The Law-bringers/Chapter 14
### CHAPTER XIV
#### "ON THE LONG TRAIL"

"Bio Blanket, is it?" said Gillington. "Just look his name up, Otway. Two wives and six children, eh? Got them all here, has he? Well, Francois, tell him to go ahead and name them so I'll know he hasn't swapped any since last year. Otway, I guess I'll want out another box of the paper."
The Treaty-clerk disappeared into the little tent, and Gillington pushed his hat back from his heated, florid face, and nodded as the immovable Big Blanket introduced his family, one by one, through the interpreter.
"Little Cow, she old wife," said Big Blanket, thrusting the wrinkled wisp of womanhood forward. "Glory-of-the-eyes, she new." Then he ranged up the berry-brown, laughing children, and told them over. "Violette. Piapot. Song-of-all-the-birds. Apisis. Smoke. Beak-of-the-eagle." He stretched his hands for the little packet of dollar-bills, done up neatly in fives, as Gillington paid them down on the big box in front of the little box on which he sat.
Word by word Francois translated as Gillington spoke.
"Payuk, nesoo, nisto, naoo, nayanun, Nikoowasik. Those packets are for the children, Big Blanket. Three more lots for yourself and the wives, making kakut mitatut in all. Nine sets for Big Blanket, Otway. What's that, Doc.?"
The heat of the sun poured over him as he turned where the grey smoke from a mosquito-smudge blew sideways, hiding and revealing the silent knots of Indians—Chipewyans, Doglegs and Yellow Knives—who had come to Fort Resolution on the Great Slave Lake for their yearly payment of the Treaty money. And this Treaty money is the pledge of the Canadian Government that it will stand by ​the children of the North-West to the extent of five dollars yearly to every man and woman and child which can produce the Treaty-tickets carrying his or her name, the number of his band and family, and the date of his last payment.
A big man with his eyes reddened by the smoke-reek halted at Gillington's elbow. He carried a brown battered bag, and there was a suggestion of strenuousness above all his movements. For the last three hours he had been examining wounds, disease, and various sicknesses in the colony of tepees set along the sandy short, and those hours had been very full indeed. Because many of the distant tribes take their doctor as they take their Treaty-money, once only in a year.
"I've just seen that old scoundrel, Turquetil," he said. "He and his son had a fight, and they're more or less laid out. Send them their Treaty by Charlie Diamond, won't you, Gillington? He'll see that they get it."
Gillington growled assent, ticking off the necessary dollars for Little Hat and his belongings. Charlie Diamond was Chief of the Canoe River Band of which Turquetil was an unworthy member.
"Sure," he said. "Got many sick, Sherwood?"
The doctor thrust his lip out. He was lighting a pipe with eager fingers.
"Same as usual," he said. "If only the Lord had made 'em able to comprehend the meaning of cleanliness life would be simplified. Joseph Iron broke his leg yesterday, and I met him crawling out for his Treaty just now. For the land's sake, Gillington, what are you doing with all those police? Do the people at headquarters think our precious lives need guarding?"
Gillington glanced round to the tent where, in the shade, three khaki uniforms made a dull blurr. Two more walked the stretch of sandy level immediately behind the tepees. As Gillington looked they separated; and one went up to the barracks and the other came down towards the tent.
"Those four came in just now," he said. "A patrol going through to Fullerton. Tempest is in charge. You remember him? The man who was made Inspector for his moral influence—and a few more reasons."
​He made the introductions briefly as Tempest came up, then turned to his work again. And from where he lay by the tent with his hat pulled over his eyes and his pipe going fiercely to free him of the mosquitoes, Dick watched this scene which had been so familiar to him in other days: on the Little Slave River; on the Peace; at Vermilion, and which never grew stale. For it was colour and movement, tragedy and comedy. It was Life.
He lifted on his elbow; dragged out his sketch-book, and roughed in the picture with a charcoal stub. And it was a picture worth while to the man who could see.
Back of all lay the broad blue line of the lake that lipped the sandy beach. Then the dirty brown, close-set jumble of tepees half-hid by smoke that lifted sometimes to show the white houses of the Fort beyond. The medley of children and dogs that rolled, laughing and yapping, round the tents. The fathers and mothers of the race, crowding round the Treaty-Payer; pure Mongolian type, some with eager, slant-eyes for the "sooneyahs" which Gillington was dealing; erect, dignified chiefs who ask help of the white man against none but the white man and who manipulate their family quarrels in private; ill-made derelicts, hauling their loose store-clothes tighter round their unwashed bodies, and looked on with disfavour by the sturdier Dog-legs. And foremost of all, the little group of white men: Gillington straddled on his box, with his shirt loose at the thick throat and the sweat dripping from him as he flung his jokes and genial encouragements to the mercy of Francois' interpretation, seeing in answer the white of eyes and teeth flashing out suddenly with a coarsely-humorous retort; the slim, gentlemanly Otway, with the furtive eyes which told, while they believed they hid, the reason which had brought him so far from the land and the class which bred him; Sherwood, the big-boned, merry-eyed doctor, who carried his lonely beat over a good-sized section of a half-continent—Tempest.
Dick smudged them in; longing for his paints to dab on the raw vermilion of that Cree's waist-scarf, or the saffron tempered by dirt of that woman's shawl. Or the blue of the lake, and the warm umbers of the tepees, and the pure ash-grey of a dog that scratched itself at Tempest's feet. ​Tempest he did not care to look at. Through those long steamer days on the Athabaska Dick had seen more of Tempest than he ever wished to see again, and he was dreading the plunge into the wilderness as he had not dreaded the future ever before in all his life. For the fret of that impotent rage which we feel only against those whom we have wronged and who will not give us the satisfaction of justifying ourselves was on Dick, by day and by wakeful night.
Of what Tempest thought through these weeks which held them so closely together Dick did not know. There was nothing in him which could interpret the heart of this man to whom the higher and the deeper places of life were open. Of late he had sometimes even grown to fear Tempest. The utter self-restraint of the still man who walked with him by day and sat beside him over the evening fires when neither the pipe-smoke or the long loneliness could knit them together into more than casual speech had its effect on his nerves and on his heart. Tempest was completely just to him; completely courteous and kind. But Dick understood well that it was the gentleman in Tempest which owed these things to himself; not the friend which owed them to Dick. Not once did he suffer Dick to look below the surface of his quiet manner; and Dick, knowing the savagery in himself which would have had satisfaction for a wrong done him, grew uneasy and resentful, and found it daily more difficult to keep Tempest out of his thoughts.
It was Dick's nature to demand an eye for an eye, and until now he had always felt contempt for the man who asked less. But he could not feel contempt for Tempest. He knew what he had done to this man; he knew the torment which he had given him to bear, and he knew that Tempest was still the stronger. He would not soon forget his good-bye to Andree on the bank at Grey Wolf, with Tempest standing by. And he knew that the fear which walked with Tempest eternally was the fear for this girl whom Dick had waked to the realisation of love and dependence and had flung away to seek helplessly and blindly for what she could find instead. There could be no forgiveness for such a thing as this, and Dick did not expect it. ​He did not want it, for Tempest would have seemed to him less than human if he could have given it. But, gradually, he was realising, keenly, bitterly, that he was controlled and driven by the blind forces of the universe only, and that for Tempest and Jennifer there was a higher grade.
Life made sport of them and tied their feet, even as his were tied. But it could not break their spirits. They were nearer that supreme thing which Jennifer called God, and which Tempest had once called Understanding. And for the sacrifice of self which that required of them they had surely found the compensation. And then Dick rolled over, looking straight at Tempest where he talked with Sherwood in the sunlight, and he wondered if this man was to use for Canada only all those great and rich gifts for which his life had qualified him.
Gillington and Otway were speaking together, low-voiced, and before them stood an Indian girl with restless, beseeching eyes which made Dick think of Andree's as he had seen them sometimes. Her coarse, black hair was parted over the young forehead and hung on her shoulders in two thick plaits. There was a little moss-bag baby in the curve of her arm, and two round-eyed, tottering, elder babies clung to her ragged black skirts. She looked so very young and undefended, and Dick felt curious to know what was puzzling the white men in connection with her. Gillington sat up at last, pushing his hat back. His ruddy, jolly face was troubled.
"Sorry, Leaf-of-the-woods," he said. "I can't do it. I'll give you Treaty for yourself and the other two; but I can't let you have it for the baby."
The baby, as though understanding its repudiation, gave a little cry where the girl moved it on her arm. Tempest turned with a half-spoken sentence on his lips. It broke as he looked at Leaf-of-the-woods, and Dick knew why. Those soft wide eyes had brought Andree to Tempest also.
"What's wrong?" he asked of Gillington, and Gillington rubbed his nose vexedly.
"Why—she can't account for the kiddie. He isn't one of Canada's legitimate citizens, and I can't pay him Treaty."
"Poor little beggar." Tempest regarded the placid ​baby-face with pity. "Can't you waive the law for once, Gillington?"
"Guess not. It wouldn't do to create a precedent. I'm sorry, too. I reckon those five dollars mean as much to her as two or three hundred to you or me."
Leaf-of-the-woods raised her eyes to Tempest. She did not understand what these big-voiced men were saying; but she read that heart-note in Tempest's tone which is common to all languages. Dick saw Tempest's grave face flush and soften.
"Can't you manage it some way, Gillington?" he asked.
"As an officer of the law, I can't. But there's nothing to prevent your giving her the five dollars if you feel like it."
Gillington laughed at his own joke. But Tempest's eyes lighted to a gleam of the mischievous laughter of earlier days.
"Nothing to prevent my adopting that kid and insuring his yearly payment out of my own pocket, I suppose?" he asked.
"Nothing but the state of your own pocket," agreed Gillington.
"I fancy I can stand that. Will you explain to Francois that I want the girl to know that I'm going to be responsible for those five dollars in future, and that I'm going to give the child my name so that I can keep track of him."
"You always were quixotic," remarked Sherwood, looking at him curiously.
"Likely enough," cried Tempest dryly, and raised his voice, calling to a little burly priest who was passing from the Roman Catholic Mission.
The priest halted, and Tempest went to him, and then the two came back together. A gaping young breed was sent to the lake for a dipper of water, and before the rough box with its thumbed account-books Dick saw enacted a queer little ceremony which left him undecided to the end of his life concerning its comedy or tragedy.
Gillington's jolly face was composed into an unusual solemnity, and Otway leaned against the tent-opening with his brows knit and in his eyes a haunting look of memory. ​Among the crowding Indians stood the fat priest with rusty cassock and kindly, flabby face. Tempest took the baby from the girl's arms, starting with all a man's alarm as it began to cry. Hastily he thrust it into the priest's hands, giving his own name with it, and the child screamed strongly as the water sprayed over it from the priest's hot fingers.
Then the mother took it again; Gillington, relaxing the corners of his mouth with evident relief, made a careless joke, and insisted on Tempest himself placing the five dollars in the soft dark fingers of Neil Fraser Tempest the younger.
Dick got up and walked hurriedly down to the canoes on the Lake shore. Was this brown, greasy baby the only one who was to carry on Tempest's name when the man's work was done and that alert, breezy step stilled for ever? Dick guessed that it almost surely would be so. There was a lonely life before Tempest now: a lonely life and his work, supposing that this crust of quiet dignity behind which he had withdrawn himself hid living fires and not burnt-out ash. Dick would have given all he had, except a certain little oil-painting, to know what lay beneath that crust. He could have borne with Tempest for an outspoken enemy, or he could have abased himself and asked forgiveness for the first time in his life. But this rigid, outward calm maddened him; and yet, here again because Tempest was the stronger, he could not break through it.
He went down to the Lake where the canoes lay; loaded and ready for their long unknown journey to the East. The other two policemen of the Patrol were there, packing in their own dunnage, and joking with the few white men who stood round. The mosquitoes hummed in swarms across the low swamp-land, and Myers, the stocky little Corporal detailed from work on the Yukon, was swearing in Cockney English as he puffed his briar pipe and beat the air right and left. The bowman of Dick's canoe was a tall, melancholy French-Canadian, with drooping moustache and drooping shoulders and muscles of springy steel. He looked at Myers with his dark, sad eyes.
"Parblieu! You are too fat," he said. "They will eat ​you always. And it is to be worse where we go in the next days."
"Ain't 'e a nice feller ter have along on a picnic?" appealed Myers to the lookers-on. "A reel merry company, that's what 'e is. 'Wot's the good o' livin' terday?' 'e says. 'We gotter die termorrocr.' Yesser. Why—yesser. We ain't got nothin' more ter wait for—'cept them breeds."
Tempest had hired two breeds and a canoe to help lighten the loads across the dangerous Long Traverse of rapids on the Lake. He looked right and left for them now, drawn to his full height, with his bright eyes keen as Dick's own. Outwardly he seemed all that a workman should be. But the test that would try him in so many ways was not yet.
Up the sweep of the shore came a canoe, shot forward by the quick, long strokes of the breeds. They paddled Indian-fashion, changing the hands every few minutes, and the flash of the dripping paddles overhead dazzled in the sunlight. Dick looked down at the canoes which were to carry the little patrol so far. Long and snaky-brown they lay; of varnished strip cedar; a good eighteen feet in length, with a forty-four inch beam and a draught of eighteen inches. Tempest had chosen them from the design-book, and he knew every stroke of them; for he and Dick had tried them on the rapids of the Athabaska and he had gone over them, foot by foot, as they lay covered on the deck of the steamer which brought them up to Smith's Landing. They were fitted with oars, and big rolled lateen sails, and with many paddles. Aft and amidships were stowed part of the freight which was to feed and clothe the men until they touched to white-man life again, and at the shore-lip the two breeds were stowing the remainder into their own light birch canoe.
A man beside Dick stooped to lift the prow of a canoe.
"What's her portaging weight?" he asked; and Dick, blowing the tobacco-smoke round him in a cloud, said:
"About one-twenty pounds. The very lightest make I've come across for the strength."
"Ah!" said the man, and wagged his head. "But you don't know where you're going. Where a feller has to cut ​portages and portage his canoe afterwards I guess it gets heavy enough."
Dick turned away with a grunt. He did not like men who looked out for trouble. Besides, it was so very true that he did not know where he was going. Neither in spirit nor in body did he know. But he was very sure of one thing. Before the trail was ended he would burst through that crust which sheltered Tempest, even if Tempest killed him for it.
The sun was yet high, though Tempest's watch said half-past six, when the three canoes dropped away from Fort Resolution, threading through the big and little channels that harry the many island shores. The sun laid its broad gold on their faces or on their neck-napes as they wound right and left, with the birds calling past them from island to island and all the warm wet scents of trees and earth blowing fresh in their nostrils; there was enough wind to keep the mosquitoes off, and the canoes cut their way strongly with the dipping paddles sending light-flashes far over the streaming water.
Leaf-of-the-woods, crouched with her children in a little crazy dug-out, and paddling heavily back to her home on a distant island, looked up as the canoes swept by, with the sun glinting on tunic-buttons and badges, and making ruddy the firm-lipped, keen-eyed faces. Exactly what Tempest had done for her she could not comprehend; but she understood that in some mysterious way he had assured those coveted five dollars to the sleeping child at her feet. She halted the paddle in her dusky, dirty little hands; staring, round-eyed and unemotional. Tempest smiled as he went by. He was kneeling bare-headed, with the wind in his thick chestnut hair and his strong neck stiffened for the thrust and swing of the paddle. Leaf-of-the-woods gave no response. She did not think about it. Tempest was something so utterly alien to her; so completely outside her life and her comprehension. He scarcely seemed a man among men to Leaf-of-the-woods. He was more like some undefined force, as all the white men who trod and looked as he did were. She watched him pass with a kind of indifference, and when the islands hid him, she took up her paddle again and worked her stolid way home.
​Tempest forgot her in a struggle to clear a snag round the next corner. But the thing which he had done before the Treaty tent at Fort Resolution meant more than either the white man or the brown girl knew. For it was earnest of that deeper, more impersonal fathering which Tempest was later to give to the land he loved.
Through the evening haze a tall York boat grew out of the blue distance with its patched sail drawing feebly in the fitful wind. It was crowded with the Yellow Knives and Dog Rib Indians, going in to Fort Resolution for Treaty Payment. Idly they sat or lay about the decking; long-haired, loose-limbed, indifferent, except where one boy sprang up on a thwart, holding a little girl on his broad shoulder. A red handkerchief was bound about the boy's head; and his shrill hail, broken across by the drop of his voice to a man's depth, came curiously over the empty waters. Then they too fell away into the past, and Dick turned his eyes to the man ahead of him again.
He had watched each one of those swarthy, dark-eyed faces with the lightningly-keen glance which was his by nature. He knew that he would look so at every man he passed—until he found Ducane. The order to go and look for Ducane until he found him would have been very nearly the greatest joy earth could have given him now. But, because it was denied, he knew the matter only lengthened by a little. If Ducane lived he would find him. If Ducane died he would know it. Concerning this matter he had the strange intuition which occasionally comes to men who have relied all their lives on chance.
The Lake, wide and moaning as the sea, was dark with the wrath of an eastern wind that night. But it was no darker than Tempest's spirit as he walked the stony ridge behind their island camp, forgetful of the mosquito-smudges, and remembering only that he had at last taken the decisive step away from civilisation and from all knowledge of Andree.
He knew Andree now very much for what she was. But that only changed his love. He no longer thought of her a wife. To him she was, and always would be, just Grange's Andree; a thing half-human and wholly dear—a thing which the very soul of him longed to protect and ​which he could not touch, could not help, could not shield.
He looked down the slope to the sleeping bodies round the mosquito-smudge, and knew instantly which of them was Dick. He had lain round camp-fires with him too often not to know how Dick always slept on his side, with one knee bent and fingers curving for the revolver-butt; quick to spring up on the instant at any unusual sound. He was so quick always, this man whom Tempest had loved and trusted. So quick with his laugh and his love and his generous impulses. Tempest had loved Dick because he was Dick, never halting to consider that Dick might treat him as he had treated other men. And now Dick had done it; done it with the usual callous indifference which he showed at most crises of his life; done it with mocking eyes and a lie on his mouth.
In Tempest there was no such mad mixture of rogue and martyr and devil, of sin and renunciation and selfishness and reverence as tormented Dick. There was no little cynical imp of humour in his blood to teach him how to jest at his soul and at all other things which hurt him. Dick possessed that imp. Without it he could not have served the Law which he derided, or found such good joy in life still. Tempest had none of that spark to keep the fire of his days burning. He knew, as all the world's chosen men know (and there are many more of them than the world ever finds out) that, having endured the suffering, it was his plain duty as immortal man to find the remedy and to apply it until he could stand upon his feet again, sane and cured, and fit for the work which was to fit him for the future.
But he knew to-night, as he had known so many times through the last months, that as yet he could not do it. He had first to stamp out his hate of Dick, and all the outraged, betrayed friendship in him fought instinctively against that.
He went down to the fire again; took his blanket, and wrapped it round him. A breed was raised on his elbow, throwing more wood on the fire. The flickering light went playing hide-and-seek across the faces of the sleeping men, bringing the semblance of laughter to Dick's mouth. Tempest turned his back on him and lay down. But that mock​ing laughter chased him through his dreams and spoiled his rest.
The morning broke, wet and squally, with a following wind that ran them with taut sails down to the grey angry line of rough water that began the Traverse. Far off the small, bare islands that flanked the shore were lost in haze, and the naked width of the Great Slave Lake was like a rimless sea about them. The canoes seemed absurdly inadequate and frail to take that passage; but the breeds slid into it, indifferently, with the assured skill of their kind, and the white men's canoes followed, as snaky and alert as they. The rising wind blew up a sea that threatened danger, and the next two hours were full of it. With tunics flung aside, and sleeves rolled, and hats off every man laboured for his life; and the crested waves about them allowed no rest, any more than the stalking Indian of an earlier day had allowed rest to those free-traders who were marked down for punishment on that Long Traverse of an earlier day.
They were dripping with rain and lake-water; exhausted, and stiff with the muscle-ache when they hauled to shore again, two hours later. But the great Traverse was passed, and the beginning of a new world was before them. Dick knew something of that world already. He had trodden part of it himself, and from the tribes gathered in Fort Resolution he had learnt much more. For Fort Resolution is the book which holds the largest and the biggest chapter of the story of Fur. From there men go north to the Barren Lands to hunt the musk ox; from there fur of marten, of wolverine, of brown bear and ermine, and many more go south in the close-pressed bales, by steamer and by portage and by the tracker's pull. And from there, all round about it, the trails of the sturdy hunters drive out into the silences over the chartless hundreds of miles.
At Fond du Lac was a deserted post of the Hudson Bay Company. They left it to rot its way back to the earth again, and followed up the narrowing lake until Charlton Harbour marked the end of it and the beginning of that which all men knew to be the real test of flesh and spirit.
That night's camp was among a cluster of empty tepees ​on the lonely shore whence white-man tread and white-man voices had departed long ago. The tepees were used as a half-way camp by the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives going into Fort Resolution for the yearly Treaty Payments, and the signs of recent occupation were plain on them. Dick prowled through their dirty silences that night; but he found nothing of moment except a puppy with a broken leg. He put the leg into adequate splints and fed to it the raw moosemeat brought from the Fort; and Tempest, seeing, marvelled as he had so often marvelled before, at the strong line of distinction which this man drew between human nature and the animal.
The black flies and the mosquitoes hailed them before the sun shot up to presage a hot, airless day. And then, under the blaze of it and attended by a mighty murmuring, stabbing army, they began that portaging which was to stay with them in larger or lesser degree throughout the rest of the journey.
The three-mile portage over the divide that parted the two lakes had been beaten hard by the passing of the fur hunters through uncounted years on their way to Fort Resolution. It lay between low close forest where the mosquitoes hung like an awning, and it climbed a six-hundred feet slope in the sun where the blackflies made patterns on the white stony earth. In four days they had travelled a distance of over sixty miles across that three-mile portage; and Myers vented some opinions as he flung the list tightly-rolled pack on the crest of the divide where the little lake lay, and rubbed the aching muscles of his neck.
"I'm thinkin' as it were some joker called us the Mounted Police," he said. "We're 'orses, bloomin' 'orses, that's what we are. An' this darned strap"—he pulled viciously at the leather loop which hung from his Stetson hat to the curve of the skull—"this are our bridle, on'y we hadn't oughter be wearin* it behind."
Depache, the tall French-Canadian, eased his shoulders from the pressure of the canoe-paddles which had been strapped across the canoe-thwarts so as to enable him to carry the whole thing on his head.
"Bien," he said. "You will soon not be so fat. I did never see a man sweat as you do sweat. It is wonderful."
​Myers grunted, beating the swarming flies from hands and face.
"Guess me an' Heriot is a-goin' ter hev good strong beards ter shelter us in a while," he remarked. "Wot you an' th' Inspector want wi' keepin' yer faces bare ter be bit I can't see. Tommy-rot, I calls it."
"C'est en règle," said Depache, and shrugged his shoulders.
He could not have explained why he and Tempest found no day too hard nor too long but that they could take from it five minutes for a cold-water shave and three more to brush their hair. But Tempest knew. There is something in man which makes it unwise for him to let go of the outer usages of refinement to which he has been accustomed. Insensibly those refinements keep awake the like in the heart, though outward conditions may batter on both. At no time is it more necessary for some men to hold on to their inner self-respect by according outward respect to their body than in the desolate places where there is none to shame them if they fall. Tempest brushed his clothes daily. He washed out the coarse flannel shirt of the day's wear each night; and through all the dust and the sweating heat and the loathsome crawling flies he walked with the cleanly-groomed alertness which he carried in the barrack-yard. He dared not let go of that, for he had lost too much else; and Depache, blindly copying the man to whom he gave a silent, unobtrusive worship, bore his head the higher for it also.
Dick and Myers frankly sloughed conventionalities on every possible point. They were strong as brown bears and restless as foxes. While Tempest wrote up his diary or did his washing, and Depache, roaming the wind-swept shore, sang his pathetic lumber-camp songs in clipped French, Dick and Myers caught the long, coarse trout of the Great Slave, or the abundant whitefish, or hunted game along the shores, and found none. Dick had his own physical pain on those burning days of the portage-trail. His walk had not the spring of Tempest's, and the sand and the stone of the way seared his feet through the moccasin-soles until every step meant the negotiation of a separate hill of torment.
​Tempest did not know of this until the last of those four days, when Depache and Myers were swimming in the litthe lake that lipped the knees of the sparse trees with so different a sound from the thunder of the Slave, and Dick, in the smoke of the mosquito-smudge, was mending a tear in his tunic by button-clips and talking idle animal-talk to the splint-legged dog at his elbow. Tempest came out of his tent, and looked round.
"Where are the men?" he asked.
"Swimming," said Dick, and did not look up.
"Was that little black leather case of mine put into your tent? It came up in the last packs to-day."
"Yes. I chucked it down with the dunnage somewhere."
Dick stood up to go to his tent, and Tempest stopped him.
"I can get it," he said. "Tell me where it is."
"Thank you," said Dick dryly. "I prefer to overhaul my personal belongings myself."
Tempest flushed, biting his lips. But his eyes followed the man into the second tent, and when Dick brought the case it was not of it that Tempest spoke.
"What have you been doing to your feet?" he asked.
"Nothing." Dick took up his work and sat down again.
"You'll be good enough to answer me more civilly," said Tempest, and for a moment his voice shook. "What is wrong with your feet?"
"I burnt them portaging." Dick looked up. "When I cry out it will be time enough for you to fuss over me."
Tempest understood all that look and words meant. They angered him.
"I should have imagined you knew enough by now to take care of your feet," he said sharply.
Dick sought among the odds and ends of the fishing line, buttons, floats, oiled rags and other things that were stuffed into a battered little embroidered silk bag made for him years since by some girl whose name he had forgotten. He had carried that bag for sentimental reason at first. Later on it had become a familiar. Now it was about the one thing which might be said to represent home to him. Other things passed and were replaced; but the little faded bag ​survived in some way which he never took the trouble to account for.
"Be easy," he said, and detached another clip from a melting lump of cobbler's wax. "I will get through my work as well as the next man."
He kept his word unconcernedly and to the letter. But it hurt Tempest more than he had believed he could be hurt now to watch those limping feet on the many portages that linked up lake after lake until the long waters of Artillery Lake stretched before them, gleaming delicate mauve and silver under the dying day. Dick had been this way before on a lone patrol, filled only with the cheerful exultance of a hunter who keeps a difficult trail. Now he dropped his pack on the camping-ground; straightened with an effort; rubbed his hot hands over his hotter face, and looked out across the peaceful water. At his side Depache said gently:
"Mary Mother! But it is like w'en de bells of San Michel do call us to pray at home."
Dick heard, but he did not speak. The great spreading calm of the water; the pure air, warm and soothing where it blew in his face; the quiet, bare hill-spaces dimming to dusk, and the one grove of trees about him where the dark thickened, brought more rest into his fretted weary mind than he had known for long. Unmoving he stood, with his face changing and softening. Then he turned, loosed the straps round his pack, and went back over the hundred-yard portage for a second load.
That night the real keepers of the Silences waked and walked about the two little tents along the lake-shore. Dick, hearing the faint familiar call and the soft clicking of hoofed feet saw them first. Then he crawled to the tent-opening and lay there, watching. In twos and threes and in dozens they passed and repassed him; the full-grown caribou bull standing mightily with his antlers clear-cut on the pallor of the lake; the slender does, stepping lightly and turning their dappled necks to left and right, and the young bulls halting now and again to butt each other with their sprouting horns and then rushing off with exaggerated snorts of fear. All along the lake-lip they drank and clustered; parted and came again. The smell of ​their warm, furry bodies and of the mud they churned up in the swampy places came strongly to Dick; and the murmuring, whimpering sounds of them; the sharp scuffles and the occasional deep note of warning struck home to the very core of the man's heart.
It was only among the creatures of the wild that the savage was wiped out of him and the unquestioning simplicity of their lives filled his own. He stood up presently, and went to them; walking softly, and keeping in the shadow. And then, ahead, where the naked sides of the lake slid to the water, he saw a thing which he once had seen before, and for a moment he wondered if the turbulent years between were nightmare only, and if this endless army of stately-treading bulls who crossed the ridge against the sky, descended, and breasted the lake one after one, was not the same army, even as this was the same night which he had passed here five full years ago.
Depache's soft, melancholy tones spoke below him as they lay in the grass.
"Dieu! They are like the angels of Heaven for multitude."
And then Dick laughed: a smothered, heart-whole laugh such as he had not known these many days. For the surging, crested horns that split the water above the dark swimming bodies looked devilish entirely among the naked hills and the barren waters. Both men lay still until Depache's long body grew chilled, and he crept back through the grass to the tent. But Dick clung to his spur-top yet, keen-eared for the distant splash where a great bull took the water; for the soft rushing sound as he swam steadily; for the flapping shake of his great body as he landed. In the utter stillness sound carried far, and Dick's ears were quick as those of the hunter must be. And his eyes were quick. That sweeping, endless river of the life which belongs to the solitudes was distinct and very dear to him. Year by year the caribou took their trails and came again: stately, unafraid, unchanging; seeking the reindeer-moss and the tree-branch and the waters of some unnamed lake for drink. Homeless, drifting ever from North to South and back, they were yet the rightful masters of this land; the sentry-go of the Barren Grounds; the guard along the frontier.
​In a very few days Dick and the men with him would be across that frontier where once, years before, he and Tempest had trodden together. But when they were gone and the North closed up into its long sleep the caribou would still be there, moving in their countless ranks over the noiseless whiteness.
In the days that came after, the northern limit of trees was passed and the Barren Grounds only lay left and right and north to the Arctic Seas. Here the wind dropped, and the sun poured heat down steadily, until the mosquitoes and flies clung about them in thick, stupid swarms, bringing blood on every naked part, and the clayey untrodden portages slid and quaked beneath the tread, letting the feet through to clogging mud and water that sometimes caught the ankles and flung the man forward violently. Up the Cusba River they tracked the canoes among the snarling rapids. In open reaches sudden, stiff winds bore them back to barren shores that held no anchorage. The one lonely little Indian camp they passed was far behind, and the four men moved alone in the hand of the elements and of the God who made them.
But the fat mosquito-bitten Myers had unfailing jokes for every good or evil; Depache sang his little plaintive French-Canadian songs, untroubled by wind or rain, and the dangerous, alert look softened in Dick's eyes before the touch of the outer places on his soul, and he told his casual yarns of the things he had seen and had done as easily in the cold, wind-beaten tent as round the jovial camp-fires of the south. Tempest's men had been picked with skill, and he had reason to approve the judgment. They were men right through, these roughened, sweating, blood-smudged ruffians who took the tracking-line of the portage-pack, the paddle, the oar, or the straining stays of the sail, cheerfully and without comment, at his word. And he, knowing himself for the king-bolt of the company, laboured with all the inward courage left him to take his part manfully in the daily trials that no man knows until he comes to face them for himself.
The days dropped away, remembered only by "that noon when we couldn't make a landing, and had no dinner"; or, "the night it blew too hard to pitch the tents, and we slept under the canoes"; or, "that bloomin' day ​what was all portages an' we unloaded an' loaded up again fire times." And then, when a short month was done, they came to the portage on the Height of Land, with rivers and ground falling eastward into Hudson Bay.
They camped on Height of Land portage that night; round a fire made of driftwood worn and light from long beating on these barren shores, and of moss which Dick searched for, and, knowing well the use of, brought back to the fire in great cakes. It gave out a musty smell to the night, and Myers declared that it made the tea taste. But the flavour was good to Dick, and the wild night blowing up dark on the naked wastes about him was good. For the belief was quickening in his mind—day by day, and hour by hour—that when he touched to the haunts of men again he would find Ducane.
Through all those miles from Fort Resolution, which were only about three hundred and seventy on the survey map, although the portages had piled them up to almost as many more, Dick's mind held sleeplessly to the thought of Ducane. While his senses exulted in the smell of the rivers; in the deep-trod spore of deer on the shores; in the high, white stars that strung themselves across the curve of the great sky; in the winds that blew out of the unbreathed spaces round the Pole, his brain was still planning the capture of Ducane. By force of will he had thrust Jennifer into the background. It maddened him to think of her, and therefore he would not think of her.
He took his skill in his work for his fetish again, finding the very salt of life in it. The try-pit wherein he had been welded, with strong blows and white-hot searing fire, had not left him with much mercy towards himself or other men. Law, duty, discipline had meant practically nothing to him until he saw the beauty of them in Tempest's hands. Now, even through his pain in connection with this man, it appealed to his pride and his humour to know that he, the morally-derelict, had whipped Tempest back into the straight path, and that Tempest was treading it, faithfully, if not with the glorying delight of old.
In some way which he did not try to fathom, this knowledge awakened Dick's understanding of what he owed the ​thing to which he had given his oath. It began to lose the vague semblance of a burden to be slipped when possible; a lesson to be got up with a crib; a factor which had no value, no interest except where it concerned his private self. Step by step, out here among these mighty forces which could crush him so lightly, the personal sloughed off and the impersonal grew more real. What he was doing; what Tempest was doing; what every map and woman who bent their will to accept law and restraint and discipline throughout the universe was doing, could not be a little thing. In the bulk it was bigger than Destiny itself, because it was the only force which could overcome what humanity knows as Destiny. It was the only force which could raise the world when done from purified motives.
Dick had never done anything from a purified motive in his life, although the delivering of Tempest had been near it in the beginning. Now, with his clear inner sight, he knew that he probably never would do anything from that motive. He knew that when he found Ducane he would delight to see the man cringe and whimper to him. He would delight to kick Ducane up on to his feet and keep him there by the goad. He had suffered too much through Jennifer's husband ever to forgive him, and he knew well that he was going to suffer, so long as he or Ducane lived. And then suddenly, Myers, passing him on the portage, halted, peering into his face with little twinkling, blue eyes.
"Who was you a-settin' out to kill jus' now?" he demanded.
"Black flies," said Dick, and scooped his hand down his stinging neck. "Like Joab and Joshua and the rest, I've been slaying my thousands and tens of thousands."
Myers grunted.
"Looks like the smell o' blood don't sicken you any," he said, and went on.
There was a curious affinity between the cheerful little Cockney and Dick. Myers had served in the Yukon Territory during the mining rush, and there were several passages in his life which he found it convenient to forget. But he had learnt there how to seek for the inner values in a man, knowing them to be different utterly from the side he faces the world with. Like Dick there were times ​when the man in him grew tired of strife, and turned boyishly to the boyish equivalent for birds'-nesting and chasing cats; and together they sought these equivalents now; trolling for the great red trout at foot of the rapids; whipping the water for grayling; hunting caribou when fresh meat was needed; and chasing the cat (which was Depache) when opportunity occurred.
No power on earth could ruffle Depache's gentle melancholy into a storm. When Dick and Myers cursed the flies and the damp heat along the ragged streams and boulders that broke the portages, and yet would not allow canoe- work; when they swore at the windy nights; at the infinitely desolate hills where only the moss and a few handfuls of grass in the bottoms offered fuel; when, rising to giddy peaks of profanity, they vowed that they would feed no more biscuit to the stomachs that desired bread—bread, and could make no fire wherewith to bake it; then Depache would look at them, sad-eyed, and interested.
"But I could never think of all those words, moi," he would say, and drift off to sing his little songs contentedly.
By the nature of things Tempest stood somewhat alone throughout his patrol. Birth and position placed him apart, and his temper just now kept him there. He did his work accurately, both in the physical and mental branches; and what he thought about he kept to himself. Once Dick saw him handling his revolver with rather unnecessary interest, and he walked past noisily, meaning to make Tempest look up. Tempest did not look up. He put the revolver back in its case and snapped it shut. But Dick carried the memory of that little scene away with him, and he did not forget it.
In Tempest's place he would have used the revolver on the other man. He knew that if Tempest used it he would use it on himself, and that thought kept his mind busy, even through the keen disappointment when the patch of spruce wood promised by an early survey map as growing on the shores of Sifton Lake turned out, after much searching, to be soft ground spruce, of hardly greater value than the moss. Over that spruce Myers lost his temper fully for the first time. He flung himself on it, tearing it up by the stringy roots, and consigning it to hotter flames ​than that by which he had hoped to bake his bread. Then, exhausted, he went down the hill, climbed into his canoe, and took up the paddle again.
"Makes a man wish he was a bloomin' caribou," he said. "They can get their fill off of moss—moss, an' like it."
Once, through a grey evening on the Thelon, they came on a musk-ox, lying like a great earth-clod on the flank of a naked hill. He raced across it when their shouts woke him, and the long hair that swept the ground waved and fluttered round him like rags shaken in the wind. He was the one piece of life they had seen that day, and the barren stretches seemed more desolate without him.
And then, slow and slow, came promise of life again. Grass blowing thick along the foreshores; heavy timber skirting the banks; sea-gulls and musk-ox; brown bears sauntering under the sunset; wolverine and foxes crying in the night. On a portage Dick kicked up a carved bone of Exquimaux workmanship. He thrust it into his tunic and trudged on with a new light shining in his eyes. Before long, before very long, he would know if the stamping-grounds of these eastern Esquimaux sheltered Ducane.
It was a year and two months since Ducane had disappeared; and as he had not been found among the peopled roadways of the land, it followed that he must have fled to the waste places. And as the places where a white man can find means of existence are rather clearly defined in Canada, Dick knew that he must be along the river trail if he had gone east. He could not leave the country undetected by any of the northern ways, and Dick did not believe that he would dare to face the congested places of the south. He knew too many men, and would be known by too many. And never for one instant did Dick think him dead. He felt instinctively that he would have known if it had been so. And he felt, almost as instinctively, that it would be for him to find Ducane and carry him back to that justice which he had baffled so long. He owed it to Jennifer; he owed it to himself; he owed it to the work which was beginning to mean more to him than ever before.
Already winter was chasing them with sounding feet; flinging white frost to greet them when they turned out ​from their tents each morning, and spreading soft creaking ice-films before the canoe-prows. The heat of midday swept it off; but each morning it lasted longer, and each evening it came more early. The tentacles of the North were pushing down to annex its own again. Little by little the land was closing up behind them. Already the Mackenzie River would have shut down, and Herschel be settling into its seven months of rigidity. The keen, glad breath of the mornings put new vigour into the men; the flies were dead, and the long, hard miles of labour had tightened thew and muscle, and sweated off superfluous flesh until there was nothing left but a tense springy strength that seemed never to tire.
And then, one hot midday when the river ran fast between tall, naked cliffs, the canoes swung round a bluff and found an anchorage before a knot of deerskin tepees where Esquimaux women were working. Dick's heart was in his throat as he went with Tempest up to the tepees. But there was nothing for him there. All the men were away at Fullerton, trading fur and carvings with the whalers, and the little information which the laughing, fat-faced women could give in their broken English suggested no knowledge of a white man among them.
Tempest stopped to admire the sleek, alert, dusky dogs which made the sledge-teams.
"About as different from an Indian dog as day from night," he said. "I shouldn't wonder if we weren't wishing we had 'em before long."
"Why!" Dick was startled. "Don't you imagine we will catch the steamer at Chesterfield or Fullerton?" he asked.
"Can't say." Tempest turned on his heel. "Winter seems likely to be early, and I am afraid its going to take us all our time——"
And then he forgot Dick and stood watching Depache down on his long knees among the greasy, chuckling babies who rolled on the stamped ground without the tepees.
Depache was cuddling those babies and kissing them. He made bobbing rabbits for them out of his ragged handkerchief. He tickled them and laughed as the fat, good-natured mothers laughed, and Tempest went away to camp with a sudden, surprised understanding in him. Shut in ​on his own troubles, it had never struck him that this gentle, serenely obedient man had been famishing for something to fondle; something to take care of. Tempest remembered now how Depache had begged for the broken-legged dog, and how he had gone away by himself when Tempest had refused him. For all the rigid laws and the strenuous man-life to which they had submitted themselves, there was yet something strangely young and uneradicable in these lives under his hand. Dick and Myers wanted their boy-games, though their eyes and the lines round their mouths could tell how much they knew of men. The soft, melancholy Depache, who was stronger than Tempest himself, wanted some little helpless thing to pet and kiss. Of what Tempest himself wanted he did not care to think. He went back to camp, and wrote up his diary.
Along the Thelon River old cut trees told where Esquimaux camps had been. For the Indians never stray so far from the western fur-trading posts, and the Esquimaux make no permanent homes in the woods. The open country where the snow packs hard beneath the dog-trains and the caribou run in their endless herds are dearer to them by far.
There were fish and deer and musk-ox in plenty where the following winter chased the little patrol east and ever east into Hudson Bay. Sweeps of utterly barren country were interspersed with heavy timber; deserted camps showed nakedly among the spruces; and the thickly-crossed spores of little and big fur animals were everywhere. Under sail they crossed Beverley Lake at the foot of the Thelon River, and saw that the far end of it a large Esquimaux camp where men came down to greet them among the barking huskies and the women and children.
Dick knelt without moving in the stern of his canoe while Tempest called a welcome, and the answers came in unusually good English. He was wondering why that husky man, who was broader and taller than any on the beach, had gone suddenly into a half-hidden tepee and dropped the skin flap behind him. And yet, in his own heart, he did not really wonder. He swung his canoe alongside Tempest's and spoke to him, very low.
"Can't we make camp here?" he said. "For I believe I have just seen Ducane."