The start was made at last. At the sharp “Marche donc!” of the drivers, the sleepy looking ponies woke into life and were off at a brisk trot. The carts pitched and wobbled, each with a gait of its own, over the rough, hard ground, the ungreased axles groaning and screeching in every key. The discord set Walter’s teeth on edge, as he walked with Louis beside the vehicle the latter was driving.
At the head of the column the guide in charge, Jean Baptiste Lajimonière, rode horseback, followed closely by the cart carrying his wife and younger children. The whole family had come from Pembina a short time before to have the newest baby christened by Father Provencher, the priest. Behind the Lajimonières, the train stretched out across the plain, the two wheeled carts piled with baggage and household belongings or occupied by the women and children sitting flat on the bottom, their heels higher than their hips. The drivers sat on the shafts or walked alongside. The Swiss men and boys went afoot, but some of the Scotch and Canadians rode wiry ponies and drove a few cattle. The riders used deerskin pads for saddles and long stirrups or none at all. Spare cart horses ran loose beside their harnessed companions.
Not all of the Swiss were in the party. Several families, taken into the cabins of the DeMeurons, had been allowed to remain. Matthieu and his wife also stayed behind. The baby was ill and Matthieu himself scarce able to travel. The Colony had started a new industry, the manufacture of cloth from buffalo hair, and the weaver was to be given employment. When Walter learned that Matthieu was to remain, the boy entrusted to him a letter for Mr. Perier, explaining how he had been forced to go on to Pembina.
Leaving Point Douglas, the cart train turned southeast, traveling a little back from the west bank of the river, along a worn track across open prairie. Beyond the narrow valley, scattered cabins could be seen among the trees on the east side.
“That is St. Boniface settlement,” Louis told his companion. “Père Provencher is building a church there.”
About a mile south of Point Douglas, the carts approached the junction of the Assiniboine River with the Red, the place Louis calledLes Fourches, the Forks. On the north bank of the Assiniboine stood a small Hudson Bay post, and not far from it were piles of logs for a new building or stockade.
“The Company is going to make a new fort,” Louis explained. “M’sieu Garry and M’sieu McGillivray chose this spot. There was an old Northwest post, Fort Gibraltar, here, but five years ago M’sieu Colin Robertson, a Hudson Bay man, seized it, and Governor Semple had it pulled down. The logs and timber were taken down river to Fort Douglas. Fort Gibraltar had been here a long time, and so has this trading house. Les Fourches is an old trading place. Men say there was a fort here a hundred years ago, when all Canada and the fur country were French, but nothing is left of those old buildings now.”
The cart train halted near the trading post, as some of the men had business there, and Louis asked Walter to go with him to see the Chief Trader. “At Fort Douglas I told a clerk how our pemmican disappeared and aboutle Murrai’spackage of trade goods.Le Murraihad received his pay and had left the fort. The clerk knew not where he had gone. He told me to report the affair to M’sieu the Chief Trader here. Come with me, and we will tell what we know.”
The men of the little post were busy outfitting boats to go up the Assiniboine with goods and supplies for stations farther west, but the two boys had a few minutes’ conversation with the Chief Trader. Louis told the story and Walter corroborated it. The trader looked grave and shook his head perplexedly. The charge against Murray,—stealing supplies and exchanging them for goods with which to trade on his own account,—was a serious one. Could it be proved? The trader did not doubt the story of the contents of the bundle, but Murray might have come by the things honestly and for a legitimate purpose.
“He is due here to-day to go with the Assiniboine brigade,” the trader explained, “but I have seen nothing of him. You have no proof that he took the pemmican and substituted the bag of clay. If he denies it, the only thing I can do is to report the matter to Norway House at the first opportunity. They ought to know whether anyone exchanged pemmican for goods while your brigade was there. Of course Murray didn’t make the bargain himself. Someone else did it for him. It won’t be necessary to mention your names at present, to Murray I mean. You would find the Black Murray a bad enemy.”
“Yes,” Louis agreed. “He does not love either of us now. I thank you, M’sieu.”
“The thanks are due to you, from the Company, for reporting this matter. Don’t you want to sign for the Assiniboine voyage? We can use you both.”
Walter shook his head. He had had quite enough voyaging for the present. Louis answered simply, “No, M’sieu. I go to my mother at Pembina.”
Instead of continuing on the west bank of the Red River and crossing the Assiniboine, the cart train turned to the east, followed a well-traveled track down to the Red, and forded that river below the Forks. The country just south of the Assiniboine was marshy and thickly wooded with willows and small poplars. By following the east bank of the Red the almost impassable low ground was avoided.
The carts were now on the St. Boniface side, where the stream that Louis calledRivière la Seine, and the Scotch settlers, German Creek, entered the river. Some of the DeMeuron cabins were near at hand, and the Swiss who were to remain there were on the lookout for a chance to say good-bye to their friends. Walter saw again the red-faced ex-soldier who had boasted that he and his comrades were the pick of many countries. He carried a gun on his shoulder and looked as if he had been drinking. The boy liked him even less than before.
The carts crossed the creek, which was narrow and shallow where it joined the river. Ten or twelve miles farther on, they forded the Red again, above the mouth of theRivière la Sale, a small, muddy stream coming in from the west.
Their way now lay across the open prairie west of the Red River; treeless plains such as the Swiss immigrants had never seen before. Trees grew along the river bank only. The few elevations in sight seemed scarcely high enough to be called hills. This was the fertile, rich soiled land of which the new settlers had been told. Its grass ravaged by locusts, dried by the sun, withered by frost, in some places consumed by sweeping fires; the prairie showed little outward sign of its fertility. The immigrants gazed across the yellow-gray expanse and the unsightly black stretches, and shook their heads wonderingly and doubtfully. Many a heart was heavy with homesickness for native mountains and valleys.
Walter Rossel was not a little heartsick, as he walked beside the loaded cart or took a turn at riding on the shafts and driving the shaggy pony. He was trudging along, absorbed in his own thoughts, when he was startled by the sudden dash of a horse so close that he instinctively jumped the other way. Looking up, he saw a freckled, red-haired lad in a Tam-o’-Shanter, grinning cheerfully down from the back of the wiry, black pony he had pulled up so short it was standing on its hind legs. Instantly Walter recognized the horseman. This red-headed boy was the first of the settlers he had seen when the brigade approached the Scotch settlement of Kildonan. He was the fisherman who had waved his blue bonnet to the boats.
The Scotch lad was greeting Louis as an old friend, and the Canadian responded smilingly. “Bo’jou, Neil MacKay,” he cried. “So your family goes again to Pembina.”
“What else can we do?” was the question. “We must eat, and there is sure to be more food at Pembina this winter than at Kildonan. We will hunt together again, Louis.”
“Yes, you and I and my other friend here, Walter Rossel.”
Walter and Neil responded to this introduction by exchanging nods and grins. The red-haired lad dismounted, and, leading his pony, fell into step by Walter’s side. The conversation of the three was carried on principally in French. The Scotch boy had learned that language during his first winter at the Red River. That winter, and several of the succeeding ones, he had spent at Pembina. Among the French andbois bruléshe had had plenty of practice in the Canadian tongue. Indeed he spoke it far better than English, for his native speech was the Gaelic of northern Scotland. Already familiar with Louis’ Canadian French, Walter had little difficulty in understanding Neil, except when he introduced a Gaelic word or phrase.
The Scotch boy answered the newcomer’s questions readily and told him much about the Colony. Neil had come from Scotland with his father and mother, brothers and sisters, before he was nine years old. He was just fifteen now. When the MacKays and their companions had reached the Red River, they had found the settlement deserted, the houses burned. The settlers were gathered together again and spent the winter at Pembina, returning to Fort Douglas in the spring. Then came Cuthbert Grant and his wildbois bruléfollowers. Governor Semple was killed and Fort Douglas captured for the Northwest Company. The colonists, including the MacKays, were compelled to go to Norway House. They had returned when Lord Selkirk and his DeMeurons arrived and had gone on with their farming.
There were some two hundred settlers at Kildonan now, Neil said, and about a hundred DeMeurons along German Creek. How many Canadians andbois brulésreally belonged at St. Boniface it was hard to tell, they came and went so constantly. “They do little farming on the east side of the river,” the boy remarked. “Hunting and fishing are more to their taste. I don’t blame them. They can get enough to eat more easily that way. Raising crops here is discouraging work. You will learn that soon enough.”
“Isn’t the soil good?” asked Walter. “We were told it was rich.”
“Oh, the soil is all right, after you get the ground broken. Breaking is hard work though, when you have nothing but a hoe and a spade. There is scarcely a plow in the Colony. There hasn’t been an ox till just lately. The Indian ponies aren’t trained for farm work. Things grow fast once they are planted, but what is the good of raising them when the grasshoppers take them all? I would go to Canada, as so many have done, or to the United States, but my father is stubborn. He won’t leave Kildonan. He has worked hard and he doesn’t want to give up his land. Yet if the grasshoppers keep coming every year, they will drive even him away.” Neil shook his red head, his face very sober.
The settlers, he went on to say, had no sheep and few pigs. Until a few weeks before, they had had no cattle. Alexis Bailly, abois brulétrader had come, during the summer, clear from the Mississippi River with a herd of about forty.
“He got a good price for the beasts,” Neil commented, “but he deserved it, after bringing them hundreds of miles through the Sioux country. Why the Indians didn’t get every one of them I can’t understand.”
“It was a great feat truly,” Louis agreed. “But most of those cattle will be killed for food this winter.”
“I’m afraid so. It will be hard times in the Colony, and everyone is deep in debt to the store now.”
“The prices are high there I hear,” Louis remarked.
“High? Yes, and that’s not the worst of it. The Colony store isn’t run honestly. So many of the settlers can’t read or write, it is easy to cheat them. My father can write and he keeps account of everything he buys, but they won’t let him have anything more until he settles the bill they have against him. Half of that bill is for things he never had, and he swears he won’t pay for what he didn’t buy.”
“I should think not,” cried Walter indignantly. “Why doesn’t he appeal to the Governor?”
Neil laughed shortly. “He tried, but it did him no good. If the Governor doesn’t do the cheating himself, he winks at it. Governor ‘Grasshopper’ is one of the Colony’s worst troubles. He thinks he is a little king, with his high-handed ways, and the court he keeps at Fort Douglas, and the revels he holds there.”
“We heard something of that last night.”
“Aye, it’s no uncommon thing. McDonnell is not the man to be at the head of the Colony. We’re all hoping he won’t last much longer. Many complaints have been made to the Company, to Nicholas Garry and Simon McGillivray when they were here in the summer, and even by letter across the sea.”
The prairie track the carts followed ran well back from the wooded river banks. As the sun was setting behind a far distant rise of land across the plain, the guide turned from the trail. The squeaking carts followed his lead, bumping, pitching, and wobbling over the untracked ground. Supposing that Lajimonière was seeking the shelter of the woods, Walter was surprised when the guide reined in his mount at a distance of at least a half mile from the nearest trees. His cart stopped also and the flag it bore was lowered, as a signal to the rest of the train. Camp was to be made on the prairie in the full sweep of the sharp northwest wind.
“This is a poor place it seems to me,” the Swiss boy commented. “Farther over, among the trees, there would be shelter, and plenty of wood.”
“Lajimonière prefers the open. It is safer.”
“What is there to fear?”
“Nothing probably, but we can’t be sure.” Neil MacKay spoke quietly but seriously. “Out here on the prairie, we can see anyone approaching.”
“You mean Indians? I thought the Saulteux and Crees were friendly.”
“They are. Lajimonière is thinking about Sioux. Whether the Sioux are friendly or not is an open question just now. Didn’t you hear what happened at Fort Douglas a few weeks ago?”
“The visit of the Sioux?” questioned Louis. “I was told of it last night at St. Boniface. It was a most unfortunate affair.”
“What was it?” Walter asked. “I didn’t know the Sioux ever came to Fort Douglas. Louis told me their country was farther south.”
“So it is,” replied the Scotch lad. “A Sioux seldom ventures this far down the Red River nowadays, but a party of them did come clear to the fort a while ago. They said they had heard how fine the Company’s goods were and what generous presents the traders gave. So they came to pay a visit to the Hudson Bay white men. They were friendly, almost too friendly. They expected drink and gifts. The Governor was away, and one of the Company clerks was in charge. He didn’t know just what to do with such dangerous guests. He told them there wasn’t any rum in the fort, and gave them tea instead. Then he fed them and distributed a few trinkets and little things. If they would go back to their own country, he said, the Company would send traders to them with goods and more presents.”
“The Company will get into trouble with the American traders if goods are sent to the Sioux country beyond the border,” Louis commented.
“Yes, but he had to promise something to get rid of the fellows. If they stayed around, he was afraid of trouble with the Saulteux. The Sioux seemed satisfied when they left the fort. But several Saulteux were hiding in ambush in the fort garden. They fired on the Sioux, killed two, and wounded another, then escaped by swimming the river and dodging through the willows. Of course the Sioux were furious. They said the white men had given the Saulteux powder and shot to kill friendly visitors. One of them boasted to abois bruléfrom St. Boniface,—who is part Sioux himself and speaks their language,—that they were going back to the fort to scalp the clerk. The half-breed went right to the fort with the story. Things looked serious. If the party of Sioux had been larger they might have attacked the fort or massacred all of us, but they knew they were far outnumbered. Somehow they learned that the men in the fort had been warned of their plot. They decamped suddenly, and nothing more has been seen of them. Probably they have gone back to their own country, but no one knows. They may be hiding somewhere waiting for a chance to attack any Saulteur orbois bruléor white man who comes along.”
Louis nodded soberly. “When an Indian seeks revenge he is not always careful what man he strikes. Lajimonière does well to camp in the open.”
Neil’s story had sent a chill up Walter’s spine. Hardship he had become used to during the journey from Fort York, hardship and danger from the forces of Nature; water and wind, cold and storm. But this was the first time in his life that real peril from enemy human beings had ever confronted him. He had known of course that there might be danger from Indians in this wild land to which he had come, but he had never actually sensed that danger before. He glanced towards the woods, and saw, in imagination, half naked, copper colored savages concealed in the shadows and watching with fierce eyes the approaching carts.
Although camp was pitched out of musket range from that belt of trees, the woods nevertheless must be penetrated. The beasts must be taken to the river. Water and fuel must be brought back. After listening to Neil’s story, Walter was surprised at the apparent light-hearted carelessness of the men and boys who started riverward with the horses and cattle. Neil had a cow and three ponies to water, and he offered one of the latter to Walter.
“Ride the roan,” he advised, “if you’re not used to our ponies. He is older and better broken.”
Neil took for granted that Walter wanted to go with Louis and himself, and the Swiss boy, who was far from being a coward, did not think of declining. He had not been on a horse for several years, but before his apprenticeship to Mr. Perier, he had been used to riding. The roan was unusually well broken and sedate for a prairie pony. Though obliged to ride bareback and with only a halter instead of bridle and bit, Walter had no trouble with the animal. The horse knew it was being taken to water and needed no guidance to keep with the other beasts.
The boy could not help a feeling of uneasiness as he approached the woods, and he noticed that Louis, though he seemed to ride carelessly, kept one hand on his gun. The irregular cavalcade of mounted men and boys and loose animals passed in among the trees,—sturdy oaks, broad topped elms, great basswoods, which Louis calledbois blanc,—white wood,—and Walterlindens. All were nearly leafless now, except the oaks, which retained part of their dry, brown foliage, but the trunks stood close enough together to furnish cover for any lurking enemy. Without alarm, however, the animals threaded their way through the belt of larger growth to the river bank. The steep slopes and narrow bottom were covered with smaller trees and bushes, aspen poplar, wild plum and cherry, highbush cranberry, saskatoon or service berry, prickly raspberry canes, and, especially along the river margin, thick willows.
Following a track where wild animals had broken a way through the bushes and undergrowth, dogs, cattle, horses, and men made their way down the first slope, along a shelf or terrace, and on down a yet steeper incline to the river bottom. The sure-footed, thirsty beasts made the descent in quick time, and crashed eagerly through the willows to the water. The Red River ran sluggishly here. It was smooth and deep, with muddy shores. In the dried mud along the margin were the old tracks of the animals that had broken the trail down the slope.
When the boys had dismounted to water their horses, Louis pointed out the prints, which resembled those of naked feet. “Somewhere near here,” he said, “the bears must cross. They have regular fords. Once in the fall I watched a band of bears cross the Pembina. I was up in a tree and I counted nineteen, old and young, but I was too far away for a good shot.”
The bear tracks led up stream. Leaving the horses to bathe and splash, Louis and Walter, who preferred to drink at a less muddy spot, pushed their way among the willows. A hundred yards up stream, they came to a bend and shallows, caused by a limestone cliff.
“This is the bears’ fording place,” said Louis, “and a good one too. Not only bears but men have been here,” he added quickly, “and not long ago. Look.”
On the bit of beach at the base of the cliff lay a little heap of charred wood and ashes. Near by, clearly imprinted in the damp sand, were foot tracks and marks that must have been made by the bow of a boat.
“Indians?” questioned Walter, the chill creeping up his spine again.
“Or white men,” Louis returned. “These are moccasin prints, but the color of the feet inside those moccasins I know no way to tell. There were two men, that is plain, and one is tall, I think, for his feet are long. They were voyaging, those two, and stopped here to boil their tea. They have not been gone many hours. That fire was burning since last night’s frost.” The Canadian boy’s tone was careless. His curiosity had in it no suggestion of fear.
Walter was more concerned. “Those Sioux,” he ventured. “Do you suppose——”
“No, no,” came the prompt reply. “The Sioux had horses. They didn’t come by river. Sioux seldom travel by water. These men were white, orbois brulés, or Saulteux, or other Ojibwas. They had a birch canoe. No clumsy wooden boat or dugout made that mark.” Louis examined the footprints again. “That one man is a big fellow truly. See how long his track is.” The boy placed his own left foot in the most distinct of the prints. “He must be as tall asle Murrai Noir.”
Without alarm or hint of lurking enemy, men and beasts made their way slowly up the steep river bank and through the woods to the prairie. The carts, shafts out, had been arranged in a circle, and within this defensive barricade camp had been pitched. Families fortunate enough to have tents had set them up. Others had devised shelters by stretching a buffalo skin, a blanket, or a square of canvas over the box and one wheel of a cart. The ponies, hobbled around the fore legs or staked out with long rawhide ropes, were left to feed on the short, dry prairie grass, and to take care of themselves, but the few precious oxen and cows were carefully watched and guarded against straying.
With the fuel brought from the woods fires were kindled within the circle. Kettles were swung on tripods of sticks or on stakes driven into the hard ground and slanted over the blaze. Pemmican and tea had been supplied to the Swiss. The older settlers had, in addition, a little barley meal for porridge and a few potatoes which they roasted in the ashes. Louis and Walter eked out their scanty supper with a handful of hazelnuts that had escaped the notice of the squirrels in the woods. The autumn was too far advanced for berries of any kind.
After the meal, Walter made the acquaintance of the MacKay family, Neil’s burly, red-bearded father, his mother, his two sisters, and next younger brother. The eldest brother, who was married, had gone to Pembina nearly a month earlier. Mrs. MacKay, a tall, thin woman with a rather stern face, spoke little French, but with true Highland hospitality she made Walter and Louis welcome to the family fire. Wrapped in a blanket and knitting a stocking, she sat on a three-legged stool close to the blaze. At her right was her older daughter patching, by firelight, the sleeve of a blue cloth capote. On the other side, the father was mending a piece of harness, cutting the ends of the rawhide straps into fine strips and braiding them as if he were splicing a rope. Neil too was busy cleaning and oiling his gun, and his younger brother, a sandy-haired lad of ten, was whittling a wooden arrow. The two little children had been put to bed in a snug nest of blankets and robes underneath the cart. The sight of this family gathering around the fire gave Walter a feeling of homesickness and loneliness that brought a lump to his throat. The feeling deepened as he and his companion strolled from cart to cart and fire to fire. Everyone in the camp but Louis and himself had his own family circle, and Louis was on the way to home and mother.
It was the Lajimonières who gave the two boys the warmest welcome and made the Swiss lad forget his homesickness. They were old friends of the Brabant family, and Louis called Madame Lajimonière “marraine.” She had acted as his godmother when Père Provencher baptized him. Indeed she was godmother to so many of the Canadian children at St. Boniface and Pembina that the younger members of the two settlements seldom called her by any other name. There was no Indian blood in Marie Lajimonière, and she had lived in the valley of the Red River longer than any other white woman. Several years before the first band of Selkirk settlers had reached the forks of the Assiniboine and the Red, she had come with her husband to the Red River country from Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. When, in 1818, the Roman Catholic missionaries, Father Provencher and Father Dumoulin, had arrived in the Selkirk Colony, Madame Lajimonière had received them with warmth and enthusiasm. She was a devout member of their church, and she gladly stood sponsor for the Canadian andbois bruléchildren brought to the priests for baptism. Louis had a warm affection for hismarraine, and Walter took an immediate liking to her and her family.
One of the Lajimonière children was a girl of about Elise Perier’s age, a slender, black-haired, red-cheeked girl named Reine. When Reine, somewhat shyly, questioned the Swiss boy about his long journey from Fort York, he told her of Elise and Max and Mr. Perier, and how anxious he was about their welfare.
“Oh, we will all help to make them comfortable and happy when they come to Pembina,” Reine eagerly assured him. “It will be delightful to have a new girl, just my age, who speaks French. The Scotch girls are so hard to talk to, when you don’t know their language or they yours. I shall like your sister I know, and I hope she will like me.”
At Louis’ urging, Jean Baptiste Lajimonière told Walter of the greatest adventure of his adventurous life. In the winter of 1815 and ’16 he had gone alone from Red River to Montreal. He carried letters to Lord Selkirk,—who had come over from England,—telling how the Northwesters had driven away his colonists. All alone, the plucky voyageur faced the perils and hardships of the long wilderness journey. He came through safely, to give the letters into Lord Selkirk’s own hands and relate to his own ears the story of the settlers’ troubles. Lajimonière told his tale well, and the boy forgot his own perplexities as he listened. Not until the story was finished did Walter realize how late the hour was, long past time to seek his blanket. Madame Lajimonière and the children had already disappeared under their buffalo skin shelter, Louis had stolen quietly away, and the whole camp was wrapped in silence.
Walter thanked the guide, said good night, and hurried back to his own camping place. The horses and cattle had been brought within the circle and picketed or tied to cart wheels. The settlers were taking no chance of Indian horse thieves making away with their beasts. Everyone in the camp, except the guards stationed outside the barricade, was sleeping, and the fires were burning low. The night was dark, without moon or stars. How lonely and insignificant was this little circle of carts, with the prairie stretching around it and the vast arch of the sky overhead! The flickering light of the fires, only partly revealing picketed beasts, clumsy carts, and rude shelters, seemed merely to intensify the darkness, the vastness, the loneliness beyond.
Not a wild animal, except a few gophers, had been seen all day; the cart train was too noisy. But now the wind that swept the prairie brought a chorus of voices, the high-pitched barking of the small prairie wolves, and the long-drawn howling of the big, gray timber ones. The dogs answered, until their masters, waking, belabored them into silence. The camps along the rivers and the shores of Lake Winnipeg had seemed remote enough from civilization, but not one had impressed the mountain-bred lad with such an overwhelming sense of loneliness as did this circle of carts on the prairie.
He found Louis already asleep, and crawled in beside him. There he lay, listening to the wolves and, when their howlings ceased for a time, to the faint and far-away cries of a flock of migrating birds passing high overhead. Then he drifted away into sleep.
The approach of dawn was beginning to gray the blackness in the east when every dog in the camp suddenly began to growl. The horses grew restive, neighing and moving about. Startled wide awake, Walter, thrilling at the thought of a Sioux attack, asked his comrade what the matter was. Louis did not know. He had thrown aside his blanket and was crawling out from under the cart. As Walter followed, he heard the guide calling to the watchers beyond the barricade. The guards replied that all was quiet on the prairie. They could see nothing wrong, discern no moving form.
For a few minutes everyone in the camp was awake, anxious, excited, but nothing happened, no war whoop came out of the darkness. The dogs ceased growling, the ponies neighing, and soon all was silence again. What had caused the alarm, whether prowling wild beast or skulking man, or the mere restlessness of some sleepless dog or nervous horse, no one could tell.
The camp was astir before the sun was up, and the first task was to water the horses and cattle. Louis remained behind to get breakfast while Walter rode the pony to the river.
The late start from Fort Douglas made getting to Pembina that day impossible. After plodding along the prairie track and crossing several small streams, the cart train passed a cold and stormy night in the open beyond the wooded bank of a muddy creek that Louis called Rivière aux Marais. Pembina was reached next day in a driving storm of rain, sleet and snow.
The Pembina River took its name fromanepeminan, the Ojibwa term for the shrub we call highbush cranberry. The junction of the Pembina with the Red was an old trading place. The Northwest men had established themselves there before the close of the eighteenth century, and in the early years of the nineteenth all three rival companies, the Northwest, the Hudson Bay, and the New Northwest or X. Y. Company, as it was called by the old Northwesters, maintained posts a short distance from one another. Those old posts were gone,—burned or torn down,—long before the time of this story. The two forts then standing had been built at a later date. Fort Daer, the Selkirk Colony post, dated from the autumn of 1812, when the first of the colonists, under the leadership of Miles McDonnell, had come to the Pembina to winter. It stood on the south bank of that river near where it empties into the Red. Just opposite, across the Pembina, was a former Northwest fort, which had become, since the uniting of the companies, a Hudson Bay trading post.
Some of the Scotch settlers and all of the Swiss except Walter were to be lodged at Fort Daer until they could build cabins of their own. Louis had asked Walter to be his guest. The cart he was driving, which was not his own, was loaded with the household goods of some of the settlers, and had to be taken to Fort Daer. After leaving the fort, the two boys, carrying their scanty belongings in packs, made their way to Louis’ home. The little village of log cabins was not actually on the Pembina, but near the bank of the Red a mile or more from the junction point. The arrival at Fort Daer of a cart train from down river was an important event, but the abominable weather curbed curiosity, and the boys saw few people as they made their way against the storm to the Brabant cabin.
Louis’ mother, hoping that he might have come with the party from Fort Douglas, was on the lookout for him. Before he could reach the door, it flew open. Followed by the younger children and three shaggy-haired sled dogs, Mrs. Brabant ran out into the sleet and snow. Very heartily Louis hugged and kissed her. When he presented his companion, she welcomed Walter warmly. The children greeted him shyly. The dogs, inclined at first to resent his presence, concluded, after a curt command and a kick or two from the moccasined toe of Louis’ younger brother, to accept the newcomer as one of the family.
To the Swiss lad, weary, soaked, and chilled through, the rude but snug cabin with a fire blazing in the rough stone fireplace, promised a comfort that seemed almost heavenly. He had not spent a night or even eaten a meal inside a building for many weeks. The warmth was so grateful, the smell from the steaming kettle that hung above the blaze so appetizing, that for a few minutes he could do nothing but stand before the fire, speechless, half dazed by the sudden transition from the wet and the bitter cold.
He was roused by Mrs. Brabant who offered him dry moccasins and one of the shirts she had been making for Louis during his absence. Walter had a dry shirt in his pack, but he accepted the moccasins gratefully. His shoes were not only soaked, but so worn from the long journey that they scarcely held together. The cabin, one of the best in the settlement, boasted two rooms, and Louis’ mother and sisters retired to the other one while the boys changed their clothes. As soon as they were warm and partly dry, supper was served.
The household sat on stools and floor in front of the fire, each with his cup and wooden platter. From the bubbling pot standing on the hearth Madame Brabant ladled out generous portions. The rich and savory stew was made up of buffalo meat, wild goose, potatoes, carrots, onions, and other ingredients that Walter did not recognize but enjoyed nevertheless. It was the best meal he had tasted in months, and he ate until he could hold no more.
The hunters had returned only a few days before from the great fall buffalo chase, and there was abundance of meat in the settlement. It was during the autumn hunt two years before that Louis’ father had been accidentally killed, and the Brabant family had not accompanied the hunters since that time, but Mrs. Brabant’s brother had brought her a supply of fresh and dried meat and pemmican. The goose thirteen-year-old Raoul had shot, and the potatoes and other vegetables were from the Brabant garden. The grasshopper hordes had missed Pembina. Mrs. Brabant expressed sympathy for the poor Selkirk colonists who had lost all their crops. She listened with lively interest to the boys’ account of the trip from Fort York, and asked the Swiss lad many questions about his own people.
Walter was so grateful for shelter, warmth, food, and the kindly welcome he was receiving that he could not have been critical of the Brabant family whatever they had been. As it happened, he liked them all heartily. He was to discover, within the next few days, that this household was considerably superior to most of those in Pembina. The interior of the cabin was neat and clean, differing markedly in this respect from many of thebois brulédwellings. Her straight black hair, smoothly arranged in braids hanging over her shoulders, her dark skin, and high cheek-bones betrayed the Ojibwa in Louis’ mother, but in every other way, especially in her ready smile, lively speech, and alert movements, she seemed wholly French. She wore deerskin leggings with moccasins, but her dark blue calico dress, belted with a strip of bright beadwork, was fresh and clean. Her little daughters were dressed in the same fashion, except that Marie, the elder, who was about ten years old, wore skirt and tunic of soft, fringed doeskin, instead of calico. The dark eyes of both little girls sparkled when Louis, unknotting a small bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief, handed each one a length of bright-colored ribbon, one red, the other orange, to tie in their long black braids. For his mother he brought a silk handkerchief, a gilt locket, and a packet of good tea, the kind, he had been told, the Chief Factor at Fort York drank. Raoul was made happy with a shiny new knife.
Louis and Walter were tired enough to take to their blankets early. Mrs. Brabant and the girls slept in a great box bed, made of hand-hewn boards painted bright blue, that stood in the corner of the room where the fireplace was. In the smaller room, which was nothing but a lean-to shed with a dirt floor, was a curious couch for the boys. It was made of strips of rawhide stretched tightly on a frame of poles, and was covered with buffalo robe and blankets. This cot Louis shared with Walter, who found the rawhide straps not nearly so hard as bare ground. Raoul rolled himself in a robe and lay down in front of the fire.
Walter was anxious to get a place ready for the Periers, but he found that every one of the fifty or sixty log cabins in Pembina was full to overflowing. Indeed he marveled at the number of men, women, and children of all sizes that could be packed into a one-room cabin. The houses were built of logs chinked with clay and moss, and roofed with bark or grass thatch, and few had more than one room.
A straggling, unkempt place was the settlement, the cabins set down hit or miss, with cart tracks wandering around among them. The tracks and dooryards were deep in mud, which was stiff with frost when the boys started out that morning. As the sun softened the ground, Walter found walking in the sticky stuff something like wading through thick glue, it clung to his moccasins so. Gardens were rare. The surroundings of most of the cabins were very untidy, cluttered with broken-down carts, disorderly piles of firewood, odds, ends, and rubbish of all sorts. Shaggy, unkempt ponies, hobbled or staked out, and wolfish looking sled dogs, running loose, were everywhere.
The people were most of thembois bruléswhose hair, skin, and features showed all degrees of mixed blood from almost pure white to nearly pure Indian. They seemed good-natured and very hospitable. The merrymaking in celebration of the return of the hunt was not yet at an end. Everywhere Louis and his companion were urged to share in a feast of buffalo meat, to join in a gambling game or in dancing to the scraping of a fiddle. So pressing were the invitations that declining was difficult.
The neatest, best kept buildings in the village were the mission chapel and presbytery. Father Dumoulin was setting a good example to his flock by cleaning up his garden patch. Looking up from his work, he greeted Louis by name. The priest was a striking looking man, tall and strong of frame, his height emphasized by his long, straight, black cassock. His face was strong too. Walter, though not of Father Dumoulin’s church, felt instantly that here was a man to command the respect of white men, half-breeds, and savages. When the priest learned that the boy was one of the newly arrived immigrants, he asked a number of questions.
Near Fort Daer, in the edge of the woods bordering the river, a cluster of better kept cabins housed some of the more thrifty of the Scotch. In one of the largest and best of the houses, the two lads found the MacKay family settled for the winter. Neil was eager to arrange for an immediate buffalo hunt, but Louis replied that he could not go for a while. There were things he must do for his mother, and Walter did not want to be away when his friends arrived.
From the MacKay cabin the boys went on to Fort Daer. Like all the forts in that part of the world, Daer and Pembina House, the old Northwest post, consisted of log stockades enclosing a few buildings. They stood on opposite sides of the Pembina and the land about each had been cleared of most of its trees and bushes. The Pembina was a good-sized stream, deep, sluggish, and like the Red, colored with the mud it carried. At Fort Daer Walter talked with some of his countrymen, who were feeling somewhat encouraged. They had been well fed, and were grateful for warmth and shelter. Real winter, the bitterly cold winter of this northern country, might come at any moment now to stay.
If Walter was to hunt to help supply himself and the Periers with food, he needed a gun. With Louis he went to the Company store at Pembina House to buy one. He could not pay for it in money, but hoped that he might get it on credit, paying later in buffalo skins and other furs. The Hudson Bay Company frowned on fur hunting as well as on Indian trading by the colonists, but the settlers would be obliged to hunt that winter if they wished to eat. Louis thought that if Walter agreed to turn over to the Company the pelts of the food animals he killed, and not to engage in barter with the Indians, he might arrange for a gun and ammunition.
The two were explaining Walter’s needs, when an Indian burst suddenly into the room. His buckskin clothing was covered with mud. Blood matted his black hair and stained one dark cheek which was disfigured by a great scar. His eyes glittered, and his manner was wild and excited. The boys thought for a moment that he was going to attack the trader. The Indian, however, had no weapons,—no gun, hatchet, or knife. He began to talk rapidly, angrily. Walter could not understand a word of Ojibwa, but he could see that the Indian’s speech startled both Louis and the trader. The latter replied briefly in the same tongue, then darted out of the door, the Ojibwa after him. Before Walter could voice a question, Louis was gone too. The Swiss boy turned to follow, hesitated, and decided to stay where he was.
In a few moments Louis was back again. “What is it? Are the Sioux coming?” Walter asked anxiously.
“No, unless this affair is the work of spies.”
“What affair? Could you understand what he said?”
“Most of it. He was so wild it was hard to follow him. He has been attacked. He was down at the river loading his canoe. Two men came along. While one was talking to him, the other stole up behind him, knocked him over the head, and ‘put him to sleep.’ When he came to his senses, the goods he had just bought and his gun and knife were gone. There was a hole cut in his canoe. Of course he may be lying. He may have hidden the things and made up the story.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To get a double supply of goods and ammunition. The trader believes him though. He is sending men in search of those two fellows.”
When the trader returned he added further details to the story. The Ojibwa, he said, was an honest, trustworthy hunter, who had been bringing his furs to the Company for several years. He had come alone from Red Lake to get his winter’s supplies and ammunition. Having finished his bargaining, he was loading his boat at the riverside when another canoe, with two men, appeared, coming up stream. One of the men shouted a greeting in Ojibwa, they turned their boat in to shore, jumped out, and engaged him in talk. Entirely unsuspicious of treachery, Scar Face was answering one man’s questions, when the other struck him from behind and knocked him senseless.
“Does he know the fellows?” questioned Louis.
“He never saw them before.”
“Could they be Sioux passing themselves off as Ojibwa?”
“No, one was a white man, he says, and the other,—the man who attacked him,—was in white man’s clothes, but looked like an Indian. He wore his hair in braids, had no beard, and spoke like a Cree. He was a very tall man, strong and broad shouldered.”
“Do you think he is telling the truth?”
“I’m sure he is. Scar Face is a reliable fellow, always pays his debts, and has never tried to deceive us in any way. You saw the blood on his face. He has a bad cut on the side of his head. One of our men is dressing it for him. No, he isn’t lying. His description of the men is good, and he was not in the fort when they were here.”
“They have been here? You know who they are?”