Jan had not played upon his violin since the coming of Jean de Gravois; but one evening he tuned his strings, and said to Mélisse:
"They have been good to you, my Mélisse. I will give them ze museek of ze violon."
It was the big night at the post—the night that is known from Athabasca to Hudson's Bay as the night of the caribou roast. A week had passed, and there were no more furs to be disposed of. In the company's ledger each man had received his credit, and in the company's store the furs were piled high and safe. Three caribou had been killed by Per-ee and his hunters; and on this night, when Jan took down his violin from its peg on the wall, a huge fire blazed in the open, and on spits six inches in diameter the caribou were roasting.
The air was filled with the sound and odor of the carnival. Above the fighting and snarling of dogs, the forest people lifted their voices in wild celebration, forgetting, in this one holiday of the year, the silence that they would carry back into the solitudes with them. Numbers gave them courage of voice, and in its manifestation there was the savagery of the forests that hemmed them in. Shrill voices rose in meaningless cries above the roaring of the fire. Caribou whips snapped fiercely. Chippewayans, Crees, Eskimos, and breeds crowded in the red glare. The factor's men shouted and sang like mad, for this was the company's annual "good time"—the show that would lure many of these same men back again at the end of another trapping season.
Huge boxes of white bread were placed near to the fire. A tub of real butter, brought five thousand miles from across the sea for the occasion, was set on a gun-case thrown where the heat played upon it in yellow glory. In a giant copper kettle, over a smaller fire, bubbled and steamed half a barrel of coffee.
The richness of the odors that drifted in the air set the dogs gathering upon their haunches beyond the waiting circle of masters, their lips dripping, their fangs snapping in an eagerness that was not for the flesh of battle. And above it all there gleamed down a billion stars from out of the skies, the aurora flung its banners through the pale night, and softly the smoke rose straight up and then floated into the North, carried there by the gentle breath that spring was luring from out of the South.
Jan picked his way through the cordon of dogs and the inner circle of men until he stood with the firelight flashing in his glossy hair and black eyes, and there, seated upon the edge of one of the bread-boxes, he began to play.
It was not the low, sweet music of Cummins and the little Mélisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing—saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half-cringing little black men who were squatted in a group a dozen feet away, nothing of the staring amazement in the eyes that were looking upon this miracle he was performing. He knew only that about him there was a deep hush, and after a while his violin sang a lower song, and sweeter; and still softer it became, and more sweet, until he was playing that which he loved most of all—the music that had filled the little cabin when Cummins' wife died.
As he continued to play there came an interruption to the silence—a low refrain that was almost like that of the moaning wind. It grew beyond the tense circle of men, until a song of infinite sadness rose from the throats of a hundred dogs in response to Jan Thoreau's violin. To Jan, it was like the song of life. The unending loneliness and grief of it stirred him to the quick of his soul, and unconsciously his voice rose and fell softly with the wailing of the brute chorus. But to the others it was a thing that rose portentous above their understanding, a miracle of mystery that smote them with awe even as they surrendered themselves to the wonderful sweetness of the music.
Cummins saw the change in his people, and understood what it meant. He saw the surrounding cordon become thinner as man crushed closer to man, and he saw strained faces turned from the player to where the dogs sat full-throated upon their haunches, with their heads pointed straight to the stars in the sky.
Suddenly he burst into a volume of wild song, and made his way through the crouching Eskimos to Jan.
"For the love of Heaven, play no more of that!" he cried in the boy's ear. "Play something fast!"
Jan lifted his head as if from a dream. In an instant he perceived the strange effect of his music, and his bow raced across the strings of his violin in a rhythm swift and buoyant, his voice rising shrill and clear in words familiar to them all:
"Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo,He roas' on high,Jes' under ze sky,Ze beeg white cariboo-oo-oo!"
With a yell Cummins joined in, waving his arms and leaping in the firelight. The spell was broken. Williams and Mukee and the rest of the company's men burst forth in song; Jan's violin leaped in crescendos of stirring sound; and where before there had been a silent circle of awestruck men there was now a yelling din of voices.
The dogs lowered their heads again, and licked their chops at the odors in the air. With a yell Mukee and three Crees dashed toward the fire, long-hooked poles in their hands; and as the caribou carcasses were turned upon their huge spits, and their dripping fat fell sizzling into the flames, the wild chorus of men and dogs and Jan's violin rose higher, until Cummins' great voice became only a whisper in the tumult.
The third caribou had been twice turned upon its spit, and Mukee and his Crees paused in waiting silence, their hooked poles gripping the long bar that rested horizontally across the arms of two stout posts driven into the earth close to the fire. At this signal there was a final outburst from the waiting horde, and then a momentary silence fell as Cummins sprang upon one of the bread-boxes and waved his arms frantically above his head. "Now!" he shouted. "Now! 'Ze cariboo-oo-oo—'"
With eyes flashing with excitement, Jan stood before Cummins, and his violin shrieked out the wild tune to a still wilder response of untamed voices.
"Now!" yelled Cummins again.
The wilderness song, that was known from Athabasca to Hudson's Bay, burst forth in a savage enthusiasm that reached to the skies:
"Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo,He roas' on high,Jes' under ze sky,Ze beeg white cariboo-oo-oo!"
Cummins drew his revolver and blazed fiercely into the air.
"Now!" he shrieked.
"Oh, ze cariboo-oo-oo, ze cariboo-oo-oo,He brown 'n' juice 'n' sweet!Ze cariboo-oo-oo, he ver' polite—He roas' on high,Jes' under ze sky,He ready now to come 'n' eat!"
With yells that rose above the last words of the song, Mukee and his Crees tugged at their poles, and the roasted caribou fell upon the snow. Jan drew back, and with his violin hugged under one arm, watched the wild revelers as, with bared knives flashing in the firelight, they crowded to the feast. Williams, the factor, who was puffing from his vocal exertions, joined him.
"Looks like a fight, doesn't it, Jan? Once I saw a fight at a caribou roast."
"So did I," said Jan, who had not taken his eyes from the jostling crowd.
"It was far to the west and north," continued Williams; "beyond theGreat Slave country."
"Far beyond," said Jan, lifting his eyes quietly. "It was ver' near to ze Great Bear."
The factor stared at him in amazement.
"You saw it?" he exclaimed.
But Jan turned away, as if he had heard nothing, and passed beyond the packs of waiting dogs to restore his precious violin to its peg on the cabin wall. The factor's words had stirred deep memories within him, and for the first time since he had come to the post he spoke no word to Mélisse when he found her wakeful and friendly in her cot.
Neither was it the old Jan Thoreau who returned to the excitement about the great fire. With his long hunting-knife flashing above his head, he plunged into the throng around the caribou, crowding and jostling with the others, his voice rising in shrill cries as he forced himself through to the edge of the fire. Cummins was there, kneeling with turned-up sleeves and greasy hands beside the huge roast, and when he saw Jan he stared at him in wonder. There was neither laughter nor song in Jan Thoreau's voice. It was vibrant with a strange savageness which was more savage than the wildest yells of the half-breed Crees, and his great eyes burned fiercely as they rested for an instant upon Cummins' face.
Close behind Cummins stood Williams. Jan saw him, and his knife dropped to his side. Then, so quickly that the startled factor drew back a step, Jan sprang to him.
"Ze fight at ze Great Bear!" he cried in swift eagerness. "For who you fight at ze Great Bear?"
The factor was silent, and the muscles of his arms grew like steel as he saw the madness in Jan's face. Suddenly he reached out and gripped the boy's wrists. Jan made no effort to evade the clutch.
"For who you fight?" he cried again. "For who you fight at ze GreatBear?"
"We tried to kill a man, but he got away," said Williams, speaking so low that only Jan heard. "He was—" The factor stopped.
"Ze missioner!" panted Jan.
The wild light went out of his eyes as he stared up at Williams, and the softer glow which came into them loosened at once the factor's grip on the boy's wrists.
"Yes, the missioner!"
Jan drew back. He evaded meeting the eyes of Cummins as he made his way among the men. There was a new burst of song as Mukee and his Crees pulled down a second caribou, but the boy paid no attention to the fresh excitement. He thrust his knife into its sheath and ran—ran swiftly through the packs of dogs fighting and snarling over the scraps that had beep thrown to them; past Maballa who was watching the savage banquet around the big fire, and into the little cabin, to Mélisse.
Here he flung himself upon his knees, and for the first time he caught the baby in his arms, holding her close to him, and rocking her to and fro, as he cried out sobbingly the words which she did not understand.
"An' when I fin' heem an' kill heem, I will come back to you, my angel Mélisse," he whispered. "And then you will luf Jan Thoreau for letting out the blood of a missioner!"
He put her back into the little bed, kissed her again, took down his violin from its peg in the wall, and turned to the door.
For a few moments Jan stood with his back to Mélisse and his eyes upon the carnival about the great fire. As he looked, the third caribou was pulled down from its spit, and the multitude of dogs rushed in upon the abandoned carcasses of the other two.
He caught his breath quickly as a loud shout and the wailing yelp of a hurt dog rose for an instant above all other sounds. Only one thing was wanting to complete another picture in his brain—a scene which had burned itself into his life for ever, and which he strove to fight back as he stood staring from the doorway. He half expected it to come—the shrill scream of a boyish voice, an instant's sullen quiet, then the low-throated thunder of impending vengeance—and the fight!
With marvelous quickness his excited mind reconstructed the scene before him into the scene that had been. He heard the scream again, which had been HIS voice; saw, as if in a dream, the frenzied rush of men and the flash of knives; and then, from where he lay trampled and bleeding in the snow, the long, lean team of swift huskies that had carried in mad flight the one whose life those knives sought.
Williams had been there; he had seen the fight—his knife had flashed with the others in its demand for life. And yet he—Jan Thoreau—had not been recognized by the factor out there beside the caribou roast!
He hurried toward the fire. Half-way across the open he stopped. From out of the forest opposite Cummins' cabin there trailed slowly a team of dogs. In the shadows of the spruce, hidden from the revelers, the team halted. Jan heard the low voices of men, and a figure detached itself from the gloom, walking slowly and in the manner of one near to exhaustion in the direction of the carnival.
It was a new team. It had come from the trails to the east, and Jan's heart gave a sudden jump as he thought of the missionary who was expected with the overdue mail. At first he had a mind to intercept the figure laboring across the open, but without apparent reason he changed his course and approached the sledge.
As he came nearer, he observed a second figure, which rose from behind the dogs and advanced to meet him. A dozen paces ahead of the team it stopped and waited.
"Our dogs are so near exhaustion that we're afraid to take them any nearer," said a voice. "They'd die like puppies under those packs!"
The voice thrilled Jan. He advanced with his back to the fire, so that he could see the stranger.
"You come from Churchill?" he asked.
His words were hardly a question. They were more of an excuse for him to draw nearer, and he turned a little, so that for an instant the glowing fire flashed in his eyes.
"Yes, we started from the Etawney just a week ago to-day."
Jan had come very near. The stranger interrupted himself to stare into the thin, fierce face that had grown like a white cameo almost within reach of him. With a startled cry, he drew a step back, and Jan's violin dropped to the snow.
For no longer than a breath there was silence. The man wormed himself back into the shadows inch by inch, followed by the white face of the boy. Then there came shrilly from Jan's lips the mad shrieking of a name, and his knife flashed as he leaped at the other's breast.
The stranger was quicker than he. With a sudden movement he cleared himself of the blow; and as Jan's arm went past him, the point of the knife ripping his coat-sleeve, he shot out a powerful fist and sent the boy reeling to the ground.
Stunned and bleeding, Jan dragged himself to his knees. He saw the dogs turning, heard a low voice urging them to the trail, and saw the sledge disappear into the forest. He staggered from his knees to his feet, and stood swaying in his weakness. Then he followed.
He forgot that he was leaving his knife in the snow, forgot that back there about the fire there were other dogs and other men. He only knew that once before he had seen a sledge slip off into the wilderness; that its going had left him a life of hatred and bitterness and desire for vengeance; and that this was the same man who was slipping away from him in the same way again.
He followed, sickened by the blow, but gaining strength as he pursued. Ahead of him he could hear the sound of the toboggan and the cautious lashing of a whip over the backs of the tired huskies. The sounds filled him with fierce strength. He wiped away the warm trickle of blood that ran over his cheek, and began to run, slowly at first, swinging in the easy wolf-lope of the forest runner, with his elbows close to his sides.
At that pace he could have followed for hours, losing when the pack took a spurt, gaining when they lagged, an insistent Nemesis just behind when the weighted dogs lay down in their traces. But there was neither the coolness of Mukee nor the cleverness of Jean de Gravois in the manner of Jan's running. When he heard the cracking of the whip growing fainter, he dropped his arms straight to his sides and ran more swiftly, his brain reeling with the madness of his desire to reach the sledge—to drag from it the man who had struck him, to choke life from the face that haunted that mental picture of his, grinning at him and gloating always from the shadow world, just beyond the pale, sweet loveliness of the woman who lived in it.
That picture came to him now as he ran, more and more vividly, and from out of it the woman urged him on to the vengeance which she demanded of him, her great eyes glowing like fire, her beautiful face torn with the agony which he had last seen in it in life.
To Jan Thoreau there seemed almost to come from that face a living voice, crying to him its prayer for retribution, pleading with him to fasten his lithe, brown hands about the throat of the monster upon the sledge ahead, and choke from it all life. It drove reason from him, leaving him with the one thought that the monster was almost within reach; and he replied to the prayer with the breath that came in moaning exhaustion from between his lips.
He did not feel the soft, sun-packed snow under the beat of his feet. He received the lash of low-hanging bushes without experiencing the sensation of their sting. Only he knew that he wanted air—more and more air; and to get it he ran with open mouth, struggling and gasping for it, and yet not knowing that Jean de Gravois would have called him a fool for the manner in which he sought it.
He heard more and more faintly the run of the sledge. Then he heard it no longer, and even the cracking of the whip died away. His heart swelled in a final bursting effort, and he plunged on, until at last his legs crumpled under him and he pitched face downward in the snow, like a thing stung by sudden death.
It was then, with his scratched and bleeding face lying in the snow, that reason began to return to him. After a little while he dragged himself weakly to his knees, still panting from the mad effort he had made to overtake the sledge. From a great distance he heard faintly the noise of shouting, the whispering echo of half a hundred voices, and he knew that the sound came from the revelers at the post. It was proof to him that there had been no interruption to the carnival, and that the scene at the edge of the forest had been witnessed by none. Quickly his mental faculties readjusted themselves. He rose to his feet, and for a few moments stood hesitatingly. He had no weapon; but as his hand rested upon the empty knife-sheath at his belt, there came to him a thought of the way in which Mukee had avenged Cummins' wife, and he turned again upon the trail. He no longer touched the low-hanging bushes. He was no more than a shadow, appearing and disappearing without warning, trailing as the white ermine follows its prey, noiseless, alert, his body responding sinuously and without apparent effort to the working commands of his brain.
Where the forest broke into an open, lighted by the stars, he found blood in the footprints of the leading dog. Half-way across the open, he saw where the leader had swung out from the trail and the others of the pack had crowded about him, to be urged on by the lashings of the man's whip. Other signs of the pack's growing exhaustion followed close.
The man now traveled beside the sledge where the trail was rough, and rode where it was smooth and hard. The deep imprints of his heeled boots in the soft snow showed that he ran for only a short distance at a time—a hundred yards or less—and that after each running spell he brought the pack to a walk. He was heavy and lacked endurance, and this discovery brought a low cry of exultation to Jan's lips.
He fell into a dog-trot. Mile after mile dropped behind him; other miles were ahead of him, an endless wilderness of miles, and through them the tired pack persisted, keeping always beyond sound and vision.
The stars began fading out of the skies. The shadows of the forest grew deeper and blacker, and where the aurora had lightened the heavens there crept the somber gray film that preceded dawn by three hours.
Jan followed more and more slowly. There was hard-breathing effort now in his running—effort that caused him physical pain and discomfort. His feet stumbled occasionally in the snow; his legs, from thigh to knee, began to ache with the gnawing torment that centers in the marrowbone; and with this beginning of the "runner's cramp" he was filled with a new and poignant terror.
Would the dogs beat him out? Sloughing in the trail, bleeding at every foot, would they still drag their burden beyond the reach of his vengeance? The fear fastened itself upon him, urging him to greater effort, and he called upon the last of his strength in a spurt that carried him to where the thick spruce gave place to thin bush, and the bush to the barren and rocky side of a huge ridge, up which the trail climbed strong and well defined. For a few paces he followed it, then slipped and rolled back as the fatal paralysis deadened all power of movement in his limbs. He lay where he fell, moaning out his grief with his wide-staring eyes turned straight up into the cold gray of the starless sky.
For a long time he was motionless. From the top of the ridge, where the trail cut over the mountain, he looked like a bit of fire-blackened wood half buried in the snow. Half-way up the ridge a wolf, slinking hungrily, sniffed first up the trail and then down, and broke the stillness of the gray night-end with a mournful howl. It did not stir Jan Thoreau.
Long after the wolf had passed on, he moved a little, twisting himself so that his eyes could follow the tracks made by the sledge and dogs. When he came to where the snow-covered backbone of the ridge cut itself in faint outline against the desolate coldness of the sky, there fell from him the first sound of returning life. Up there he was sure that he had seen something move—an object which at first he had taken for a bush, and which he knew was not the wolf.
He watched for its reappearance, until all sorts of gray dawn shadows danced before his eyes. Then he began slowly to crawl up the trail. Some of the dull, paralytic ache was gone from his limbs, and as he worked his blood began to warm them into new strength, until he stood up and sniffed like an animal in the wind that was coming over the ridge from the south.
There was something in that wind that thrilled him. It stung his nostrils to a quick sensing of the nearness of something that was human. He smelled smoke. In it there was the pungent odor of green balsam, mixed with a faint perfume of pitch pine; and because the odor of pitch grew stronger as he ascended, he knew that it was a small fire that was making the smoke, with none of the fierce, dry woods to burn up the smell. It was a fire hidden among the rocks, a tiny fire, over which the fleeing missioner was cooking his breakfast.
Jan almost moaned aloud in his gladness, and the old mad strength returned to his body. Near the summit of the ridge he picked up a club. It was a short, thick club, with the heavy end knotted and twisted.
Cautiously he lifted his face over the rocks, and looked out upon a plateau, still deep in snow, swept bare by the winter's winds, and covered with rocks and bushes. His face was so white that at a little distance it might have been taken for a snow hare. It went whiter when, a few yards away, he saw the fire, the man, and the dogs.
The man was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death.
Jan drew himself over the rocks. Once he had seen a big-footed lynx creep upon a wide-awake fox, and like that lynx he crept upon the man beside the fire. One of the tired dogs moved, and his pointed nostrils quivered in the air. Jan lay flat in the snow. Then the dog's muzzle dropped between his paws, and the boy moved on.
Inch by inch he advanced. The inches multiplied themselves into a foot, the foot lengthened into yards, and still the man remained hunched over his simmering pot.
Jan rose gently from his hands and knees to his feet, a furnace of madness blazing in his eyes. The restless dog raised his head again. He sniffed danger—near, menacing danger—and sprang up with a snarling cry that brought the man over the fire to quick attention. In a flash Jan took the last leap, and his club crashed down upon the missioner's head. The man pitched over like a log, and with a shrill cry the boy was at his throat.
"I am Jan Thoreau!" he shrieked. "I am Jan Thoreau—Jan Thoreau—come to keel you!" He dropped his club, and was upon the man's chest, his slender fingers tightening like steel wire about the thick throat of his enemy. "I keel you slow—slow!" he cried, as the missioner struggled weakly.
The great thick body heaved under him, and he put all his strength into his hands. Something struck him in the face. Something struck him again and again, but he felt neither the pain nor the force of it, and his voice sobbed out his triumph as he choked. The man's hands reached up and tore at his hair; but Jan saw only the missioner's mottled face growing more mottled, and his eyes staring in greater agony up into his own.
"I am Jan Thoreau," he panted again and again. "I am Jan Thoreau, an' I keel you—keel you!"
The blood poured from his face. It blinded him until he could no longer see the one from which he was choking life. He bent down his head to escape the blows. The man's body heaved more and more; it turned until he was half under it; but still he hung to the thick throat, as the weasel hangs in tenacious death to the jugular of its prey.
The missioner's weight was upon him in crushing force now. His huge hands struck and tore at the boy's head and face, and then they had fastened themselves at his neck. Jan was conscious of a terrible effort to take in breath, but he was not conscious of pain. The clutch did not frighten him. It did not make him loosen his grip. His fingers dug deeper. He strove to cry out still his words of triumph; but he could make no sound, except a gasping like that which came from between the gaping jaws of the man whose life his body and soul were fighting to smother.
There was death in each of the two grips; but the man's was the stronger, and his neck was larger and tougher, so that after a time he staggered to his knees and then to his feet, while Jan lay upon his back, his face and hair red with blood, his eyes wide open and with a lifeless glare in them. The missioner looked down upon his victim in horror. As the life that had nearly ebbed out of him poured back into his body, he staggered among the dogs, fastened them to the sledge, and urged them down the mountain into the plain. There was soon no sound of the sledge.
From a bush a dozen yards away a wondering moose-bird had watched the terrible struggle. Now he hopped boldly upon Jan's motionless body, and perked his head inquisitively as he examined the strange face, covered with blood and twisted in torture.
The gray film of dawn dissolved itself into the white beginning of day. Far to the south, a bit of the red sunrise was creeping into the northern world.
Half a mile down the ridge, where it sloped up gradually from the forests and swamps of the plain, a team of powerful Malemutes were running at the head of a toboggan. On the sledge was a young half-Cree woman. Now beside the sledge, now at the lead of the dogs, cracking his whip and shouting joyously, ran Jean de Gravois.
"Is it not beautiful, my Iowaka?" he cried for the hundredth time, inCree, leaping over a three-foot boulder in his boundless enthusiasm."Is this not the glorious world, with the sun just rising off there,and spring only a few days away? It is not like the cold chills atChurchill, which come up with the icebergs and stay there all summer!What do you think of your Jean de Gravois and his country now?"
Jean was bringing back with him a splendid young woman, with big, lustrous eyes, and hair that shone with the gloss of a raven's wing in the sun. She laughed at him proudly as he danced and leaped beside her, replying softly in Cree, which is the most beautiful language in the world, to everything that he said.
Jean leaped and ran, cracked his caribou whip, and shouted and sang until he was panting and red in the face. Just as Iowaka had called upon him to stop and get a second wind, the Malemutes dropped back upon their haunches where Jan Thoreau lay, twisted and bleeding, in the snow.
"What is this?" cried Jean.
He caught Jan's limp head and shoulders up in his arms, and called shrilly to Iowaka, who was disentangling herself from the thick furs in which he had wrapped her.
"It is the fiddler I told you about, who lives with Williams at Post Lac Bain!" he shouted excitedly in Cree. "He has been murdered! He has been choked to death, and torn to pieces in the face, as if by an animal!" Jean's eyes roved about as Iowaka kneeled beside him. "What a fight!" he gasped. "See the footprints—a big man and a small boy, and the murderer has gone on a sledge!"
"He is warm," said Iowaka. "It may be that he is not dead."
Jean de Gravois sprang to his feet, his little black eyes flashing with a dangerous fire. In a single leap he was at the side of the sledge, throwing off the furs and bundles and all other objects except his rifle.
"He is dead, Iowaka. Look at the purple and black in his face. It is Jean de Gravois who will catch the murderer, and you will stay here and make yourself a camp. Hi-o-o-o-o!" he shouted to the Malemutes.
The team twisted sinuously and swiftly in the trail as he sped over the edge of the mountain. Upon the plain below he knelt upon the toboggan, with his rifle in front of him; and at his low, hissing commands, which reached no farther than the dogs' ears, the team stretched their long bodies in pursuit of the missioner and his huskies.
Jean knew that whoever was ahead of him was not far away, and he laughed and hunched his shoulders when he saw that his magnificent Malemutes were making three times the speed of the huskies. It was a short chase. It led across the narrow plain and into a dense tangle of swamp, where the huskies had picked their way in aimless wandering until they came out in thick balsam and Banksian pine. Half a mile farther on, and the trail broke into an open which led down to the smooth surface of a lake, and two-thirds across the lake was the fleeing missioner.
The Malemute leader flung open his jaws in a deep baying triumph, and with a savage yell Jean cracked his caribou whip over his back. He saw the man ahead of him lean over the end of his sledge as he urged his dogs, but the huskies went no faster; and then he caught the glitter of something that flashed for a moment in the sun.
"Ah!" said Jean softly, as a bullet sang over his head. "He fires at Jean de Gravois!" He dropped his whip, and there was the warm glow of happiness in his little dark face as he leveled his rifle over the backs of his Malemutes. "He fires at Jean de Gravois, and it is Jean who can hamstring a caribou at three hundred yards on the run!"
For an instant, at the crack of his rifle, there was no movement ahead; then something rolled from the sledge and lay doubled up in the snow. A hundred yards beyond it, the huskies stopped in a rabble and turned to look at the approaching strangers.
Beside it Jean stopped; and when he saw the face that stared up at him, he clutched his thin hands in his long black hair and cried out, in shrill amazement and horror:
"The saints in Heaven, it is the missioner from Churchill!"
He turned the man over, and found where his bullet had entered under one arm and come out from under the other. There was no spark of life left. The missioner was already dead.
"The missioner from Churchill!" he gasped again.
He looked up at the warm sun, and kicked the melting snow under his moccasined feet.
"It will thaw very soon," he said to himself, looking again at the dead man, "and then he will go into the lake."
He headed his Malemutes back to the forest. Then he ran out and cut the traces of the exhausted huskies, and with his whip scattered them in freedom over the ice.
"Go to the wolves!" he shouted in Cree. "Hide yourselves from the post, or Jean de Gravois will cut out your tongues and take your skins off alive!"
When he came back to the top of the mountain, Jean found Iowaka making hot coffee, while Jan was bundled up in furs near the fire.
"It is as I said," she called. "He is alive!"
Thus it happened that the return of Jean de Gravois to the post was even more dramatic than he had schemed it to be, for he brought back with him not only a beautiful wife from Churchill, but also the half dead Jan Thoreau from the scene of battle on the mountain. And in the mystery of it all he reveled for two days; for Jean de Gravois said not a word about the dead man on the lake beyond the forest, nor did the huskies come back into their bondage to give a hint of the missing missionary.
From the day after the caribou roast the fur-gatherers began scattering. The Eskimos left the next morning. On the second day Mukee's people from the west set off along the edge of the barrens. Most of the others left by ones and twos into the wildernesses to the south and east.
Less than a dozen still put off their return to the late spring trapping, and among these were Jean de Gravois and his wife. Jean waited until the third day. Then he went to see Jan. The boy was bolstered up in his cot, with Cummins balancing the little Mélisse on the edge of the bed when he came in.
For a time Jean sat and watched them in silence; then he made a sign toCummins, who joined him at the door.
"I am going the Athabasca way to-day," he said. "I wish to talk with the boy before I go. I have a word to say to him which no ears should hear but his own. Will it be right?"
"Talk to him as long as you like," said Cummins, "but don't worry him about the missionary. You'll not get a word from him."
Jan's eyes spoke with a devotion greater than words as Jean de Gravois came and sat close beside him. He knew that it was Jean who had brought him alive into the post, and now there was something in the suggestive grimacing of the Frenchman's face, and in the eagerness with which he looked over his shoulder, as if he was not quite sure but that the walls held ears, that caused the boy's heart to beat a little faster as he speculated upon what Jean was going to say.
For a few moments Jean looked at the other steadily, with his thin, black face propped in his hands and a curious smile on his lips. He twisted his face into a dozen expressions of a language as voluble as that of his tongue, hunched his shoulders up to his ears as he grinned at Jan, and chuckled between his grimaces.
"Ah, it was wan be-e-a-u-tiful fight!" he said softly. "You are a brave boy, Jan Thoreau!"
"You did not see it?" asked Jan.
Unconsciously the words came from him in French. Jean caught one of his thin hands and laughed joyfully, for the spirit of him was French to the bottom of his soul.
"I see it? No, neither I nor Iowaka; but there it was in the snow, as plain as the eyes in your face. And did I not follow the trail that staggered down the mountain, while Iowaka brought you back to life? And when I came to the lake, did I not see something black out upon it, like a charred log? And when I came to it, was it not the dead body of the missioner from Churchill? Eh, Jan Thoreau?"
Jan sat up in his bed with a sharp cry.
"Sh-h-h-h-h!" admonished Jean, pressing him back gently. "There is no need of telling what is out there on the lake. Only the Blessed Virgin made me dream last night that you would like to see with your own eyes that the missioner is dead. The thaw will open up the lake in a few days. Then he will go down in the first slush. And"—Jean looked about him cautiously again, and whispered low—"if you see anything about the dead missioner that you do not understand—THINK OF JEAN DE GRAVOIS!"
He rose to his feet and bent over Jan's white face.
"I am going the Athabasca way to-day," he finished. "Perhaps, Jan Thoreau, you will hear after a time that it would be best for Jean de Gravois never to return again to this Post Lac Bain. If so, you will find him between Fond du Lac and the Beaver River, and you can make it in four days by driving your dogs close to the scrub-edge of the barrens, keeping always where you can see the musk-ox to the north." He turned to the door, and hesitated there for a moment, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. "Jean de Gravois wonders if Jan Thoreau understands?" he said, and passed out.
When Cummins returned, he found Jan's cheeks flushed and the boy in a fever.
"Devil take that Gravois!" he growled.
"He has been a brother to me," said Jan simply. "I love him."
On the second day after the Frenchman's departure, Jan rose free of the fever which had threatened him for a time, and in the afternoon he harnessed Cummins' dogs. The last of the trappers had started from the post that morning, their sledges and dogs sinking heavily in the deepening slush; and Jan set off over the smooth toboggan trail made by the company's agent in his return to Fort Churchill.
This trail followed close along the base of the ridge upon which he had fought the missionary, joining that of Jean de Gravois miles beyond. Jan climbed the ridge. From where he had made his attack, he followed the almost obliterated trail of the Frenchman and his Malemutes until he came to the lake; and then he knew that Jean de Gravois had spoken the truth, for he found the missionary with his face half buried in the slush, stark dead.
He no longer had to guess at the meaning of Jean's words. The bullet-hole under the dead man's arms was too large to escape eyes like Jan's. Into the little hidden world which he treasured in his heart there came another face, to remain always with him—the face of the courageous little forest dandy who was hurrying with his bride back into the country of the Athabasca.
Jan allowed his dogs to walk all the way back to the post, and it was dusk before they arrived. Maballa had prepared supper, and Cummins was waiting for him. He glanced sharply at the boy. There was a smile on Jan's lips, and there was something in his eyes which Cummins had never seen there before. From that night they were no longer filled with the nervous, glittering flashes which at times had given him an appearance almost of madness. In place of their searching suspicions, there was a warmer and more companionable glow, and Cummins felt the effect of the change as he ate his caribou steak and talked once more entirely of Mélisse.
A Cree trapper had found Jan's violin in the snow, and had brought it to Maballa. Before Cummins finished his supper, the boy began to play, and he continued to play until the lights at the post went out and both the man and the child were deep in sleep. Then Jan stopped. There was the fire of a keen wakefulness in his eyes as he carefully unfastened the strings of his instrument, and held it close to the oil lamp, so that he could peer down through the narrow aperture in the box.
He looked again at Cummins. The man was sleeping with his face to the wall. With the hooked wire which he used for cleaning his revolver Jan fished gently at the very end of the box, and after three or four efforts the wire caught in something soft, which he pulled toward him. Through the bulge in the F-hole he dragged forth a small, tightly rolled cylinder of faded red cloth.
For a few moments he sat watching the deep breathing of Cummins, unrolling the cloth as he watched, until he had spread out upon the table before him a number of closely written pages of paper. He weighted them at one end with his violin, and held them down at the other with his hands. The writing was in French. Several of the pages were in a heavy masculine hand, the words running one upon another so closely that in places they seemed to be connected; and from them Jan took his fingers, so that they rolled up like a spring. Over the others he bent his head, and there came from him a low, sobbing breath.
On these pages the writing was that of a woman, and from the paper there still rose a faint, sweet scent of heliotrope. For half an hour Jan gazed upon them, reading the words slowly, until he came to the last page.
When there came a movement from over against the wall, he lifted for an instant a pair of startled eyes. Cummins was turning in his sleep. Soundlessly Jan tiptoed across the floor, opened the door, without disturbing the slumbering man and went out into the night. In the south and east there glowed a soft blaze of fire where the big spring moon was coming up over the forest. As Jan turned his face toward it, a new and strange longing crept into his heart. He stretched out his arms, with the papers and his violin clutched in his hands, as if from out of that growing glory a wonderful spirit was calling to him.
For the first time in his lonely life it came to him—this call of the great world beyond the wilderness; and suddenly he crushed the woman's letter to his lips, and his voice burst from him in whispering, thrilling eagerness:
"I will come to you—some day—w'en ze leetle Mélisse come too!"
He rolled the written pages together, wrapped them in the faded red cloth, and concealed them again in the box of his violin before he reentered the cabin.
The next morning Cummins stood in the door, and said:
"How warm the sun is! The snow and ice are going, Jan. It's spring.We'll house the sledges to-day, and begin feeding the dogs on fish."
Each day thereafter the sun rose earlier, the day was longer, and the air was warmer; and with the warmth there now came the sweet scents of the budding earth and the myriad sounds of the deep, unseen life of the forest, awakening from its long slumber in its bed of snow. Moose-birds chirped their mating songs and flirted from morning until night in bough and air; ravens fluffed themselves in the sun; and snowbirds—little black-and-white beauties that were wont to whisk about like so many flashing gems—changed their color from day to day until they became new creatures in a new world.
The poplar buds swelled in their joy until they split like over fat peas. The mother bears come out of their winter dens, accompanied by little ones born weeks before, and taught them how to pull down the slender saplings for these same buds. The moose returned from the blizzardy tops of the great ridges, where for good reasons they had passed the winter, followed by the wolves who fed upon their weak and sick. Everywhere were the rushing torrents of melting snow, the crackle of crumbling ice, the dying frost-cries of rock and earth and tree; and each night the pale glow of the aurora borealis crept farther and farther toward the pole in its fading glory.
The post fell back into its old ways. Now and then a visitor came in from out of the forest, but he remained for only a day or two, taking back into the solitude with him a few of the necessaries of life. Williams was busy preparing his books for the coming of the company's chief agent from London, and Cummins, who was helping the factor, had a good deal of extra time on his hands.
Before the last of the snow was gone, he and Jan began dragging in logs for an addition which they planned for the little cabin. Basking out in the sun, with a huge bearskin for a floor, Mélisse looked upon the new home-building with wonderful demonstrations of interest. Cummins' face glowed with pleasure as she kicked and scrambled on the bearskin and gave shrill-voiced approval of their efforts.
Jan was the happiest youth in the world. It was certain that the little Mélisse understood what they were doing, and the word passed from Cummins and Jan to the others at the post, so that it happened frequently during the building operations that Mukee and Per-ee, and even Williams himself, would squat for an hour at a time in the snow near Mélisse, marveling at the early knowledge which the great God saw fit to put into a white baby's brain. This miracle came to be a matter of deep discussion, in which there were the few words but much thought of men born to silence. One day Mukee brought two little Indian babies and set them on the bearskin, where they continued to sit in stoic indifference—a clear proof of the superior development of Mélisse.
"I wouldn't be surprised to hear her begin talking at any time," confided Cummins to Jan, one evening when the boy was tuning his violin. "She is nearly six months old."
"Do you suppose she would begin in French?" asked Jan, suddenly stopping the tightening of his strings.
Cummins stared.
"Why?"
Jan dropped his voice to an impressive whisper.
"Because I have heard her many times say, 'Bon-bon—bonbon—bonbon'—which means candee; and always I have given her candee, an' now ze leetle Mélisse say 'Bonbon' all of ze time."
"Well," said Cummins, eying him in half belief. "Could it happen?"
Like a shot Jan replied:
"I began in Engleesh, an' Jan Thoreau is French!"
He began playing, but Cummins did not hear much of the music. He went to the door, and stared in lonely grief at the top of the tall spruce over the grave. Later he said to Jan:
"It would be bad if that were so. Give her no more sweet stuff when she says 'Bonbon,' Jan. She must forget!"
The next day Jan tore down the sapling barricade around the woman's grave, and from noon until almost sunset he skirted the sunny side of a great ridge to the south. When he came back he brought with him a basket of the early red snow-flowers, with earth clinging to their roots. These he planted thickly over the mound under the spruce, and around its edge he put rows of the young shoots of Labrador tea and backneesh.
As the weather grew warmer, and spring changed into summer, he took Mélisse upon short excursions with him into the forests, and together they picked great armfuls of flowers and Arctic ferns. The grave was never without fresh offerings, and the cabin, with its new addition complete, was always filled with the beautiful things that spring up out of the earth.
Jan and Mélisse were happy; and in the joys of these two there was pleasure for the others of the post, as there had been happiness in the presence of the woman. Only upon Cummins had there settled a deep grief. The changes of spring and summer, bringing with them all that this desolate world held of warmth and beauty, filled him with the excruciating pain of his great grief, as if the woman had died but yesterday.
When he first saw the red flowers glowing upon her grave, he buried his head in his arms and sobbed like a child. The woman had loved them. She had always watched for the first red blooms to shoot up out of the wet earth. A hundred times he had gone with her to search for them, and had fastened the first flower in the soft beauty of her hair. Those were the days when, like happy children, they had romped and laughed together out there beyond the black spruce. Often he had caught her up in his strong arms and carried her, tired and hungry but gloriously happy, back to their little home in the clearing, where she would sit and laugh at him as he clumsily prepared their supper.
Thoughts and pictures like these choked him and drove him off alone into the depths of the wilderness. When this spirit impelled him his moccasined feet would softly tread the paths they had taken in their wanderings; and at every turn a new memory would spring up before him, and he longed to fling himself down there with the sweet spirit of the woman and die.
Little did he dream, at these times, that Jan and Mélisse were to cherish these same paths, that out of the old, dead joys there were to spring new joys, and that the new joys were to wither and die, even as his own—for a time. Beyond his own great sorrow he saw nothing in the future. He gave up Mélisse to Jan.
At last, his gaunt frame thinned by sleepless nights and days of mental torture, he said that the company's business was calling him to Churchill, and early in August he left for the bay.
Upon Jan now fell a great responsibility. Mélisse was his own. Days passed before he could realize the fullness of his possession. He had meant to go by the Athabasca water route to see Jean de Gravois, leaving Mélisse to Cummins for a fortnight or so. Now he gave this up. Day and night he guarded the child; and to Jan's great joy it soon came to pass that whenever he was compelled to leave her for a short time, Mélisse would cry for him. At least Maballa assured him that this was so, and Mélisse gave evidence of it by her ecstatic joy when he returned.
When Cummins came back from Fort Churchill in the autumn, he brought with him a pack full of things for Mélisse, including new books and papers, for which he had spent a share of his season's earnings. As he was freeing these treasures from their wrapping of soft caribou skin, with Jan and Mélisse both looking on, he stopped suddenly and glanced from his knees up at the boy.
"They're wondering over at Churchill what became of the missionary who left with the mail, Jan. They say he was last seen at the Etawney."
"And not here?" replied Jan quickly.
"Not that they know of," said Cummins, still keeping his eyes on the boy. "The man who drove him never got back to Churchill. They're wondering where the driver went, too. A company officer has gone up to the Etawney, and it is possible he may come over to Lac Bain. I don't believe he'll find the missionary."
"Neither do I," said Jan quite coolly. "He is probably dead, and the wolves and foxes have eaten him before this—or mebby ze feesh!"
Cummins resumed his task of unpacking, and among the books which he brought forth there were two which he gave to Jan.
"The supply ship from London came in while I was at Churchill, and those came with it," he explained. "They're school-books. There's going to be a school at Churchill next winter, and the winter after that it will be at York Factory, down on the Hayes." He settled back on his heels and looked at Jan. "It's the first school that has ever come nearer than four hundred miles of us. That's at Prince Albert."
For many succeeding days Jan took long walks alone in the forest trails, and silently thrashed out the two problems which Cummins had brought back from Churchill for him. Should he warn Jean de Gravois that a company officer was investigating the disappearance of the missionary?
At first his impulse was to go at once into Jean's haunts beyond the Fond du Lac, and give him the news. But even if the officer did come to Post Lac Bain, how would he know that the missionary was at the bottom of the lake, and that Jean de Gravois was accountable for it? So in the end Jan decided that it would be folly to stir up the little hunter's fears, and he thought no more of the company's investigator who had gone up to the Etawney.
But the second problem was one whose perplexities troubled him. Cummins' word of the school at Churchill had put a new and thrilling thought into his head, and always with that thought he coupled visions of the growing Mélisse. This year the school would be at Churchill, and the next at York Factory, and after that it might be gone for ever, so that when Mélisse grew up there would be none nearer than what Jan looked upon as the other end of the world. Why could not he go to school for Mélisse, and store up treasures which in time he might turn over to her?
The scheme was a colossal one, by all odds the largest that had ever entered into his dreams of what life held for him—that he, Jan Thoreau, should learn to read and write, and do other things like the people of the far South, so that he might help to make the little creature in the cabin like her who slept under the watchful spruce. He was stirred to the depths of his soul, now with fear, again with hope and desire and ambition; and it was not until the first cold chills of approaching winter crept down from the north and east that the ultimate test came, and he told Cummins of his intention.
Once his mind was settled, Jan lost no time in putting his plans into action. Mukee knew the trail to Churchill, and agreed to leave with him on the third day—which gave Williams' wife time to make him a new coat of caribou skin.
On the second evening he played for the last time in the little cabin; and after Mélisse had fallen asleep he took her up gently in his arms and held her there for a long time, while Cummins looked on in silence. When he replaced her in the little bed against the wall, Cummins put one of his long arms about the boy's shoulders and led him to the door, where they stood looking out upon the grim desolation of the forest that rose black and silent against the starlit background of the sky. High above the thick tops of the spruce rose the lone tree over the grave, like a dark finger pointing up into the night, and Cummins' eyes rested there.
"She heard you first that night, Jan," he spoke softly. "She knew that you were coming long before I could hear anything but the crackling in the skies. I believe—she knows—now—"
The arm about Jan's shoulder tightened, and Cummins' head dropped until his rough cheek rested upon the boy's hair. There was something of the gentleness of love in what he did, and in response to it Jan caught the hand that was hanging over his shoulder in both his own.
"Boy, won't you tell me who you are, and why you came that night?"
"I will tell you, now, that I come from ze Great Bear," whispered Jan. "I am only Jan Thoreau, an' ze great God made me come that night because"—his heart throbbed with sudden inspiration as he looked up into his companion's face—"because ze leetle Mélisse was here," he finished.
For a time Cummins made no move or sound; then he drew the boy back into the cabin, and from the little gingham-covered box in the corner he took a buckskin bag.
"You are going to Churchill for Mélisse and for HER" he said in a voice pitched low that it might not awaken the baby. "Take this."
Jan drew a step back.
"No, I fin' work with ze compan-ee at Churchill. That is ze gold forMélisse when she grow up. Jan Thoreau is no—what you call heem?"
His teeth gleamed in a smile, but it lasted only for an instant. Cummins' face darkened, and he caught him firmly, almost roughly, by the arm.
"Then Jan Thoreau will never come back to Mélisse," he exclaimed with finality. "You are going to Churchill to be at school, and not to work with your hands. THEY are sending you. Do you understand, boy? THEY!" There was a fierce tremor in his voice. "Which will it be? Will you take the bag, or will you never again come back to Lac Bain?"
Dumbly Jan reached out and took the buckskin pouch. A dull flush burned in his cheeks. Cummins looked in wonder upon the strange look that came into his eyes.
"I pay back this gold to you and Mélisse a hundred times!" he cried tensely. "I swear it, an' I swear that Jan Thoreau mak' no lie!"
Unconsciously, with the buckskin bag clutched in one hand, he had stretched out his other arm to the violin hanging against the wall. Cummins turned to look. When he faced him again the boy's arm had fallen to his side and his cheeks were white.
The next day he left. No one heard his last words to Mélisse, or witnessed his final leave-taking of her, for Cummins sympathized with the boy's grief and went out of the cabin an hour before Mukee was ready with his pack. The last that he heard was Jan's violin playing low, sweet music to the child. Three weeks later, when Mukee returned to Lac Bain, he said that Jan had traveled to Churchill like one who had lost his tongue, and that far into the nights he had played lonely dirges upon his violin.
It was a long winter for Cummins and Mélisse. It was a longer one for Jan. He had taken with him a letter from the factor at Lac Bain to the factor at Churchill, and he found quarters with the chief clerk's assistant at the post—a young, red-faced man who had come over on the ship from England. He was a cheerful, good-natured young fellow, and when he learned that his new associate had tramped all the way from the Barren Lands to attend the new public school, he at once invested himself with the responsibilities of a private tutor.
He taught Jan, first of all, to say "is" in place of "ees." It was a tremendous lesson for Jan, but he struggled with it manfully, and a week after his arrival, when one evening he was tuning his violin to play for young MacDonald, he said with eager gravity:
"Ah, I have it now, Mr. MacDonald. It ees not 'EES,' it ees 'EES!'"
MacDonald roared, but persisted, and in time Jan began to get the twist out of his tongue.
The school opened in November, and Jan found himself one of twenty or so, gathered there from forty thousand square miles of wilderness. Two white youths and a half-breed had come from the Etawney; the factor at Nelson House sent up his son, and from the upper waters of the Little Churchill there came three others.
From the first, Jan's music found him a premier place in the interest of the tutor sent over by the company. He studied by night as well as by day, and by the end of the second month his only competitor was the youth from Nelson House. His greatest source of knowledge was not the teacher, but MacDonald. There was in him no inherent desire for the learning of the people to the south. That he was storing away, like a faithful machine, for the use of Mélisse. But MacDonald gave him that for which his soul longed—a picture of life as it existed in the wonderful world beyond the wilderness, to which some strange spirit within him, growing stronger as the weeks and months passed, seemed projecting his hopes and his ambitions.
Between his thoughts of Mélisse and Lac Bain, he dreamed of that other world; and several times during the winter he took the little roll from the box of his violin, and read again and again the written pages that it contained.
"Some time I will go," he assured himself always. "Some time, whenMélisse is a little older, and can go too."
To young MacDonald, the boy from Lac Bain was a "find." The Scottish youth was filled with an immense longing for home; and as his homesickness grew, he poured more and more into Jan's attentive ears his knowledge of the world from which he had come. He told him the history of the old brass cannon that lay abandoned among the vines and bushes, where a fort had stood at Churchill many years before. He described the coming of the first ship into the great bay; told of Hudson and his men, of great wars that his listener had never dreamed of, of kings and queens and strange nations. At night he read a great deal to Jan out of books that he had brought over with him.
As the weeks and months passed, the strange spirit that was calling to the forest boy out of that other world stirred more restlessly within him. At times it urged him to confide in MacDonald what was hidden away in the box of his violin.
The secret nearly burst from him one Sunday, when MacDonald said:
"I'm going home on the ship that comes over next summer. What do you say to going back with me, Jan?"
The spirit surged through Jan in a hot flood, and it was only an accident that kept him from saying what was in his heart.
They were standing with the icy bay stretching off in interminable miles toward the pole. A little way from them, the restless tide was beating up through the broken ice, and eating deeper into the frozen shore. From out of the bank there projected, here and there, the ends of dark, box-like objects, which, in the earlier days of the company, had been gun-cases. In them were the bones of men who had lived and died an age ago; and as Jan looked at the silent coffins, now falling into the sea, another spirit—the spirit that bound him to Mélisse—entered into him, and he shuddered as he thought of what might happen in the passing of a year.
It was this spirit that won. In the spring, Jan went back to Lac Bain with the company's supplies. The next autumn he followed the school to York Factory, and the third year he joined it at Nelson House. Then the company's teacher died, and no one came to fill his place.
In midwinter of this third year, Jan returned to Lac Bain, and, hugging the delighted Mélisse close in his arms, he told her that never again would he go away without her. Mélisse, tightening her arms around his neck, made his promise sacred by offering her little rosebud of a mouth for him to kiss. Later, the restless spirit slumbering within his breast urged him to speak to Cummins.
"When Mélisse is a little older, should we not go with her into theSouth?" he said. "She must not live for ever in a place like this."
Cummins looked at him for an instant as if he did not understand. When Jan's meaning struck home, his eyes hardened, and there was the vibrant ring of steel in his quiet voice.
"Her mother will be out there under the old spruce until the end of time," he said slowly; "and we will never leave her—unless, some day, Mélisse goes alone."
From that hour Jan no longer looked into the box of his violin. He struggled against the desire that had grown with his years until he believed that he had crushed it and stamped it out of his existence. In his life there came to be but one rising and one setting of the sun. Mélisse was his universe. She crowded his heart until beyond her he began to lose visions of any other world.
Each day added to his joy. He called her "my little sister," and with sweet gravity Mélisse called him "brother Jan," and returned in full measure his boundless love. He marked the slow turning of her flaxen hair into sunny gold, and month by month watched joyfully the deepening of that gold into warm shades of brown. She was to be like her mother! Jan's soul rejoiced, and in his silent way Cummins offered up wordless prayers of thankfulness.
So matters stood at Post Lac Bain in the beginning of Mélisse's ninth year, when up from the south there came a rumor. As civil war spreads its deepest gloom, as the struggle of father against son and brother against brother stifles the breathing of nations, so this rumor set creeping a deep pall over the forest people.
Rumor grew into rumor. From the east, the south and the west they multiplied, until on all sides the Paul Reveres of the wilderness carried news that the Red Terror was at their heels, and the chill of a great fear swept like a shivering wind from the edge of civilization to the bay.