Nineteen years before these same rumors had come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of it still remained with the forest people; for a thousand unmarked graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the toll it demanded.
From DuBrochet, on Reindeer Lake, authentic word first came to Lac Bain early in the winter. Henderson was factor there, and he passed up the warning that had come to him from Nelson House and the country to the southeast.
"There's smallpox on the Nelson," his messenger informed Williams, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. God only knows what it is doing to the bay Indians, but we hear that it is wiping out the Chippewayans between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same day with his winded dogs. "I'm off for the Révillon people to the west, with the compliments of our company," he explained.
Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's servants and her majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thick face went as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill factor.
"It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can make!"
He read the paper aloud to the men at Lac Bain, and every available man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory. There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out was a roll of red cotton cloth. Williams' face was still white as he passed these rolls out from the company's store. They were ominous of death, lurid signals of pestilence and horror, and the touch of them sent shuddering chills through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people.
Jan went over the Churchill trail, and then swung southward along the Hasabala, where the country was crisscrossed with trap-lines of the half-breeds and the French. First, he struck the cabin of Croisset and his wife, and left part of his cloth. Then he turned westward, while Croisset harnessed his dogs and hurried with a quarter of the roll to the south. Between the Hasabala and Klokol Lake, Jan found three other cabins, and at each he left a bit of the red cotton. Forty miles to the south, somewhere on the Porcupine, were the lines of Henry Langlois, the post's greatest fox-hunter. On the morning of the third day, Jan set off in search of Langlois; and late in the afternoon of the same day he came upon a well-beaten snow-shoe trail. On this he camped until morning. When dawn came he began following it.
He passed half a dozen of Langlois' trap-houses. In none of them was there bait. In three the traps were sprung. In the seventh he found the remains of a red fox that had been eaten until there was little but the bones left. Two houses beyond there was an ermine in a trap, with its head eaten off. With growing perplexity, Jan examined the snow-shoe trails in the snow. The most recent of them were days old. He urged on his dogs, stopping no more at the trap-houses, until, with a shrieking command, he brought them to a halt at the edge of a clearing cut in the forest. A dozen rods ahead of him was the trapper's cabin. Over it, hanging limply to a sapling pole, was the red signal of horror.
With a terrified cry to the dogs, Jan ran back, and the team turned about and followed him in a tangled mass. Then he stopped. There was no smoke rising from the clay chimney on the little cabin. Its one window was white with frost. Again and again he shouted, but no sign of life responded to his cries. He fired his rifle twice, and waited with his mittened hand over his mouth and nostrils. There was no reply. Then, abandoning hope, he turned back into the north, and gave his dogs no rest until he had reached Lac Bain.
His team came in half dead. Both Cummins and Williams rushed out to meet him as he drove up before the company's store.
"The red flag is over Langlois' cabin!" he cried. "I fired my rifle and shouted. There is no life! Langlois is dead!"
"Great God!" groaned Williams.
His red face changed to a sickly pallor, and he stood with his thick hands clenched, while Cummins took charge of the dogs and Jan went into the store for something to eat.
Mukee and Per-ee returned to the post the next day. Young Williams followed close after them, filled with terror. He had found the plague among the Crees of the Waterfound.
Each day added to the gloom at Lac Bain. For a time Jan could not fully understand, and he still played his violin and romped joyfully with Mélisse in the little cabin. He had not lived through the plague of nineteen years before. Most of the others had, even to Mukee, the youngest of them all.
Jan did not know that it was this Red Terror that came like a Nemesis of the gods to cut down the people of the great Northland, until they were fewer in number than those of the Sahara desert. But he learned quickly. In February, the Crees along Wollaston Lake were practically wiped out. Red flags marked the trail of the Nelson. Death leaped from cabin to cabin in the wilderness to the west. By the middle of the month, Lac Bain was hemmed in by the plague on all sides but the north.
The post's trap-lines had been shortened; now they were abandoned entirely, and the great fight began. Williams assembled his men, and told them how that same battle had been fought nearly two decades before. For sixty miles about the post every cabin and wigwam that floated a red flag must be visited—and burned if the occupants were dead. In learning whether life or death existed in these places lay the peril for those who undertook the task. It was a dangerous mission. It meant facing a death from which those who listened to the old factor shrank with dread; yet, when the call came, they responded to a man.
Cummins and Jan ate their last supper together, with Mélisse sitting between them and wondering at their silence. When it was over, the two went outside.
"Mukee wasn't at the store," said Cummins in a thick, strained voice, halting Jan in the gloom behind the cabin. "Williams thought he was off to the south with his dogs. But he isn't. I saw him drag himself into his shack, like a sick dog, an hour before dusk. There'll be a red flag over Lac Bain in the morning."
Jan stifled the sharp cry on his lips.
"Ah, there's a light!" cried Cummins. "It's a pitch torch burning in front of his door!"
A shrill, quavering cry came from the direction of Mukee's cabin, and the two recognized it as the voice of the half-breed's father—a wordless cry, rising and dying away again and again, like the wailing of a dog. Sudden lights flashed into the night, as they had flashed years ago when Cummins staggered forth from his home with word of the woman's death. He gripped Jan's arm in a sudden spasm of horror.
"The flag is up NOW!" he whispered huskily. "Go back to Mélisse. There is food in the house for a month, and you can bring the wood in to-night. Bar the door. Open only the back window for air. Stay inside—with her—until it is all over. Go!"
"To the red flags, that is where I will go!" cried Jan fiercely, wrenching his arm free. "It is your place to stay with Mélisse!"
"My place is with the men."
"And mine?" Jan drew himself up rigid.
"One of us must shut himself up with her," pleaded Cummins. "It must be you." His face gleamed white in the darkness. "You came—that night—because Mélisse was here. SOMETHING sent you—SOMETHING—don't you understand? And since then she has never been near to death until now. You must stay with Mélisse—WITH YOUR VIOLIN!"
"Mélisse herself shall choose," replied Jan. "We will go into the cabin, and the one to whom she comes first goes among the red flags. The other shuts himself in the cabin until the plague is gone."
He turned swiftly back to the door. As he opened it, he stepped aside to let Cummins enter first, and behind the other's broad back he leaped quickly to one side, his eyes glowing, his white teeth gleaming in a smile. Unseen by Cummins, he stretched out his arms to Mélisse, who was playing with the strings of his violin on the table.
He had done this a thousand times, and Mélisse knew what it meant—a kiss and a joyous toss halfway to the ceiling. She jumped from her stool and ran to him; but this time, instead of hoisting her above his head, he hugged her up close to his breast, and buried his face in her soft hair. His eyes looked over her in triumph to Cummins.
"Up, Jan, up—'way up!" cried Mélisse.
He tossed her until she half turned in midair, kissed her again as he caught her in his arms, and set her, laughing and happy, on the edge of the table.
"I am going down among the sick Crees in Cummins' place," said Jan toWilliams, half an hour later. "Now that the plague has come to LacBain, he must stay with Mélisse."
The next morning Jan struck out over his old trail to the Hasabala. The Crees were gone. He spent a day swinging east and west, and found old trails leading into the north.
"They have gone up among the Eskimos," he said to himself. "Ah, Kazan, what in the name of the saints is that?"
The leading dog dropped upon his haunches with a menacing growl as a lone figure staggered across the snow toward them. It was Croisset. With a groan, he dropped upon the sledge.
"I am sick and starving!" he wailed. "The fiend himself has got into my cabin, and for three days I've had nothing but snow and a raw whisky-jack!"
"Sick!" cried Jan, drawing a step away from him.
"Yes, sick from an empty belly, and this, and this!" He showed a forearm done up in a bloody rag, and pointed to his neck, from which the skin was peeling. "I was gone ten days with that red cloth you gave me; and when I came back, if there wasn't the horror itself grinning at me from the top of my own shanty! I tried to get in, but my wife barred the door, and said that she would shoot me if I didn't get back into the woods. I tried to steal in at night through a window, and she drenched me in hot water. I built a wigwam at the edge of the forest, and stayed there for five days. Hon-gree! Blessed saints, I had no matches, no grub; and when I got close enough to yell these things to her, she kept her word and plunked me through a crack in the door, so that I lost a pint of blood from this arm."
"I'll give you something to eat," laughed Jan, undoing his pack. "How long has the red flag been up?"
"I've lost all count of time, but it's twelve days, if an hour, and I swear it's going to take all winter to get it down!"
"It's not the plague. Go back and tell your wife so."
"And get shot for my pains!" groaned Croisset, digging into meat and biscuit. "I'm bound for Lac Bain, if you'll give me a dozen matches. That whisky-jack will remain with me until I die, for when I ate him I forgot to take out his insides!"
"You're a lucky man, Croisset. It's good proof that she loves you."
"If bullets and hot water and an empty belly are proofs, she loves me a great deal, Jan Thoreau! Though I don't believe she meant to hit me. It was a woman's bad aim."
Jan left him beside a good fire, and turned into the southwest to burn Langlois and his cabin. The red flag still floated where he had seen it weeks before. The windows were thicker with frost. He shouted, beat upon the door with the butt of his rifle and broke in the windows. The silence of death quickened the beating of his heart when he stopped to listen. There was no doubt that Langlois lay dead in his little home.
Jan brought dry brushwood from the forest, and piled it high against the logs. Upon his sledge he sat and watched the fire until the cabin was a furnace of leaping flame.
He continued westward. At the head of the Porcupine he found the remains of three burned wigwams, and from one of them he dug out charred bones. Down the Porcupine he went slowly, doubling to the east and west, until, at its junction with Gray Otter Creek, he met a Cree, who told him that twenty miles farther on there was an abandoned village of six teepees. Toward these he boldly set forth, praying as he went that the angels were guarding Mélisse at Post Lac Bain.
Croisset reached the post forty-eight hours after he had encounteredJan.
"The red flag is everywhere!" he cried, catching sight of the signal over Mukee's cabin. "It is to the east and west of the Hasabala as thick as jays in springtime!"
The Cree from the Gray Otter drove in on his way north.
"Six wigwams with dead in them," he reported in his own language to Williams. "A company man, with a one-eyed leader and four trailers, left the Gray Otter to burn them."
Williams took down his birch-bark moose-horn and bellowed a weird signal to Cummins, who opened a crack of his door to listen, with Mélisse close beside him.
"Thoreau is in the thick of it to the south," he called. "There's too much of it for him, and I'm going down with the dogs. Croisset will stay in the store for a few days."
Mélisse heard the words, and her eyes were big with fear when her father turned from closing and bolting the door. In more than a childish way, she knew that Jan had gone forth to face a great danger. The grim laws of the savage world in which she lived had already begun to fix their influence upon her, quickening her instinct and reason, just as they hastened the lives of Indian children into the responsibilities of men and women before they had reached fifteen.
She knew what the red flag over Mukee's cabin meant. She knew that the air of this world of hers had become filled with peril to those who breathed it, and that people were dying out in the forests; that all about them there was a terrible, unseen thing which her father called the plague, and that Jan had gone forth to fight it, to breathe it, and, perhaps, to die in it. Their own door was locked and bolted against it. She dared not even thrust her head from the window which was opened for a short time each day; and until Cummins assured her that there was no danger in the sunshine, she shunned the few pale rays that shot through the cabin-window at midday.
Unconsciously, Cummins added to her fears in more ways than one, and as he answered her questions truthfully, her knowledge increased day by day. She thought more and more of Jan. She watched for him through the two windows of her home. Every sound from outside brought her to them with eager hope; and always, her heart sank with disappointment, and the tears would come very near to her eyes, when she saw nothing but the terrible red flag clinging to the pole over Mukee's cabin.
In the little Bible which her mother had left there was written, on the ragged fly-leaf, a simple prayer. Each night, as she knelt beside her cot and repeated this prayer, she paused at the end, and added:
"Dear Father in Heaven, please take care of Jan!"
The days brought quick changes now. One morning the moose-horn calledCummins to the door. It was the fifth day after Williams had gone south.
"There was no smoke this morning, and I looked through the window," shouted Croisset. "Mukee and the old man are both dead. I'm going to burn the cabin."
A stifled groan of anguish fell from Cummins' lips as he went like a dazed man to his cot and flung himself face downward upon it. Mélisse could see his strong frame shaking, as if he were crying like a child; and twining her arms tightly about his neck, she sobbed out her passionate grief against his rough cheek. She did not know the part that Mukee had played in the life of the sweet woman who had once lived in this same little cabin; she knew only that he was dead; that the terrible thing had killed him and that, next to her father and Jan, she had loved him more than any one else in the world.
Soon she heard a strange sound, and ran to the window. Mukee's cabin was in flames. Wild-eyed and tearless with horror, she watched the fire as it burst through the broken windows and leaped high up among the black spruce. In those flames was Mukee! She screamed, and her father sprang to her with a strange cry, running with her from the window into the little room where she slept.
The next morning, when Cummins went to awaken her, his face went as white as death. Mélisse was not asleep. Her eyes were wide open and staring at him, and her soft cheeks burned with the hot glow of fire.
"You are sick, Mélisse," he whispered hoarsely. "You are sick!"
He fell upon his knees beside her, and lifted her face in his hands. The touch of it sent a chill to his heart—such as he had not felt since many years ago, in that other room a few steps away.
"I want Jan," she pleaded. "I want Jan to come back to me!"
"I will send for him, dear. He will come back soon. I will go out and send Croisset."
He hid his face from her as he dragged himself away. Croisset saw him coming, and came out of the store to meet him. A hundred yards away Cummins stopped.
"Croisset, for the love of God, take a team and go after Jan Thoreau," he called "Tell him that Mélisse is dying of the plague. Hurry, hurry!"
"Night and day!" shouted Croisset.
Twenty minutes later, from the cabin window, Cummins saw him start.
"Jan will be here very soon, Mélisse," he said, running his fingers gently through her hair.
It fell out upon the pillow in thick brown waves, and the sight of it choked him with the memory of another vision which would remain with him until the end of time. It was her mother's hair, shining softly in the dim light; her mother's eyes looked up at him as he sat beside her through all this long day.
Toward evening there came a change. The fever left the child's cheeks. Her eyes closed, and she fell asleep. Through the night Cummins sat near the door, but in the gray dawn, overcome by his long vigil, his head dropped upon his breast, and he slumbered.
When he awoke the cabin was filled with light He heard a sound, and, startled, sprang to his feet. Mélisse was at the stove building a fire!
"I'm better this morning, father. Why didn't you sleep until breakfast was ready?"
Cummins stared. Then he gave a shout, made a rush for her, and catching her up in his arms, danced about the cabin like a great bear, overturning the chairs, and allowing the room to fill with smoke in his wild joy.
"It's what you saw through the window that made you sick, Mélisse," he cried, putting her down at last. "I thought—" He paused, and added, his voice trembling: "I thought you were going to be sick for more than one day, my sweet little woman!"
He opened one of the windows to let in the fresh air of the morning.
When Croisset returned, he did not find a red flag over Cummins' cabin; nor did he bring word of Jan. For three days he had followed the trails to the south without finding the boy. But he brought back other news. Williams was sick with the plague in a Cree wigwam on the lower Porcupine. It was the last they ever heard of the factor, except that he died some time in March, and was burned by the Crees.
Croisset went back over the Churchill trail, and found his wife ready to greet him with open arms. After that he joined Per-ee, who came in from the north, in another search for Jan. They found neither trace nor word of him after passing the Gray Otter, and Cummins gave up hope.
It was not for long that their fears could be kept from Mélisse. This first bitter grief that had come into her life fell upon her with a force which alarmed Cummins, and cast him into deep gloom. She no longer loved to play with her things in the cabin. For days at a time she would not touch the books which Jan had brought from Churchill, and which he had taught her to read. She found little to interest her in the things which had been her life a few weeks before.
With growing despair, Cummins saw his own efforts fail. As the days passed Mélisse mingled more and more with the Indian and half-breed children, and spent much of her time at the company's store, listening to the talk of the men, silent, attentive, unresponsive to any efforts they might make to engage her smiles. From her own heart she looked out upon a world that had become a void for her. Jan had been mother, brother, and everything that was tender and sweet to her—and he was gone. Mukee, whom she had loved, was gone. Williams was gone. The world was changed, terribly and suddenly, and it added years to her perspective of things.
Each day, as the weeks went on, and the spring sun began to soften the snow, she became a little more like the wild children at Lac Bain and in the forest. For Jan, she had kept her hair soft and bright, because he praised her for it and told her it was pretty. Now it hung in tangles down her back.
There came a night when she forgot her prayer, and Cummins did not notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next. Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was unobservant of many other things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled the life of the little cabin.
They were eating dinner, one day in the early spring, with the sunshine flooding in upon them, when a quick, low footfall caused Mélisse to lift her eyes in the direction of the open door. A strange figure stood there, with bloodless face, staring eyes, and garments hanging in tatters—but its arms were stretched out, as those same arms had been held out to her a thousand times before, and, with the old glad cry, Mélisse darted with the swiftness of a sun-shadow beyond Cummins, crying:
"Jan, Jan—my Jan!"
Words choked in Cummins' throat when he saw the white-faced figure clutching Mélisse to its breast.
At last he gasped "Jan!" and threw out his arms, so that both were caught in their embrace.
For an instant Jan turned his face up to the light The other stared and understood.
"You have been sick," he said, "but it has left no marks."
"Thank God!" breathed Jan.
Mélisse raised her head, and stroked his cheeks with her two hands.That night she remembered her prayer, and at its end she added:
"Dear Father in Heaven, thank you for sending back Jan!"
Peace followed in the blighted trails of the Red Terror. Again the forest world breathed without fear; but from Hudson's Bay to Athabasca, and as far south as the thousand waters of the Reindeer country, the winds whispered of a terrible grief that would remain until babes were men and men went to their graves.
Life had been torn and broken in a cataclysm more fearful than that which levels cities and disrupts the earth. Slowly it began its readjustment. There was no other life to give aid or sympathy; and just as they had suffered alone, so now the forest people struggled back into life alone, building up from the wreck of what had been, the things that were to be.
For months the Crees wailed their death dirges as they sought out the bones of their dead. Men dragged themselves into the posts, wifeless and childless, leaving deep in the wilderness all that they had known to love and give them comfort. Now and then came a woman, and around the black scars of burned cabins and teepees dogs howled mournfully for masters that were gone.
The plague had taken a thousand souls, and yet the laughing, dancing millions in that other big world beyond the edge of the wilderness caught only a passing rumor of what had happened.
Lac Bain suffered least of the far northern posts, with the exception of Churchill, where the icy winds down-pouring from the Arctic had sent the Red Terror shivering to the westward. In the late snows, word came that Cummins was to take Williams' place as factor, and Per-ee at once set off for the Fond du Lac to bring back Jean de Gravois as "chief man." Croisset gave up his fox-hunting to fill Mukee's place.
The changes brought new happiness to Mélisse. Croisset's wife was a good woman who had spent her girlhood in Montreal, and Iowaka, now the mother of a fire-eating little Jean and a handsome daughter, was a soft-voiced young Venus who had grown sweeter and prettier with her years—which is not usually the case with half-breed women.
"But it's good blood in her, beautiful blood," vaunted Jean proudly, whenever the opportunity came. "Her mother was a princess, and her father a pure Frenchman, whose father's father was a chef de bataillon. What better than that, eh? I say, what better could there be than that?"
So, for the first time in her life, Mélisse discovered the joys of companionship with those of her own kind.
This new companionship, pleasant as it was, did not come between her and Jan. If anything, they were more to each other than ever. The terrible months through which they had passed had changed them both, and had given them, according to their years, the fruits which are often ripened in the black gloom of disaster rather than in the sunshine of prosperity.
To Mélisse they had opened up a new world of thought, a new vision of the things that existed about her. The sternest teacher of all had brought to her the knowledge that comes of grief, of terror, and of death, and she had passed beyond her years, just as the cumulative processes of generations made the Indian children pass beyond theirs.
She no longer looked upon Jan as a mere playmate, a being whose diversion was to amuse and to love her. He had become a man. In her eyes he was a hero, who had gone forth to fight the death of which she still heard word and whisper all about her. Croisset's wife and Iowaka told her that he had done the bravest thing that a man might do on earth. She spoke proudly of him to the Indian children, who called him the "torch-bearer." She noticed that he was as tall as Croisset, and taller by half a head than Jean, and that he lifted her now with one arm as easily as if she were no heavier than a stick of wood.
Together they resumed their studies, devoting hours to them each day, and through all that summer he taught her to play upon his violin. The warm months were a time of idleness at Lac Bain, and Jan made the most of them in his teaching of Mélisse. She learned to read the books which he had used at Fort Churchill, and by midsummer she could read those which he had used at York Factory. At night they wrote letters to each other and delivered them across the table in the cabin, while Cummins looked on and smoked, laughing happily at what they read aloud to him.
One night, late enough in the season for a fire to be crackling merrily in the stove, Jan was reading one of these letters, when Mélisse cried:
"Stop, Jan—stop THERE!"
Jan caught himself, and he blushed mightily when he read the next lines:
"'I think you have beautiful eyes. I love them.'"
"What is it?" cried Cummins interestedly. "Read on, Jan."
"Don't!" commanded Mélisse, springing to her feet and running around the table. "I didn't mean you to read that!"
She snatched the paper from Jan's hand and threw it into the fire.
Jan's blood filled with pleasure, and at the bottom of his next letter he wrote back:
"I think you have beautiful hair. I love it."
That winter Jan was appointed post hunter, and this gave him much time at home, for meat was plentiful along the edge of the barrens. The two continued at their books until they came to the end of what Jan knew in them. After that, like searchers in strange places, they felt their way onward, slowly and with caution. During the next summer they labored through all the books which were in the little box in the corner of the cabin.
It was Mélisse who now played most on the violin, and Jan listened, his eyes glowing proudly as he saw how cleverly her little fingers danced over the strings, his face flushed with a joy that was growing stronger in him every day. One day she looked curiously into the F-hole of the instrument, and her pretty mouth puckered itself into a round, red "O" of astonishment when Jan quickly snatched the violin from her hands.
"Excuses-moi, ma belle Mélisse," he laughed at her in French. "I am going to play you something new!"
That same day he took the little cloth-covered roll from the violin and gave it another hiding-place. It recalled to him the strange spirit which had once moved him at Fort Churchill, and which had remained with him for a time at Lac Bain. That spirit was now gone, luring him no longer. Time had drawn a softening veil over things that had passed. He was happy.
The wilderness became more beautiful to him as Mélisse grew older. Each summer increased his happiness; each succeeding winter made it larger and more complete. Every fiber of his being sang in joyful response as he watched Mélisse pass from childhood into young girlhood. He marked every turn in her development, the slightest change in her transformation, as if she had been a beautiful flower.
He possessed none of the quick impetuosity of Jean de Gravois. Years gave the silence of the North to his tongue, and his exultation was quiet and deep in his own heart. With an eagerness which no one guessed he watched the growing beauty of her hair, marked its brightening luster when he saw it falling in thick waves over her shoulders, and he knew that at last it had come to be like the woman's. The changing lights in her eyes fascinated him, and he rejoiced again when he saw that they were deepening into the violet blue of the bakneesh flowers that bloomed on the tops of the ridges.
To him, Mélisse was growing into everything that was beautiful. She was his world, his life, and at Post Lac Bain there was nothing to come between the two. Jan noticed that in her thirteenth year she could barely stand under his outstretched arm. The next year she had grown so tall that she could not stand there at all. Very soon she would be a woman!
The thought leaped from his heart, and he spoke it aloud. It was on the girl's fifteenth birthday. They had come up to the top of the ridge on which he had fought the missionary, to gather red sprigs of the bakneesh for the festival that they were to have in the cabin that night. High up on the face of a jagged rock, Jan saw a bit of the crimson vine thrusting itself out into the sun, and, with Mélisse laughing and encouraging him from below, he climbed up until he had secured it. He tossed it down to her.
"It's the last one," she cried, seeing his disadvantage, "and I'm going home. You can't catch me!"
She darted away swiftly along the snow-covered ridge, taunting him with merry laughter as she left him clambering in cautious descent down the rock. Jan followed in pursuit, shouting to her in French, in Cree, and in English, and their two voices echoed happily in their wild frolic.
Jan slackened his steps. It was a joy to see Mélisse springing from rock to rock and darting across the thin openings close ahead of him, her hair loosening and sweeping out in the sun, her slender figure fleeing with the lightness of the pale sun-shadows that ran up and down the mountain.
He would not have overtaken her of his own choosing, but at the foot of the ridge Mélisse gave up. She returned toward him, panting and laughing, shimmering like a sea-naiad under the glistening veil of her disheveled hair. Her face glowed with excitement; her eyes, filled with the light of the sun, dazzled Jan in their laughing defiance. Before her he stopped, and made no effort to catch her. Never had he seen her so beautiful, still daring him with her laugh, quivering and panting, flinging back her hair. Half reaching out his arms, he cried:
"Mélisse, you are beautiful—you are almost a woman!"
The flush deepened in her cheeks, and there was no longer the sweet, taunting mischief in her eyes. She made no effort to run from him when he came to her.
"Do you think so, Brother Jan?"
"If you did your hair up like the pictures we have in the books, you would be a woman," he answered softly. "You are more beautiful than the pictures!"
He drew a step back, and her eyes flashed at him again with the sparkle of the old fun in them.
"You say that I am pretty, and that I am almost a woman," she pouted."And yet—" She shrugged her shoulders at him in mock disdain. "JanThoreau, this is the third time in the last week that you have notplayed the game right! I won't play with you any more!"
In a flash he was at her side, her face between his two hands and, bending down, he kissed her upon the mouth.
"There," she said, as he released her. "Isn't that the way we have played it ever since I can remember? Whenever you catch me, you may have that!"
"I am afraid, Mélisse," he said seriously. "You are growing so tall and so pretty that I am afraid."
"Afraid! My brother afraid to kiss me! And what will you do when I get to be a woman, Jan—which will be very soon, you say?"
"I don't know, Mélisse."
She turned her back to him and flung out her hair; and Jan, who had done this same thing for her a hundred times before, divided the silken mass into three strands and plaited them into a braid.
"I don't believe that you care for me as much as you used to, Jan. I wish I were a woman, so that I might know if you are going to forget me entirely!"
Her shoulders trembled; and when he had finished his task, he found that she was laughing, and that her eyes were swimming with a new mischief which she was trying to hide from him. In that laugh there was something which was not like Mélisse. Slight as the change was, he noticed it; but instead of displeasing him, it set a vague sensation of pleasure trilling like a new song within him.
When they reached the post, Mélisse went to the cabin with her bakneesh, and Jan to the company's store. Tossing the vines upon the table, Mélisse ran back to the door and watched him until he disappeared. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips half parted in excitement; and no sooner had he gone from view than she hurried to Iowaka's home across the clearing.
It was fully three quarters of an hour later when Jan saw Mélisse, with Iowaka's red shawl over her head, walking slowly and with extreme precision of step back to the cabin.
"I wonder if she has the earache," he said to himself, watching her curiously. "That is Iowaka's shawl, and she has it all about her head."
"A clear half-inch of the rarest wool from London," added the cheery voice of Jean de Gravois, whose moccasins had made no sound behind him. He always spoke in French to Jan. "There is but one person in the world who looks better in it than your Mélisse, Jan Thoreau, and that is Iowaka, my wife. Blessed saints, man, but is she not growing more beautiful every day?"
"Yes," said Jan. "She will soon be a woman."
"A woman!" shouted Jean, who, not having his caribou whip, jumped up and down to emphasize his words. "She will soon be a woman, did you say, Jan Thoreau? And if she is not a woman at thirty, with two children—God send others like them!—when will she be, I ask you?"
"I meant Mélisse," laughed Jan.
"And I meant Iowaka," said Jean. "Ah, there she is now, come out to see if her Jean de Gravois is on his way home with the sugar for which she sent him something like an hour ago; for you know she is chef de cuisine of this affair to-night. Ah, she sees me not, and she turns back heartily disappointed, I'll swear by all the saints in the calendar! Did you ever see a figure like that, Jan Thoreau? And did you ever see hair that shines so, like the top-feathers of a raven who's nibbling at himself in the hottest bit of sunshine he can find? Deliver us, but I'll go with the sugar this minute!"
The happy Jean hopped out, like a cricket over-burdened with life, calling loudly to his wife, who came to meet him.
A few minutes later Jan thrust his head in at their door, as he was passing.
"I knew I should get a beating, or something worse, for forgetting that sugar," cried the little Frenchman, holding up his bared arms. "Dough—dough—dough—I'm rolling dough—dough for the bread, dough for the cakes, dough for the pies—dough, Jan Thoreau, just common flour and water mixed and swabbed—I, Jean de Gravois, chief man at Post Lac Bain, am mixing dough! She is as beautiful as an angel and sweeter than sugar—my Iowaka, I mean; but there is more flesh in her earthly tabernacle than in mine, so I am compelled to mix this dough, mon ami. Iowaka, my dear, tell Jan what you were telling me, about Mélisse and—"
"Hush!" cried Iowaka in her sweet Cree. "That is for Jan to find out for himself."
"So—so it is," exclaimed the irrepressible Jean, plunging himself to the elbows in his pan of dough. "Then hurry to the cabin, Jan, and see what sort of a birthday gift Mélisse has got for you."
The big room was empty when Jan came quietly through the open door. He stopped to listen, and caught a faint laugh from the other room, and then another; and to give warning of his presence, he coughed loudly and scraped a chair along the floor. A moment's silence followed. The farther door opened a little, and then it opened wide, and Mélisse came out.
"Now what do you think of me, brother Jan?" She stood in the light of the window through which came the afternoon sun, her hair piled in glistening coils upon the crown of her head, as they had seen them in the pictures, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing questioningly at Jan.
"Do I look—as you thought—I would, Jan?" she persisted, a little doubtful at his silence. She turned, so that he saw the cluster of soft curls that fell upon her shoulder, with sprigs of bakneesh half smothered in them. "Do I?"
"You are prettier than I have ever seen you, Mélisse," he replied softly.
There was a seriousness in his voice that made her come to him in her old impulsive, half-childish way. She lifted her hands and rested them on his shoulders, as she had always done when inviting him to toss her above his head.
"If I am prettier—and you like me this way—why don't you—"
She finished with a sweet, upturned pouting of her mouth, and, with a sudden, laughing cry, Jan caught her in his arms and kissed the lips she held up to him. It was but an instant, and he freed her, a hot blush burning in his brown cheeks.
"My dear brother!" she laughed at him, gathering up the bakneesh on the table. "I love to have you kiss me, and now I have to make you do it. Father kisses me every morning when he goes to the store. I remember when you used to kiss me every time you came home, but now you forget to do it at all. Do brothers love their sisters less as they grow older?"
"Sometimes they love the SISTER less and the OTHER GIRL more, ma belle Mélisse," came a quick voice from the door, and Jean de Gravois bounded in like a playful cat, scraping and bowing before Mélisse until his head nearly touched the floor. "Lovely saints, Jan Thoreau, but she IS a woman, just as my Iowaka told me! And the cakes—the bread—the pies! You must delay the supper my lady, for the good Lord deliver me if I haven't spilled all the dough on the floor! Swas-s-s-s-h—such a mess! And my Iowaka did nothing but laugh and call me a clumsy dear!"
"You're terribly in love, Jean," cried Mélisse, laughing until her eyes were wet; "just like some of the people in the books which Jan and I read."
"And I always shall be, my dear, so long as the daughter of a princess and the great-granddaughter of a chef de bataillon allows me to mix her dough!"
Mélisse flung the red shawl over her head, still laughing.
"I will go and help her, Jean."
"Mon Dieu!" gasped Gravois, looking searchingly at Jan, when she had left. "Shall I give you my best wishes, Jan Thoreau? Does it signify?"
"Signify—what?"
The little Frenchman's eyes snapped.
"Why, when our pretty Cree maiden becomes engaged, she puts up her hair for the first time, that is all, my dear Jan. When I asked my blessed Iowaka to be my wife, she answered by running away from me, taunting me until I thought my heart had shriveled into a bit of salt blubber; but she came back to me before I had completely died, with her braids done up on the top of her head!"
He stopped suddenly, startled into silence by the strange look that had come into the other's face. For a full minute Jan stood as if the power of movement had gone from him. He was staring over the Frenchman's head, a ghastly pallor growing in his cheeks.
"No—it—means—nothing," he said finally, speaking as if the words were forced from him one by one.
He dropped into a chair beside the table like one whose senses had been dulled by an unexpected blow. With a great sighing breath that was almost a sob, he bowed his head upon his arms.
"Jan Thoreau," whispered Jean softly, "have you forgotten that it was I who killed the missioner for you, and that through all of these years Jean de Gravois has never questioned you about the fight on the mountain top?" There was in his voice, as gentle as a woman's, the vibrant note of a comradeship which is next to love—the comradeship of man for man in a world where friendship is neither bought nor sold. "Have you forgotten, Jan Thoreau? If there is anything Jean de Gravois can do?"
He sat down opposite Jan, his thin, eager face propped in his hands, and watched silently until the other lifted his head. Their eyes met, steady, unflinching, and in that look there were the oath and the seal of all that the honor of the big snows held for those two.
Still without words, Jan reached within his breast and drew forth the little roll which he had taken from his violin. One by one he handed the pages over to Jean de Gravois.
"Mon Dieu!" said Jean, when he had finished reading. He spoke no other words. White-faced, the two men stared, Jan's throat twitching, Gravois' brown fingers crushing the rolls he held.
"That was why I tried to kill the missioner," said Jan at last. He pointed to the more coarsely written pages under Jean's hand. "And that—that—is why it could not signify that Mélisse has done up her hair." He rose to his feet, straining to keep his voice even, and gathered up the papers so that they shot back into the little cylinder-shaped roll again. "Now do you understand?"
"I understand," replied Jean in a low voice, but his eyes glittered like dancing dragon-flies as he raised his elbows slowly from the table and stretched his arms above his head. "I understand, Jan Thoreau, and I praise the blessed Virgin that it was Jean de Gravois who killed the missioner out upon the ice of Lac Bain!"
"But the other," persisted Jan, "the other, which says that I—"
"Stop!" cried Jean sharply. He came around the table and seized Jan's hands in the iron grip of his lithe, brown fingers. "That is something for you to forget. It means nothing—nothing at all, Jan Thoreau! Does any one know but you and me?"
"No one. I intended that some day Mélisse and her father should know; but I waited too long. I waited until I was afraid, until the horror of telling her frightened me. I made myself forget, burying it deeper each year, until to-day—on the mountain—"
"And to-day, in this cabin, you will forget again, and you will bury it so deep that it will never come back. I am proud of you, Jan Thoreau. I love you, and it is the first time that Jean de Gravois has ever said this to a man. Ah, I hear them coming!"
With an absurd bow in the direction of the laughing voices which they now heard, the melodramatic little Frenchman pulled Jan to the door. Half-way across the open were Mélisse and Iowaka, carrying a large Indian basket between them, and making merry over the task. When they saw Gravois and Jan, they set down their burden and waved an invitation for the two men to come to their assistance.
"You should be the second happiest man in the world, Jan Thoreau," exclaimed Jean. "The first is Jean de Gravois!"
He set off like a bolt from a spring-gun in the direction of the two who were waiting for them. He had hoisted the basket upon his shoulder by the time Jan arrived.
"Are you growing old, too, Jan?" bantered Mélisse, as she dropped a few steps behind Jean and his wife. "You come so slowly!"
"I think I'm twenty-nine."
"You think!" Her dancing eyes shot up to his, bubbling over with the mischief which she had been unable to suppress that day. "Why, Jan—"
He had never spoken to Mélisse as he did now.
"I was born some time in the winter, Mélisse—like you. Perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it is to-morrow. That is all I know."
He looked at her steadily, the grief which he was fighting to keep back tightening the muscles about his mouth.
Like the quick passing of sunshine, the fun swept from her face, leaving her blue eyes staring up at him, filled with a pain which he had never seen in them before. In a moment he knew that she had understood him, and he could have cut out his tongue. Her hand reached his arm, and she stopped him, her face lifted pleadingly, the tears slowly gathering in her eyes.
"Forgive me!" she whispered, her voice breaking into a sob. "Dear, dear Jan, forgive me!" She caught one of his hands in both her own, and for an instant held it so that he could feel the throbbing of her heart. "To-day is your birthday, Jan—yours and mine, mine and yours—and we will always have it that way—always—won't we, Jan?"
Jan was glad when the evening came, and was gone. Not until Jean and Iowaka had said good night with Croisset and his wife, and both Cummins and Mélisse had gone to their rooms, did he find himself relieved of the tension under which he had struggled during all of that night's merry-making in the cabin.
From the first he knew that his nerves were strung by some strange and indefinable sensation that was growing within him—something which he could hardly have explained at first, but which swiftly took form and meaning, and oppressed him more as the hours flew by. Almost fiercely he strove to fight back the signs of it from his face and voice. Never had he played as on this night. His violin leaped with life, his voice rose high in the wild forest songs of Jean de Gravois and Croisset, he sprang aloft in the caribou dance until the tips of his fingers touched the log beams overhead; and yet there was none of the flush of excitement in his face, no joyous fire flashing from his eyes upon Mélisse.
She saw this, and wondered. A dozen times her eyes encountered his, straight and questioning, when the others were not looking. She saw in response only a dull, lusterless glow that was not like the Jan who had pursued her that day on the mountain-top.
Jan was unaware of what was lacking in him. He smiled when she gave him these glances; deep down in him his heart trembled at the beauty of her flushed cheeks, the luster of her coiled hair, the swimming depths of her clear eyes; but the mask of the thing at which she wondered still remained.
After the others had gone, Cummins sat up to smoke a pipe. When he had finished, he went to his room. Jan was now sleeping in a room at the company's store, and after a time he rose silently to take down his cap and coat. He opened the outer door quietly, so as not to arouse Mélisse, who had gone to bed half an hour before.
As he was about to go out, there came a sound—a low, gentle, whispered word.
"Jan!"
He turned. Mélisse stood in her door. She had not undressed, and her hair was still done up in its soft coils, with the crimson bakneesh shining in it. She came to him hesitatingly, until she stood with her two hands upon his arm, gazing into his tense face with that same question in her eyes.
"Jan, you were not pleased with me to-night," she whispered. "Tell me, why?"
"I was pleased with you, Mélisse," he replied.
He took one of the hands that was clinging to his arm, and turned his face to the open night. Countless stars gleamed in the sky, as they had shone on another night fifteen years ago. From where they stood they saw the pale flicker of the aurora, sending its shivering arrows out over the dome of the earth, with the same lonely song that it had played when the woman died. Gaunt and solitary, the tall spruce loomed up against the silver glow, its thick head sighing faintly in the night wind, as if in wailing answer to that far-away music in the skies.
Suddenly there leaped up from Jan Thoreau's breast a breath that burst from his lips in a low cry.
"Mélisse, Mélisse, it was just fifteen years ago that I came in through that forest out there, starved and dying, and played my violin when your mother died. You were a little baby then, and since that night you have never pleased me more than now!"
He dropped her hand and turned squarely to the door, to hide what he knew had come into his face. He heard a soft, heart-broken little sob behind him, and something fell rustling upon his arm.
"Jan, dear Jan!"
Mélisse crowded herself into his arms, her hair torn down and tumbling about her shoulders. In her eyes there were the old pride and the old love, the love and pride of what seemed to Jan to be, years ago, the old, childish pleading for his comradeship, for the fun of his strong arms, the frolic of his laugh. Irresistibly they called to him, and in the old glad way he tightened his arms about her shoulders, his eyes glowing, and life leaping back, flushed and full, into his face.
She laughed, happy and trembling, her lips held up to him.
"I didn't please you to-day," she whispered. "I will never do up my hair again!"
He kissed her, and his arms dropped from her shoulders.
"Never, never again—until you have forgotten to love me," she repeated. "Good night, Brother Jan!"
Across the open, through the thinned edge of the black spruce, deeper and deeper into the cold, unquivering lifelessness of the forest, Jan went from the door that closed between him and Mélisse, her last words still whispering in his ears, the warm touch of her hair on his cheeks—and the knowledge of what this day had meant for him swiftly surging upon him, bringing with it a torment which racked him to the soul.
Fifteen years ago! He stopped and looked up, the starlight whitening his face. There was no change in this night from that other one of ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning prayers on that night when he had staggered into Lac Bain.
He went on until he came to where the beaten trail swept up and away from a swamp. As vividly as if it had happened but yesterday, he remembered how he had dragged himself through this swamp, bleeding and starving, his violin clutched to his breast, guided by the barking of dogs, which seemed to come from a million miles away. He plunged into it now, picking his tangled way until he stood upon a giant ridge, from which he looked out through the white night into the limitless barrens to the north.
Along the edge of those barrens he had come, daring the hundred deaths between hunter's cabin and Indian wigwam, starving at times, almost dying of cold, building fires to keep the wolves back, and playing—always playing to keep up his courage, until he found Mélisse. Fifteen years had passed since then, and the cumulative force of the things that had grown out of those years had fallen upon him this day. He had felt it first when Mélisse turned upon him at the foot of the mountain; and after that in the cabin, in every breath he drew, in every look that he gave her. For him she had changed for all time. She was no longer the little Mélisse, his sister. And yet—
He was almost saying her last words aloud:
"Good night, Brother Jan!"
She had come to him that day to let him kiss her, as she had come to him a thousand times before; but he had not kissed her in the old way. It was a different love that his lips had given, and even now the hot blood surged again into his face as he thought of what he had done. His was a different idea of honor from that held by men born to the ways of passion.
In that which had stirred his blood, thrilling him with strange joy as he held her in his arms, he saw more than the shadow of sin—sacrilege against a thing which was more precious to him than life. Mélisse came to him still as his sister, abiding in her glorious faith in him, unaware of his temptation; while he, Jan Thoreau—
He thrust a hand inside his coat and clutched at the papers that Jean de Gravois had read. Then he drew them forth, slowly, and held them crumpled in his fingers, while for many minutes he stared straight out into the gray gloom of the treeless plain.
His eyes shifted. Searchingly they traveled up the face of the crags behind him. They hunted where the starlight made deep pits of gloom in the twisting edge of the mountains. They went from rock to rock and from tree to tree until at last they rested upon a giant spruce which hung out over the precipitous wall of the ridge, its thick top beckoning and sighing to the black rocks that shot up out of the snow five hundred feet below.
It was a strange tree, weird and black, free of stub or bough for a hundred feet, and from far out on the barrens those who traveled their solitary ways east and west knew that it was a monument shaped by men. Mukee had told Jan its story. In the first autumn of the woman's life at Lac Bain, he and Per-ee had climbed the old spruce, lopping off its branches until only the black cap remained; and after that it was known far and wide as the "lobstick" of Cummins' wife. It was a voiceless cenotaph which signified that all the honor and love known to the wilderness people had been given to her.
To it went Jan, the papers still held in his hand. He had seen a pair of whisky-jacks storing food in the butt of the tree, two or three summers before, and now his fingers groped for the hole. When he found it, he thrust in the papers, crowded them down, and filled the hole with chunks of bark.
"Always my sister—and never anything more to Jan Thoreau," he said gently in French, as if he were speaking to a spirit in the old tree. "That is the honor of these snows; it is what the great God means us to be." The strife had gone from his voice; it rose strong and clear as he stretched his arms high up along the shorn side of the spruce, his eyes upon the silent plume that heard his oath. "I swear that Jan Thoreau will never do wrong to the little Mélisse!"
With a face white and set in its determination, he turned slowly away from the tree. Far away, from the lonely depths of the swamp, there came the wailing howl of a wolf—a cry of hungerful savageness that died away in echoes of infinite sadness. It was like the howling of a dog at the door of a cabin in which his master lay dead, and the sound of it swept a flood of loneliness into Jan's heart. It was the death-wail of his own last hope, which had gone out of him for ever that night.
He listened, and it came again; but in the middle of it, when the long, moaning grief of the voice was rising to its full despair, there broke in a sharp interruption—a shrieking, yelping cry, such as a dog makes when it is suddenly struck. In another moment the forest thrilled with the deep-throated pack-call of the wolf who has started a fresh kill. Hardly had its echoes died away when, from deeper in the swamp, there came another cry, and still another from the mountain; and up and out of the desolation rose the calls of others of the scattered pack, in quick response to the comrade who had first found meat.
All the cries were alike, filled with that first wailing grief, except that of the swelling throat which was sending forth the call to food. A few minutes, and another of the mournful howls changed into the fierce hunt-cry; then a second, a third, and a fourth, and the sound of the chase swept swiftly from the swamp to the mountain, up the mountain and down into the barrens.
"A caribou!" cried Jan softly. "A caribou, and he is going into the barrens. There is no water, and he is lost!"
He ran and leaned over beside the old tree, so that the great plain stretched out below him. Into the west turned the pack, the hunt-cry growing fainter until it almost died away. Then, slowly, it grew again in volume, swinging into the north, then to the east—approaching nearer and nearer until Jan saw a dark, swiftly moving blot in the white gloom.
The caribou passed by within half a rifle-shot of him; another half rifle-shot behind followed the wolves, flung out fan-shape, their gray bodies moving like specters in a half-moon cordon, and their leaders almost abreast the caribou a dozen rods to each side.
There was no sound now. Below him, Jan could see the pale glimmer of ice and snow, where in summer there was a small lake. Desperately the caribou made an effort to reach this lake. The wolves drew in. The moon-shape of their bodies shrunk until it was nearer a circle. From the plain side the leading wolf closed until he was running at the caribou's forelegs. The mountain wolf responded on the opposite side. Then came the end, quick, decisive, and without sound.
After a few moments there came faintly the snapping of jaws and the crunching of bones. Torn and bleeding, and yet quivering with life, the caribou was given up to the feast.
Jan turned away from the scene. Torn and bleeding at his own heart, he went back to Lac Bain.