THE PLANNING OF LE GROS
THE PLANNING OF LE GROS
THE PLANNING OF LE GROS
It was still broad daylight for all the lateness of the hour. At this time of year darkness was unknown on the Hekor River. The sky was brilliant, with its cloudless summer blue shining with midday splendour.
Marty Le Gros was standing in the doorway of his log-built home, a home of considerable dimensions and comfort for his own hands, and those gentle hands of his dead wife, had erected every carefully trimmed log of it. He had only that day returned, sick at heart with the hideous recollection of the tragedy of his far-off Mission.
He was gazing out over the bosom of the sluggish river, so broad, so peacefully smiling as it stole gently away on its never-ending task of feeding the distant lake whose demands upon it seemed quite insatiable. His mind was gravely troubled, and it was planning the thing which had so suddenly become imperative. In a moment it seemed all the peace, all the quiet delight of his years of ardent labour amongst the Eskimo had been utterly rent and dispelled. He had been caught up in the tide of Usak’s savage understanding of the position of imminent danger in which he and all his belongings were standing. The thing he contemplated must be done, and done at once.
The evening hour, for all its midday brilliance, was no less peaceful than the hours of sundown in lower latitudes. He had learned to love every mood of this far northern world from its bitter storms of winter to the tropical heat of its fly and mosquito-ridden summer. It was the appeal of the remote silence of it all; it was the breadth of that wide northern world so far beyond the sheer pretences of civilization; it was the freedom, the sense of manhood it inspired. Its appeal had never once failed him even though it had robbed him of that tender companionship of the woman whose only thought in the world had been for him and his self-sacrificing labours.
At another time, with the perfect content of a mind at ease, he would have stood there smoking his well-charred pipe contemplating the beauty of this world he had made his own. But all that was changed now. The beauty, the calm of it all, only aggravated his moody unease.
Beyond the mile-wide river the western hills rose up to dizzy, snow-capped heights. Their far off slopes were buried under the torn beds of ages-old glacial fields, or lay hidden behind the dark forest-belts of primordial growth. The sight of them urged him with added alarm. He was facing the west, searching beyond the Alaskan border, and somewhere out there, hidden within those scarce trodden fastnesses lay the pulsing heart of the thing he had suddenly come to fear. Usak had warned him. Usak had convinced him on the seven day paddle down the river. So it was that those far-off ramparts, with their towering serrated crowns lost in the heavy mists enshrouding them, no longer appealed in their beauty. Their appeal had changed to one of serious dread.
He avoided them deliberately. His gaze came back to the nearer distance of the river, and just beyond it where the old fur-trading post, which gave its name to the region, stood out dark and staunch as it had stood for more than a century. A heavy stockade of logs, which the storms of the years had failed to destroy, encompassed it. The sight of the stockade filled him with a satisfaction it had never inspired before. He drew a deep breath. Yes, he was glad because of it. He felt that those old pelt hunters had built well and with great wisdom.
Then the wide river slipping away so gently southward. It was the road highway of man in these remotenesses, passing along just here between low foreshores of attenuated grasses and lichen-covered boulders, lit by the blaze of colour from myriads of tiny Arctic flowers. It was very, very beautiful. But its beauty was of less concern now than another thought. Just as it was a possible approach for the danger he knew to be threatening, so it was the broad highway of escape should necessity demand.
For the time Le Gros was no longer the missionary. He was no less a simple adventurer than those others who peopled the region. Spiritual things had no longer place in his thought. Temporal matters held him. His motherless child was there behind him in his home in the care of the faithful Pri-loo.
Gold! He wondered. What was the curse that clung to the dull yellow creation of those fierce terrestrial fires? A painful trepidation took possession of him as he thought of the tremendous richness of the discovery which the merest chance had flung into his hands. It had seemed absurd, curiously absurd, even at the time. He had had no desire for any of it. He had not yielded himself to the hardship and self-sacrifice of the life of a sub-Arctic missionary and retained any desire for the things which gold would yield him. Perhaps for this very reason an ironical fate had forced her favours upon him.
He had been well-nigh staggered at the wealth of his discovery, and he had laughed in sheer amazed amusement that of all people such should fall to his lot. The discovery had been his alone. Not even Usak had shared in it. There had been no reason for secrecy, so he had been prepared to give the story of it broadcast to the world.
He had shown his specimens, and he had enjoyed the mystery with which he had enshrouded his discovery when he displayed them to Jim McLeod, the factor at Fort Cupar, and a small gathering of trailmen. This had been at first. And chance alone had saved him from revealing the locality of his discovery. It came in a flash when he had witnessed the staggering effect which the two great nuggets he offered for inspection had had upon his audience. In that moment he had realised something of the potentiality of the thing that was his.
Instantly re-action set in. Instantly he was himself transformed. The missionary fell from him. He remembered his baby girl, and became at once a plain adventurer and—father. Someday Felice would grow to womanhood. Someday he would no longer be there to tend and care for her. What could he give her that she might be freed from the hardships waiting upon a lonely girl in a world that had so little of comfort and sympathy to bestow upon the weak? Nothing. So, when they pressed him for the locality whence came his discovery, he—deliberately lied.
More than ever now was he concerned for his secret. More than ever was he concerned for the thing which the savage understanding of Usak had instilled into his simple mind. His secret must be safeguarded at once. Whatever the future might have in store for him personally he must make safe this thing for—little Felice.
A sound came to him from within the house. It was the movement of the moccasined feet of Usak’s woman, Pri-loo. He spoke over his shoulder without leaving the doorway.
“Does she sleep, Pri-loo?” he inquired in a low voice. The answer came in the woman’s deep, velvet tones.
“She sleep, boss.”
The man bestirred himself. He turned about, and the woman’s dusky beauty came under his urgent gaze.
“Then I go,” he said. “I’m going right over to see Jim McLeod, at the Fort. You just sit around till Usak comes back from the farm. You won’t quit this doorway till he comes along. That so? I’ll be back in a while, anyway. Felice’ll be all right? You’ll see to it?”
“Oh, yes. Sure. Felice all right. Pri-loo not quit. No.”
There was smiling confidence and assurance in the woman’s wide eyes, so dark and gentle, yet so full of the savage she really was.
“Good.” Marty Le Gros reached out his hand and patted the woman’s rounded shoulder under the elaborately beaded buckskin tunic she had never abandoned for the less serviceable raiment of the whitewoman. “Then I go.”
The missionary nodded and passed out. And the squaw stood in his place in the doorway gazing after him as he hurried down to the canoe which lay moored at the river bank.
The scene about the Fort was one of leisurely activity. The day’s work was nearly completed for all the sun was high in the heavens. The smoke of camp fires was lolling upon the still evening air, and the smell of cooking food pervaded the entire neighbourhood.
Now the store had emptied of its human, bartering freight, and with the close of the day’s trading, Jim McLeod and his young wife, like all the rest, were about to retire to their evening meal.
The man was leaning on the long counter contemplating the narrow day book in which he recorded his transactions with the Eskimo, and those other trailmen who were regular customers. His wife, Hesther, young, slight and almost pretty, was standing in the open doorway regarding the simple camp scenes going on within the walls of the great stockade which surrounded their home. She was simply clad in a waist and skirt of some rough plaid material. Her soft brown eyes were alight and smiling, and their colour closely matched the wealth of brown hair coiled neatly about her head.
“Nearly through, Jim?” she inquired after awhile.
The man at the counter looked up.
“It ain’t so bad as it’s been,” he said. “But it’s short. A hell of a piece short of what it should be.” He moved out from behind his counter and came to the woman’s side. “You know, Hes, I went into things last night. We’re three hundred seals down on the year and I’d hate to tell you the number of foxes we’re short. We’re gettin’ the left-overs. That’s it. Those darn Euralians skin the pore fools of Eskimo out of the best, an’ we get the stuff they ain’t no use for. It’s a God’s shame, gal. If it goes on ther’s jest one thing in sight. We’ll be beatin’ it back to civilization, an’ chasing up a grub stake. The company’ll shut this post right down—sure.”
The man glanced uneasily about him. His pale blue eyes were troubled as he surveyed the shelves laden with gaudy trading truck, and finally came to rest on the small pile of furs baled behind the counter ready for the storeroom. He understood his position well enough. He held it by results. The Fur Valley Trading Company was no philanthropic institution. If Fort Cupar showed no profit then Fort Cupar, so far as their enterprise was concerned, would be closed down.
He was worried. He knew that a time was coming in the comparatively near future when Hesther would need all the comfort and ease that he could afford her. If the Company closed down as it had been threatening him, it would, he felt, be something in the nature of a tragedy to them.
The woman smiled round into his somewhat fat face.
“Don’t you feel sore, Jim,” she said in her cheerful inspiriting way. “Maybe the Good God hands us folk out our trials, but I guess He’s mighty good in passing us compensations. Our compensation’s coming along, boy. An’ I’m looking forward to that time so I don’t hardly know how to wait for it.”
Jim’s blue eyes wavered before the steadfast encouragement in his wife’s confident, slightly self-conscious smile.
“Yes,” he said, and turned away again to the inadequate pile of furs that troubled him.
Nature had been less than kind to Jim McLeod. His body was ungainly with fat for all his youth. His face was puffy and almost gross, which the habit of clean shaving left painfully evident. In reality the man was keen and purposeful. He was kindly and intensely honest. His one serious weakness, the thing that had driven him to join up with the hard life of the northern adventurers was an unfortunate and wholly irresistible addiction to alcohol. In civilization he had failed utterly for that reason alone, and so, with his young wife, he had fled from temptation whither he hoped and believed his curse would be unable to follow him.
“You see, Jim,” Hesther went on reassuringly, “if they close us down, what then? I guess we’ll be only little worse off. They’ve got to see us down to our home town, and we can try again. We—”
The man interrupted her with a quick shake of the head.
“I don’t quit this north country,” he said definitely. “Ther’s things here if we can only hit ’em. And besides it’s my only chance. An’, Hes, it’s your only chance—with me. You know what I mean, dear.” He nodded. “Sure you do, gal. It means drink an’ hell—down there. It means—”
The girl laughed happily.
“Have you escaped it here, Jim?” She shook her head. “But I don’t worry so I have you. You’re mine. You’re my husband,” she went on softly. “God gave you to me, an’ whatever you are, or do, why I guess I’d rather have you than any good angel man who lived on tea and pie-talk. Please God you’ll quit the drink someday. You can’t go on trying like you do without making good in the end. But even if you didn’t—well, you’re just mine anyway.”
Jim smiled tenderly into his wife’s up-turned face. And he stooped and kissed the pretty, ready lips. And somehow half his trouble seemed to vanish with the thought of the beautiful mother heart that would so soon be called upon to exercise its natural functions. This frail, warm-hearted, courageous creature was his staunch rock of support. And her simple inspiriting philosophy was the hope which always urged him on.
“That’s fine, my dear,” he said. “You’re the best in the world, but you can’t conjure furs so we can keep this darn old ship afloat. But it don’t do to think that way. We’ll jest think of that baby of ours that’s comin’ an’ do our best, an’—Say!” He broke off pointing through the doorway and beyond the gateway of the great stockade in the direction of the river. “Ther’s Marty comin’ along up from the river—and—he’s in one hell of a hurry.”
The girl turned at once, her gaze following the pointing finger. The great figure of the missionary was hastily approaching. The sight of his hurry was sufficiently unusual to impress them both.
“I didn’t know he’d got back.” Hesther’s tone was thoughtful.
Jim shook his head.
“He wasn’t due back for two weeks.”
“Is there—? Do you think—?”
“I guess ther’s something worrying sure. He don’t—”
The man broke off and placed an arm about the woman’s shoulder.
“Say best run along, Hes, an’ see about food. I’ll ask him to eat with us.”
The wife needed no second bidding. She understood. She nodded smilingly and hurried away.
The two men were standing beside the counter. Jim McLeod had his broad back turned to it, and his fat hands, stretched out on either side of him, were gripping the over-hanging edge of it. His pale eyes were gazing abstractedly out through the doorway searching the brilliant distance beyond the river, while a surge of vivid thought was speeding through his brain.
Marty Le Gros was intent upon his friend. His dark eyes were riveted upon the fleshy features of the man upon whom he knew he must depend.
There was a silence between them now. It was the silence which falls and endures only under the profoundest pre-occupation. The store in which they stood, the simple frame structure set up on the ruins of the old-time Fort, which it had displaced, was forgotten. The lavish stock of trading truck, the diminished pile of furs. Neither had cognizance of the things about them. They were concerned only with the thing which Marty had told of. The desperate slaughter, the destruction of his Mission, seven days higher up the river.
After awhile Jim stirred. His gaze came back to the surroundings in which they stood. He glanced over the big room with its boarded walls, adorned here and there with fierce, highly-coloured showcards which he had fastened up to entertain his simple customers. His wavering eyes paused at the great iron stove which in winter made life possible. They passed on and finally rested on the simple modern doorway through which his young wife had not long passed on her way to prepare food. Here they remained, for he was thinking of her and of their baby so soon to be born. Finally he yielded his hold on the counter and turned on the man who had told of the horror he had so recently witnessed.
“It’s bad, Marty,” he said in a low tone. “It’s so bad it’s got me scared. Why? Why? Say, it don’t leave me guessing. Does it you?”
He looked searchingly into the steady, dark eyes of the man he had come to regard above all others.
“No,” he went on emphatically. “You’re not guessing. They’ve heard of your gold—these cursed Euralians. This is their way of doin’ things sure. They’ll be along down on us—next.”
The door opened at the far end of the store. Hesther stood for a moment framed in the opening. She gazed quickly at the two men, and realised something of the urgency under which they were labouring. In a moment she forced a smile to her eyes.
“Supper’s fixed, Jim,” she said quietly. “Marty’ll join us—sure. Will you both come right along?”