THE WOLF PACKCHAPTER ITHE RUNAWAY
THE WOLF PACK
THE ancient train was laboring heavily. It was climbing, and stated the fact vociferously to the wilderness of echoing hills. Its speed was little better than that of a weary team of horses on an outward journey.
It was passing through a broken, tattered world of wind-swept, stunted northern forest. There were bald crags, and open, water-logged flats. There was snow, too; melting snow, for the Canadian spring was hungrily devouring the last remnants of a fierce winter. The sun was brilliant. The cloud-flecked sky was a steely blue. And the crisp, mountain air even contrived to refresh the superheated atmosphere within the passenger coaches.
Luana’s dark eyes were without concern for the natural beauties beyond the windows of the fantastic old observation car. The small boy-child, who was her charge, occupied her whole attention.
The infant was sturdily clinging to a brass stanchion. He was peering out at the wonders of the endless panorama passing before his baby eyes. But his chubby hand was unequal to its task. He had spent much time and energy in falling down and scrambling again to his feet as the train lumbered drearily over its uneven track. However, he was quite undismayed. In fact,he seemed to consider every struggling effort to be an essential joy of his infant life.
He was only a few brief months beyond his second birthday. But he was wonderfully grown and sturdy. Perhaps it was his warm, woolly suit that helped the impression. But it certainly had nothing to do with the full, rosy cheeks, and the bright intelligence of his smiling black eyes.
In response to a fierce jolt of the train, Luana dropped her sewing in her lap and spoke warning in a deep voice of almost mannish quality.
“Hold fast, boy-man,” she cried. “Bimeby, you get hurt. Then your moma get mad with Luana. Maybe she send her right away. Then boy-man see her no more. And you not happy again. Yes?”
The boy smiled. Then he turned to the window and pressed the palm of his disengaged hand against the window-pane. He spread out his little fingers, and presently pointed at the slowly passing hill-crests as though counting them. Then, all in a moment, he squatted on the floor of the car with a bump.
A gurgle of laughter broke from him.
“Up-ee!” he crowed. And he scrambled again to his feet, and came with a rush to his nurse’s knee.
“Hurt, boy-man?”
The nurse was smiling happily as she put the unnecessary question.
“Bad ole puffer!” came the laughing reply, as two chubby hands clapped themselves on the dark-skinned hand that was held out to caress.
Luana fondled one of the little hands. She drew a deep breath.
“Bimeby we mak home on the big lake,” she said. “No more holiday. No more big city. No more old bad puffer. Boy-man see big lake. He see all the dogs. Nap. Ketch. Susan. An’ the Indian papooses at the mission. And all the mans. Yes? And Luana play the forest game with boy-man. She run an’ hide. Yes? Oh, yes. Maybe to-morrow—after boy-man sleep.”
“Why us jump like anything?” the child asked, as the train crashed its way over some uneven points.
Luana laughed.
“Cos it’s—bad ole puffer, eh?”
“Ess.”
The child nodded his dark tuque-enveloped head in solemn agreement. Then he turned away and grabbed again at his stanchion. Finally he lurched to his window in comparative safety and gazed out of it.
Luana watched him, a hungry light in her smiling eyes. The half-breed in her was passionately stirring. A creature of almost volcanic impulse and hot emotion, there was something lawless in her mentality. It was her heritage from savage forbears.
The long journey was nearing its end. More than half the continent had passed under train wheels since the Reverend Arthur Steele and his little family had set out to return from the cities of the East to his mission on Lake Mataba. Vacation came to him once in three years, and this was the end of his first holiday since taking up his appointment.
Luana was glad it was over. Civilization had no appeal for her. She was of the outlands. Bred in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, she had no lovefor the crowded streets of the city. She felt that only in the hills, in the twilit forests, on the wind-swept waterways, was it possible to breathe. It was only where Indians dwelt could she feel that she was at home.
No, she did not want the white folks’ cities, with their dazzling life and their paved roads, and where white women eyed her askance. She wanted the great lake, and the mission that was full of those whose blood she shared. She wanted that, and the knowledge that little Ivan Steele looked to her for everything necessary to his small life.
Luana loved the white child with all her woman’s soul. Hers had been the first arms to caress, to nurse him. Helen Steele was too deeply immersed in the work of her husband’s mission to fulfill all the natural demands of motherhood. She was one of those whose sense of duty would never allow her to be wholly satisfied with the simple felicities of her humanity. The domestic claims of home and wifehood came under the ban of her distorted view of all that which she looked upon as selfishness. So her boy-child, from the earliest moment of his small life, was relegated to the only too willing care of his half-Indian nurse.
In a woman of Luana’s temperament the result was inevitable. She looked upon Ivan as something of her very own. She even believed that the boy looked to her as his mother. And she rejoiced in the thought. She was consumed with jealousy when Helen Steele found time to notice the infant; and a frenzy possessed her at the sight of the white woman’s caresses. It was at such moments that she hated the white woman with all the savage in her. But she bore these trials withoutoutward sign or protest, and consoled herself that the boy’s love was wholly hers.
Away from the mission, and on vacation, Luana’s emotional trials had been profoundly increased. During the four months of respite from the routine at the mission, Helen Steele, in a measure, had discovered her child. The mother in her had found opportunity to assert itself. The result to the half-breed had been almost unendurable. And so it came that within a dozen hours of the end of their homeward journey a certain sense of content and easement was already settling down upon the nurse’s passionate soul.
To-morrow! Yes, to-morrow the mother and father would have forgotten Ivan in the engrossing claims of return to their spiritual work. They would have forgotten the merry life gazing up at them out of the infant’s happy eyes. They would have forgotten the wonderful caress of his soft, white arms. But she, Luana, would remember.
The Reverend Arthur Steele looked up from the book on the table in front of him. His dark eyes scanned the broken mountain scene through which the train was passing. There was still a white skin of snow on the hilltops. But it was a moist, dank, dripping world, in spite of the brilliant spring sunshine pouring down out of a cloudless sky.
He was a tall, ascetic creature, who lived for his missionary work at Lake Mataba. He was desperately in earnest, and impatient of everything that interfered with his spiritual labors. His long vacation had been forced upon him. It had not occurred to him as aholiday. His mission needed money. And he had used his vacation for the purposes of raising it.
“We’re about at the divide,” he said to his wife beside him.
Helen Steele did not even look up from her book.
“I’m glad,” she said without interest. “It won’t take long to run down the gradient to the river.”
“No. And home to-morrow morning. We’re only about eight hours late.” The missionary laughed. “I should call it something like a record at this time of year. We’re in luck.”
He turned and glanced down the queer, little old-fashioned restaurant car in which the evening meal had just been served. There were only about ten other passengers, most of whom were well known to him. They included, in a remote corner, an Indian huddled in his parti-colored blanket, and two commercial men who were making the journey in the vain hope of selling farming machinery in a territory given up to fur-trading.
The missionary’s comment was not without justification. There was no time in the year when the hardy human freight which found itself compelled to use the Sisselu Northern Railroad but did so in a spirit of complete resignation. The road was the offshoot of a great line which bridged the Canadian Dominion from ocean to ocean. Its three hundred miles of ill-laid track, from Fort Sura in the south, to the shores of Lake Mataba, was one of those grudging concessions to a prosperous fur-trading industry.
The result was inevitable. The whole organization suffered from managerial unwillingness. There wasonly one train in each direction in each week, and the rolling stock was the decaying cast-off of the greater road. In winter, without regard to schedule, the train groaned and clanked its way to its home depot, provided always a snowstorm had not chanced to bury it on the way. In spring the hazard of its journey was added to by the chances of “washouts,” and the devastating ice jams on the rivers which crossed its track. Summer, of course, was its best season. But even in summer forest fires became a source of perilous interference.
The missionary’s comment was more than warranted. And his claim to luck was well enough founded. So he had eaten the uninteresting supper provided, with an appetite that was inspired by ease of spirit.
Now he was waiting for his bill and the next stop. Then he would make his way back to the end of the train, behind a dozen or more freight cars. There he would join his tiny son and the nurse, Luana.
The man closed his book as the waiter staggered towards him. The uniformed trainman stood at the table swaying to the merciless jolting of the car. And he scrawled a bill, and made change to the note which the missionary handed him.
“We’re doing well, Jim,” Steele ventured hopefully, as the waiter accepted his proffered tip. “If we pass the Sisselu down below without interference, we ought to make the lake by noon to-morrow.”
Optimism, however, was not the trainman’s strong point. He had been too long on the road.
“You just can’t say,” he doubted, with a shake ofhis gray head. “You folks have got Sisselu Ford bad. ’Tain’t that way with us. The ford ain’t a circumstance to the ‘washouts’ we ken hit on the flats. A ‘washout’ ken easy hold us up twenty-four hours. It’s true it don’t worry. We ken sit around dry, and I got food aboard fer a week. I just got to have it. The Sisselu gradient’s a dead straight run to the bottom and no water can worry. There ain’t a bend till you hit the river bank, and the timbers of the trestle’ll stand up to any old river ice. No. It’s the ‘washouts’ on the flats this time o’ year that holds us up.”
“Any news of them?” There was anxiety in Steele’s tone, and the pretty eyes of his wife were raised waiting for the trainman’s reply.
The waiter grinned sardonically.
“We don’t need noos,” he observed lugubriously. “You see,” he added, as he prepared to move on to the next table, “they happen along when the notion takes the flood water. Then you just got to set around.”
Helen Steele laughed outright and closed her book as the waiter passed on.
“He would hate to afford us comfort,” she commented, and glanced out of the window.
At that instant three prolonged blasts on the locomotive siren came back to them.
“Wait for the answer,” the missionary said listening. “We’ll see how right is our dismal friend.”
They waited in silence. And presently, faint and far off, came an answering single hoot from the signal station down on the river.
“All clear. Jim’s right, and our fears are groundless,”sighed Helen. “I do hope the flats will be all right, too. It’s good to be getting home.”
“Good?” Again came the man’s ready laugh. “Think of it, dear. From Montreal to Fort Sura we ran to transcontinental schedule. It’s taken us thirty-six hours already on the run home, and we aren’t there yet by more than twelve hours. It’s enough to depress a saint.”
The grinding of brakes under them added to their confidence.
“The descent,” the missionary commented, preparing to return to his reading.
But Helen wanted to talk. She was no less earnest in her work than her husband. And the journey home had been a time of profound yearning.
“I’ve been thinking, Arthur,” she said seriously, her pretty dark brows drawn in concentration. “Four thousand dollars! It isn’t much with which to found and build our church. You know our Society asks a lot of us. In a way they’re right. We should give all there is in us. But—but—it’s a pity money has to come into our lives at all.” She sighed. “Still, so it is. Beyond the barest necessities I don’t want us to touch that money they’ve given us for the actual building. I want to stir up the right spirit in our Indians, and the white folks on the lake. Surely the lumber can be felled, and hauled, and the whole church can be carpentered voluntarily? Can’t we stir up a spiritual pride that will rise above mere—— What’s that?”
The woman broke off and a quick apprehension lit her questioning eyes. Arthur Steele turned instinctivelyto the window beside him. The hold of the brakes under the car had suddenly been taken off. There had been a queer jarring and clanking under them. Then the train seemed to leap forward at great speed down the steep gradient.
Steele was gazing at the wooded slope which lined the track. In a moment it seemed the dark green of the trees had started to race by and become a mere continuous verdant smudge.
There was a restless stirring throughout the car. Every eye contained a look of sharp inquiry. A few passengers had risen from their seats the better to gaze out of windows. Then, too, a sound of urgent voices had risen above the rattle of the speeding train.
A railroader flung open a door. He hurried down the aisle of the rocking car and passed out at the other end. The door slammed behind the man’s overall-clad figure.
“Something’s—wrong!”
Helen spoke in a low tone, and her eyes searched the face of her man.
“We’re running—free,” the missionary replied. “It’s a gradient of one in forty.”
“And there’s a bend at the river bank.”
“It’s nearly two miles to the river. And by—I wonder?”
“You don’t think the brakes have gone wrong, Arthur?”
Helen’s voice was low. Her anxiety had leaped to something like panic.
The man shook his head, but without conviction.He knew well enough the quality of the rolling stock on the Sisselu Northern.
“If they have——”
He gestured hopelessly.
“And we can’t get back there to Ivan and Luana.”
“No, dear. We can’t do anything. Oh! Here’s Jim,” Steele cried in a tone of relief, as the waiter reëntered the car. “Maybe——”
In those brief moments the speed of the rocking train had become terrific, and the trainman staggered down the car with the greatest difficulty. The uneven track, combined with inadequate springing, set the wheels jumping perilously.
The man was grinning as he came. But, to the missionary, his grin was unreal, and wholly extravagant. His raucous voice made itself heard above the deafening clatter of the train as he replied to an urgent inquiry from one of the commercial men.
“No,” he shouted. “Guess ther’ ain’t nothin’ amiss. They’re lettin’ her rip some. Makin’ up time. We’re late,” he warned, as though it were something unusual. “You see, this gradient’s dead straight till you get to the bottom. There ain’t no chances. Jest kep your seats, folks. They’ll brake her at the right moment. Ther’ ain’t no worry.”
The man paused at the missionary’s table, and clutched it to steady himself. He bent over it, and anxious eyes looked into those of Arthur Steele.
“They’ve broke away, Mister Steele,” he said, in a tone intended for the missionary’s ears alone. “She’s doing sixty. And she’ll be doing a hundred and twentywhen we hit the river. Ther’ ain’t a thing to be done but keep the folks from jumpin’. That way they’ll be killed sure. Ther’s a chance they’ll hold her up in time by reversing the ‘loco.’ I’m going forrard to the handbrakes. Will you kep ’em quiet? It’s the only chance. The vacuum’s petered plumb. We’ve got the boys on the freight brakes. It’s our best hope.”
The conductor hurried away. The panic he feared in the passengers was certainly looking out of his own eyes. Steele’s hand suddenly sought that of his wife as the man passed on with his sickly grin.
“Keep calm,” he said. “I must lie to them.”
Helen gave no outward sign of any fear beyond the anxiety in the eyes which clung to her husband’s face. The missionary stood up and turned to the panic-stricken passengers.
It was evident to him at once how desperately charged was the human atmosphere of the car. Scarcely restrained panic was in every face. And it was tugging at his own heart as he thought of the little son at the far end of the train, and of the helpless woman beside him. But he resolutely smothered his fears and lied in a voice that rang out above the din of the speeding train. He lied far beyond anything the trainman had attempted. And he had his reward.
Every passenger had resumed his seat when the missionary sat down.
“The bend can’t be far off.”
Helen’s voice was barely audible in the din.
“We shall jump the track if——”
The woman suddenly gestured.
“Oh, I wish I could get to the boy.”
“You can’t. Sit still.” Steele’s voice was harsh. The mention of his son had driven him almost beyond endurance. Then he said more quietly, “They’ll get the locomotive——”
But that which he would have said remained unspoken. There was a terrible crash ahead. There was a fierce rending. The train lurched, and Helen was flung from her seat and sprawled across the car. The floor rose up. A wild shriek rang out above the din. And in a moment pandemonium reigned.
The forward end of the car rose sheer. Then it flung over sideways and every window shattered. Then came hideous descent. The car was falling, falling.
It was all over in seconds. The restaurant car had fulfilled its last service. It was lying deep buried in fathoms of the ice-cold bosom of the Sisselu River.
Inspector Landan of the Mounted Police was standing on the rear platform of the caboose of the waiting “breakdown” train. He was weary with many hours of hopeless, depressing labor. The pipe in his mouth had burned itself out, and he had not troubled to refill it. Truth to tell, as he gazed out on the flare-lit scene of wreckage which was piled about the track where it approached the river, he was without inclination even to smoke. He was yearning to get away. For twenty-four hours he and his detachment had prosecuted their indefatigable search of succor, and he knew that the work remaining to be done was the ordinary routine for the breakdown gang.
For all his weariness, however, his mind and feelings were very active. He was contemplating the reporthe would have to send in to his headquarters. He had studied the disaster in its every aspect and had bitterly realized its cause. Then, too, he had obtained much information from the man at the flag station on the river bank.
From all he could discover the railroad company was criminally responsible. It was no case of “washout” or natural disaster. It was, according to the flag-station operator, a sheer case of old rolling stock and defective brakes. The operator, in horrified accents, had told him all he needed to know in a few poignant words.
“Ther’ ain’t a guess in my mind, sir,” he had said. “She came thundering down that gradient at a hundred miles. An’ that after I’d signalled ‘brakes’ to her, and got her answer. She was a ‘runaway’ and quit the metals at the bend, as she was bound to do at that pace.”
Well, the railroad management would hear something. Two injured, unconscious bodies, and ten corpses! That was the tally of human salvage. For the rest? A full-laden train completely wrecked. And as the inspector’s weary gaze searched the moonlit scene, he wondered shudderingly at the despairing horror of those who had found a grave beneath the frigid waters of the river.
Several figures were moving up beside the track, towards the waiting train. The inspector saw them, and breathed his relief. They were his four men returning. And they came empty-handed.
Three of the men passed on up the train, but thecorporal in charge of them swung himself up onto the platform of the caboose.
The man saluted.
“There’s nothing more we can do down there, sir,” he said. “There isn’t an inch we haven’t explored. We’ve searched the woods along the track. And, beyond the locomotive man and his fireman we’ve already got aboard here, no one seems to have had time or nerve to make a jump for it. The rest of ’em are down there in the cars in the river, I guess. And we shan’t get them till the company salves the cars. It’s pretty sickening, sir,” he added with a sight of feeling.
“Sickening? It’s damnable, Perrin,” the officer cried. “By God! There’s going to be a red-hot report on this!”
“I’m glad, sir. I think I can hand you some stuff for it. I’m a bit of an engineer myself, and I’ve gone over all the running gear of the cars at the rear of the train. It’s all ‘scrap’ stuff. Has the doc pulled round that poor woman with her little kid?”
The inspector nodded.
“Yes. She’s come to, and the kid doesn’t seem to have had worse than a bumping. You see, she seems to have held him hugged tightly to her bosom when the crash came. Her body kind of acted as a buffer. She got all that was coming and saved her kid. And she’s only a poor half-breed.”
Corporal Perrin gazed out over the moonlit scene where the busy railroaders were indefatigably laboring.
“It’s pretty fine, sir, when you think of it. There’s nothing to beat a mother when her kid’s threatened. Took it all herself, eh? I’m glad for that woman. Isshe going to come back all right, sir? Did the doc say?”
“He thinks so. You see, the observation car only went over on its side. It wasn’t wrecked. The mother was badly crushed about the head. Yes. The doctor thinks she’ll be right in a week or so. We’ll pull out seeing there’s nothing more for us.”
“Shall I go forward and give the trainman the order, sir?”
“Yes. I’m sick to death. Tell him right away.”
“Very good, sir.”
The corporal saluted and dropped off the car.
A few moments later the clang of the locomotive bell rang out on the night air, and the couplings of the train jolted taut. Then came movement. And the train labored heavily up the steep ascent.