Whaley sat up, groaned, and pressed his hands upon the abdomen at the point where he had been struck.
The reddish-brown glint in the eyes of Morse advertised the cold rage of the Montanan. He caught the gambler by the collar and pulled him to his feet.
“Get out, you yellow wolf!” he repeated in a low, savage voice.
The white-faced trader was still wobbly on his feet. He felt both sore and sick at the pit of his stomach, in no mood for any further altercation with this hard-hitting athlete. But he would not go without saving his face.
“I don’t know what business you’ve got to order me out—unless—” His gaze included the girl for a moment, and the insult of his leer was unmistakable.
Morse caught him by the scruff of the neck, ran him out of the room, and flung him down the steps into the road. The gambler tripped on the long buffalo coat he was wearing and rolled over in the snow. Slowly he got to his feet and locked eyes with the other.
Rage almost choked his words. “You’ll be sorry for this one o’ these days, Morse. I’ll get you right. Nobody has ever put one over on Poker Whaley and nobody ever will. Don’t forget that.”
Tom Morse wasted no words. He stood silently on the steps, a splendid, supple figure of menacing power, and watched his foe pass down the road. There was in him a cruel and passionate desire to take the gambler and break him with his hands, to beat him till he crawled away a weak and wounded creature fit for a hospital. He clamped his teeth hard and fought down the impulse.
Presently he turned and walked slowly back into the house. His face was still set and his hands clenched. He knew that if Whaley had hurt Jessie, he would have killed him with his naked fingers.
“You can’t stay here. Where do you want me to take you?” he asked, and his cold hardness reminded her of the Tom Morse who had led her to the whip one other night.
She did not know that inside he was a caldron of emotion and that it was only by freezing himself he could keep down the volcanic eruption.
“I’ll go to Susie Lemoine’s,” she said in a small, obedient voice.
With his hands in his pockets he stood and let he find a fur coat and slip into it. He had a sense of frustration. He wanted to let go of himself and tell all that was in his torrid heart. Instead, he encased himself in ice and drove her farther from him.
They walked down the road side by side, neither of them speaking. She too was a victim of chaotic feeling. It would be long before she could forget how he had broken through the door and saved her.
But she could not find the words to tell him so. They parted at the door of Lemoine’s cabin with a chill “Good-night” that left them both unhappy and dissatisfied.
CHAPTER XIX
“D’YOU WONDER SHE HATES ME?”
To Morse came Angus McRae with the right hand of friendship the day after the battle in the log house.
Eyes blue as Highland lochs fastened to those of the fur-trader. “Lad, I canna tell ye what’s in my heart. ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.’”
Tom, embarrassed, made light of the affair. “Lucky I was Johnnie-on-the-Spot.”
The old Scot shook his head. “No luck sent ye back to hear the skreigh o’ the lass, but the whisper of the guid Father withoot whose permission not even a sparrow falls to the ground. He chose you as the instrument. I’ll never be forgettin’ what you did for my dawtie, Tom Morse. Jess will have thankit you, but I add mine to hers.”
In point of fact Jessie had not thanked him in set words. She had been in too great an agitation of spirit to think of it. But Morse did not say so.
“Oh, that’s all right. Any one would have done it. Mighty glad I was near enough. Hope she doesn’t feel any worse for the shock.”
“Not a bit. I’m here to ask ye to let bygones be bygones. I’ve nursed a grudge, but, man, it’s clean, washed oot o’ my heart. Here’s my hand, if you’ll tak it.”
Tom did, gladly. He discovered at the same moment that the sun was striking sparks of light from a thousand snow crystals. It was a good world, if one only looked for the evidence of it.
“The latchstring is always oot for you at the hame of Angus McRae. Will you no’ drap in for a crack the nicht?” asked the trapper.
“Not to-night. Sometime. I’ll see.” Tom found himself in the position of one who finds open to him a long-desired pleasure and is too shy to avail himself of it immediately. “Have you seen Whaley yet to-day?” he asked, to turn the subject.
The hunter’s lip grew straight and grim. “I have not. He’s no’ at the store. The clerk says a messenger called for him early this mornin’ and he left the clachan at once. Will he be hidin’ oot, do you think?”
Tom shook his head. “Not Whaley. He’ll bluff it through. The fellow’s not yellow. Probably he’ll laugh it off and say he was only stealin’ a kiss an’ that Miss Jessie was silly to make a fuss about it.”
“We’ll let it go at that—after I’ve told him publicly what I think o’ him.”
Where Whaley had been nobody in Faraway knew. When he returned at sunset, he went direct to the store and took off his snowshoes. He was knocking the packed and frozen slush from them at the moment Angus McRae confronted him.
The trader laughed, from the lips, just as Tom had prophesied he would do. “I reckon I owe you an apology, McRae,” he said. “That li’l’ wild-cat of yours lost her head when I jollied her and Morse broke the door down like the jackass he is.”
The dressing-down that Angus McRae gave Whaley is still remembered by one or two old-timers in the Northwest. In crisp, biting words he freed his mind without once lapsing into profanity. He finished with a warning. “Tak tent you never speak to the lass again, or you an’ me’ll come to grips.”
The storekeeper heard him out, a sneering smile on his white face. Inside, he raged with furious anger, but he did not let his feelings come to the surface. He was a man who had the patience to wait for his vengeance. The longer it was delayed, the heavier would it be. A characteristic of his cold, callous temperament was that he took fire slowly, but, once lit, his hate endured like peat coals in a grate. A vain man, his dignity was precious to him. He writhed at the defeat Morse had put upon him, at his failure with Jessie, at the scornful public rebuke of her father. Upon all three of these some day he would work a sweet revenge. Like all gamblers, he followed hunches. Soon, one of these told him, his chance would come. When it did he would make all three of them sweat blood.
Beresford met Tom Morse later in the day. He cocked a whimsical eye at the fur-trader.
“I hear McRae’s going to sue you for damages to his house,” he said.
“Where did you hear all that?” asked his friend, apparently busy inspecting a half-dozen beaver furs.
“And Whaley, for damages to his internal machinery. Don’t you know you can’t catapult through a man’s tummy with a young pine tree and not injure his physical geography?” the constable reproached.
“When you’re through spoofin’ me, as you subjects of the Queen call it,” suggested Tom.
“Why, then, I’ll tell you to keep an eye on Whaley. He doesn’t love you a whole lot for what you did, and he’s liable to do you up first chance he gets.”
“I’m not lookin’ for trouble, but if Whaley wants a fight—”
“He doesn’t—not your kind of a fight. His idea will be to have you foul before he strikes. Walk with an eye in the back of your head. Sleep with it open, Don’t sit at windows after lamps are lit—not without curtains all down. Play all your cards close.” The red-coat spoke casually, slapping his boot with a small riding-switch. He was smiling. None the less Tom knew he was in dead earnest.
“Sounds like good advice. I’ll take it,” the trader said easily. “Anything more on your chest?”
“Why, yes. Where did Whaley go to-day? What called him out of town on a hurry-up trip of a few h
ours?”
“Don’t know. Do you?”
“No, but I’m a good guesser.”
“Meanin’?”
“Bully West. Holed up somewhere out in the woods. A fellow came in this morning and got Whaley, who snowshoed back with him at once.”
Tom nodded agreement. “Maybeso. Whaley was away five or six hours. That means he probably traveled from eight to ten miles out.”
“Question is, in what direction? Nobody saw him go or come—at least, so as to know that he didn’t circle round the town and come in from the other side.”
“He’ll go again, with supplies for West. Watch him.”
“I’ll do just that.”
“He might send some one with them.”
“Yes, he might do that,” admitted Beresford. “I’ll keep an eye on the store and see what goes out. We want West. He’s a cowardly murderer—killed the man who trusted him—shot him in the back. This country will be well rid of him when he’s hanged for what he did to poor Tim Kelly.”
“He’s a rotten bad lot, but he’s dangerous. Never forget that,” warned the fur-buyer. “If he ever gets the drop on you for a moment, you’re gone.”
“Of course we may be barking up the wrong tree,” the officer reflected aloud. “Maybe West isn’t within five hundred miles of here. Maybe he headed off another way. But I don’t think it. He had to get back to where he was known so as to get an outfit. That meant either this country or Montana. And the word is that he was seen coming this way both at Slide Out and crossing Old Man’s River after he made his getaway.”
“He’s likely figurin’ on losin’ himself in the North woods.”
“My notion, too. Say, Tom, I have an invitation from a young lady for you and me. I’m to bring you to supper, Jessie McRae says. To-night. Venison and sheep pemmican—and real plum pudding, son. You’re to smoke the pipe of peace with Angus and warm yourself in the smiles of Miss Jessie and Matapi-Koma. How’s the programme suit you?”
Tom flushed. “I don’t reckon I’ll go,” he said after a moment’s deliberation.
His friend clapped an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “Cards down, old fellow. Spill the story of this deadly feud between you and Jessie and I’ll give you an outside opinion on it.”
The Montanan looked at him bleakly. “Haven’t you heard? If you haven’t, you’re the only man in this country that hasn’t.”
“You mean—about the whipping?” Beresford asked gently.
“That’s all,” Morse answered bitterly. “Nothing a-tall. I merely had her horsewhipped. You wouldn’t think any girl would object to that, would you?”
“I’d like to hear the right of it. How did it happen?”
“The devil was in me, I reckon. We were runnin’ across the line that consignment of whiskey you found and destroyed near Whoop-Up. She came on our camp one night, crept up, and smashed some barrels. I caught her. She fought like a wild-cat.” Morse pulled up the sleeve of his coat and showed a long, ragged scar on the arm. “Gave me that as a lil’ souvenir to remember her by. You see, she was afraid I’d take her back to camp. So she fought. You know West. I wouldn’t have taken her to him.”
“What did you do?”
“After I got her down, we came to terms. I was to take her to McRae’s camp and she was to be horsewhipped by him. My arm was hurtin’ like sin, and I was thinkin’ her only a wild young Injun.”
“So you took her home?”
“And McRae flogged her. You know him. He’s Scotch—and thorough. It was a sickening business. When he got through, he was white as snow. I felt like a murderer. D’you wonder she hates me?”
Beresford’s smile was winning. “Is it because she hates you that she wants you to come to supper to-night?”
“It’s because she’s in debt to me—or thinks she is, for of course she isn’t—and wants to pay it and get rid of it as soon as she can. I tell you, Win, she couldn’t bear to touch my hand when she gave me the key to the storehouse the other night—laid it down on the table for me to pick up. It has actually become physical with her. She’d shudder if I touched her. I’m not going to supper there. Why should I take advantage of a hold I have on her generosity? No, I’ll not go.”
And from that position Beresford could not move him.
After supper the constable found a chance to see Jessie alone. She was working over the last touches of the gun-case.
“When it’s finished who gets it?” he asked, sitting down gracefully on the arm of a big chair.
She flashed a teasing glance at him. “Who do you think deserves it?”
“I deserve it,” he assured her at once. “But it isn’t the deserving always who get the rewards in this world. Very likely you’ll give it to some chap like Tom Morse.”
“Who wouldn’t come to supper when we asked him.” She lifted steady, inquiring eyes. “What was the real reason he didn’t come?”
“Said he couldn’t get away from the store because—”
“Yes, I heard that. I’m asking for the real reason, Win.”
He gave it. “Tom thinks you hate him and he won’t force himself on your generosity.”
“Oh!” She seemed to be considering that.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Hate him.”
She felt a flush burning beneath the dusky brown of her cheeks. “If you knew what he’d done to me—”
“Perhaps I do,” he said, very gently.
Her dark eyes studied him intently. “He told you?”
“No, one hears gossip. He hates himself because of it. Tom’s white, Jessie.”
“And I’m Indian. Of course that does make a difference. If he’d had a white girl whipped, you couldn’t defend him,” she flamed.
“You know I didn’t mean that, little pal.” His sunny smile was disarming. “What I mean is that he’s sorry for what he did. Why not give him a chance to be friends?”
“Well, we gave him a chance to-night, didn’t we? And he chose not to take it. What do you want me to do—go and thank him kindly for having me whipped?”
Beresford gave up with a shrug. He knew when he had said enough. Some day the seed he had dropped might germinate.
“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to work a W.B. on that case?” he asked with friendly impudence. “Then if I lost it, whoever found it could return it.”
“I don’t give presents to people who lose them,” she parried.
Her dancing eyes were very bright as they met his. She loved the trim lines of his clean beautiful youth and the soul expressed by them.
Matapi-Koma waddled into the room and the Mounted Policeman transferred his attention to her. She weighed two hundred twelve pounds, but was not sensitive on the subject. Beresford claimed anxiously that she was growing thin.
The Indian woman merely smiled on him benignantly. She liked him, as all women did. And she hoped that he would stay in the country and marry Sleeping Dawn.
CHAPTER XX
ONISTAH READS SIGN
McRae fitted Jessie’s snowshoes.
“You’ll be hame before the dark, lass,” he said, a little anxiously.
“Yes, Father.”
The hunter turned to Onistah. “She’s in your care, lad. Gin the weather changes, or threatens to, let the traps go and strike for the toon. You’re no’ to tak chances.”
“Back assam weputch (very early),” promised the Blackfoot.
He was proud of the trust confided to him. To him McRae was a great man. Among many of the trappers and the free traders the old Scot’s word was law. They came to him with their disputes for settlement and abided by his decisions. For Angus was not only the patriarch of the clan, if such a loose confederation of followers could be called a clan; he was esteemed for his goodness and practical common sense.
Onistah’s heart swelled with an emotion that was more than vanity. His heart filled with gladness that Jessie should choose him as guide and companion to snowshoe with her out into the w
hite forests where her traps were set. For the young Indian loved her dumbly, without any hope of reward, in much the same way that some of her rough soldiers must have loved Joan of Arc. Jessie was a mistress whose least whim he felt it a duty to obey. He had worshiped her ever since he had seen her, a little eager warm-hearted child, playing in his mother’s wigwam. She was as much beyond his reach as the North Star. Yet her swift tender smile was for him just as it was for Fergus.
They shuffled out of the village into the forest that crept up to the settlement on all sides. Soon they were deep in its shadows, pushing along the edge of a muskeg which they skirted carefully in order not to be hampered by its treacherous boggy footing.
Jessie wore a caribou-skin capote with the fur on as a protection against the cold wind. Her moccasins were of smoked moose-skin decorated with the flower-pattern bead embroidery so much in use among the French half-breeds of the North. The socks inside them were of duffle and the leggings of strouds, both materials manufactured for the Hudson’s Bay Company for its trappers.
The day was comparatively warm, but the snow was not slushy nor very deep. None the less she was glad when they reached the trapping ground and Onistah called a halt for dinner. She was tired, from the weight of the snow on her shoes, and her feet were blistered by reason of the lacings which cut into the duffle and the tender flesh inside.
Onistah built a fire of poplar, which presently crackled like a battle front and shot red-hot coals at them in an irregular fusillade. Upon this they made tea, heated pemmican and bannocks, and thawed a jar of preserves Jessie had made the previous summer of service berries and wild raspberries. Before it they dried their moccasins, socks, and leggings.
Afterward they separated to make a round of the traps, agreeing to meet an hour and a half later at the place of their dinner camp.
The Blackfoot found one of the small traps torn to pieces, probably by a bear, for he saw its tracks in the snow. He rebuilt the snare and baited it with parts of a rabbit he had shot. In one trap he discovered a skunk and in another a timber wolf. When he came in sight of the rendezvous, he was late.
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