The Second Western Megapack

by Various Writers

  He did not look at her steadily. His gaze was in the red glow of the fire a good deal. She talked, and he answered in monosyllables. When he looked at her, his eyes glowed with the hot red light reflected from the fire, Live coals seemed to burn in them.

  In spite of the heat a little shiver ran down her spine.

  Silence became too significant. She was afraid of it. So she talked, persistently, at times a little hysterically. Her memory was good. If she liked a piece of poetry, she could learn it by reading it over a few times. So, in her desperation, she “spoke pieces” to this man whose face was a gray mask, just as the girls had done at her school in Winnipeg.

  Often, at night camps, she had recited for her father. If she had no dramatic talent, at least she had a sweet, clear voice, an earnestness that never ranted, and some native or acquired skill in handling inflections.

  “Do you like Shakespeare?” she asked. “My father’s very fond of him. I know parts of several of the plays. ‘Henry V’ now. That’s good. There’s a bit where he’s talking to his soldiers before they fight the French. Would you like that?”

  “Go on,” he said gruffly, sultry eyes on the fire.

  With a good deal of spirit she flung out the gallant lines. He began to watch her, vivid, eager, so pathetically anxious to entertain him with her small stock of wares.

  “But, if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.”

  There was about her a quality very fine and taking. He caught it first in those two lines, and again when her full young voice swelled to English Harry’s prophecy.

  “And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered.

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition:

  And gentlemen in England now abed

  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

  As he watched her, old memories stirred in him. He had come from a good family in the Western Reserve, where he had rough-and-tumbled up through the grades into High School. After a year here he had gone to a Catholic School, Sacred Heart College, and had studied for the priesthood. He recalled his mother, a gentle, white-haired old lady, with fond pride in him; his father, who had been the soul of honor. By some queer chance she had lit on the very lines that he had learned from the old school reader and recited before an audience the last day prior to vacation.

  He woke from his reveries to discover that she was giving him Tennyson, that fragment from “Guinevere” when Arthur tells her of the dream her guilt has tarnished. And as she spoke there stirred in him the long-forgotten aspirations of his youth.

  “… for indeed I knew

  Of no more subtle master under heaven

  Than is the maiden passion for a maid,

  Not only to keep down the base in man,

  But teach high thought and amiable words

  And courtliness, and the desire of fame,

  And love of truth, and all that makes a man.”

  His eyes were no longer impassive. There was in them, for the moment at least, a hunted, haggard look. He saw himself as he was, in a blaze of light that burned down to his very soul.

  And he saw her too transformed—not a half-breed, the fair prey of any man’s passion, but a clean, proud, high-spirited white girl who lived in the spirit as well as the flesh.

  “You’re tired. Better lie down and sleep,” he told her, very gently.

  Jessie looked at him, and she knew she was safe. She might sleep without fear. This man would not harm her any more than Beresford or Morse would have done. Some chemical change had occurred in his thoughts that protected her. She did not know what it was, but her paean of prayer went up to heaven in a little rush of thanksgiving.

  She did not voice her gratitude to him. But the look she gave him was more expressive than words.

  Out of the storm a voice raucous and profane came to them faintly.

  “Ah, crapaud Wulf, pren’ garde. Yeu-oh! (To the right!) Git down to it, Fox. Sacre demon! Cha! Cha! (To the left!)”

  Then the crack of a whip and a volley of oaths.

  The two in the cabin looked at each other. One was white to the lips. The other smiled grimly. It was the gambler that spoke their common thought.

  “Bully West, by all that’s holy!”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  WEST MAKES A DECISION

  Came to those in the cabin a string of oaths, the crack of a whip lashing out savagely, and the yelps of dogs from a crouching, cowering team.

  Whaley slipped a revolver from his belt to the right-hand pocket of his fur coat.

  The door burst open. A man stood on the threshold, a huge figure crusted with snow, beard and eyebrows ice-matted. He looked like the storm king who had ridden the gale out of the north. This on the outside, at a first glance only. For the black scowl he flung at his partner was so deadly that it seemed to come red-hot from a furnace of hate and evil passion.

  “Run to earth!” he roared. “Thought you’d hole up, you damned fox, where I wouldn’t find you. Thought you’d give Bully West the slip, you’n’ that li’l’ hell-cat. Talk about Porcupine Creek, eh? Tried to send me mushin’ over there while you’n’ her—”

  What the fellow said sent a hot wave creeping over the girl’s face to the roots of her hair. The gambler did not speak, but his eyes, filmed and wary, never lifted from the other’s bloated face.

  “Figured I’d forget the ol’ whiskey cache, eh? Figured you could gimme the double-cross an’ git away with it? Hell’s hinges, Bully West’s no fool! He’s forgot more’n you ever knew.”

  The man swaggered forward, the lash of the whip trailing across the puncheon floor. Triumph rode in his voice and straddled in his gait. He stood with his back to the fireplace absorbing heat, hands behind him and feet set wide. His eyes gloated over the victims he had trapped. Presently he would settle with both of them.

  “Not a word to say for yoreselves, either one o’ you,” he jeered. “Good enough. I’ll do what talkin’ ’s needed, then I’ll strip the hide off’n both o’ you.” With a flirt of the arm he sent the lash of the dog-whip snaking out toward Jessie.

  She shrank back against the wall, needlessly. It was a threat, not an attack; a promise of what was to come.

  “Let her alone.” They were the first words Whaley had spoken. In his soft, purring voice they carried out the suggestion of his crouched tenseness. If West was the grizzly bear, the other was the forest panther, more feline, but just as dangerous.

  The convict looked at him, eyes narrowed, head thrust forward and down. “What’s that?”

  “I said to let her alone.”

  West’s face heliographed amazement. “Meanin’—?”

  “Meaning exactly what I say. You’ll not touch her.”

  It was a moment before this flat defiance reached the brain of the big man through the penumbra of his mental fog. When it did, he strode across the room with the roar of a wild animal and snatched the girl to him. He would show whether any one could come between him and his woman.

  In three long steps Whaley padded across the floor. Something cold and round pressed against the back of the outlaw’s tough red neck.

  “Drop that whip.”

  The order came in a low-voiced imperative. West hesitated. This man—his partner—would surely never shoot him about such a trifle. Still—

  “What’s eatin’ you?” he growled. “Put up that gun. You ain’t fool enough to shoot.”

  “Think that hard enough and you’ll never live to know better. Hands off the girl.”

  The slow brain of West functioned. He had been taken wholly by surprise, but as his cunn
ing mind Worked the situation out, he saw how much it would be to Whaley’s profit to get rid of him. The gambler would get the girl and the reward for West’s destruction. He would inherit his share of their joint business and would reinstate himself as a good citizen with the Mounted and with McRae’s friends.

  Surlily the desperado yielded. “All right, if you’re so set on it.”

  “Drop the whip.”

  The fingers of West opened and the handle fell to the floor. Deftly the other removed a revolver from its place under the outlaw’s left armpit.

  West glared at him. That moment the fugitive made up his mind that he would kill Whaley at the first good opportunity. A tide of poisonous hatred raced through his veins. Its expression but not its virulence was temporarily checked by wholesome fear. He must be careful that the gambler did not get him first.

  His voice took on a whine intended for good-fellowship. “I reckon I was too pre-emtory. O’ course I was sore the way you two left me holdin’ the sack. Any one would ’a’ been now, wouldn’t they? But no use friends fallin’ out. We got to make the best of things.”

  Whaley’s chill face did not warm. He knew the man with whom he was dealing. When he began to butter his phrases, it was time to look out for him. He would forget that his partner had brought him from Faraway a dog-team with which to escape, that he was supplying him with funds to carry him through the winter. He would remember only that he had balked and humiliated him.

  “Better get into the house the stuff from the sled,” the gambler said. “And we’ll rustle wood. No telling how long this storm’ll last.”

  “Tha’s right,” agreed West. “When I saw them sun dogs to-day I figured we was in for a blizzard. Too bad you didn’t outfit me for a longer trip.”

  A gale was blowing from the north, carrying on its whistling breath a fine hard sleet that cut the eyeballs like powdered glass. The men fought their way to the sled and wrestled with the knots of the frozen ropes that bound the load. The lumps of ice that had gathered round these had to be knocked off with hammers before they could be freed. When they staggered into the house with their packs, both men were half-frozen. Their hands were so stiff that the fingers were jointless.

  They stopped only long enough to limber up the muscles. Whaley handed to Jessie the revolver he had taken from West.

  “Keep this,” he said. His look was significant. It told her that in the hunt for wood he might be blinded by the blizzard and lost. If he failed to return and West came back alone, she would know what to do with it.

  Into the storm the two plunged a second time. They carried ropes and an axe. Since West had arrived, the gale had greatly increased. The wind now was booming in deep, sullen roars and the temperature had fallen twenty degrees already. The sled dogs were nowhere to be seen or heard. They had burrowed down into the snow where the house would shelter them from the hurricane as much as possible.

  The men reached the edge of the creek. They struggled in the frozen drifts with such small dead trees as they could find. In the darkness Whaley used the axe as best he could at imminent risk to his legs. Though they worked only a few feet apart, they had to shout to make their voices carry.

  “We better be movin’ back,” West called through his open palms. “We got all we can haul.”

  They roped the wood and dragged it over the snow in the direction they knew the house to be. Presently they found the sled and from it deflected toward the house.

  Jessie had hot tea waiting for them. They kicked off their webs and piled the salvaged wood into the other end of the cabin, after which they hunkered down before the fire to drink tea and eat pemmican and bannocks.

  They had with them about fifty pounds of frozen fish for the dogs and provisions enough to last the three of them four or five meals. Whaley had brought West supplies enough to carry him only to Lookout, where he was to stock for a long traverse into the wilds.

  As the hours passed there grew up between the gambler and the girl a tacit partnership of mutual defense. No word was spoken of it, but each knew that the sulky brute in the chimney corner was dangerous. He would be held by no scruples of conscience, no laws of friendship or decency. If the chance came he would strike.

  The storm raged and howled. It flung itself at the cabin with what seemed a ravenous and implacable fury. The shriek of it was now like the skirling of a thousand bagpipes, again like the wailing of numberless lost souls.

  Inside, West snored heavily, his ill-shaped head drooping on the big barrel chest of the man. Jessie slept while Whaley kept guard. Later she would watch in her turn.

  There were moments when the gale died down, but only to roar again with a frenzy of increased violence.

  The gray day broke and found the blizzard at its height.

  CHAPTER XXV

  FOR THE WEE LAMB LOST

  Beresford, in front of the C.N. Morse & Company trading-post, watched his horse paw at the snow in search of grass underneath. It was a sign that the animal was prairie-bred. On the plains near the border grass cures as it stands, retaining its nutriment as hay. The native pony pushes the snow aside with its forefoot and finds its feed. But in the timber country of the North grass grows long and coarse. When its sap dries out, it rots.

  The officer was thinking that he had better put both horse and cariole up for the winter. It was time now for dogs and sled. Even in summer this was not a country for horses. There were so many lakes that a birch-bark canoe covered the miles faster.

  Darkness was sweeping down over the land, and with it the first flakes of a coming storm. Beresford had expected this, for earlier in the day he had seen two bright mock suns in the sky. The Indians had told him that these sun dogs were warnings of severe cold and probably a blizzard.

  Out of the edge of the forest a man on snowshoes came. He was moving fast. Beresford, watching him idly, noticed that he toed in. Therefore he was probably a Cree trapper. But the Crees were usually indolent travelers. They did not cover ground as this man was doing.

  The man was an Indian. The soldier presently certified his first guess as to that. But not until the native was almost at the store did he recognize him as Onistah.

  The Blackfoot wasted no time in leading up to what he had to say. “Sleeping Dawn she prisoner of Bully West and Whaley. She say bring her father. She tell me bring him quick”

  Beresford’s body lost its easy grace instantly and became rigid. His voice rang with sharp authority.

  “Where is she?”

  “She at Jasper’s cabin on Cache Creek. She frightened.”

  As though the mention of Sleeping Dawn’s name had reached him by some process of telepathy, Tom Morse had come out and stood in the door of the store. The trooper wheeled to him.

  “Get me a dog-team, Tom. That fellow West has got Jessie McRae with him on Cache Creek. We’ve got to move quick.”

  The storekeeper felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his heart. He glanced up at the lowering night. “Storm brewing. We’ll get started right away.” Without a moment’s delay he disappeared inside the store to make his preparations.

  Onistah carried the news to McRae.

  The blood washed out of the ruddy-whiskered face of the Scot, but his sole comment was a Scriptural phrase of faith. “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken…”

  It was less than half an hour later that four men and a dog-train moved up the main street of Faraway and disappeared in the forest. Morse broke trail and McRae drove the tandem. Onistah, who had already traveled many miles, brought up the rear. The trooper exchanged places with Morse after an hour’s travel.

  They were taking a short-cut and it led them through dead and down timber that delayed the party. Tom was a good axeman, and more than once he had to chop away obstructing logs. At other times by main strength the men lifted or dragged the sled over bad places.

  The swirling storm made it difficult to know where they were going or to choose the best way. They floun
dered through deep snow and heavy underbrush, faces bleeding from the whip of willow switches suddenly released and feet so torn by the straps of the snowshoes that the trail showed stains of blood which had soaked from the moccasins.

  Onistah, already weary, began to lag. They dared not wait for him. There was, they felt, not a moment to be lost. McRae’s clean-shaven upper lip was a straight, grim surface. He voiced no fears, no doubts, but the others knew from their own anxiety how much he must be suffering.

  The gale increased. It drove in bitter blasts of fine stinging sleet. When for a few hundred yards they drew out of the thick forest into an open grove, it lashed them so furiously they could scarcely move in the teeth of it.

  The dogs were whimpering at their task. More than once they stopped, exhausted by the wind against which they were battling. Their eyes turned dumbly to McRae for instructions. He could only drive them back to the trail Morse was breaking.

  The train was one of the best in the North. The leader was a large St. Bernard, weighing about one hundred sixty pounds, intelligent, faithful, and full of courage. He stood thirty-four inches high at his fore shoulder. Not once did Cuffy falter. Even when the others quit, he was ready to put his weight to the load.

  Through the howling of the wind Beresford shouted into the ear of Morse. “Can’t be far now. Question is can we find Jasper’s in this blizzard.”

  Morse shook his head. It did not seem likely. Far and near were words which had no meaning. A white, shrieking monster seemed to be hemming them in. Their world diminished to the space their outstretched arms could reach. The only guide they had was Cache Creek, along the bank of which they were traveling. Jasper’s deserted cabin lay back from it a few hundred yards, but Tom had not any data to tell him when he ought to leave the creek.

  Cuffy solved the problem for him. The St. Bernard stopped, refused the trail Beresford and Morse were beating down in the deep snow. He raised his head, seemed to scent a haven, whined, and tried to plunge to the left.