by Max Brand
There was no sign of Calmont’s train.
All that day we had been going on with the blind dread tapping us between the shoulder blades and making me, at least, feel pretty sick. And when that blanket of white was peeled off from the face of the Yukon, I could have cried, I could have sung, I could have danced, even on my weary legs.
I ran up and clapped Massey on his shoulder — padded with rubbery muscle like a panther’s arm — and told him that we had distanced Calmont.
He listened to me and nodded. “You won’t distance Calmont,” he said. “You may drop him below the skyline, now and then, but you haven’t distanced Calmont as long as he is on the same planet with you.”
You cannot imagine the calmness and the surety with which he said this. Marjorie and I knew that he understood Calmont perfectly, having been such friends with him long ago. We had to take what Massey said for gospel, or just about, and the ecstasy faded out of us instantly.
We kept slogging on, therefore, getting more valuable miles behind us, until Massey advised that we halt and make camp, which he said was what Calmont was probably doing. He pointed out that one very punishing march was likely to dry up our marching power for the next day — dog and man. There was sense in this. My own legs were numb to the hips, and how Marjorie managed to keep up, I never could tell. Her face was pinched with effort, but she had not said a word, and she never asked for a single halt.
We had reached a point where the ice along the bank had broken loose from the ground, so that the deep and swiftly running gutter water did not have to be crossed. It was easy to get up the bank into good camping ground and there, sure enough, we saw the smoke of a fire down the river behind us, a couple of miles away, the thin film rising through the sunshine, for the sun was above the horizon. At midnight, in this season, the sky is bright.
The sight of the camp fire was only a partial consolation. For all that we knew, it might be a bluff under the cover of which they would sneak up behind us; but Massey, always calm, pointed out that this was a game in which we all would have to take a gamester’s chances.
We built our own fire as small and of as dry wood as possible. In this way, little or no smoke rose, except for a puff or two at the beginning, and we cooked the usual meal for ourselves and for the dogs.
Marjorie did her share of the work, her lips still locked over her fatigue. When she had eaten, forcing down the food, she dropped into her sleeping bag and was instantly gone from us.
I was dead enough to want to do the same thing. But I stared across at the bandaged face of Massey and wondered what thoughts were going the rounds in his brain.
I got out his sleeping bag, and he slid into it. Still I waited for a moment beside him, patting Alec’s head and looking down at the set mouth and the iron-hard jaw of my friend.
“Hugh,” I said, “it might be that during the night you’d be tempted to get up and walk away from us. I want you to promise me that you won’t.”
“Go to sleep,” he said, “and don’t bother me.”
“If you won’t promise,” I said, “I’ll have to tie myself to you and then, in case of a surprise, we’ll most certainly be goners.”
His lips twitched a bit. Then he groaned: “All right. Have it your own way.”
I took his hand. “Will you shake on that, Hugh?” I said.
He gritted his teeth, then gave my hand a convulsive grip and turned on his side. It was a great victory for me and a great load off my mind, for I knew that his word of honor was as strong as his punch. He was famous for it.
Then, like a stone dropped from a height, I sank into such a sleep as very few men ever have. No dream could come near me through the thick wall of my utter weariness.
Yet I waked suddenly several hours later and sat up with my heart beating to a wild tune. I thought at first that one of the dogs must have moved, but there was nothing to be seen or heard around us in the ragged woods. Alec got up like a ghost from beside his master and came over to look into my face with his bright, wise eyes.
Outside the tent, the night air was cold, for although the days were bright and warm, the night temperature was always below freezing. The dogs were breathing white as they slept. Rimings of frost appeared on all the twigs and branches around us; the steam of our cookery, I suppose, having condensed there.
I squinted through the brush toward the point at which we had seen the campfire smoke at the end of the day’s march, but of course there was no trace of it now. I wondered what they were doing. Still sleeping soundly, or just turning out and getting ready for the day’s struggle. Alec, walking beside me, turned his head and looked up into my face. He seemed to me to be asking something, and perhaps it was this questioning attitude of his that made me feel that I must do something for my party — and the next instant the perilous idea of what it should be was in my mind.
XIV. UP AND STIRRING
I DETERMINED THAT I would make a solitary march to the camp of the enemies and do what I could to embarrass them in their progress for that day. The idea frightened me cold, but there is a peculiar logic in despair, and I knew that if something were not done, they would most certainly capture us.
Then what?
Massey would probably be butchered before our eyes. My remembrance of the wolfish face of Calmont was enough to assure me of that. And then the girl would go to Calmont, and Alec as well — and as for me? Well, dead boys as well as dead men tell no tales.
However, I was set on going down there and trying my chances.
I did so, though it is hard for me to believe that I could have found the courage for such an effort. I had been a boy up to that moment, but standing there in the arctic night among the frozen willows I became a man in a brief and burning moment of torment. For the definition of manhood, I take it, is that quality which enables people to strike out for themselves, and for those who are near and dear to them.
Well, Marjorie and Hugh Massey were near and dear to me. For her I had an oddly combined feeling of tenderness, pity, and respect. She was so brave and quiet, so gentle and strong, that I loved her with something more than the usual flabby sentimentality of a boy. As for Massey, now that he was blinded and his strength useless to him or to us, I seemed to see him more clearly than ever before. I could not deny that there was a wide strain of brutality in him and that he was capable of great cruelty; but I began to feel that all these bad traits were due to the long-continued hatred which existed between him and Calmont. Hatred is a definite poison in the blood and in the brain. It may sharpen the wits; it may give one the strength of ten; but the wit and the strength of hatred is more than half madness. I was able to see Massey now as one who had long been sick in the brain.
He appeared to me, also, with a new and special dignity, for it did actually seem to me that it was an act of Providence that had blinded him when he was on the verge of a triple killing — into which I would have been dragged almost as a matter of course, and in the course of which he might have gone down himself.
Well, that was behind us. The power was gone from poor Massey, and I saw a ruined life stretching ahead of him.
This, with a curious power, was what drove me on this still, bright night.
I had a good hunting knife, sharp as a razor. That was to be my tool. I thought of taking the revolver with me, but I remembered that I was not much good with that weapon and that, if it came to a shooting scrape, I would have no chance against such a fellow as Calmont, even if there were not two others to support him.
So I started off down the ice of the river, with Alec alongside. Now and then he halted, as though tempted to go back to his master. But, after all, his master was safely sleeping, and adventure lay in the white world of the outdoors. So Alec faithfully went along with me, and I was wonderfully glad to have him.
I could have gone through the woods, but there was a cutting wind that began to blow out of the east, and the bluff of the river gave me a good shelter against it.
It was fully two miles that I travele
d before I found the place where the sleds had turned in to the bank. I went up the trail which they had left slanting up the bank, and I was grateful to the rising force and the whistle of that wind because it made enough of a noise to drown any sounds that I made in approaching.
I stuck my head up over the top of the bluff as carefully as any soldier looking out of a trench with the enemy twenty yards away. Of course there would be a guard, with such an enemy as Massey within twenty miles, to say nothing of two.
And I was right. There sat the guard outside the tent, mending some dog harness with clumsy, mittened hands. I watched him with a sinking heart.
It was not Calmont, but it was a fellow who looked almost as formidable, with a great pair of shoulders and a foolish-looking little head stuck down in the middle of them. I saw the frost on his whiskers and heard him snort a little at the cold, now and then. He seemed a patient sort of a fellow, sitting there at his awl work, pulling the leather lacings through with infinite pains. My heart sank, I say, when I saw him, but I hoped that I would have a chance to give him infinitely more repair work before the morning came.
I think I lay there shuddering with excitement and cold for half an hour. Every minute frightened me more, because it was drawing closer to the time when they would get up and stir about in preparation for their day’s march.
Circle City, according to the calculations of Massey, lay about two days’ march away. We never could get there ahead of the pursuit unless I put a spoke in their wheel, so to speak. So I gritted my teeth and prayed for my chance.
It was there in my sight, but beyond my power, for a moment, to reach. The guard had been reviewing all the dog harness, it seemed, for a big pile of it was beside him.
After a time, the cold got too much for him, and he got up and stuck his head inside the flap of the tent. He withdrew again and, cursing softly beneath his breath, he walked through the willows straight toward the spot where I lay.
This I had not expected. Why, I cannot say. Of course, it was a logical thing for him to go to the edge of the bluff and look up the white face of the river ice, now and again, but that had not occurred to me, and now I dared not move. I had to lie there like a wretched log while this fellow strode up to within five feet of the spot where I lay on the edge of the bluff, with Alec cuddled beside me.
For the first and last time in my life I hated Alec, positively, for his brilliant white coat should have attracted any eye, let alone a sentinel’s.
A moment went by, and then the fellow withdrew from the lookout position at the edge of the bank. Why he did not see us, I cannot tell. I cannot even dream. It was about the worst five seconds of my life, and I can only explain his blindness by the fact that he did not expect to find us there. He paid no more attention to us than a man would to a real emerald in a string of green glass. He marched back to the tent, hesitated, and then, after a glance all about him, he went inside.
I waited for two or three seconds only. Then I cautioned Alec to lie still, and I got up and began to creep forward.
The wind was icing my face, but that was not the coldest part of me. My heart was the thing that turned to stone. The guard might, as I hoped, have gone into the tent to lie down, feeling that further watching was not much good. Or, on the other hand, he might have gone in to waken another man who was to stand the last watch. Or he might be rousing the others to commence the day’s work. Only in the first case would I be fairly safe. In either of the other instances, I would be advancing into a trap.
Well, I was straight in front of that tent and leaning over the pile of the dog harness, when a hand thrust back the flap of the tent. I saw the big, fuzzy mitten that covered the hand, and the sight struck my brain numb. I actually expected the guard to leap out at me.
Instead, the hand disappeared and the flap was allowed to fall again.
Then I understood. He had gone inside to fetch something and, having got it, he now remembered something else. That touch of remembering might be the salvation of Joe May!
I scooped up that harness in one sweep. It was hard with ice, stiff, and actually crackled like fire under my hands; but I slid back through the willows with that trailing armful, with a wild hope in my heart, and a shudder of cold dread in the small of my back, as though eyes were already fixed on me.
I slipped over the edge of the bank a half second before the watcher came out the second time from the tent.
Crouching in my shelter, breathing with a deal of difficulty and biting my lips, I saw him stretch his big arms once or twice. Then I went on down the bank.
It would only be a moment before he noticed the disappearance of the harness, and probably two seconds later before he found my trail.
So I slid down that bank like an otter heading into a pool, and then I streaked up in the shadow of the bluff. Every step that I made was making a bigger margin of safety for me. Guns miss ten times as often at fifty yards as they do at twenty.
I got my fifty yards behind me before I dared to turn and look back.
Still, nothing showed over the edge of the bluff.
On I went. I ran with not quite all my might, because I had two miles before me — and that dreadful weight of trailing, tangling harness in my arms.
Still there was no sound from behind me!
At last, I turned and climbed to the top of the bank again. There I threw down my prize and I began to work with my knife. I sliced and slashed those harnesses to smithereens. I cut them vertically and then across the grain of the straps. Then I threw them away among the bushes. Only one harness I saved, for a use which I’ll tell you about at once.
When I had finished this destruction, I went back to the edge of the bluff, expecting to find three dark forms streaking across the bright face of the ice, but again I was wrong.
I could not understand. If that watcher had sat down where he had been sitting before, of course he would instantly notice what was lacking. But perhaps he began to walk aimlessly up and down.
At any rate, my job was done, and done well, I thought. I got down that bank again to the ice, and there I slipped that harness onto Alec and took hold of the long pull strap myself.
He knew perfectly what I meant. Running home like that, with Alec pulling at a gallop, was a good deal like being blown along by a strong wind. And all the way, turning to look over my shoulder from time to time, I was more and more amazed, more and more delighted to see that no one had come out behind us.
Alec took me home, as I’ve been saying, helped me to climb the bank, and then went into the tent and stuck his cold nose into the neck of Massey.
We had that camp up and stirring in half a minute.
Working furiously, we struck camp. We bundled things loosely onto the sleds. We strung out the dogs, and hustled them out onto the ice.
Great Scott, how my heart jumped and my head grew dizzy when I saw three gigantic silhouettes coming up the river toward us, and not more than a quarter of a mile away.
XV. MARJORIE’S STORY
THEY HAD COME up close in under the bluff, so that we did not see them till the last minute. Then, with yells, we started the dogs. The sleds were very lightly loaded by this time. The dogs could pull them and yank us along, too, at a good clip. But for a few minutes I thought that my legs would give way and that I’d have to fall flat on my face on the ice. Marjorie’s head was back and wobbling from side to side as she raced along, and every breath that she drew was a groan. But finally the pace told on the three men running after us. The first I knew of it was the singing of a bullet past my ear, and then the sharp, thin echo flung after it across the ice.
Other bullets followed. One of the three carried a rifle, and he was kneeling on the ice behind us, taking careful shots.
However, mittens are bad things to shoot in and, besides, every one gets out of practice with guns during the long winter, when there’s little or nothing to shoot at. These bullets went wild. A month later, at the same distance and the same targets, I suppose that very
man would have dropped us, all three; but he missed, and we went around a bend to safety.
We could afford to settle down to a walk, then, and all that day we continued to slog along slowly. We had an enormous start on Calmont, now. Having failed in his spurt to catch us, he would have to go back to the camp, give up a large part of the load that remained, devise some sort of a harness for a few of the dogs, and then strike out after us once more. It was probable that he had some extra leather along but, if he had enough to hitch up more than three or four dogs, he was lucky.
Take it all in all, we had good reason to feel that the danger was over and that we were safe from Calmont from this time forward. We did not talk much about it, but words were not needed to express our relief and our happiness. To make everything perfect, the day was bright and clear and almost hot. We were tired, of course, and traveled very slowly, but that made no difference to us, because we were confident that Calmont was out of the picture. Another trouble, and about the only one we had, was the fact that the ice had been cut pretty thin in places by the action of the water from underneath. Sometimes we could feel the whole surface give under our weight, and a very sickening sensation it was. Sometimes, too, we could see open bits of water under cracks, and everything pointed to the breaking up of the Yukon at once. Well, we hardly cared, for in any case Calmont was lost behind us.
We found a good camping place in the evening and had a hearty meal. Even Massey seemed more cheerful than usual, and actually smiled once or twice. And Alec the Great, always in perfect sympathy with the humans around him, acted like a foolish, great puppy, rolling, pawing, nipping, begging, playing possum, walking on hind legs and front legs, and going through the hundred clowning tricks which Massey had taught him.
After dinner, I helped Marjorie wash and rebandage Massey’s eyes. A frightful sight they were, the balls as red as fire, and all the skin around the eyes badly swollen and inflamed. The burning powder had been enough to scald the outer tough epidermis. Think what it must have done to the exquisite tenderness of the eyeball!