by Unknown
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 white 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.
Jessie was not there. He waited half an hour in growing anxiety before he went to meet her. Night would fall soon. He must find her while it was still light enough to follow her tracks. The disasters that might have fallen upon her crowded his mind. A bear might have attacked her. She might be lost or tangled in the swampy muskeg. Perhaps she had accidentally shot herself.
As swiftly as he could he
snowshoed through the forest, following the plain trail she had left. It carried him to a trap from which she had taken prey, for it was newly baited and the snow was sprinkled with blood. Before he reached the second gin, the excitement in him quickened. Some one in snowshoes had cut her path and had deflected to pursue. Onistah knew that the one following was a white man. The points of the shoes toed out. Crees toed in, just the same on webs as in moccasins.
His imagination was active. What white man had any business in these woods? Why should he leave that business to overtake Jessie McRae? Onistah did not quite know why he was worried, but involuntarily he quickened his pace.
Less than a quarter of a mile farther on, he read another chapter of the story written in the trampled snow. There had been a struggle. His mistress had been overpowered. He could see where she had been flung into a white bank and dragged out of it. She had tried to run and had got hardly a dozen yards before recapture. From that point the tracks moved forward in a straight line, those of the smaller webs blotted out by the ones made by the larger. The man was driving the girl before him.
Who was he? Where was he taking her? For what purpose? Onistah could not guess. He knew that McRae had made enemies, as any forceful character on the frontier must. The Scotchman had kicked out lazy ne'er-do-wells from his camp. As a free trader he had matched himself against the Hudson's Bay Company. But of those at war with him few would stoop to revenge themselves on his daughter. The Blackfoot had not heard of the recent trouble between Whaley and the McRaes, nor had the word reached him that Bully West was free again. Wherefore he was puzzled at what the signs on the snow told him.
Yet he knew he had read them correctly. The final proof of it to him was that Jessie broke trail and not the man. If he were a friend he would lead the way. He was at her heels because he wanted to make sure that she did not try to escape or to attack him.
The tracks led down into the muskeg. It was spitting snow, but he had no difficulty in seeing where the trail led from hummock to hummock in the miry earth. The going here was difficult, for the thick moss was full of short, stiff brush that caught the webbed shoes and tripped the traveler. It was hard to find level footing. The mounds were uneven, and more than once Onistah plunged knee-deep from one into the swamp.
He crossed the muskeg and climbed an ascent into the woods, swinging sharply to the right. There was no uncertainty as to the direction of the tracks in the snow. If they veered for a few yards, it was only to miss a tree or to circle down timber. Whoever he might be, the man who had taken Jessie prisoner knew exactly where he was going.
The Blackfoot knew by the impressions of the webs that he was a large, heavy man. Once or twice he saw stains of tobacco juice on the snow. The broken bits of a whiskey-bottle flung against a tree did not tend to reassure him.
He saw smoke. It came from a tangle of undergrowth in a depression of the forest. Very cautiously, with the patience of his race, he circled round the cabin through the timber and crept up to it on hands and knees. Every foot of the way he took advantage of such cover as was to be had.
The window was a small, single-paned affair built in the end opposite the door. Onistah edged close to it and listened. He heard the drone of voices, one heavy and snarling, another low and persuasive.
His heart jumped at the sound of a third voice, a high-pitched treble. He would have known it among a thousand. It had called to him in the swirl of many a wind-swept storm. He had heard it on the long traverse, in the stillness of the lone night, at lakeside camps built far from any other human being. His imagination had heard it on the summer breeze as he paddled across a sun-drenched lake in his birch-bark canoe.
The Blackfoot raised his head till he could look through the window.
Jessie McRae sat on a stool facing him. Two men were in the room. One strode heavily up and down while the other watched him warily.
CHAPTER XXI
ON THE FRONTIER OF DESPAIR
The compulsion of life had denied Jessie the niceness given girls by the complexities of modern civilization. She had been brought up close to raw stark nature. The habits of animals were familiar to her and the vices of the biped man.
A traveler in the sub-Arctic is forced by the deadly cold of the North into a near intimacy of living with his fellows. Jessie had more than once taken a long sled journey with her father. On one occasion she had slept in a filthy Indian wigwam with a dozen natives all breathing the same foul, unventilated air. Again she had huddled up against the dogs, with her father and two French half-breeds, to keep in her the spark of life a blizzard's breath was trying to blow out.
On such a trip some of the common decencies of existence are dropped. The extreme low temperature makes it impossible for one to wash either face or hands without the skin chapping and breaking. Food at which one would revolt under other circumstances is devoured eagerly.
Jessie was the kind of girl such a life had made her, with modifications in the direction of fineness induced by McRae's sturdy character, her schooling at Winnipeg, and the higher plane of the family standard. As might have been expected, she had courage, energy, and that quality of decisive action bred by primitive conditions.
But she had retained, too, a cleanness of spirit hardly to be looked for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts of goodness and beauty while bestiality crossed the path she trod.
So when she found in one of the gins a lynx savage with the pain of bruised flesh and broken bone snapped by the jaws of the trap, the girl did what needed to be done swiftly and with a minimum of reluctance.
She was close to the second trap when the sound of webs slithering along the snow brought her up short. Her first thought was that Onistah had changed his mind and followed her, but as soon as the snowshoer came out of the thick timber, she saw that he was not an Indian.
He was a huge man, and he bulked larger by reason of the heavy furs that enveloped him. His rate of travel was rapid enough, but there was about the gait an awkward slouch that reminded her of a grizzly. Some sullenness of temperament seemed to find expression in the fellow's movements.
The hood of his fur was drawn well forward over the face. He wore blue glasses, as a protection against snow-blindness apparently. Jessie smiled, judging him a tenderfoot; for except in March and April there is small danger of the sun glare which destroys sight. Yet he hardly looked like a newcomer to the North. For one thing he used the web shoes as an expert does. Before he stopped beside her, she was prepared to revise a too hasty opinion.
Jessie recoiled at the last moment, even before she recognized him. It was too late to take precautions now. He caught her by the wrist and tore off his glasses, at the same time shaking back the hood.
"Glad to death to meet up with you, missie," he grinned evilly through broken, tobacco-stained teeth.
The blood drenched out of her heart. She looked at the man, silent and despairing. His presence here could mean to her nothing less than disaster. The girl's white lips tried to frame words they could not utter.
"Took by surprise, ain't you?" he jeered. "But plumb pleased to see old Bully West again, eh? It's a damn long lane that ain't got a crook in it somewheres. An' here we are at the turn together, jus' you'n' me, comfy, like I done promised it would be when I last seen you."
She writhed in a swift, abortive attempt to break his hold.
He threw back his head in a roar of laughter, then with a twist of his fingers brought his captive to the knees.
Sharp teeth flashed in a gleam of white. He gave a roar of pain and tore away his hand. She had bit him savagely in the wrist, as she had once done with another man on a memorable occasion.
"Goddlemighty!" he bellowed. "You damn li'l' hell-cat!"
She was on her feet and away instantly. But one of the snowshoes had co
me off in the struggle. At each step she took the left foot plunged through the white crust and impeded progress.
In a dozen strides he had reached her. A great arm swung round and buffeted the runner on the side of the head. The blow lifted the girl from her feet and flung her into a drift two yards away.
She looked up, dazed from the shock. The man was standing over her, a huge, threatening, ill-shaped Colossus.
"Get up!" he ordered harshly, and seized her by the shoulder.
She found herself on her feet, either because she had risen or because he had jerked her up. A ringing in the head and a nausea made for dizziness.
"I'll learn you!" he exploded with curses. "Try that again an' I'll beat yore head off. You're Bully West's woman, un'erstand? When I say 'Come!' step lively. When I say 'Go!' get a move on you."