The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  ‘Has Lew gone on?’

  ‘Lew’s gone on. I’ve been over a bit of his trail. He’s not wastin’ time.’

  ‘But the other – my friend – won’t he have followed Lew’s blazes?’

  ‘He wouldn’t notice ’em, being raw. Lew’s blazed a trail for his use on the way back, not for any pal to follow.’

  So this was journey’s end for him – to have traced Galliard to the uttermost parts of the earth only to find him dead. Remembrance of his errand and his original purpose awoke exasperation, and exasperation stirred the dying embers of his vitality.

  ‘Our job is to find Mr Galliard,’ he said. ‘We stay here until we get him dead or alive.’

  Johnny nodded. ‘I guess that’s right, but I’m mighty anxious about brother Lew. Looks like he’s gone haywire.’

  The snow was the trouble, Johnny said. It was disappearing fast under sun and wind, and its melting would obliterate all tracks on soft ground, almost as completely as if it still covered them. He thought that the Hares were better trackers than himself and they might find what he missed. He proposed that Leithen should lie up in camp while he and the Indians went back on yesterday’s trail in the hope of finding the place where the two men had parted.

  Johnny packed some food and in half an hour he and the Hares were climbing the steep side of the glen. Leithen carried his blankets out to a patch which the sun had already dried, and basked in the thin winter sunshine. Oddly enough, Johnny’s news had not made him restless, though it threatened disaster to his journey. He had wanted that journey to succeed, but the mere finding of Galliard would not spell success, or the loss of him failure. Success lay in his own spirit. A slight increase of bodily comfort had given him also a certain spiritual ease. This sun was good, though soon for him it would not rise again.

  The search-party did not return until the brief twilight. Johnny, as he entered the tent, shook his head dolefully.

  ‘No good, mister. We’ve found where the other feller quit the trail – them Hares are demons at that game. Just what I expected – up on the barrens where there ain’t no trees to blaze and brother Lew had got out of sight. But after that we couldn’t pick up no trail. He might have gone left or he might have gone right, but anyhow he must have gone down into the woods. So we started to beat out the woods, each of us takin’ a line, but we’ve struck nothin’. Tomorrow we’ll have another try. I reckon he can’t have gone far, for he’s dead lame. He must be lyin’ up somewhere and starvin’.’

  Johnny counted on his fingers.

  ‘Say, look! He’s been three days quit of Lew – he’s dead lame, and I reckon he wasn’t carryin’ more’n his own weight – if he didn’t catch up with Lew at night he didn’t have no food – maybe he wasn’t able to make fire – maybe he didn’t carry more’n one blanket – if he’s alive he’s mighty cold and mighty hungry.’

  He was silent until he went to bed, a certain proof of anxiety.

  ‘This sure is one hell of a business,’ he said as he turned in. ‘Lew kind of mad and streakin’ off into space, and his pal aimin’ to be a corpse. It’s enough to put a man off his feed.’

  11

  JOHNNY and the Hares were off at dawn next morning. The weather was mild, almost stuffy, and there had been little frost in the night. Leithen sat outside the tent, but there was no sun to warm him, only a grey misty sky which bent low on the hills. He was feeling his weakness again, and with it came a deep depression of spirit. The wilds were brutal, inhuman, the abode of horrid cruelty. They had driven one man mad and would be the death of another. Not much comfort for Felicity Galliard in his report – ‘Discovered where your man had gone. Followed him and found him dead.’ That report would be carried by Johnny some time down into the civilised places, and cabled to New York, signed with the name of Leithen. But he would not see Felicity’s grief, for long before then he would be out of the world.

  In the afternoon the weather changed. The heavens darkened and suddenly burst into a lace-work of lightning. It was almost like the aurora, only it covered the whole expanse of sky. From far away there was a kind of muttering, but there were no loud thunder peals. After an hour it ceased and a little cold wind came out of the west. This was followed by a torrential rain, the heaviest Leithen had ever seen, which fell not in sheets but with the solid three dimensions of a cataract. In five minutes the hillside was running with water and the floor of the tent was a bog. In half an hour the brook below was a raving torrent. The downpour ceased and was followed by a burst of sunshine from a pale lemon sky, and a sudden sharpening of the air. Johnny had spoken of this; he had said that the winter would not properly be on them until they had the father and mother of a thunderstorm and the last rains.

  Leithen pulled on his gum-bots and went out for a breath of air. The hill was melting under him, and only by walking in the thicker patches of fern and berries could he find decent foothold. Somehow his depression had lifted with the passing of the storm, and in the sharp air his breath came easier. It was arduous work walking in that tangle. ‘I had better not go far,’ he told himself, ‘or I’ll never get home. Not much chance for Johnny and the Indians after such a downpour.’

  He turned to look back … There seemed to be a lumbering body at the door of the tent trying to crawl inside. A bear, no doubt. If the brute got at the food there would be trouble. Leithen started to slither along the hillside, falling often, and feeling his breath run short.

  The thing was inside. He had closed the door-flap before leaving, and now he tore it back to let in the light. The beast was there, crouching on its knees on the muddy floor. It was a sick beast, for it seemed to nuzzle the ground and emit feeble groans and gasps of pain. A bear! It’s hinder parts were one clot of mud, but something like a ragged blanket seemed to be round its middle. The head! The head looked like black fur, and then he saw that this was a cap and that beneath it was shaggy human hair.

  The thing moaned, and then from it came a sound which, though made by dry lips, was articulate speech.

  ‘Frizelle!’ it said. ‘Oh, Frizelle! … pour l’amour de Dieu!’

  12

  IT took all Leithen’s strength to move Galliard from the floor to his bed. He folded a blanket and put it under his head. Then he undid the muffler at his throat and unbuttoned the shirt. The man’s lips were blue and sore, and his cheeks were shrunk with hunger and fatigue. He seemed to be in pain, for as he lay on his back he moaned and screwed up his eyes. His wits were dulled in a stupor, and, apart from his first muttered words, he seemed to be unconscious of his environment.

  Leithen mixed a little brandy and tinned milk and forced it between his lips. It was swallowed and immediately vomited. So he lit the stove and put on the kettle to boil, fetching water from the nearby spring. The moaning continued as if the man were in pain, and he remembered that Johnny had guessed at a wounded foot. The sight of another mortal suffering seemed to give Leithen a certain access of strength. He found himself able to undo Galliard’s boots, and it was no light task, for they were crusted thick with mud. The left one had been sliced open like a gouty man’s shoe, to give ease to a wound in his shin, a raw, ragged gash which looked like an axe cut. Before the boot could be removed the moaning had several times changed to a gasp of pain. Leithen made an attempt to wash the wound, and bound it up with a handkerchief, which was all he had in the way of a bandage. That seemed to give Galliard relief, and the moaning ceased.

  The kettle was boiling and he made tea. Galliard tried to take the pannikin, but his hands were shaking so that Leithen had to feed him like a child. He swallowed all that he did not spill and seemed to want more. So Leithen tried him again with brandy and milk, the milk this time thinned and heated. Now two brown eyes were staring at him, eyes in which consciousness was slowly dawning. The milk was drunk and Galliard lay for a little blinking at the tent wall. Then his eyes closed and he slept.

  Leithen laid himself down on Johnny’s mattress and looked at the shapeless heap which had
been the object of his quest. There was the tawny beard which he had come to expect, but for the rest – it was unfamiliar wreckage. Little in common had it with the gracious portrait in the Park Avenue hall, or the Nattier, or the Aubusson carpet, or Felicity’s rose-and-silver drawing-room. This man had chosen the wilderness, and now the wilderness had taken him and tossed him up like the jetsam of a flood.

  There was no satisfaction for Leithen in the fact that he had been successful in his search. By an amazing piece of luck he had found Galliard and in so doing had achieved his purpose. But now the purpose seemed trivial. Was this derelict of so great importance after all? The unaccustomed bending in his handling of Galliard had given him a pain in his back, and the smell of the retched brandy and milk sickened him. He felt a desperate emptiness in his body, in his soul, and in the world.

  It was almost dark when Johnny and the Hares returned. Leithen jerked his thumb towards the sleeping Galliard. Johnny nodded.

  ‘I sort of suspicioned he’d be here. We got his tracks, but lost them in the mud. The whole darned hill is a mud-slide.’ He spoke slowly and flatly, as if he were very tired.

  But his return set the little camp going, and Leithen realised what a blundering amateur he was compared with Johnny and the Indians. In a few minutes a fire was crackling before the tent door. Galliard, still in a coma, was lifted and partly unclothed, and his damaged leg was washed and rebandaged by Johnny with the neatness of a hospital nurse. The tent was tidied up and supper was set cooking – coffee on the stove and caribou steaks on the fire. Johnny concocted a dish of his own for the sick man, for he made a kind of chicken broth from a brace of willow grouse he had shot.

  ‘You’d better eat,’ he said. ‘We’ll feed the soup to that feller when he wakes. Best let him sleep a little longer. How you feelin’ yourself? When I come in you looked mighty bad.’

  ‘I found Galliard more than I could manage; but never mind me. What about him?’

  Johnny’s bat’s ears seemed to prick up as he bent over the sleeping figure. He was like a gnome in a fairy-tale; but he was human enough when he turned to Leithen, and the glow of the fire showed his troubled blue eyes.

  ‘He’ll come through a’ right,’ he said. ‘He’s been a healthy man and he ain’t bottomed his strength yet. But he’s plumb weary. He can’t have fed proper for three days, and I reckon he can’t have slept proper for a week.’

  ‘The wound?’

  ‘Nasty cut he’s got, and he’ll have to watch his self if he don’t want to go lame all his days. He can’t move for a good spell.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Ten days – a fortnight – maybe more.’

  Leithen had the appetite of a bird, but Johnny was ordinarily a good trencherman. Tonight, however, he ate little, though he emptied the coffee-pot. His mind was clearly on his brother, but Leithen asked no questions. At last, after half an hour’s sucking at his pipe, he spoke.

  ‘I figure that him’ – and he nodded towards Galliard – ‘and brother Lew has been agreein’ about as well as a carcajou and a sick b’ar. Lew’d gotten into a bad mood and this poor soul didn’t know what the matter was, and got no answer when he asked questions. But he was bound to hang on to Lew or get lost and perish. Pretty nasty time he’s been havin’. Lew’s been actin’ mighty mean, I’d say. But you can’t just blame Lew, for, as I figure it, he don’t know what he’s doin’. He ain’t seein’ his pal, he ain’t seein’ nothin’ except the trail he’s blazin’ and somethin’ at the end of it’.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The old Sick Heart River.’

  ‘Then he’s gone mad?’

  ‘You might say so. And yet Lew for ordinar’ is as sane as you, mister, and a darn lot saner than me. He’s gotten a vision and he’s bound to go after it.’

  ‘What’s to be done?’

  ‘Our first job is to get this feller right. That was the reason you come down North, wasn’t it? Every man’s got to skin his own skunk. But I don’t mind tellin’ you I’m worried to death about brother Lew.’

  The attention of both was suddenly diverted to Galliard, who had woke up, turned on his side, and was looking at them with wide-awake eyes – pained eyes, too, as if he had awakened to suffering. Johnny took the pannikin of soup which had been heating on the stove, and began to feed the sick man, feeding him far more skilfully than Leithen had done, so that little was spilt. The food seemed to revive him and ease his discomfort. He lay back for a little, staring upward, and then he spoke.

  His voice was hoarse, little above a croak. Johnny bent over him to catch his words. He shook his head.

  ‘It’s French, but Godamighty knows what he means. It don’t sound sense to me.’

  Leithen dragged himself nearer. The man was repeating some form of words like a litany, repeating it again and again, so that the same phrase kept recurring. To his amazement he recognised it as a quotation from Chateaubriand, which had impressed him long ago and which had stuck to his fly-paper memory.

  ‘S’il est parmi les anges,’ the voice said, ‘comme parmi des hommes, des campagnes habitées et des lieux déserts.’

  There was a pause. Certain phrases followed, ‘Solitudes de la terre,’ ‘Solitudes célestes.’ Then the first sentence was repeated. Galliard spoke the words in the slurred patois of Quebec, sounding harshly the final consonants.

  ‘He is quoting a French writer who lived a century ago,’ Leithen told Johnny. ‘It’s nonsense. Something about the solitary places of heaven.’

  Galliard was speaking again. It was a torrent of habitant French and his voice rose to a pitch which was almost a scream. The man was under a sudden terror, and he held out imploring hands which Johnny grasped. The latter could follow the babble better than Leithen, but there was no need of an interpreter, for the pain and fear in the voice told their own tale. Then the fit passed, the eyes closed, and Galliard seemed to be asleep again.

  Johnny shook his head. ‘Haywire,’ he said. ‘Daft – and I reckon I know the kind of daftness. He’s mortal scared of them woods. You might say the North’s gotten on his mind.’

  ‘But it was a craze for the North that dragged him here.’

  ‘Yep, but having gotten here he’s scared of it. His mind’s screwed right round. It’s a queer thing, the North, and you need to watch your step for fear it does you down. This feller was crazy for it till he poked his head a wee bit inside, and now he’s scared out of his life, and would give his soul to quit. I’ve known it happen before. Folks come down here thinking the North’s a pretty lady, and find that she can be a cruel, bloody-minded old bitch, and they scurry away from her like jack-rabbits from a forest fire. I’ve seen them as had had a taste of her ugly side, and ever after the stink of smoke-dried Indian moccasins, and even the smell of burning logs, would turn out their insides … I reckon this feller’s had a pretty purifyin’ taste of it. Ever been lost?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Well, it ain’t nice, and it tests a man’s guts.’

  The air sharpened in the night and the little tent with its three occupants was not too stuffy. Galliard never stirred. Johnny had the short sound slumbers of a woodman, waking and rising before dawn; but Leithen slept badly. He had found his man, but he was a lunatic – for the time being. His task now was to piece together the broken wits. It seemed to him a formidable and unwelcome business. Could a dying man minister to a mind diseased? He would have preferred his old job – to go on spending his bodily strength till he had reached the end of it. That would, at any rate, have given him peace to make his soul.

  Johnny set the camp stirring and was everywhere at once, like a good housewife. Galliard was washed and fed and his wound dressed. Leithen found that he had more power in his legs, and was able to make a short promenade of the shelf on which the camp stood, breathing air which was chilly as ice and scented with a thousand miles of pines. Johnny and the Hares were busy with measurements.

  Leithen, huddled in the lee of the fire, watched t
he men at work. They were laying out the ground plan of a hut. It was to be built against the hillside, the gravel of which, when cut away, would make its back wall, and it seemed to be about twenty feet square. The Hares did the levelling of the shelf, and presently came the sound of Johnny’s axe from the woods. In a couple of hours the four corner posts were cut, trimmed, and set up, and until the midday meal all three were busy felling well-grown spruce and pine.

  Johnny’s heavy preoccupation lightened a little as they ate.

  ‘We need a hut whatever happens,’ he said. ‘The feller’ – that was how he referred to Galliard – ‘will want something snugger than a tent when the cold sets in, for he ain’t goin’ to get well fast. Then there’s you, a mighty sick man. And, please God, there’ll be brother Lew.’

  ‘Is there no way of getting back to the Hares’ camp?’

  ‘For Lew and me – not for you and the feller. We got to plan to spend the winter here, or hereabouts. We can send the Indians back for stores and dog teams, and maybe we could get out in February when the good snows come. But we got to plan for the winter. I can fix up a tidy hut, and when we get the joints nicely chinked up with mud, and plenty of moss and sods on the roof, we’ll be as snug as an old b’ar in its hole. I’m aimin’ to fix a proper fireplace inside, for there’s the right kind of clay in the creek for puddlin’.’

  ‘Let me help.’

  ‘You can’t do nothin’ yet, so long as we’re on the heavy jobs, but I’ll be glad of you when it comes to the inside fixin’. You get into the tent beside the feller and sleep a bit. I’m all right if I wasn’t worried about Lew.’

  Johnny was attending to the bodily needs of the sick man like a hospital nurse, feeding him gruel and chicken broth and weak tea. Galliard slept most of the time, and even his waking hours were a sort of coma. He was asleep when Leithen entered the tent, and presently, to the accompaniment of Johnny’s axe in the woods, Leithen himself drowsed off, for by this time of the day he was very weary. But sleep was for him the thinnest of films over the waking world and presently he was roused by Galliard’s voice. This time it sounded familiar, something he had heard before, and not the animal croak of yesterday.