The iron door slammed behind them; the damp odour of fog came from the black street. Lynde buried his head in his hands; McManus leaned heavily on the bar, pale as a corpse. Presently I heard the sound of rustling paper.
It was Penlow, tearing up his pad.
THE LITTLE MISERY
If you be dead also and are come hither to join us, I pity your lot, for you will be stunned with the noise of the dwarfs and the storks.
VATHEK.
I.
THERE was a river-driver beyond the Northwest Carry who respected neither moose nor man. Because he was the best river-driver on the West Branch they let him alone until he struck an Indian with a pick-pole.
The Indian’s head was damaged and while he waited for it to heal, he selected his revenge. His revenge was simple and effective. He hunted up the moose-warden and told many lies. Deftly concealed among these lies, however, was a truth that infuriated the warden.
The river-driver, whose name was Skeene, sat on his haunches and sneered when the moose-warden glided into camp. But when he dug out a head and antlers behind a shanty, Skeene picked up his rifle, looked obliquely at the moose-warden, tied his blanket and fry-pan, hoisted his canoe onto his head, and walked away to the southward, still sneering.
I don’t know what they said about it in Foxcroft, but Hale, who owned the timber, and who thought he owned Skeene, hunted him up and sent him to work on the new cut-off, hoping the affair might blow over in time for Skeene to drive logs again. But Skeene turned lazy and lined the dead water with traps and set-lines, and when Hale remonstrated, Skeene laughed. Then Hale threatened him and hinted about moose-wardens, and $500 fines, but Skeene thrashed Hale before the whole camp, packed his kit and canoe, and paddled serenely away down the West Branch.
That really began the trouble, for Hale never forgave him. When Skeene started to guide for Henderson on the upper Portage, Hale heard of it and ran him out. That, of course, marked him among the guides in the lake-country, and Skeene perhaps felt the ostracism, for he quietly went to work for Colby on the new sluice that ran from the carry-pond to the lake. Possibly, if they had let him alone, he might have turned out as tame as a moose-bird, — he was only twenty-three, — but Hale remembered, and the Indian remembered, and one day a man came in to the Carry Camp with a forty-four bullet in his wrist and an unserved warrant in his pocket. The man was a moose-warden, and the warrant was for Skeene.
When the news spread that Skeene had shot a warden, the guides from Portage to Lily-Bay condemned him. Down at Greenville a sheriff and posse boarded the “Katahdin,” and spent several weeks cruising about at public expense. The lake steamboat was comfortable, the food good, and the sheriff and posse were in no hurry to quit. Possibly they expected Skeene to come down to the shore and sit on the rocks; perhaps they fancied he might paddle across their bows in his sleep. Naturally he did neither. When at length somebody suggested that the sheriff and posse take to their canoes, that official steamed back to the foot of the lake in a huff, and presently the rumours of Skeene’s misdoings became scarcely more definite than campfire gossip.
Perhaps even then, if they had given him a chance, he might have surrendered and taken his punishment, but they didn’t give him the chance. A warden saw him building a lean-to, on the island that divides the West Branch. The warden waited until dark, crawled in outside the fire, and caught Skeene asleep. That is all the warden recollects, merely that he caught Skeene asleep. What Skeene did to the warden when he awoke, the official cannot remember distinctly.
Three weeks after that, Skeene walked into Kineo store, handling his rifle in a most alarming fashion. He suggested that they place certain provisions and ammunition in his canoe, which lay on the beach below. The three clerks complied with an enthusiasm borne of fright. Twenty minutes later Skeene, in his canoe, was seen making for Moose River. Two guides, just from Lily Bay, refused to fire at him, arguing it was not right to drown a man for stealing pork and powder. The hotel had not yet opened, and the people at the annex objected to a man-hunting trip, so they only notified the sheriff again and secretly wished Skeene in hell.
Of course, at the hotels they denied the very existence of Skeene; but the Bangor “News” printed the story, and people fought shy of Moose River and the lake beyond which is called Red Lake. In vain the guides declared the region safe. It was safe as far as they were concerned. It is not the nature of a guide — that is, a white guide — to inform on or interfere with any man. Skeene let them alone. The Indians, too, paddled about Red Lake when they wanted to. The Indian log-driver, however, stayed away after Skeene had shot a hole in his canoe. The canoe being bark, it was through Providence and a patch of gum that the log-driving half-breed ever paddled out of the mouth of Moose River.
Now if they had not started to hunt Skeene from the Lakes, he would never have troubled anybody, except possibly Hale and the half-breed. He went to Canada for a year, worked at anything that came along, and sent money to Kineo store to pay for his pork and powder. That, of course, won him the guides again. So when home-sickness drove him back to Red Lake, he expected to be let alone. Hale, sluicing at the Northwest Carry, heard he had returned, and started for Red Lake with the log-driving half-breed and six men. Two days later they returned; Hale had a bullet in his leg above the knee and the half-breed carried a similar gift in his forearm.
This incident, while relieving the conversational monotony at camp and landing, bothered the sheriff cruelly. He went to Foxcroft where they said unpleasant things to him; he went back to the Landing and they made fun of him.
There was a captain on the lake named Snow, — a white-bearded, mild-eyed giant. When the local paper wanted an item it filled in with, “Extraordinary weather on the Lake in July! Steamboat ‘Red-Deer’ in port with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot house!”
The sheriff went to see Snow, and, after a long confab, summoned his posse, boarded the Red-Deer, and left Greenville, as the local paper expressed it, “under sealed orders, bound for Moose River.” Naturally, half a dozen canoes were aboard, some lying bottom upward on the superstructure, some lashed to the rail. The posse carried Winchesters, although no game was in season.
Off the Grey Gull, an island, the little steamboat slowed down and stopped, the canoes were hoisted over the rail and dropped; the posse embarked. The sheriff said good-bye in a voice made loud by nervousness, and the Red-Deer swung about and steamed back to the foot of the lake with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot-house.
At the mouth of Moose River two more canoes were waiting; Hale sat in one, paddle glistening in the pale spring sunshine; in the other sat the Indian log-driver, nursing the hammer of a rifle.
Below the long ridge the water is nearly dead, although a canoe might drift to the point in twenty-four hours. It was paddling for a mile to the first wing-dam, and there, the sheriff, who led, flung his stern-paddle into the bottom of the canoe, flourished the setting-pole, and stood up. At the same moment a jet of flame leaped from the edge of the wing-dam and a bullet passed through the sheriff’s hat. The amazed official promptly fell overboard, sank, rose, grasped the edge of the canoe, and swamped it, turning the bow-paddler into the river. The swift current landed them on a shoal before the sheriff could shriek more than twice, and they crawled up on a rock, sleek and wet as half drowned flies in a sap-pan.
The other canoes had halted; some of the posse waved their rifles, but nobody fired at the wing-dam except Hale. He banged away as fast as he could pump the breach-lever, and Billy Sebato, the Indian, took to the bushes and lay patiently waiting for a mark, purring with eagerness.
“Jim Skeene, you darned thief!” shouted Hale, “come out from them stones! Jest you come out on to that there wing-dam once!”
Above the rush and gurgle of the river they heard Skeene’s voice: “You let me be or I’ll shoot to kill!”
“Thief! Thief!” yelled Hale, dancing in his seat with anger, until the canoe heeled and almost swamped.
“I ain’t no more thief than you be, Josh Hale!” bawled Skeene, “I paid for them rations and cartridges and you know damn well I did!” Before he could add anything, the Indian, Sebato, fired twice.
“If that nigger Sebato don’t quit shootin’ I’ll let loose on all o’ ye!” called Skeene, shaking his rifle above the wing-darn edge. “Git back to your dreen, Josh Hale, I tell you.”
Hale had reloaded his magazine, and now, swinging his setting-pole with one hand, started to push his canoe among the rocks where he could hold it and fire under cover. Skeene evidently saw him for he slid suddenly to the corner of the wing-dam and fired three shots through the canoe, cutting a swale lengthwise at the water’s edge.
“Oh, you sneaky bob-cat!” yelled Hale, white with rage. In another moment he was working cup and sponge to bail his canoe, which swung away on the current and drifted broadside across the sandbar below, where it settled in two feet of limpid water.
“Now’ll you let me be?” called Skeene. “I hain’t done nothin’ to you. If that there moosewarden wants me let him come and get me. Ain’t you ashamed to go huntin’ a man like a Lucivee? I tell ye I’ll shoot to kill, b’ God I will, at the next man that fires!”
“You dasn’t,” shouted the sheriff from behind his rock; “you ain’t half a man, Jim Skeene!”
“I be,” said Skeene calmly, “but I don’t want no fuss. You keep off’n this river, and you keep off’n this here wing-dam. And you stop sneakin’ along the woods there, Billy Sebato! Git back there! Git back, or I’ll shoot to kill!”
“You’ll hang if you do!” bawled the sheriff. “Then tell that nigger Indian to git back! Tell him quick! I see him — I—”
Sebato’s rifle cracked, and the shot was repeated by Hale, wading out on the shoal. Then a forked flame flashed from the wing-darn, there came a crash and crackle of dry twigs, and the Indian pitched heavily over the bank into the swirling river.
The echoes of the shots died out among the trees; for a minute the gurgle of the river ripple alone troubled the stillness. A kingfisher wheeled up stream, the sun flashing on his blue wings; a fish soused in a calm pool below the dam. Presently the changed voice of the sheriff broke the silence: “Jim Skeene, God help you, you’ll swing for this.” Skeene’s pale face appeared above the dam, but nobody shot at him.
“You drove me to it,” said Skeene. He spoke huskily. “I told him to git back, — I warned him to quit sneakin’ up on me.”
“Come down off’n that wing-dam,” commanded Hale.
“Not for you, Josh Hale,” replied Skeene, “nor not for any man o’ ye! An’ I won’t be took neither. I’m goin’ away to live quiet if they let me.”
He crouched and watched them as they pushed their canoes out into the main channel. The sheriff and Hale advanced to the pool where Sebato lay.
A slender fillet of blood, a mere thread hung in the water just below the surface, and stretched out, following the current, floating like a red string.
“Bring them settin’-poles,” said the sheriff soberly, “paddles won’t stand the heft, an’ he’s hefty.” Hale suddenly turned, snarling at the wing-dam; “Jim Skeene, you sneakin’muskrat!—” he said; but Skeene was gone when Hale’s bullet stung the rock above.
II.
They gave Skeene little peace for two months. Week after week a string of canoes passed the swift water under the first and second wing-dams, poled to the point-trail, and, disembarking a file of riflemen, poled on again to the discharge at Red Lake. Week after week the distant flash of a paddle startled the deer at sunrise among the lily-pads. At evening, too, silent canoes stealing through the sedge-grass, roused the great blue herons from their heavenward contemplation and sent the sheldrake scuttling and splashing across shoal water with a noise like a churning twinscrew.
But they did not catch Skeene.
Once they saw him for a moment standing in the stern of his canoe. The canoe lay at the mouth of the Little Misery, that dead stretch of water and dead-fall, winding through the bog to the southward. They gave chase, trailing Skeene’s canoe by the wake bubbles until they ran plump into quick water.
But the Little Misery is a strange stream draining a strange land, and there, in that maze of cuts and channels, of “logans” and quick water, of swamp, shoal, sedge, and spectral ranks of dead trees, towering above swale and deadwood, they stood no more chance of flushing Skeene than a caribou has of raising three fawns in a season.
What he did with his canoe nobody might know. Certainly he left the main channel. Did he himself hide in the bog or dead-falls? Where do young sandpipers vanish on a shingle beach? Oh there were sounds in the swamp as the sheriff’s posse steered through the even with silent paddle, — sounds that stir only in lonely places, faint splashes, a sound of a swirl in still water, the breeze in the swale-grass.
And so they hunted Skeene at twilight, at dusk of morning, at high noon, from the Northeast Carry to the Northwest Carry, from the West-Branch to Seboomook, from Portage to Lily Bay, and through a hundred miles of lake and stream, up and down, up and down. But Moose River bore no tales on its placid breast, and the wing-dams towered silent as twin Sphinxes, and the sounds that startled the silence where the Little Misery coils through the strange country, are mysteries even to those who interpret them.
It was in May that the ice went out, in company with Skeene; it was in July that they felt the bite of his bullets below the wing-dam; it was in August that they gave up the chase.
That evening, Skeene stood on a wind-fall in the depths of the Little Misery and watched three canoes file out of the discharge and glide into the swift water of Moose River. The next morning he started a lean-to on the ridge back of the Little Misery, and the sharp crack and thwack of his axe rang out over Red Lake. At sunrise a moose-cow heard it and ploughed hastily shoreward through the lily-pads with an ouf! woof! ouf! as she struck the pebbles on the beach. One by one the great blue herons flapped up from the dead pines, circled, sailed, and turned over to pitch head downwards into the sedge with dull cries.
At noon the echoes of axe-strokes died away and the hut was thatched with balsam, blue side skyward. By three o’clock a spike buck, a yearling, lay across a log on the ridge, and at four o’clock Skeene had satisfied his hunger.
He sat on the shore under the ridge, pensively picking his white teeth with the enjoyment of the abandoned. Across the lake the mountains turned to sapphire and ashes; a pale sky deepened into flame colour; the sun hung a globe of crimson in gilded mist.
One by one the last sunbeams reddened the trunks of the trees to the eastward, the foliage burned, the shore line glimmered. Like changing hues on a bubble, the colours deepened, and played over the placid lake. A single snowy bank of cloud, piled up in the east, glowed where the sun stained its edges. The midges danced above the sedge; the lake-wash rocked the swales, to and fro, to and fro.
A trout broke in shallow water, flapped up and splashed again, and the red sky crimsoned the widening rings, spreading slowly shoreward.
In the days that followed, Skeene learned to talk to himself. When he did this he forgot that he had killed Sebato; after a while he forgot it altogether.
When the August afternoons were ablaze with brazen sunlight and the lake glistened like a sheet of steel, Skeene sprawled on a log in the shade and watched the great blue herons. When they “drove stakes” he mocked them with the same note until they answered “Ke-whack! Ke-whack! Ke-whack!” The red squirrel’s thin treble he imitated; he called the chipmunks with a tsip! tsip! and laughed until his white teeth glistened when a carrion-jay alighted on his knee for a shin-joint half hacked. The great belted-kingfishers knew him, the sheldrake, stringing along the creek at evening, turned their bright eyes to his, the osprey who lived above the ledge, wheeled above him for hours, knowing that he also was a savage thing and hunted when hungry.
He was hungry several times between sunrise and sunset. The swift water of the Little Misery gave him a trout to every set-line;
the deeper pools by the sedge gave him pleasure.
On the Little Misery deer swarm at evening, and he had meat for the price of a cartridge.
The white nights of August brought that vague unrest that all forest creatures feel. The deer girdled the roots of the ash-trees and the spike bucks grew bolder; the great blue herons danced their contre-dance, evening after evening, at first solemnly, advancing, retreating in stately quadrilles, lifting their slim shins high in the sedge; but, as the month ended, the contre-dance lost dignity and gained in abandon, until the lone loon out on the lake shook the silence with his demon’s laughter. As the moon waned, the forest world stirred; its attitude was expectant; it waited. The cow-moose began to cast evil oblique glances on her calves, now turned darker; and the little bull moose-calf, frisked until his tiny bell swung like the wattle on a turkey.
An impatience, almost a sadness fell upon Skeene. And with sadness came fear. He covered his lean-to and built a smoke-hole through which blue haze rose in the calm morning air. But, like wild things in winter, he was wary, and the steam-hole of a beaver’s house might be more easily located than the chimney of Skeene’s hut.
When September came a hush fell over the forest; and and water were silent; the trout no longer broke,vater or leaped full length in the after glow; the deer picked a silent path along the shore; the herons stood all day, heads stretched heavenward; the loon’s maniac laughter was stilled. Silent and more silent the woods grew as the new moon, a faint tracery above the hills, rose in the evening sky. At its first quarter the silence deepened, at its half, the stillness was intense. Then one black night the Full Moon of September flashed in the sky, and before the last shore ripple had caught its glitter, a gigantic black shadow waded out into the lake and a roar shook the hills.
The first bull-moose had bellowed, and the rutting season had begun.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1110