He had seen the look in Bush McTaggart"s eyes. He had heard the thrill in McTaggart"s voice. He had caught the desire of a beast in McTaggart"s face. It had frightened him at first. But now--he was not frightened. He was uneasy, but his hands were clenched. In his heart there was a smoldering fire. At last Nepeese turned and came and sat down beside him again, at his feet.
"He is coming tomorrow, ma cherie," he said. "What shall I tell him?"
The Willow"s lips were red. Her eyes shone. But she did not look up at her father.
"Nothing, Nootawe--except that you are to say to him that I am the one to whom he must come--for what he seeks."
Pierrot bent over and caught her smiling. The sun went down. His heart sank with it, like cold lead.
From Lac Bain to Pierrot"s cabin the trail cut within half a mile of the beaver pond, a dozen miles from where Pierrot lived. And it was here, on a twist of the creek in which Wakayoo had caught fish for Baree, that Bush McTaggart made his camp for the night. Only twenty miles of the journey could be made by canoe, and as McTaggart was traveling the last stretch afoot, his camp was a simple affair--a few cut balsams, a light blanket, a small fire. Before he prepared his supper, the factor drew a number of copper wire snares from his small pack and spent half an hour in setting them in rabbit runways. This method of securing meat was far less arduous than carrying a gun in hot weather, and it was certain. Half a dozen snares were good for at least three rabbits, and one of these three was sure to be young and tender enough for the frying pan. After he had placed his snares McTaggart set a skillet of bacon over the coals and boiled his coffee.
Of all the odors of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away--twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam.
Since his experience in the canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not fared particularly well. Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had lived almost entirely on crayfish. This new aroma that came with the night wind roused his hunger. But it was elusive: now he could smell it--the next instant it was gone. He left the dam and began questing for the source of it in the forest, until after a time he lost it altogether. McTaggart had finished frying his bacon and was eating it.
It was a splendid night that followed. Perhaps Baree would have slept through it in his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim--the Molting Moon--and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the beavers had begun to cease their labors. The horns of the moose, the deer, and the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little and fought not at all. It was late July, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon of Silence for the Chipewyan.
In this silence Baree began to hunt. He stirred up a family of half-grown partridges, but they escaped him. He pursued a rabbit that was swifter than he. For an hour he had no luck. Then he heard a sound that made every drop of blood in him thrill. He was close to McTaggart"s camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of McTaggart"s snares. He came out into a little starlit open and there he saw the rabbit going through a most marvelous pantomime. It amazed him for a moment, and he stopped in his tracks.
Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his first frightened jump had "shot" the sapling to which the copper wire was attached so that he was now hung half in mid-air, with only his hind feet touching the ground. And there he was dancing madly while the noose about his neck slowly choked him to death.
Baree gave a sort of gasp. He could understand nothing of the part that the wire and the sapling were playing in this curious game. All he could see was that Wapoos was hopping and dancing about on his hind legs in a most puzzling and unrabbitlike fashion. It may be that he thought it some sort of play. In this instance, however, he did not regard Wapoos as he had looked on Umisk the beaver. He knew that Wapoos made mighty fine eating, and after another moment or two of hesitation he darted upon his prey.
Wapoos, half gone already, made almost no struggle, and in the glow of the stars Baree finished him, and for half an hour afterward he feasted.
McTaggart had heard no sound, for the snare into which Wapoos had run his head was the one set farthest from his camp. Beside the smoldering coals of his fire he sat with his back to a tree, smoking his black pipe and dreaming covetously of Nepeese, while Baree continued his night wandering. Baree no longer had the desire to hunt. He was too full. But he nosed in and out of the starlit s.p.a.ces, enjoying immensely the stillness and the golden glow of the night. He was following a rabbit-run when he came to a place where two fallen logs left a trail no wider than his body. He squeezed through; something tightened about his neck. There was a sudden snap--a swish as the sapling was released from its "trigger"--and Baree was jerked off his feet so suddenly that he had no time to conjecture as to what was happening.
The yelp in his throat died in a gurgle, and the next moment he was going through the pantomimic actions of Wapoos, who was having his vengeance inside him. For the life of him Baree could not keep from dancing about, while the wire grew tighter and tighter about his neck.
When he snapped at the wire and flung the weight of his body to the ground, the sapling would bend obligingly, and then--in its rebound--would yank him for an instant completely off the earth.
Furiously he struggled. It was a miracle that the fine wire held him.
In a few moments more it must have broken--but McTaggart had heard him!
The factor caught up his blanket and a heavy stick as he hurried toward the snare. It was not a rabbit making those sounds--he knew that.
Perhaps a fishercat--a lynx, a fox, a young wolf--
It was the wolf he thought of first when he saw Baree at the end of the wire. He dropped the blanket and raised the club. If there had been clouds overhead, or the stars had been less brilliant, Baree would have died as surely as Wapoos had died. With the club raised over his head McTaggart saw in time the white star, the white-tipped ear, and the jet black of Baree"s coat.
With a swift movement he exchanged the club for the blanket.
In that hour, could McTaggart have looked ahead to the days that were to come, he would have used the club. Could he have foreseen the great tragedy in which Baree was to play a vital part, wrecking his hopes and destroying his world, he would have beaten him to a pulp there under the light of the stars. And Baree, could he have foreseen what was to happen between this brute with a white skin and the most beautiful thing in the forests, would have fought even more bitterly before he surrendered himself to the smothering embrace of the factor"s blanket.
On this night Fate had played a strange hand for them both, and only that Fate, and perhaps the stars above, held a knowledge of what its outcome was to be.
CHAPTER 12
Half an hour later Bush McTaggart"s fire was burning brightly again. In the glow of it Baree lay trussed up like an Indian papoose, tied into a balloon-shaped ball with babiche thong, his head alone showing where his captor had cut a hole for it in the blanket. He was hopelessly caught--so closely imprisoned in the blanket that he could scarcely move a muscle of his body. A few feet away from him McTaggart was bathing a bleeding hand in a basin of water. There was also a red streak down the side of McTaggart"s bullish neck.
"You little devil!" he snarled at Baree. "You little devil!"
He reached over suddenly and gave Baree"s head a vicious blow with his heavy hand.
"I ought to beat your brains out, and--I believe I will!"
Baree watched him as he picked up a stick close at his side--a bit of firewood. Pierrot had chased him, but this was the first time he had been near enough to the man-monster to see the red glow in his eyes.
They were not like the eyes of the wonderful creature who had almost caught him in the web of her hair, and who had crawled after him under the rock. They were the eyes of a beast. They made him shrink and try to draw his head back into the blanket as the stick was raised. At the same time he snarled. His white fangs gleamed in the firelight. His ears were flat. He wanted to sink his teeth in the red throat where he had already drawn blood.
The stick fell. It fell again and again, and when McTaggart was done, Baree lay half stunned, his eyes partly closed by the blows, and his mouth bleeding.
"That"s the way we take the devil out of a wild dog," snarled McTaggart. "I guess you won"t try the biting game again, eh, youngster?
A thousand devils--but you went almost to the bone of this hand!"
He began washing the wound again. Baree"s teeth had sunk deep, and there was a troubled look in the factor"s face. It was July--a bad month for bites. From his kit he got a small flask of whisky and turned a bit of the raw liquor on the wound, cursing Baree as it burned into his flesh.
Baree"s half-shut eyes were fixed on him steadily. He knew that at last he had met the deadliest of all his enemies. And yet he was not afraid.
The club in Bush McTaggart"s hand had not killed his spirit. It had killed his fear. It had roused in him a hatred such as he had never known--not even when he was fighting Oohoomisew, the outlaw owl. The vengeful animosity of the wolf was burning in him now, along with the savage courage of the dog. He did not flinch when McTaggart approached him again. He made an effort to raise himself, that he might spring at this man-monster. In the effort, swaddled as he was in the blanket, he rolled over in a helpless and ludicrous heap.
The sight of it touched McTaggart"s risibilities, and he laughed. He sat down with his back to the tree again and filled his pipe.
Baree did not take his eyes from McTaggart as he smoked. He watched the man when the latter stretched himself out on the bare ground and went to sleep. He listened, still later, to the man-monster"s heinous snoring. Again and again during the long night he struggled to free himself. He would never forget that night. It was terrible. In the thick, hot folds of the blanket his limbs and body were suffocated until the blood almost stood still in his veins. Yet he did not whine.
They began to journey before the sun was up, for if Baree"s blood was almost dead within him, Bush McTaggart"s was scorching his body. He made his last plans as he walked swiftly through the forest with Baree under his arm. He would send Pierrot at once for Father Grotin at his mission seventy miles to the west. He would marry Nepeese--yes, marry her! That would tickle Pierrot. And he would be alone with Nepeese while Pierrot was gone for the missioner.
This thought flamed McTaggart"s blood like strong whisky. There was no thought in his hot and unreasoning brain of what Nepeese might say--of what she might think. His hand clenched, and he laughed harshly as there flashed on him for an instant the thought that perhaps Pierrot would not want to give her up. Pierrot! Bah! It would not be the first time he had killed a man--or the second.
McTaggart laughed again, and he walked still faster. There was no chance of his losing--no chance for Nepeese to get away from him.
He--Bush McTaggart--was lord of this wilderness, master of its people, arbiter of their destinies. He was power--and the law.
The sun was well up when Pierrot, standing in front of his cabin with Nepeese, pointed to a rise in the trail three or four hundred yards away, over which McTaggart had just appeared.
"He is coming."
With a face which had aged since last night he looked at Nepeese. Again he saw the dark glow in her eyes and the deepening red of her parted lips, and his heart was sick again with dread. Was it possible--
She turned on him, her eyes shining, her voice trembling.
"Remember, Nootawe--you must send him to me for his answer," she cried quickly, and she darted into the cabin. With a cold, gray face Pierrot faced Bush McTaggart.
CHAPTER 13
From the window, her face screened by the folds of the curtain which she had made for it, the Willow could see what happened outside. She was not smiling now. She was breathing quickly, and her body was tense.
Bush McTaggart paused not a dozen feet from the window and shook hands with Pierrot, her father. She heard McTaggart"s coa.r.s.e voice, his boisterous greeting, and then she saw him showing Pierrot what he carried under his arm. There came to her distinctly his explanation of how he had caught his captive in a rabbit snare. He unwrapped the blanket. Nepeese gave a cry of amazement. In an instant she was out beside them. She did not look at McTaggart"s red face, blazing in its joy and exultation.
"It is Baree!" she cried.
She took the bundle from McTaggart and turned to Pierrot.