"You bet," said Jean, laconically.
"But I just haven"t got the money, or he"d be my dog."
Jean grinned. "Ah, well, eet"s money talks," said he. And on that they parted; for this last talk between them came when Jean"s team was pulling out for the north-west, after a profitable little rest-time in which Jean had exchanged a little rubbish for a lot of good food and a quite considerable wad of dollars.
But Jean did, on occasion, make mistakes; not vital mistakes, but slips that might injure his pocket. He made one when he put Jan in the lead, and named Bill wheeler, in place of Blackfoot. Jean wanted to make a completely educated dog of Jan as soon as might be. But he did not want to lose Bill--a very useful dog--nor yet to injure Blackfoot"s health and efficiency. Bill, as leader reduced to wheeling, made Blackfoot"s life a h.e.l.l upon earth for the kindly wise old dog with Newfoundland blood in him; and that, of course, was not good for Blackfoot.
But this was not the worst of it. As recognized leader of the team, Bill could endure Jan"s officious zeal, and even make shift to suffer the big hound"s real supremacy, while by craft he could avoid a conflagration.
So far, then, Bill had remained a force making for discipline and the working efficiency of the team. As wheeler, he became at one stride a crafty and embittered mutineer, aiming primarily at Jan"s discomfiture, and generally at the disruption of the team as a compact ent.i.ty. When not occupied in working off his vindictive spleen upon poor Blackfoot, whose hind quarters he gashed at every opportunity, Bill concentrated all his notable energies upon stirring up disorder, indiscipline, confusion, and strife among his mates.
Jean flogged Bill pretty severely; and in the interval he said:
"Tha"s all right, Bill. Jan "ll lick all thees outer you, bimeby."
And that was where Jean"s mistake lay. Jan could safely be trusted to lick pretty well anything into, or out of, the rest of the team; but there was that in Bill, the ex-leader, which no power on earth would lick out of him. He knew it; and Jan knew it. And that was where, in this one matter, they both saw a little farther than the astute Jean.
The thing of it was that what they saw did not trouble either of them.
They were content to bide the issue. But had he known of it, Jean would not have been at all content with anything of the sort. Far from it.
In any event, the issue involved loss for Jean, since, as both dogs well knew, it meant death for Jan or for Bill. They were quite content in their knowledge. But Jean could not conceivably have found content in any prospect involving himself in monetary loss; for that would have been contrary to the only guiding principles he knew. Pride in his own unfailing knowledge of dogs and life in the north helped to make Jean establish Jan as leader of the team. But if he could have foreseen monetary loss in the arrangement, his pride had a.s.suredly been called down and Bill re-established in the lead.
Jean saw that Jan made an exceptionally fine leader. There was no sort of doubt about it. He set a tremendously high working standard, and hustled the team into accepting it by the exercise of an almost uncannily far-seeing severity. Nothing escaped him, least of all a hint of any kind of shirking. He was quicker than Jean"s whip, more sure, and more compelling. But while Jean saw all this, and more, with genuine admiration for Jan, and for his own astuteness in foretelling this exceptional capacity and acquiring ownership of the hound, he also saw, with angry puzzlement, that his team was falling off in condition and in efficiency as a unit.
It was not that the leader lacked either justice or discretion in his fiery severity. Jan displayed both to a miracle. But the team had to live between his severity while at work, and Bill"s bitter and tireless persecution and crafty incendiarism outside the traces. Over all, for their consolation, were the whips of the masters. But so infernally crafty was Bill, that he never once allowed the masters to detect the real wickedness of the part he played. They could see poor Blackfoot"s bleeding hocks: "We got to call heem Redleg soon. d.a.m.n that Beel!"--but they could not see Bill"s continuous crafty incitements to mutiny, or the hundred and one ways in which he strove, when out of harness, to work up hatred of Jan among his mates, or when in harness to play subtle tricks which should produce an effect discreditable to the new leader.
Intuitively Jan became aware of most of these things. But even where he detected Bill at fault, he could not trounce the ex-leader as he trounced the other dogs, because he and Bill knew very well that there could be no sparring, no such lightsome thing as mere chastis.e.m.e.nt, between them. There was war to the death in Bill"s snarl when Jan so much as looked at him. He was perfectly certain he could, and would, kill Jan directly a suitable opportunity offered. Jan was not so sure about that; but he did know very well that he was not capable of just thrashing Bill and letting it go at that; for over and above Bill"s unbeaten prowess as a fighter and master dog there was a mortal hatred in him where Jan was concerned--a hatred which, weighed as a fighting a.s.set, was almost equivalent to a second set of fangs.
And then came the memorable evening upon which Jean killed a bull-moose and all the team fed full--except Bill.
XXVIII
THE FEAST AND THE FASTER
Jean and Jake were not out on a hunting expedition, and if it had involved hunting, the probabilities are Jean would never have bagged that bull-moose. But it happened that, when his sharp eyes sighted the moose in mid-afternoon, the poor beast had just managed to break one of its forelegs in a deep hole masked by snow. It was practically a sitting shot for Jean, and that at a range which made missing impossible for such a man.
The dogs were wild with excitement, but fortunately they were still in the traces and anch.o.r.ed to a laden sled. In spite of this there was something of a stampede among them until Jean made it clear that he meant the team to remain in harness for the present. Then the masters"
whips, backed by policeman Jan"s remorseless fangs, soon had order re-established. And this was as well, for at that particular juncture Jean and Jake were traveling fairly light, and a strong team can quickly work serious damage by stampeding among trees with a light sled.
When Jean had examined the moose, he decided to avail himself of the magnificent supply of fresh food it offered, and to carry on as large a share of the meat when frozen as the sled would take. To this end he and Jake decided to camp for the night at a spot no more than a few hundred paces away from the dead moose. The dogs were too much excited to lie down in their traces. (It was many weeks since any of them had tasted fresh meat, and though dried salmon makes an excellent working dietary, it is, of course, a very different thing from fresh meat with blood in it.) So they stood and sat erect, with parted jaws all drooling, while Jean and Jake set to work with their long knives on the great carca.s.s.
The cutting up of a full-grown moose is no light task, and darkness had fallen before the two men had finished stowing away all the heavy frozen strips of moose-meat the sled could carry. Then, having removed the choicest portions for their own use for that night and the next day, Jean and Jake set to work to loose the dogs that they might tackle their banquet. Jean knew the eight of them could give a pretty good account of the remains on the skeleton.
According to custom the leader was the first dog loosed. Jan made a bee-line for the skeleton. Within a few seconds six other dogs were streaking across the intervening stretch of soft snow between the camp and the belt of timber in which the moose had fallen. But the seventh dog, Bill--though his jaws had been dripping eagerness like all the rest of them--walked slowly in the same direction as though food were a matter of indifference to him.
"What in h.e.l.l"s the matter with that Bill?" said Jake. "Seems like as if he"s full, but he can"t be."
"Beel, hee"s an angry dog for sure," said Jean, with a grin.
"Looks "most as if he"s sick," said Jake.
"H"m! Hate-seeck, mebbe," replied Jean, as the two turned to the task of preparing their own supper.
As a fact no dog was ever more fit or more perfectly self-controlled than Bill was at that moment. In his own good time and with a most singular deliberateness he did set his teeth in fresh moose. But he did it much as house-dogs in the world of civilization put their noses into their well-filled dinner-dishes, with a deliberate absence of gusto which would have simply astounded any understanding observer who could have seen it. The other seven dogs were blissfully unconscious of anything under heaven outside their own ravening l.u.s.t of flesh. In a temperature well below zero, the lure of fresh-killed meat at the end of fourteen hundred miles of solid pulling, and five or six weeks of fish rations, is a force the strength of which cannot easily be conceived by livers of the sheltered life. It is the pull of an overwhelming strong pa.s.sion.
And Bill, the deposed leader of the team, just nosed and tasted with the calm indifferent temperateness of an English house-dog; while every organ of his supremely healthy body ached with a veritable neuralgia of longing for red meat.
The rest of the team, including Jan, fed like wolves; indeed, some of them were literally but one or two removes from the wolf, and all of them had of late lived a life which brings any dog very close to the wolf in his habits and instincts. It is a life which, so far as his instincts are concerned, carries a dog back and back through innumerable generations till his contact with his primeval ancestors is very close and real.
They fed like hungry wolves, and their feeding was not a pretty sight.
When in his ravenous guzzling one dog"s nose chanced to be thrust at all nearly to another"s, there would arise a horrid sound of half-choked snarling; the fierce hissing rattle of snarls which came from flesh and blood-glutted jaws. Obeying instincts to the full as strong as any human pa.s.sion which has ever gone to the making of tragedy, these working-dogs made a wild orgy of their feast. They wantoned and they wallowed in their perfectly natural gluttony. Having fed full and overfull, they desired more by reason of their long hunger for meat and the hard vigor of their lives. The last remains of flesh exhausted, they gnawed and tugged at bones, each snarling still, though half exhausted, whenever other fangs than his own touched a chosen bone.
And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.
A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.
One by one even the l.u.s.tiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to fan it. But the rest of the world slept.
The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill"s brain was like the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.
Fed by hate and slowly acc.u.mulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine"s pistons.
Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and he overlooked nothing. He would have given much, very much, to have been able to remove Jean"s camp a mile or so away. The belt of open snow-s.p.a.ce between it and him was all too narrow for his liking. Well he knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the need arose. But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done murder at a bedside. As it was he thought he must fight. Well, he was prepared. Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog"s bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night. More strongly, for in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning, thus giving him his perfect preparation.
The full-fed team-dogs had been too idle that night to dig out proper sleeping-nests for themselves in the snow. A mere circling whisp of head and tail and feet had served them, and the upper half of Jan"s magnificent frame lay fully exposed halfway down the slope from Bill"s tree. Very deliberately now Bill rose, and moved toward Jan, walking with dainty, springy steps like a cat at play. In all that countryside Bill possessed an absolute monopoly of springiness and elasticity. But, at their most sluggish, dogs in the northland are, of course, more alert than the home-staying dogs of civilization. Snip snarled fatly as Bill pa.s.sed with his catlike tread. Jan, the crimson haw of one eye gleaming as its lid lifted, growled savagely but low as Bill approached him. His big limbs twitched convulsively and the hair about his shoulders stiffened; but so grossly full-fed was he that he did not rise, though the note of his growl ascended toward that of a snarl as Bill came nearer.
Here again, and for the hundredth time that night, Bill"s icy self-control, his really marvelous command of his impulses, was sorely tried. His enemy actually was rec.u.mbent in the snow before him, while he, taut as a strung bow, was most exquisitely poised for the attack.
Why fight? Why not swift delicious murder, and the gush of the loathed one"s throat-blood between his fangs? Bill knew well why it must not be.
But given the knowledge, how many dogs in his case, nay, how many men similarly tempted, could have forced discretion to master impulse?
Attempted murder must mean furious uproar, and uproar must mean attempted rescue; and attempted rescue, so close to camp, might well rob Bill of the life he claimed. It might leave Jan alive and himself clubbed into insensibility. In the fire-lighted brain of Bill was understanding of all things, and the determination to take no chances with regard to this the greatest killing of his life.
And so, with the most delicate care, the most minutely measured instalments of provocation, he proceeded to "crowd" the infinitely sluggish Jan. So sunk in sloth was Jan that he, who three hours earlier had been p.r.i.c.ked to fury by an insolent glance from Bill"s eyes, now positively submitted to the actual touch of Bill"s nose on his hocks before he would budge. And then with a long snarl he only edged himself a yard or two away.
"Be still, be still! For G.o.d"s sake give peace!" his heavy movements seemed to say.
Peace! And in Bill"s lighted brain the roar of furnaces and the remorseless whirl of swiftly driven machinery!
With the fathomless scorn of the self-mastering ascetic for the sodden debauchee, Bill proceeded coldly with his task of "crowding" Jan out and away from the safety of that place and into the wilderness. In a few minutes he ventured to hasten matters by actually nipping one of Jan"s hind legs with his teeth. But with what precise delicacy! It had been sweet to drive the fangs home and feel the bone and sinew crack. But that would not mean death and might bring rescue. So Bill"s jaws pressed no more hardly than those of a nursing-mother of his kind what time she draws a too venturesome pup into the shelter of her warm dugs.
It was beautifully done; a triumph of self-mastery and an exquisitely gauged piece of tactics. It brought Jan quickly lumbering to his feet, snarling savagely but not very loudly. It sent him sullenly some twenty, thirty paces nearer to his doom and farther from the camp. A dozen paces Bill followed him, crowding threateningly to enforce the right direction. And then Bill halted, not wishing to risk causing Jan to dodge and double backward toward the camp. And because his persecutor stopped when he did, Jan followed the line of least resistance, lumbering on down the slope into the deep wood for twenty paces more before lowering himself again with a grunt for the repose which, to his glutted sloth, seemed more desirable now than all the meat in the world, aye, and of more pressing import than all his dignity, than all his new pride in working efficiency in his leadership.
With a patience no red Indian could have excelled, Bill repeated these tactics twenty or thirty times; but always with the same nicely balanced accuracy; with ample pauses between each fresh beginning; with mathematically accurate gauging of the precise provocation needed to shift Jan farther and farther into the wilderness without seriously and dangerously arousing his somnolent faculties.
But though he himself did not know it, and Bill could not possibly suspect it, it yet was a fact that something of wakefulness remained and grew through the intervals between Jan"s forced marches. It seemed that though he did most unwillingly move on and on at Bill"s cunningly given behests, Jan barely was roused from his heavy sleep into which he plunged fathoms deep every time he resumed the rec.u.mbent position. So it seemed. Thus Bill saw the outworking of his devilishly ingenious tactics. And could Jan have understood any challenge on the subject, he would have admitted that this was the way it worked.
And now, toward the end of Jan"s twentieth or thirtieth move, when his subconsciousness was simply one ache of continuous boding discomfort, while still his outer consciousness barely permitted the lifting of his heavy eyelids, now Bill, that incarnation of calculating watchfulness, gathered up his magnificent muscles for the act which should bring the first instalment of his reward, the guerdon of his season of super-canine self-mastery. In another second or so Jan would sink down again to sleep. Bill did not snarl or growl. He needed no trumpet-call.
He made no more sound than a cat makes in leaping for a bird. Yet he rushed upon the blinking, half-comatose Jan as though impelled thereto from the mouth of a spring cannon.