The Danger Trail.
by James Oliver Curwood.
CHAPTER I
THE GIRL OF THE SNOWS
For perhaps the first time in his life Howland felt the spirit of romance, of adventure, of sympathy for the picturesque and the unknown surging through his veins. A billion stars glowed like yellow, pa.s.sionless eyes in the polar cold of the skies. Behind him, white in its sinuous twisting through the snow-smothered wilderness, lay the icy Saskatchewan, with a few scattered lights visible where Prince Albert, the last outpost of civilization, came down to the river half a mile away.
But it was into the North that Howland looked. From the top of the great ridge which he had climbed he gazed steadily into the white gloom which reached for a thousand miles from where he stood to the Arctic Sea.
Faintly in the grim silence of the winter night there came to his ears the soft hissing sound of the aurora borealis as it played in its age-old song over the dome of the earth, and as he watched the cold flashes shooting like pale arrows through the distant sky and listened to its whispering music of unending loneliness and mystery, there came on him a strange feeling that it was beckoning to him and calling to him--telling him that up there very near to the end of the earth lay all that he had dreamed of and hoped for since he had grown old enough to begin the shaping of a destiny of his own.
He shivered as the cold nipped at his blood, and lighted a fresh cigar, half-turning to shield himself from a wind that was growing out of the east. As the match flared in the cup of his hands for an instant there came from the black gloom of the balsam and spruce at his feet a wailing, hungerful cry that brought a startled breath from his lips. It was a cry such as Indian dogs make about the tepees of masters who are newly dead. He had never heard such a cry before, and yet he knew that it was a wolf"s. It impressed him with an awe which was new to him and he stood as motionless as the trees about him until, from out the gray night-gloom to the west, there came an answering cry, and then, from far to the north, still another.
"Sounds as though I"d better go back to town," he said to himself, speaking aloud. "By George, but it"s lonely!"
He descended the ridge, walked rapidly over the hard crust of the snow across the Saskatchewan, and a.s.sured himself that he felt considerably easier when the lights of Prince Albert gleamed a few hundred yards ahead of him.
Jack Howland was a Chicago man, which means that he was a hustler, and not overburdened with sentiment. For fifteen of his thirty-one years he had been hustling. Since he could easily remember, he had possessed to a large measure but one ambition and one hope. With a persistence which had left him peculiarly a stranger to the more frivolous and human sides of life he had worked toward the achievement of this ambition, and to-night, because that achievement was very near at hand, he was happy.
He had never been happier. There flashed across his mental vision a swiftly moving picture of the fight he had made for success. It had been a magnificent fight. Without vanity he was proud of it, for fate had handicapped him at the beginning, and still he had won out. He saw himself again the homeless little farmer boy setting out from his Illinois village to take up life in a great city; as though it had all happened but yesterday he remembered how for days and weeks he had nearly starved, how he had sold papers at first, and then, by lucky chance, became errand boy in a big drafting establishment. It was there that the ambition was born in him. He saw great engineers come and go--men who were greater than presidents to him, and who sought out the ends of the earth in the following of their vocation. He made a slave of himself in the nurturing and strengthening of his ambition to become one of them--to be a builder of railroads and bridges, a tunneler of mountains, a creator of new things in new lands. His slavery had not lessened as his years increased. Voluntarily he had kept himself in bondage, fighting ceaselessly the obstacles in his way, triumphing over his handicaps as few other men had triumphed, rising, slowly, steadily, resistlessly, until now--. He flung back his head and the pulse of his heart quickened as he heard again the words of Van Horn, president of the greatest engineering company on the continent.
"Howland, we"ve decided to put you in charge Of the building of the Hudson Bay Railroad. It"s one of the wildest jobs we"ve ever had, and Gregson and Thorne don"t seem to catch on. They"re bridge builders and not wilderness men. We"ve got to lay a single line of steel through three hundred miles of the wildest country in North America, and from this hour your motto is "Do it or bust!" You can report at Le Pas as soon as you get your traps together."
Those words had broken the slavedom for Howland. He had been fighting for an opportunity, and now that the opportunity had come he was sure that he would succeed. Swiftly, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, he walked down the one main street of Prince Albert, puffing out odorous clouds of smoke from his cigar, every fiber in him tingling with the new joy that had come into his life. Another night would see him in Le Pas, the little outpost sixty miles farther east on the Saskatchewan. Then a hundred miles by dog-sledge and he would be in the big wilderness camp where three hundred men were already at work clearing a way to the great bay to the north. What a glorious achievement that road would be! It would remain for all time as a cenotaph to his ability, his courage and indomitable persistence.
It was past nine o"clock when Howland entered the little old Windsor Hotel. The big room, through the windows of which he could look out on the street and across the frozen Saskatchewan, was almost empty. The clerk had locked his cigar-case and had gone to bed. In one corner, partly shrouded in gloom, sat a half-breed trapper who had come in that day from the Lac la Ronge country, and at his feet crouched one of his wolfish sledge-dogs. Both were wide-awake and stared curiously at Howland as he came in. In front of the two large windows sat half a dozen men, as silent as the half-breed, clad in moccasins and thick caribou skin coats. One of them was the factor from a Hudson Bay post at Lac Bain who had not been down to the edge of civilization for three years; the others, including two Crees and a Chippewayan, were hunters and Post men who had driven in their furs from a hundred miles to the north.
For a moment Howland paused in the middle of the room and looked about him. Ordinarily he would have liked this quiet, and would have gone to one of the two rude tables to write a letter or work out a problem of some sort, for he always carried a pocketful of problems about with him.
His fifteen years of study and unceasing slavery to his ambition had made him naturally as taciturn as these grim men of the North, who were born to silence. But to-night there had come a change over him. He wanted to talk. He wanted to ask questions. He longed for human companionship, for some kind of mental exhilaration beyond that furnished by his own thoughts. Feeling in his pocket for a cigar he seated himself before one of the windows and proffered it to the factor from Lac Bain.
"You smoke?" he asked companionably.
"I was born in a wigwam," said the factor slowly, taking the cigar.
"Thank you."
"Deuced polite for a man who hasn"t seen civilization for three years,"
thought Howland, seating himself comfortably, with his feet on the window-sill. Aloud he said, "The clerk tells me you are from Lac Bain.
That"s a good distance north, isn"t it?"
"Four hundred miles," replied the factor with quiet terseness. "We"re on the edge of the Barren Lands."
"Whew!" Howland shrugged his shoulders. Then he volunteered, "I"m going north myself to-morrow."
"Post man?"
"No; engineer. I"m putting through the Hudson Bay Railroad."
He spoke the words quite clearly and as they fell from his lips the half-breed, partly concealed in the gloom behind him, straightened with the alert quickness of a cat. He leaned forward eagerly, his black eyes gleaming, and then rose softly from his seat. His moccasined feet made no sound as he came up behind Howland. It was the big huskie who first gave a sign of his presence. For a moment the upturned eyes of the young engineer met those of the half-breed. That look gave Howland a glimpse of a face which he could never forget--a thin, dark, sensitive face framed in shining, jet-black hair, and a pair of eyes that were the most beautiful he had ever seen in a man. Sometimes a look decides great friendship or bitter hatred between men. And something, nameless, unaccountable, pa.s.sed between these two. Not until the half-breed had turned and was walking swiftly away did Howland realize that he wanted to speak to him, to grip him by the hand, to know him by name. He watched the slender form of the Northerner, as lithe and as graceful in its movement as a wild thing of the forests, until it pa.s.sed from the door out into the night.
"Who was that?" he asked, turning to the factor.
"His name is Croisset. He comes from the Wholdaia country, beyond Lac la Ronge."
"French?"
"Half French, half Cree."
The factor resumed his steady gaze out into the white distance of the night, and Howland gave up his effort at conversation. After a little his companion shoved back his chair and bade him good night. The Crees and Chippewayan followed him, and a few minutes later the two white hunters left the engineer alone before the windows.
"Mighty funny people," he said half aloud. "Wonder if they ever talk!"
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his face resting in his hands, and stared to catch a sign of moving life outside. In him there was no desire for sleep. Often he had called himself a night-bird, but seldom had he been more wakeful than on this night. The elation of his triumph, of his success, had not yet worn itself down to a normal and reasoning satisfaction, and his chief longing was for the day, and the day after that, and the next day, when he would take the place of Gregson and Thorne. Every muscle in his body was vibrant in its desire for action.
He looked at his watch. It was only ten o"clock. Since supper he had smoked almost ceaselessly. Now he lighted another cigar and stood up close to one of the windows.
Faintly he caught the sound of a step on the board walk outside. It was a light, quick step, and for an instant it hesitated, just out of his vision. Then it approached, and suddenly the figure of a woman stopped in front of the window. How she was dressed Howland could not have told a moment later. All that he saw was the face, white in the white night--a face on which the shimmering starlight fell as it was lifted to his gaze, beautiful, as clear-cut as a cameo, with eyes that looked up at him half-pleadingly, half-luringly, and lips parted, as if about to speak to him. He stared, moveless in his astonishment, and in another breath the face was gone.
With a hurried exclamation he ran across the empty room to the door and looked down the starlit street. To go from the window to the door took him but a few seconds, yet he found the street deserted--deserted except for a solitary figure three blocks away and a dog that growled at him as he thrust out his head and shoulders. He heard no sound of footsteps, no opening or closing of a door. Only there came to him that faint, hissing music of the northern skies, and once more, from the black forest beyond the Saskatchewan, the infinite sadness of the wolf-howl.
CHAPTER II
LIPS THAT SPEAK NOT
Howland was not a man easily susceptible to a pair of eyes and a pretty face. The practical side of his nature was too much absorbed in its devices and schemes for the building of material things to allow the breaking in of romance. At least Howland had always complimented himself on this fact, and he laughed a little nervously as he went back to his seat near the window. He was conscious that a flush of unusual excitement had leaped into his cheeks and already the practical side of him was ashamed of that to which the romantic side had surrendered.
"The deuce, but she was pretty!" he excused himself. "And those eyes--"
Suddenly he checked himself. There had been more than the eyes; more than the pretty face! Why had the girl paused in front of the window?
Why had she looked at him so intently, as though on the point of speech?
The smile and the flush left his face as these questions came to him and he wondered if he had failed to comprehend something which she had meant him to understand. After all, might it not have been a case of mistaken ident.i.ty? For a moment she had believed that she recognized him--then, seeing her mistake, had pa.s.sed swiftly down the street. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances Howland would have accepted this solution of the incident.
But to-night he was in an unusual mood, and it quickly occurred to him that even if his supposition were true it did not explain the pallor in the girl"s face and the strange entreaty which had glowed for an instant in her eyes.
Anyway it was none of his business, and he walked casually to the door.
At the end of the street, a quarter of a mile distant, a red light burned feebly over the front of a Chinese restaurant, and in a mechanical fashion his footsteps led him in that direction.
"I"ll drop in and have a cup of tea," he a.s.sured himself, throwing away the stub of his cigar and filling his lungs with great breaths of the cold, dry air. "Lord, but it"s a glorious night! I wish Van Horn could see it."
He stopped and turned his eyes again into the North. Its myriad stars, white and unshivering, the elusive play of the mysterious lights hovering over the pole, and the black edge of the wilderness beyond the river were holding a greater and greater fascination for him. Since morning, when he had looked on that wilderness for the first time in his life, new blood had entered into him, and he rejoiced that it was this wonderful world which was to hold for him success and fortune. Never had he dreamed that the mere joy of living would appeal to him as it did now; that the act of breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience. He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him.
Always he had laughed at romance. Work--the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men"s cleverness--had almost brought him to the point of regarding romance in life as a peculiar illusion of fools--and women. But he was fair in his concessions, and to-night he acknowledged that he had enjoyed the romance of what he had seen and heard. And most of all, his blood had been stirred by the beautiful face that had looked at him from out of the night.
The tuneless thrumming of a piano sounded behind him. As he pa.s.sed through the low door of the restaurant a man and woman lurched past him and in their irresolute faces and leering stare he read the verification of his suspicions of the place. Through a second door he entered a large room filled with tables and chairs, and pregnant with strange odors. At one of the farther tables sat a long-queued Chinaman with his head bowed in his arms. Behind a counter stood a second, as motionless as an obelisk in the half gloom of the dimly illuminated room, his evil face challenging Howland as he entered. The sound of a piano came from above and with a bold and friendly nod the young engineer mounted a pair of stairs.
"Tough joint," he muttered, falling into his old habit of communing with himself. "Hope they make good tea."
At the sound of his footsteps on the stair the playing of the piano ceased. He was surprised at what greeted him above. In startling contrast to the loathsome environment below he entered a luxuriously appointed room, heavily hung with oriental tapestries, and with half a dozen onyx tables partially concealed behind screens and gorgeously embroidered silk curtains. At one of these he seated himself and signaled for service with the tiny bell near his hand. In response there appeared a young Chinaman with close-cropped hair and attired in evening dress.