"Push what?"
"Handle-bar."
He went to the sled and ill.u.s.trated, laying his hands on the arrangement at the back that stood out like the handle behind a baby"s perambulator. The Boy remembered. Of course, there were usually two men with each sled. One ran ahead and broke trail with snow-shoes, but that wasn"t necessary today, for the crust bore. But the other man"s business was to guide the sled from behind and keep it on the trail.
"Me gottah drive, you gottah push. Dogs heap tired."
Nicholas spoke severely. The Boy stared a moment at what he mentally called "the nerve of the fella," laughed, and took hold, swallowing Nicholas"s intimation that he, after all, was far more considerate of the dogs than the person merely sentimental, who had been willing to share his dinner with them.
"How much farther?"
"Oh, pretty quick now."
The driver cracked his whip, called out to the dogs, and suddenly turned off from the river course. Unerringly he followed an invisible trail, turning sharply up a slough, and went zig-zagging on without apparent plan. It was better going when they got to a frozen lake, and the dogs seemed not to need so much encouragement. It would appear an impossible task to steer accurately with so little light; but once on the other side of the lake it was found that Nicholas had hit a well-beaten track as neatly as a thread finds the needle"s eye.
Far off, out of the dimness, came a sound--welcome because it was something to break the silence but hardly cheerful in itself.
"Hear that, Nicholas?"
"Mission dogs."
Their own had already thrown up their noses and bettered the pace.
The barking of the dogs had not only announced the mission to the travellers, but to the mission a stranger at the gates.
Before anything could be seen of the settlement, clumsy, fur-clad figures had come running down the slope and across the ice, greeting Nicholas with hilarity.
Indian or Esquimaux boys they seemed to be, who talked some jargon understanded of the Pymeut pilot. The Boy, lifting tired eyes, saw something white glimmering high in the air up on the right river bank.
In this light it refused to form part of any conceivable plan, but hung there in the air detached, enigmatic, spectral. Below it, more on humanity"s level, could be dimly distinguished, now, the Mission Buildings, apparently in two groups with an open s.p.a.ce in the middle.
Where are the white people? wondered the Boy, childishly impatient.
Won"t they come and welcome us? He followed the Esquimaux and Indians from the river up to the left group of buildings. With the heathen jargon beating on his ears, he looked up suddenly, and realized what the white thing was that had shone out so far. In the middle of the open s.p.a.ce a wooden cross stood up, encrusted with frost crystals, and lifting gleaming arms out of the gloom twenty feet or so above the heads of the people.
"Funny thing for an Agnostic," he admitted to himself, "but I"m right glad to see a Christian sign." And as he knocked at the door of the big two-story log-house on the left he defended himself. "It"s the swing-back of the pendulum after a big dose of Pymeut and heathen tricks. I welcome it as a mark of the white man." He looked over his shoulder a little defiantly at the Holy Cross. Recognition of what the high white apparition was had given him a queer jolt, stirring unsuspected things in imagination and in memory. He had been accustomed to see that symbol all his life, and it had never spoken to him before.
Up here it cried aloud and dominated the scene. "Humph!" he said to himself, "to look at you a body"d think "The Origin" had never been written, and Spencer and Huxley had never been born." He knocked again, and again turned about to scan the cross.
"Just as much a superst.i.tion, just as much a fetich as Kaviak"s seal-plug or the Shaman"s eagle feather. With long looking at a couple of crossed sticks men grow as dazed, as hypnotized, as Pymeuts watching a Shaman"s ivory wand. All the same, I"m not sure that faith in "First Principles" would build a house like this in the Arctic Regions, and it"s convenient to find it here--if only they"d open the door."
He gave another thundering knock, and then nearly fell backwards into the snow, for Brother Paul stood on the threshold holding up a lamp.
"I--a--oh! How do you do? Can I come in?"
Brother Paul, still with the look of the Avenging Angel on his pale, young face, held the door open to let the Boy come in. Then, leaning out into the night and lifting the lamp high, "Is that Nicholas?" he said sternly.
But the Pymeuts and the school-boys had vanished. He came in and set down the lamp.
"We--a--we heard you were going down river," said the Boy, tamely, for he had not yet recovered himself after such an unexpected blow.
"Are you cold? Are you wet?" demanded Brother Paul, standing erect, unwelcoming, by the table that held the lamp.
The Boy pulled himself together.
"Look here"--he turned away from the comforting stove and confronted the Jesuit--"those Pymeuts are not only cold and wet and sick too, but they"re sorry. They"ve come to ask forgiveness."
"It"s easily done."
Such scorn you would hardly expect from a follower of the meek Galilean.
"No, not easily done, a penance like this. I know, for I"ve just travelled that thirty miles with "em over the ice from Pymeut."
"You? Yes, it amuses you."
The sombre eyes shone with a cold, disconcerting light.
"Well, to tell you the truth, I"ve been better amused."
The Boy looked down at his weary, wounded feet. And the others--where were his fellow pilgrims? It struck him as comic that the upshot of the journey should be that he was doing penance for the Pymeuts, but he couldn"t smile with that offended archangel in front of him.
"Thirty miles over the ice, in the face of a norther, hasn"t been so "easy" even for me. And I"m not old, nor sick--no, nor frightened, Brother Paul."
He flung up his head, but his heart failed him even while he made the boast. Silently, for a moment, they confronted each other.
"Where are you bound for?"
"I--a--" The Boy had a moment of wondering if he was expected to answer "h.e.l.l," and he hesitated.
"Are you on your way up the river?"
"No--I" (was the man not going to let them rest their wicked bones there a single night?)--"a--I--"
The frozen river and the wind-racked wood were as hospitable as the beautiful face of the brother. Involuntarily the Boy shivered.
"I came to see the Father Superior."
He dropped back into a chair.
"The Father Superior is busy."
"I"ll wait."
"And very tired."
"So"m I."
"--worn out with the long raging of the plague. I have waited till he is less hara.s.sed to tell him about the Pymeuts" deliberate depravity.
Nicholas, too!--one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand kindnesses. And this the return!"
"The return is that he takes his backsliding so to heart, he can"t rest without coming to confess and to beg the Father Superior--"
"I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw. He will agree that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an example should be made of Nicholas and of his father."