Again he stroked her ma.s.sive head with his red, unmittened hand, then for an instant resting his face against the scarred nose, sprang to his feet. With a glance at the paws and a word for each of the whining puppies whose white tails switched in answer, Jean cracked his whip and shouted, "Marche!"
Late that night a huge fire burned in the timber of the sheltered mouth of the Little Salmon. Two men and a dog-team ate ravenously, then slept like the dead, while over them roared the norther, rocking the spruce and jack-pine in the river bottom, heaping the drifts high on the Whale River trail.
In three days of gruelling toil Marcel had got within ninety miles of his goal--within a day and a half of Whale River had the trail been ice hard. But now it would be days longer--how many he dared not guess.
Had the weather held for him, four days from the night of his starting would have seen him home; for on an iced trail, at his call, his great dogs would have run like wolves at the rallying cry of the pack. As he drew his stiffened legs from the rabbit-skins to freshen the fire at dawn, he bit his cracked lips until they bled, at the thought of what the blizzard had meant to Julie Breton, waiting, waiting for the dog-team creeping up the East Coast, hobbled and held back by head-wind and drift.
The dogs had won a long rest and Marcel did not start breaking trail inland until after daylight. With the sunrise the wind had increased and the heart-sick Marcel groaned at the strength-sapping floundering in breast-high drifts which faced his devoted dogs, when he needed them fresh for the race up the sea-ice of the coast beyond. Before he slept, he had weighed the toil of ten miles of drift-barred short-cut across the Cape, against doubling the headland on the ice, but he had decided that no men or dogs could face the maelstrom of wind and snow which churned around its bald b.u.t.tresses; no strength could force its way--no endurance prevail, against it.
With Marcel in the lead as trail-breaker and the missionary, who took the punishment without murmur, like the man he was, following the sled, Fleur led her sons up to their Calvary in the hills.
As they left the valley and reached the open tundra above, they met the full force of the wind. For an instant men and dogs stopped dead in their tracks, then with heads down they hurled themselves into the white fury which had buried the trail beyond all following.
On pushed the desperate Frenchman in the direction of the north coast, followed by Fleur with her whitened nose at the tails of his snow-shoes.
At times, when the force of the snow-swirls sucked their very breath, men and dogs threw themselves panting on the snow, until, with wind regained, they stumbled on. Often plunging to their collars in the new snow, the huskies travelled solely by leaps, until, stalled nose-deep, tangled in traces and held by the drag of the overturned sled, Marcel and the exhausted Hunter came to their rescue. Heart-breaking mile after mile of the country over which Marcel had sped two days before, they painfully put behind them.
At noon, the man who lived his creed crumpled in the snow. Wrapping him in robes, Marcel lashed him on the sled and went on, the vision of a dying girl on a white cot at Whale River ever in his eyes.
Through a break in the snow, before the light waned, Marcel made out, dim in the north, the silhouette of Big Island. He was over the divide and well on his way to the coast. With the night, the wind eased, though the snow held, and although he was off the trail, the new snow on the exposed north slope of the Cape was either wind-packed or swept from the frozen tundra, and again the exhausted dogs found good footing.
For some time the team had been working easily down hill, Marcel often forced to brake the toboggan with his feet. He knew he had worked to the west of the trail, and was swinging in a circle to regain it. Worried by the sting of the cold, which was growing increasingly bitter as the wind fell off, he stopped to rub the m.u.f.fled, frost-cracked face and hands of his spent pa.s.senger, cheering him with the promise of a roaring fire.
When he started the team, Colin, stiffened by the rest, limped badly, and Jules, who had bucked the deep snow all day like a veteran of the mail-teams, gamely following his herculean mother, hobbled along, head and tail down, with a wrenched shoulder. It was high time they found a camping place. With the falling wind they would freeze in the open. So he pushed on through the murk, seeking the beach where there was wood and a lee.
They were swiftly dropping down to the sea-ice but snow and darkness drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee-pole, Marcel had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into Angus and stopped.
Mystified, Marcel called: "Marche, Fleur! Marche!" fearing to find, when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the trail.
But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl as Marcel reached her.
"What troubles you, Fleur?" he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined mysteriously.
"Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!" he ordered sharply, thinking to learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid, her throat still rumbling.
"By Gar, dis ees queer t"ing!" muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the ma.s.sive head.
Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the black wall, when, with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward, straining to reach him.
The Frenchman, checked by the dog"s action, stared into the darkness, until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away before his snow-shoes and he looked out into gray s.p.a.ce.
As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.
He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death; and Julie----
Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur and with his arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the uncanny instinct of the born lead-dog, had scented the open s.p.a.ce, divined the danger, had known--and lain down, saving them all.
Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally down to the beach, and his m.u.f.fled pa.s.senger, drowsy, with swiftly numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to the doors of doom.
In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving tea,--the panacea of the north--and pemmican, on a hot fire, which soon revived the frozen Hunter.
To his joy, he realized that the back of the blizzard was broken, for as the wind and snow eased, the temperature rapidly fell to an Arctic cold.
With Whale River eighty miles away; his dogs broken by lack of rest and stiff from the wrenching and exhaustion of the battle with the deep snow; his own legs twinging with "mal raquette"; Marcel thanked G.o.d, for the dawn would see the wind dead and if his team did not fail him, in two days he would reach the post.
CHAPTER XL
"HE"S GOT HIS MAN!"
Whale River was astir. Before the trade-house groups of Crees critically inspected the dogs of Baptiste Laval, who fretted and yelped, eagerly waiting the "_Marche!_" which would send them off on the river trail.
Inside, the grave-faced Gillies gave big Jules his parting instructions.
"He never started home in that blizzard, Jules; McKenzie wouldn"t allow the missionary to take such a chance. But Jean surely left yesterday morning and with fresh dogs he"ll come through in four days, even with a heavy trail. You ought to meet him this side the Cape."
"Yes, M"sieu. But I t"ink he travel more fas" dan dat. I see heem to-morrow, maybe."
"No, he never started that last day of the blow. It would have been suicide. Poor lad! he must have been half crazy, with her on his mind."
"How ees she dis noon, M"sieu?"
"The fever holds about the same--no worse; but she must be operated on very soon. The poison is extending. If you meet them at the Cape you ought to get the doctor here a day ahead of Jean, with his tired dogs."
Surrounded by the Crees who were wishing them luck on their trip to meet and relay Marcel home, Baptiste had cracked his dog-whip with a loud, "_Marche!_" when an Indian with arms raised to attract attention came running from the sh.o.r.e across the clearing.
"Whoa!" shouted Jules, and Baptiste checked his dogs.
"What does he say?" called Angus McCain. "A dog-team down river? Do you hear that, Gillies?"
"Husky," replied the factor drily. "Couldn"t possibly be Marcel!"
"No, he couldn"t have come through that norther," agreed McCain.
"What"s that he says, Jules?" demanded Gillies.
Jules Duroc, hands and shoulders in motion, was talking excitedly to the Cree who had joined the group by the sled. Turning suddenly, he ran back to the factor.
"Felix say dat a team crawl up de riviere trail lak" dey ver" tired. He watch dem long tam."
"That"s queer, but it"s some Husky--can"t be Marcel. Why, good Lord, man! he hasn"t been away six days."
Angus disappeared, to return with an old bra.s.s-bound telescope and hurried to the river sh.o.r.e with Jules, followed by the scoffing Gillies. To the naked eye, a black spot was discernible on the river ice.
"There are two men following a team," announced Angus, the gla.s.s at his eye. "They"re barely moving. Now they"ve stopped; the dogs must be played out. The driver"s trying to get them up! Now he"s got them going!"
Gillies took the telescope and looked for a long s.p.a.ce. Suddenly to those who watched him, waiting for his report, his hand visibly shook.
Turning to Jules, he bellowed:
"Jules, you travel like all h.e.l.l for that dog-team! G.o.d only knows how they got here alive, but there"s only one lead-dog on this coast that reaches to a man"s middle. That team crawling in out there is Jean Marcel"s--G.o.d bless him!--_and he"s got his man!_"