Heralds of Empire Part 33

I easily guessed that M. Picot would try to keep me with him till M.

Radisson had sailed. Then I must needs lock hands with piracy.

Hortense and I were p.a.w.ns in the game.

At one moment I upbraided him for bringing Hortense to this wilderness of murder and pillage. At another I considered that a banished gentleman could not choose his goings. How could I stay with M. Picot and desert M. de Radisson? How could I go to M. de Radisson and abandon Hortense?

"Straight is the narrow way," Eli Kirke oft cried out as he expounded Holy Writ.

Ah, well, if the narrow way is straight, it has a trick of becoming tangled in a most terrible snarl!

Wheeling the log-end right about, I sat down to await M. Picot. There was stirring in the next apartment. An ebon head poked past the door curtain, looked about, and withdrew without detecting me. The face I remembered at once. It was the wife of M. Picot's blackamoor. Only three men had pa.s.sed from the cave. If the blackamoor were one, M.

Picot and Le Borgne _must_ be the others.

Footsteps grated on the pebbles outside. I rose with beating heart to meet M. Picot, who held my fate in his hands. Then a ringing pistol-shot set my pulse jumping.

I ran to the door. Something plunged heavily against the curtain. The robe ripped from the hangings. In the flood of moonlight a man pitched face forward to the cave floor. He reeled up with a cry of rage, caught blindly at the air, uttered a groan, fell back.

"M. Picot!"

Blanched and faint, the French doctor lay with a crimsoning pool wet under his head. "I am shot! What will become of her?" he groaned. "I am shot! It was Gillam! It was Gillam!"

Hortense and the negress came running from the inner cave. Le Borgne and the blackamoor dashed from the open with staring horror.

"Lift me up! For G.o.d's sake, air!" cried M. Picot.

We laid him on the pelts in the doorway, Le Borgne standing guard outside.

Hortense stooped to stanch the wound, but the doctor motioned her off with a fierce impatience, and bade the negress lead her away. Then he lay with closed eyes, hands clutched to the pelts, and shuddering breath.

The blackamoor had rushed to the inner cave for liquor, when M. Picot opened his eyes with a strange far look fastened upon me.

"Swear it," he commanded.

And I thought his mind wandering.

He groaned heavily. "Don't you understand? It's Hortense. Swear you'll restore her--" and his breath came with a hard metallic rattle that warned the end.

"Doctor Picot," said I, "if you have anything to say, say it quickly and make your peace with G.o.d!"

"Swear you'll take her back to her people and treat her as a sister,"

he cried.

"I swear before G.o.d that I shall take Hortense back to her people, and that I shall treat her like a sister," I repeated, raising my right hand.

That seemed to quiet him. He closed his eyes.

"Sir," said I, "have you nothing more to say? Who are her people?"

"Is . . . is . . . any one listening?" he asked in short, hard breaths.

I motioned the others back.

"Listen"--the words came in quick, rasping breaths. "She is not mine . . . it was at night . . . they brought her . . . ward o' the court . . . lands . . . they wanted me." There was a sharp pause, a s.h.i.+vering whisper. "I didn't poison her"--the dying man caught convulsively at my hands--"I swear I had no thought of harming her. . . . They . . . paid. . . . I fled. . . ."

"Who paid you to poison Hortense? Who is Hortense?" I demanded; for his life was ebbing and the words portended deep wrong.

But his mind was wandering again, for he began talking so fast that I could catch only a few words. "Blood! Blood! Colonel Blood!" Then "Swear it," he cried.

That speech sapped his strength. He sank back with shut eyes and faint breathings.

We forced a potion between his lips.

"Don't let Gillam," he mumbled, "don't let Gillam . . . have the furs."

A tremor ran through his stiffening frame. A little shuddering breath--and M. Picot had staked his last p.a.w.n in life's game.

[1] In confirmation of Mr. Stanhope's record it may be stated that on the western side of the northland in the Mackenzie River region are gas and tar veins that are known to have been burning continuously for nearly two centuries.

CHAPTER XXI

HOW THE PIRATES CAME

Inside our Habitation all was the confusion of preparation for leaving the bay. Outside, the Indians held high carnival; for Allemand, the gin-soaked pilot, was busy pa.s.sing drink through the loopholes to a pandemonium of savages raving outside the stockades. 'Tis not a pretty picture, that memory of white-men besotting the Indian; but I must even set down the facts as they are, bidding you to remember that the white trader who besotted the Indian was the same white trader who befriended all tribes alike when the hunt failed and the famine came. La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, it was, who managed this low trafficking. Indeed, for the rubbing together of more doubloons in his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was nine parts rain-water.

"The more cheat, you, to lay such unction to your conscience," says M.

de Radisson. "Be an honest knave, La Chesnaye!"

Foret, the marquis, stalked up and down before the gate with two guards at his heels. All day long birch canoes and log dugouts and tubby pirogues and crazy rafts of loose-lashed pine logs drifted to our water-front with bands of squalid Indians bringing their pelts. Skin tepees rose outside our palisades like an army of mushrooms. Naked brats with wisps of hair coa.r.s.e as a horse's mane crawled over our mounted cannon, or scudded between our feet like pups, or felt our European clothes with impudent wonder. Young girls having hair plastered flat with bear's grease stood peeping shyly from tent flaps.

Old squaws with skin withered to a parchment hung over the campfires, cooking. And at the loopholes pressed the braves and the bucks and the chief men exchanging beaver-skins for old iron, or a silver fox for a drink of gin, or ermine enough to make His Majesty's coronation robe for some flashy trinket to trick out a vain squaw. From dawn to dusk ran the patter of moccasined feet, man after man toiling up from river-front to fort gate with bundles of peltries on his back and a carrying strap across his brow.

Unarmed, among the savages, pacifying drunken hostiles at the water-front, bidding Jean and me look after the carriers, in the gateway, helping Sieur de Groseillers to sort the furs--Pierre Radisson was everywhere. In the guard-house were more English prisoners than we had crews of French; and in the mess-room sat Governor Brigdar of the Hudson's Bay Company, who took his captivity mighty ill and grew prodigious pot-valiant over his cups. Here, too, lolled Ben Gillam, the young New Englander, rumbling out a drunken vengeance against those inland pirates, who had deprived him of the season's furs.

Once, I mind, when M. Radisson came suddenly on these two worthies, their fuddled heads were close together above the table.

"Look you," Ben was saying in a big, rasping whisper, "I shot him--I shot him with a bra.s.s b.u.t.ton. The black arts are powerless agen bra.s.s.

Devil sink my soul if I didn't shoot him! The red--spattered over the brush----"

M. Radisson raised a hand to silence my coming.

Ben's nose poked across the table, closer to Governor Brigdar's ear.

"But look you, Mister What's-y-er-name," says he.

"Don't you Mister me, you young cub!" interrupts the governor with a pompous show of drunken dignity.