The Law of the North Part 32

Under the lee of the headland the Nor'wester's canoe drifted.

Backwatering with his rigidly held paddle, he lay to below the rivergate. A loud voice hailed them from the watchtower.

"Halloo! Who comes?"

"It is Black Ferguson himself," whispered the Nor'west man to Brochet, studying the tall figure poised on the high wall. "He finds it harder to wait than he thought."

Then, lifting up his shout, Ferguson's messenger answered his leader.

"Cartienne!" he roared. "Cartienne comes. And with a priest!"

Wide swung the watergate in the s.p.a.ce of a breath. Black Ferguson seemed to have fallen from the watchtower so quickly did he accomplish the descent. His eager face peered at them from the dusky landing.

"By all the saints, Cartienne!" he laughed, mightily pleased. "What did you use? Witchcraft?"

The messenger explained. Voluble with blessings on his good luck, Ferguson dismissed Cartienne and haled the priest off to the store, in a room above which Desiree Lazard was confined.

"No supper, Father," he joked, "till you have seen my bride-to-be. And knife me, she'll give you an appet.i.te! I'll warrant that. After supper you shall marry us."

"Is she so fair, then?" ventured Brochet.

"Fair? I'll take my oath you saw none like her in all the Pontiac, Father Marcin. But you shall judge for yourself! Here is the place. Let me lead the way aloft."

Brochet looked round as he followed Ferguson up the stairway and saw, coming into the building with some trappers to barter goods, the familiar, hideous figure of Gaspard Follet. He swiftly turned his back and pulled the hood tighter. The spy's bellowing laugh made him flinch with the sickening feeling of discovery, but immediately he was ashamed of the falsity of his alarm. Gaspard's mirth held no hint of wicked triumph; nothing but harsh deviltry as he stared a second upon Ferguson and the black ca.s.socked one.

"A priest, a marriage and afterwards--h--l!" Brochet heard the dwarf cheerfully prophesy to the trappers. Again his mawkish laugh vibrated among the hewn rafters.

Above the Nor'west leader quickly crossed the room and indicated a door.

"Here, Father! Cover your eyes lest her beauty blind you!" The tone was exultant as well as bantering.

He fumbled with the bolt, failed to shoot it, and stooped to examine, for the dark was gathering thickly so that small things could not be easily seen.

"The devil!" he cried amazedly. "It's unlocked! Now what cursed trickery is this?"

Kicked back without ceremony, the door banged and quivered. Ferguson bounded inside, the breathless priest on his heels. A single candle, burning serenely, lighted an empty room.

"Legions of fiends and devils!" blasphemed the angry Nor'wester, blundering round in sheer astonishment. "Escaped? It can't be, Father Marcin! She could not have gone through the store. My men would have seen. And yonder door, the only other way out, leads into the upper part of the fur-house where the powder is stored. It is locked! What traitor----"

The grating of a key interrupted him. Ferguson whirled at the sound. The door he had mentioned had opened and closed softly. Flora, paler than when Brochet had last seen her and with the shadow of disappointment in her eyes, quietly broke the key in the lock. She failed to recognize the priest whose face was partly concealed by his hood.

"You--you!" Ferguson shrieked, choking with terrible wrath.

"I," she answered unflinchingly. "I told you that you would never marry her. Neither shall you! Had I been able to spirit her out of La Roche, it would have been done. Failing that, I have placed her beyond your earthly reach. You cannot kiss her living lips!"

"What! You she-fiend," shouted the Nor'wester, thoughts of evil dealing leaping into his bewildered brain, "do you dare tell me----"

But Flora stopped him with an imperious gesture.

"Don't misunderstand me," she returned contemptuously. "Go look for her in the powder-room."

At that, enlightenment swept him. He leaped forward, madly incensed, with fists clenched to strike her. Father Brochet had just time to throw himself between.

"Softly," the priest cautioned, whispering low that the Factor's daughter might not know his voice; "you must not offer a blow to a woman. I thought a prospective bridegroom had been more gentle with the s.e.x."

"Your pardon, Father," he begged.

But he was barely containing himself. The judgment for the woman who was his wife leaped out.

"I'll suffer you here no longer," he snarled. "Leave La Roche at dawn.

That's my last word to you!"

But the gleaming devil in his eye leered back at him in the steady contemptuous gaze of Malcolm Macleod's daughter.

Downstairs in wild, inconsiderate haste the Nor'wester dragged the priest. Dark had fallen on La Roche, a deep darkness of velvety, impenetrable gloom peculiar to the North. A drifting pall of mist that beaded the stockades and dripped from the blockhouse eaves added to the intensity of the night. Suggestive of tragedy, symbolic of disaster, prophetic of unknown calamity, the weird atmosphere chilled the men as with a breath of fatalism. Both felt it, but neither stopped long enough to a.n.a.lyze the feeling. Brochet attributed the odd sensation to his delicate position which in the event of discovery would become fatal.

Black Ferguson thought the impression was simply attendant upon his abnormal excitement as he raced across the yard to the fur-house.

There the priest sweated with a very natural fear when they met a group of Indians who had been storing bales by torchlight. Trooping back from their work, the red gleam licking across their coppery features, Brochet saw Running Wolf, his hot-tempered son Three Feathers and others of the Cree tribe from the Katchawan.

Veering a little, the priest walked on Ferguson's right side on the edge of the ring of light. Thus he avoided encountering them fairly and escaped keen eyes that would have undoubtedly recognized him even under his m.u.f.fling capote.

"_Bo' jou', bo' jou'_," the Crees grunted, and stalked on.

Into the fur-house between rows of strong-odored pelts the Nor'wester hurried through the dark with Brochet. Up the long ladder which was wide enough for both to climb abreast they hastened. Ferguson threw back the ceiling trapdoor with a resounding clang. The tableau that met the two men's eyes as they pushed up their heads was one to be stamped indelibly on their memories.

A candle gleaming beside her in a sconce on the wall, Desiree Lazard crouched behind a heap of powder kegs in the middle of the room. The top of the central keg had been broken in. The powder's black crystals shone with an awesome refraction of light. And, white-lipped, tense-fibered, Desiree held the great pistol in her hand so that its muzzle was buried in the deadly stuff.

Her eyes lightened with recognition at sight of Brochet's colorless face in the dark square of the trapdoor's s.p.a.ce. But, being behind Ferguson's shoulder, he placed a finger on his lips so that the girl understood and gave no sign.

First the Nor'wester cursed in helplessness and baffled anger. Then his powers of entreaty were exhausted to no betterment. His handsome, diabolical countenance was set with a rigid glare almost maniacal in distortion.

"Are you mad, girl?" he screamed, his voice more animal-like than human.

"No, but you are," Desiree retorted scornfully, "if you think to approach me. Remember! A crook of my finger and Fort La Roche goes!"

To Brochet it was splendid--the soft woman holding at certain bay the wily Nor'wester whom none had ever baffled before. Her courage sent a glow through his own frame, but instantly he s.h.i.+vered at the thought that this could not last any great length of time. The situation was impossible. Yet such as it was, Desiree was mistress of it!

"The minute that you or your men show foot above those ladder rungs, I fire," she declared with an intense earnestness which the Nor'wester did not for an instant doubt. "Your priest there may come up. But no other!"

Devil that he was, Black Ferguson began to test her nerve, prancing on the rounds upward, ever upward, showing his waist, his hips, knees, even ankles, while Father Brochet trembled for the sake of the girl. He expected every instant to hear the thunderous reverberation that would carry destruction and death. Once the Nor'west leader rose on the last rung till his boot-tops levelled the floor, balanced thus, grinning to see how little he had to spare.

The priest noted Desiree's hand whitening on the pistol b.u.t.t, noted the weapon's muzzle thrusting deeper into the powder. Involuntarily his fingertips went to his ears. But the explosion did not come. Laughing a grim, satisfied laugh, Black Ferguson dropped down a rung or so alongside Brochet.

"You should not do that," the latter reproved. "A slip of your foot or a nervous quiver of the girl's hand and we would all be in Heaven!"

"You and the girl might, Father. I would be in a fitter place."

Ferguson's face was insolent. He had no fear, neither had he any reverence.