Troop One of the Labrador Part 15

The whole question was canva.s.sed pro and con, and due consideration given to the length of time that Indian Jake must have consumed in pa.s.sing from Horn's Bight to Flat Point. This was alone sufficient in the mind of Thomas and the boys to lift all suspicion from Indian Jake, but Eli still held stubbornly to the opposite view.

Two days later, and on the eve of Thomas's departure for the trails, Doctor Joe returned. Lem had so far recovered that a further stay at Horn's Bight was unnecessary.

Thomas and Doctor Joe quietly discussed the shooting incident. Lem, it appeared, had later decided that he may have been shot much earlier in the afternoon than sundown. What had occurred had fallen into the hazy uncertainty of a dream.

"What kind of a rifle does Indian Jake use?" asked Doctor Joe.

"A thirty-eight fifty-five," said Thomas.

Doctor Joe drew from his pocket the bullet extracted from Lem's wound.

Thomas examined it critically.

"There's no doubtin' 'tis a thirty-eight fifty-five," he admitted.

"'Tis true Injun Jake gets a pair of nailed boots like the lumber folk wears. But Injun Jake'll tell me whether 'twere he shot Lem. Injun Jake'll be fair about un with me whatever. 'Tis hard for me to believe he did un. If he did, he'll be gone from the Nascaupee when I gets there. If he didn't, I'll find he waitin'!"

"Let us hope he'll be there, and let us hope he's innocent," said Doctor Joe.

Some day and in some way every sin is punished and every criminal is discovered. It is an immutable law of G.o.d that he who does wrong must atone for the wrong. We do not always know how the punishment is brought about, but the guilty one knows. And so with the shooting and robbery of Lem Horn. Many months were to pa.s.s before the mystery was to be solved, and then the revelation was to come in a startling manner in the course of an adventure amid the deep snows of winter.

Thomas sailed away the following morning. They watched his boat pa.s.s down through The Jug and out into the Bay, and then the silence of the wilderness closed upon him, and no word came as to whether or no Indian Jake met him at the Nascaupee River camp.

CHAPTER XI

THE LETTER IN THE CAIRN

In Labrador September is the pleasantest month of the year. It is a period of calm when fogs and mists and cold dreary rains, so frequent during July and the early half of August, are past, and Nature holds her breath before launching upon the world the bitter blasts and blizzards and awful cold of a sub-arctic winter. There are days and days together when the azure of the sky remains unmarred by clouds, and the sun s.h.i.+nes uninterruptedly. The air, brilliantly transparent, carries a tw.a.n.g of frost. Evening is bathed in an effulgence of colour. The sky flames in startling reds and yellows blending into opals and turquoise, with the shadowy hills lying in a purple haze in the west.

Then comes night and the aurora. Wavering fingers of light steal up from the northern horizon. Higher and higher they climb until they have reached and crossed the zenith. From the north they spread to the east and to the west until the whole sky is aflame with s.h.i.+mmering fire of marvellous changing colours varying from darkest purple to dazzling white.

The dark green of the spruce and balsam forests is splotched with golden yellow where the magic touch of the frost king has laid his fingers and worked a miracle upon groves of tamaracks. The leaves of the aspen and white birch have fallen, and the flowers have faded.

Spruce grouse chickens, full grown now, rise in coveys with much noise of wing, and perch in trees looking down unafraid upon any who intrude upon their forest home. Ptarmigans, still in their coat of mottled brown and white, gather in flocks upon the naked hills to feed, where upland cranberries cover the ground in red ma.s.ses; or on the edge of marshes where bake apple berries have changed from brilliant red to delicate salmon pink and offer a sweet and wholesome feast.

The honk and quack of wild geese and ducks, southward bound in great flocks, disturbs the silence of every inlet and cove and bight, where the wild fowl pause for a time to rest and feed upon the gra.s.ses.

After Thomas's departure Doctor Joe and the boys tidied and snugged things up for the winter, and many a fine hunt they had, mornings and evenings, in the edge of a near-by marsh through which a brook coursed to join the sea. Hunting geese and ducks was indeed a duty, for they must needs depend upon the hunt for no small share of their living. It was a duty they enjoyed, however. Skill and a steady hand and a quick eye are necessary to success, and they never failed to return with a full bag.

The weather was now cold enough to keep the birds sweet and fresh, and before September closed a full two score of fine fat geese were hanging in the enclosed lean-to shed with a promise of many good dinners in the future.

Between the hunting and the work about home there was no time to be dawdled vainly away. When there was nothing more pressing the wood-pile always stood suggestively near the door inviting attention, and it was necessary to saw and split a vast deal of wood to keep the big box stove supplied, for it had a great maw and would develop a marvellous appet.i.te when the weather grew cold.

No extended travelling was possible for Doctor Joe on his errands of mercy until the sea should freeze and dogs and sledge could be called into service. But during the fine September weather he and the boys made two short trips up the Bay, where there was ailing in some of the families.

In the course of these excursions they took occasion to visit Let-in-Cove, which lay just outside Grampus River, where the new lumber camps were situated, and also Snug Cove and Tuggle Bight, a little farther on. At Let-in-Cove Peter and Lige Sparks, at Snug Cove Obadiah b.u.t.ton and Micah Dunk, and at Tuggle Bight Seth Muggs were enlisted in the scout troop, and a handbook left at each place. These, indeed, with the three Anguses, were the only boys of scout age within a radius of fifty miles of The Jug.

There was great excitement among the lads, and Doctor Joe proudly declared that there would be no finer or more efficient troop of scouts in all the world than his little troop of eight when they had become familiar with their duties.

A new field and a broader vision of life was to open to these Labrador lads, whose life was of necessity circ.u.mscribed. They had never been given the opportunity to play as boys play in more favoured lands.

They had never known the joys of football or cricket or the hundred other fine, health-giving games that are a part of the life of every English or Canadian boy. They had never seen a circus or a moving picture and they had never been in a schoolroom in their lives.

This opportunity to play and study as other boys play and study in other lands was the thing, perhaps, they longed for above all else.

Doctor Joe had inspired them with ambition. They hungered to learn and here was the Handbook with many things in it to study, and through Doctor Joe and the book they were to learn the joy of play.

The new recruits to the troop, however, as well as the Angus boys, had been close students of their native wilderness. Their eyes were sharp and their ears were quick. They knew every tree and flower and plant that grew about them. They knew the birds and their calls and songs.

They knew every animal, its cry and its habits of life. They knew the fish of the sea and lake and stream. All this was a part of their training for their future profession of hunters and fishermen.

As hunters they had not learned to look upon the wild things of the woods as friends and a.s.sociates. To them the animals were only beasts whose valuable pelts could be traded at the Post for necessaries of life or whose flesh was good to eat. Success in life depended upon man's ability to outwit and slay birds or animals, and the lads held for them none of the human sympathy that would have added so much to their own enjoyment.

Now they were to have a new view of life. Doctor Joe was to open to them a wider, happier vista. It was not in the least to breed in them discontent with their circ.u.mscribed life, but rather to open to their consciousness the opportunities that lay within their reach, and to make their life richer and broader and vastly more worth while.

Doctor Joe explained to the five recruits the Tenderfoot Scout requirements, much as he had explained them to David and Andy and Jamie. Wilderness dwellers who must take in and fix in the mind at a glance every unusual tree or stump or stone if they would find their trail, have a peculiar and remarkable gift of memory born of long practice and the fact that they must perforce depend upon their ability to retain the things they see and hear. The lads, therefore, required no repet.i.tion, and learned their lessons with ease.

Though they had never attended school they could all read, stumbling, to be sure, over the big words, but nevertheless grasping the meaning.

Doctor Joe, during his years in the Bay, had taught not only the Angus boys but many of the other young people to read. Doctor Joe now marked the pages that they were to study, and before he and the Angus boys turned back across the Bay to The Jug it was agreed that the new troop should hold a week's camp to study and practise together. Hollow Cove, some five miles from The Jug, was to be the camping ground, and the first week in October was decided upon as the time.

"We'll start to camp on Monday marnin' of that week," suggested David.

"Come over to The Jug on Sunday. 'Twill be fine to have us all go to camp together."

"Aye," agreed Micah, "'twill be now, and we'll come, and have a fine time."

"And we'll all study about the scout things whilst we're in camp,"

piped up Jamie enthusiastically.

"That we will now," David a.s.sured.

"Lige, you and Peter bring a tent and stove, and all you need for setting up camp," Doctor Joe directed. "Can you bring one, too, Seth?"

"Aye," said Seth, "I'll bring un, but we have no tent stove. Pop took un to the huntin'."

"Obadiah or Micah may bring a stove. You have one, haven't you?"

Doctor Joe asked.

"Aye," said Obadiah, "I has one. I'll bring un along."

"You three fix up an outfit amongst you. There'll be three in a tent,"

Doctor Joe explained. "Andy can go in with Peter and Lige, and I'll tent with Davy and Jamie."

There was little else than the proposed camping expedition talked about on the return to The Jug, and in the days that followed David, Andy and Jamie devoted every spare moment to the study of first aid and signalling. Doctor Joe, with no end of patience, drilled them so thoroughly in first aid that they were soon really expert in applying bandages. He even instructed them in improvising splints and reducing fractures. In this secluded land, where for three hundred miles up and down the coast there was no other surgeon than Doctor Joe, it was not unlikely that some day they would be called upon to set a leg or an arm.

Doctor Joe was as ignorant, however, of the art of signalling as were the lads, and he must needs take it up from the very beginning and study with them. It was decided that they should learn both the semaph.o.r.e and Morse codes, and Doctor Joe insisted that neither he nor the lads should consider the Second Cla.s.s test satisfactorily pa.s.sed until they had not only learned the codes but could send and receive messages at the rate of speed designated in the handbook as required for the First Cla.s.s test.

"It wouldn't be fair to the scouts in the big cities," he declared.

"They have to learn a great many things that we already know how to do, like building fires, using the axe and knife, and tracking. Those are things we've been doing all our lives and won't have to practise.

We must make it just as hard for ourselves to become Second Cla.s.s Scouts as it is for the city lads. So we'll make the signalling test that much more difficult."