The Courage of Marge O'Doone Part 10

He was trembling when he went on, deeper into the forest. But of his determination there was no longer a doubt. He would say nothing to Father Roland until Tavish had seen the picture.

Until now he had forgotten Baree. In the disquieting fear with which his thoughts were weighted he had lost hold of the fact that in his hand he still carried the slightly curved and solidly frozen substance of a fish. The movement of a body near him, so unexpected and alarmingly close that a cry broke from his lips as he leaped to one side, roused him with a sudden mental shock. The beast, whatever it was, had pa.s.sed within six feet of him, and now, twice that distance away, stood like a statue hewn out of stone levelling at him the fiery gleam of a solitary eye. Until he saw that one eye, and not two, David did not breathe. Then he gasped. The fish had fallen from his fingers. He stooped, picked it up, and called softly:

"Baree!"

The dog was waiting for his voice. His one eye s.h.i.+fted, slanting like a searchlight in the direction of the cabin, and turned swiftly back to David. He whined, and David spoke to him again, calling his name, and holding out the fish. For several moments Baree did not move, but eyed him with the immobility of a half-blinded sphinx. Then, suddenly, he dropped on his belly and began crawling toward him.

A spatter of moonlight fell upon them as David, crouching on his heels, gave Baree the fish, holding for a moment to the tail of it while the hungry beast seized its head between his powerful jaws with a grinding crunch. The power of those jaws sent a little s.h.i.+ver through the man so close to them. They were terrible--and splendid. A man's leg-bone would have cracked between them like a pipe stem. And Baree, with that power of death in his jaws, had a second time crept to him on his belly--not fearingly, in the shadow of a club, but like a thing tamed into slavery by a yearning adoration. It was a fact that seized upon David with a peculiar hold. It built up between them--between this down-and-out beast and a man fighting to find himself--a comrades.h.i.+p which perhaps only the man and the beast could understand. Even as he devoured the fish Baree kept his one eye on David, as though fearing he might lose him again if he allowed his gaze to falter for an instant. The truculency and the menace of that eye were gone. It was still bloodshot, still burned with a reddish fire, and a great pity swept through David, as he thought of the blows the club must have given. He noticed, then, that Baree was making efforts to open the other eye; he saw the swollen lid flutter, the muscle twitch. Impulsively he put out a hand. It fell unflinchingly on Baree's head, and in an instant the crunching of the dog's jaw had ceased, and he lay as if dead. David bent nearer. With the thumb and forefinger of his other hand he gently lifted the swollen lid. It caused a hurt. Baree whined softly. His great body trembled. His ivory fangs clicked like the teeth of a man with ague. To his wolfish soul, trembling in a body that had been condemned, beaten, clubbed almost to the door of death, that hurt caused by David's fingers was a caress. He understood. He saw with a vision that was keener than sight. Faith was born in him, and burned like a conflagration. His head dropped to the snow; a great, gasping sigh ran through him, and his trembling ceased.

His good eye closed slowly as David gently and persistently ma.s.saged the muscles of the other with his thumb and forefinger. When at last he rose to his feet and returned to the cabin, Baree followed him to the edge of the clearing.

Mukoki and the Missioner had made their beds of balsam boughs, two on the floor and one in the bunk, and the Cree had already rolled himself in his blanket when David entered the shack. Father Roland was wiping David's gun.

"We'll give you a little practice with this to-morrow," he promised. "Do you suppose you can hit a moose?"

"I have my doubts, _mon Pere_."

Father Roland gave vent to his curious chuckle.

"I have promised to make a marksman of you in exchange for your--your trouble in teaching me how to use the gloves," he said, polis.h.i.+ng furiously. There was a twinkle in his eyes, as if a moment before he had been laughing to himself. The gloves were on the table. He had been examining them again, and David found himself smiling at the childlike and eager interest he had taken in them. Suddenly Father Roland rubbed still a little faster, and said:

"If you can't hit a moose with a bullet you surely can hit me with these gloves--eh?"

"Yes, quite positively. But I shall be merciful if you, in turn, show some charity in teaching me how to shoot."

The Little Missioner finished his polis.h.i.+ng, set the rifle against the wall, and took the gloves in his hands.

"It is bright--almost like day--outside," he said a little yearningly.

"Are you--tired?"

His hint was obvious, even to Mukoki, who stared at him from under his blanket. And David was not tired. If his afternoon's work had fatigued him his exhaustion was forgotten in the mental excitement that had followed the Missioner's story of Tavish. He took a pair of the gloves in his hands, and nodded toward the door.

"You mean...."

Father Roland was on his feet.

"If you are not tired. It would give us a better stomach for sleep."

Mukoki rolled from his blanket, a grin on his leathery face. He tied the wrist laces for them, and followed them out into the moonlit night, his face a copper-coloured gargoyle illuminated by that fixed and joyous grin. David saw the look and wondered if it would change when he sent the Little Missioner bowling over in the snow, which he was quite sure to do, even if he was careful. He was a splendid boxer. In the days of his practice he had struck a terrific blow for his weight. At the Athletic Club he had been noted for a subtle strategy and a cleverness of defence that were his own. But he felt that he had grown rusty during the past year and a half. This thought was in his mind when he tapped the Missioner on the end of his ruddy nose. They squared away in the moonlight, eight inches deep in the snow, and there was a joyous and eager light in Father Roland's eyes. The tap on his nose did not dim it.

His teeth gleamed, even as David's gloves went _plunk_, _plunk_, against his nose again. Mukoki, still grinning like a carven thing, chuckled audibly. David pranced carelessly about the Little Missioner, poking him beautifully as he offered suggestions and criticism.

"You should protect your nose, _mon Pere_"--_plunk_! "And the pit of your stomach"--_plunk_! "And also your ears"--_plunk_, _plunk_! "But especially your nose, _mon Pere_"--_plunk_, _plunk_!

"And sometimes the tip of your jaw, David," gurgled Father Roland, and for a few moments night closed in darkly about David.

When he came fully into his senses again he was sitting in the snow, with the Little Missioner bending over him anxiously, and Mukoki grinning down at him like a fiend.

"Dear Heaven, forgive me!" he heard Father Roland saying. "I didn't mean it so hard, David--I didn't! But oh, man, it was such a chance--such a beautiful chance! And now I've spoiled it. I've spoiled our fun."

"Not unless you're--tired," said David, getting up on his feet. "You took me at a disadvantage, _mon Pere_. I thought you were green."

"And you were pulverizing my nose," apologized Father Roland.

They went at it again, and this time David spared none of his caution, and offered no advice, and the Missioner no longer posed, but became suddenly as elusive and as agile as a cat. David was amazed, but he wasted no breath to demand an explanation. Father Roland was parrying his straight blows like an adept. Three times in as many minutes he felt the sting of the Missioner's glove in his face. In straight-away boxing, without the finer tricks and artifice of the game, he was soon convinced that the forest man was almost his match. Little by little he began to exert the cleverness of his training. At the end of ten minutes Father Roland was sitting dazedly in the snow, and the grin had gone from Mukoki's face. He had succ.u.mbed to a trick--a swift side step, a feint that had held in it an ambush, and the seat of the Little Missioner's faculties had rocked. But he was gurgling joyously when he rose to his feet, and with one arm he hugged David as they returned to the cabin.

"Only one other man has given me a jolt like that in many a year," he boasted, a bit proudly. "And that was Tavish. Tavish is good. He must have lived long among fighting men. Perhaps that is why I think so kindly of him. I love a fighting man if he fights honourably with either brain or brawn, even more than I despise a coward."

"And yet this Tavish, you say, is pursued by a great fear. Can he be so much of a fighting man, in the way you mean, and still live in terror of...."

"_What?_"

That single word broke from the Missioner like the sharp crack of a whip.

"Of _what_ is he afraid?" he repeated. "Can you tell me? Can you guess more than I have guessed? Is one a coward because he fears whispers that tremble in the air and sees a face in the darkness of night that is neither living nor dead? Is he?"

For a long time after he had gone to bed David lay wide awake in the darkness, his mind working until it seemed to him that it was prisoned in an iron chamber from which it was making futile efforts to escape. He could hear the steady breathing of Father Roland and Mukoki, who were asleep. His own eyes he could close only by forced efforts to bring upon himself the unconsciousness of rest. Tavish filled his mind--Tavish and the girl--and along with them the mysterious woman in the coach. He struggled with himself. He told himself how absurd it all was, how grotesquely his imagination was employing itself with him--how incredible it was that Tavish and the girl in the picture should be a.s.sociated in that terrible way that had occurred to him. But he failed to convince himself. He fell asleep at last, and his slumber was filled with fleeting visions. When he awoke the cabin was filled with the glow of the lantern. Father Roland and Mukoki were up, and a fire was crackling in the stove.

The four days that followed broke the last link in the chain that held David Raine to the life from which he was fleeing when the forest Missioner met him in the Transcontinental. They were four wonderful days, in which they travelled steadily northward; days of splendid suns.h.i.+ne, of intense cold, of brilliant stars and a full moon at night.

The first of these four days David travelled fifteen miles on his snow shoes, and that night he slept in a balsam shelter close to the face of a great rock which they heated with a fire of logs, so that all through the cold hours between darkness and gray dawn the boulder was like a huge warming-stone. The second day marked also the second great stride in his education in the life of the wild. Fang and hoof and padded claw were at large again in the forests after the blizzard, and Father Roland stopped at each broken path that crossed the trail, pointing out to him the stories that were written in the snow. He showed him where a fox had followed silently after a snow-shoe rabbit; where a band of wolves had ploughed through the snow in the trail of a deer that was doomed, and in a dense run of timber where both moose and caribou had sought refuge from the storm he explained carefully the slight difference between the hoofprints of the two. That night Baree came into camp while they were sleeping, and in the morning they found where he had burrowed his round bed in the snow not a dozen yards from their shelter. The third morning David shot his moose. And that night he lured Baree almost to the side of their campfire, and tossed him chunks of raw flesh from where he sat smoking his pipe.

He was changed. Three days on the trail and three nights in camp under the stars had begun their promised miracle-working. His face was darkened by a stubble of beard, his ears and cheek bones were reddened by exposure to cold and wind; he felt that in those three days and nights his muscles had hardened, and his weakness had left him. "It was in your mind--your sickness," Father Roland had told him, and he believed it now. He began to find a pleasure in that physical achievement which he had wondered at in Mukoki and the Missioner. Each noon when they stopped to boil their tea and cook their dinner, and each night when they made camp, he had chopped down a tree. To-night it had been an 8-inch jack pine, tough with pitch. The exertion had sent his blood pounding through him furiously. He was still breathing deeply as he sat near the fire, tossing bits of meat out to Baree. They were sixty miles from Th.o.r.eau's cabin, straight north, and for the twentieth time Father Roland was telling him how well he had done.

"And to-morrow," he added, "we'll reach Tavish's."

It had grown upon David that to see Tavish had become his one great mission in the North. What adventure lay beyond that meeting he did not surmise. All his thoughts had centred in the single desire to let Tavish look upon the picture. To-night, after the Missioner had joined Mukoki in the silk tent buried warmly under the ma.s.s of cut balsam, he sat a little longer beside the fire, and asked himself questions which he had not thought of before. He would see Tavish. He would show him the picture. And--what then? Would that be the end of it? He felt, for a moment, uncomfortable. Beyond Tavish there was a disturbing and unanswerable problem. The Girl, if she still lived, was a thousand miles from where he was sitting at this moment; to reach her, with that distance of mountain and forest between them, would be like travelling to the end of the world. It was the first time there had risen in his mind a definite thought of going to her--if she were alive. It startled him. It was like a shock. Go to her? Why? He drew forth the picture from his coat pocket and stared at the wonder-face of the Girl in the light of the blazing logs. _Why?_ His heart trembled. He lifted his eyes to the grayish film of smoke rising between him and the balsam-covered tent, and slowly he saw another face take form, framed in that wraith-like mist of smoke--the face of a golden G.o.ddess, laughing at him, taunting him. _Laughing--laughing_!... He forced his gaze from it with a shudder. Again he looked at the picture of the Girl in his hand.

"_She knows. She understands. She comforts me._" He whispered the words.

They were like a breath rising out of his soul. He replaced the picture in his pocket, and for a moment held it close against his breast.

The next day, as the swift-thickening gloom of northern night was descending about them again, the Missioner halted his team on the crest of a boulder-strewn ridge, and pointing down into the murky plain at their feet he said, with the satisfaction of one who has come to a journey's end:

"There is Tavish's."

CHAPTER XI

They went down into the plain. David strained his eyes, but he could see nothing where Father Roland had pointed except the purplish sea of forest growing black in the fading twilight. Ahead of the team Mukoki picked his way slowly and cautiously among the snow-hidden rocks, and with the Missioner David flung his weight backward on the sledge to keep it from running upon the dogs. It was a thick, wild place and it struck him that Tavish could not have chosen a spot of more sinister aspect in which to hide himself and his secret. A terribly lonely place it was, and still as death as they went down into it. They heard not even the howl of a dog, and surely Tavish had dogs. He was on the point of speaking, of asking the Missioner why Tavish, haunted by fear, should bury himself in a place like this, when the lead-dog suddenly stopped and a low, lingering whine drifted back to them. David had never heard anything like that whine. It swept through the line of dogs, from throat to throat, and the beasts stood stiff-legged and stark in their traces, staring with eight pairs of restlessly blazing eyes into the wall of darkness ahead. The Cree had turned, but the sharp command on his lips had frozen there. David saw him standing ahead of the team as silent and as motionless as rock. From him he looked into the Missioner's face.

Father Roland was staring. There was a strange suspense in his breathing. And then, suddenly, the lead-dog sat back on his haunches and turning his gray muzzle up to the sky emitted a long and mournful howl.

There was something about it that made David s.h.i.+ver. Mukoki came staggering back through the snow like a sick man.

"_Nipoo-win Ooyoo!_" he said, his eyes s.h.i.+ning like points of flame. A s.h.i.+ver seemed to be running through him.

For a moment the Missioner did not seem to hear him. Then he cried:

"Give them the whip! Drive them on!"

The Cree turned, unwinding his long lash.