The Courage of Marge O'Doone Part 5

Father Roland sat up, stopped his eating, and looked at David for a moment as though the question struck an unusual personal interest in him.

"I know a man who lived for a great many years along the Stikine," he replied then. "He knows every mile of it from where it empties into the sea at Point Rothshay to the Lost Country between Mount Finlay and the Sheep Mountains. It's in the northern part of British Columbia, with its upper waters reaching into the Yukon. A wild country. A country less known than it was sixty years ago, when there was a gold rush up over the old telegraph trail. Tavish has told me a lot about it. A queer man--this Tavish. We hit his cabin on our way to G.o.d's Lake."

"Did he ever tell you," said David, with an odd quiver in his throat--"Did he ever tell you of a stream, a tributary stream, called Firepan Creek?"

"Firepan Creek--Firepan Creek," mumbled the Little Missioner. "He has told me a great many things, this Tavish, but I can't remember that.

_Firepan Creek_! Yes, he did! I remember, now. He had a cabin on it one year, the year he had small-pox. He almost died there. I want you to meet Tavish, David. We will stay overnight at his cabin. He is a strange character--a great object lesson." Suddenly he came back to David's question. "What do you want to know about Stikine River and Firepan Creek?" he asked.

"I was reading something about them that interested me," replied David.

"A _very_ wild country, I take it, from what Tavish has told you.

Probably no white people."

"Always, everywhere, there are a few white people," said Father Roland.

"Tavish is white, and he was there. Sixty years ago, in the gold rush, there must have been many. But I fancy there are very few now. Tavish can tell us. He came from there only a year ago this last September."

David asked no more questions. He turned his attention entirely to his fish. In that same moment there came an outburst from the foxes that made Th.o.r.eau grin. Their yapping rose until it was a clamorous demand.

Then the dogs joined in. To David it seemed as though there must be a thousand foxes out in the Frenchman's pens, and at least a hundred dogs just beyond the cabin walls. The sound was blood-curdling in a way. He had heard nothing like it before in all his life; it almost made one s.h.i.+ver to think of going outside. The chorus kept up for fully a minute.

Then it began to die out, and David could hear the chill clink of chains. Through it all Th.o.r.eau was grinning.

"It's two hours over feeding time for the foxes, and they know it, m'sieur," he explained to David. "Their outcry excites the huskies, and when the two go together--_Mon Dieu_! it is enough to raise the dead."

He pushed himself back from the table and rose to his feet. "I am going to feed them now. Would you like to see it, m'sieu?"

Father Roland answered for him.

"Give us ten minutes and we shall be ready," he said, seizing David by the arm, and speaking to Th.o.r.eau. "Come with me, David. I have something waiting for you."

They went into the Little Missioner's room, and pointing to his tumbled bed, Father Roland said:

"Now, David, strip!"

David had noticed with some concern the garments worn that morning by Father Roland and the Frenchman--their thick woollen s.h.i.+rts, their strange-looking, heavy trousers that were met just below the knees by the tops of bulky German socks, turned over as he had worn his more fas.h.i.+onable hosiery in the college days when golf suits, bulldog pipes, and white terriers were the rage. He had stared furtively at Th.o.r.eau's great feet in their moose-hide moccasins, thinking of his own vici kids, the heaviest footwear he had brought with him. The problem of outfitting was solved for him now, as he looked at the bed, and as Father Roland withdrew, rubbing his hands until they cracked, David began undressing.

In less than a quarter of an hour he was ready for the big outdoors.

When the Missioner returned to give him a first lesson in properly "stringing up" his moccasins, he brought with him a fur cap very similar to that worn by Th.o.r.eau. He was amazed to find how perfectly it fitted.

"You see," said Father Roland, pleased at David's wonder, "I always take back a bale of this stuff with me, of different sizes; it comes in handy, you know. And the cap...."

He chuckled as David surveyed as much as he could see of himself in a small mirror.

"The cap is Marie's work," he finished. "She got the size from your hat and made it while we were asleep. A fine fisher-coat that--Th.o.r.eau's best. And a good fit, eh?"

"Marie ... did this ... for me?" demanded David.

The Missioner nodded.

"And the pay, Father...."

"Among friends of the forests, David, never speak of pay."

"But this skin! It is beautiful--valuable...."

"And it is yours," said Father Roland. "I am glad you mentioned payment to me, and not to Th.o.r.eau or Marie. They might not have understood, and it would have hurt them. If there had been anything to pay, _they_ would have mentioned it in the giving; _I_ would have mentioned it. That is a fine point of etiquette, isn't it?"

Slowly there came a look into David's face which the other did not at first understand. After a moment he said, without looking at the Missioner, and in a voice that had a curious hard note in it:

"But for this ... Marie will let me give her something in return--a little something I have no use for now? A little gift--my thanks--my friends.h.i.+p...."

He did not wait for the Missioner to reply, but went to one of his two leather bags. He unlocked the one in which he had placed the photograph of the girl. Out of it he took a small plush box. It was so small that it lay in the palm of his hand as he held it out to Father Roland.

Deeper lines had gathered about his mouth.

"Give this to Marie--for me."

Father Roland took the box. He did not look at it. Steadily he gazed into David's eyes.

"What is it?" he asked.

"A locket," replied David. "It belonged to _her_. In it is a picture--her picture--the only one I have. Will you--please--destroy the picture before you give the locket to Marie?"

Father Roland saw the quick, sudden throb in David's throat. He gripped the little box in his hand until it seemed as though he would crush it, and his heart was beating with the triumph of a drum. He spoke but one word, his eyes meeting David's eyes, but that one word was a whisper from straight out of his soul, and the word was:

"_Victory!_"

CHAPTER VII

Father Roland slipped the little plush box into his pocket as he and David went out to join Th.o.r.eau. They left the cabin together, Marie lifting her eyes from her work in a furtive glance to see if the stranger was wearing her cap.

A wild outcry from the dogs greeted the three men as they appeared outside the door, and for the first time David saw with his eyes what he had only heard last night. Among the balsams and spruce close to the cabin there were fully a score of the wildest and most savage-looking dogs he had ever beheld. As he stood for a moment, gazing about him, three things impressed themselves upon him in a flash: it was a glorious day, it was so cold that he felt a curious sting in the air, and not one of those long-haired, white-fanged beasts straining at their leashes possessed a kennel, or even a brush shelter. It was this last fact that struck him most forcefully. Inherently he was a lover of animals, and he believed these four-footed creatures of Th.o.r.eau's must have suffered terribly during the night. He noticed that at the foot of each tree to which a dog was attached there was a round, smooth depression in the snow, where the animal had slept. The next few minutes added to his conviction that the Frenchman and the Missioner were heartless masters, though open-handed hosts. Mukoki and another Indian had come up with two gunny sacks, and from one of these a bushel of fish was emptied out upon the snow. They were frozen stiff, so that Mukoki had to separate them with his belt-axe; David fancied they must be hard as rock. Th.o.r.eau proceeded to toss these fish to the dogs, one at a time, and one to each dog. The watchful and apparently famished beasts caught the fish in mid-air, and there followed a snarling and grinding of teeth and smas.h.i.+ng of bones and frozen flesh that made David s.h.i.+ver. He was half disgusted. Th.o.r.eau might at least have boiled the fish, or thawed them out. A fish weighing from one and a half to two pounds was each dog's allotment, and the work--if this feeding process could be called work--was done. Father Roland watched the dogs, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Th.o.r.eau was showing his big, white teeth, as if proud of something.

"Not a bad tooth among them, _mon Pere_," he said. "Not one!"

"Fine--fine--but a little too fat, Th.o.r.eau. You're feeding them too well for dogs out of the traces," replied Father Roland.

David gasped.

"Too _well_!" he exclaimed. "They're half starved, and almost frozen!

Look at the poor devils swallow those fish, ice and all! Why don't you cook the fish? Why don't you give them some sort of shelter to sleep in?"

Father Roland and the Frenchman stared at him as if they did not quite catch his meaning. Then a look of comprehension swept over the Missioner's face. He chuckled, the chuckle grew, it shook his body, and he laughed--laughed until the forest flung back the echoes of his merriment, and even the leathery faces of the Indians crinkled in sympathy. David could see no reason for his levity. He looked at Th.o.r.eau. His host was grinning broadly.

"G.o.d bless my soul!" said the Little Missioner at last. "Starved? Cold?

_Boil_ their fish? Give 'em _beds_!" He stopped himself as he saw a flush rising in David's face. "Forgive me, David," he begged, laying a hand on the other's arm. "You can't understand how funny that was--what you said. If you gave those fellows the warmest kennels in New York City, lined with bear skins, they wouldn't sleep in them, but would come outside and burrow those little round holes in the snow. That's their nature. I've felt sorry for them, like you--when the thermometer was down to sixty. But it's no use. As for the fish--they want 'em fresh or frozen. I suppose you might educate them to eat cooked meat, but it would be like making over a lynx or a fox or a wolf. They're mighty comfortable, those dogs, David. That bunch of eight over there is mine.

They'll take us north. And I want to warn you, don't put yourself in reach of them until they get acquainted with you. They're not pets, you know; I guess they'd appreciate petting just about as much as they would boiled fish, or poison. There's nothing on earth like a husky or an Eskimo dog when it comes to lookin' you in the eye with a friendly and lovable look and snapping your hand off at the same time. But you'll like 'em, David. You can't help feeling they're pretty good comrades when you see what they do in the traces."

Th.o.r.eau had shouldered the second gunny sack and now led the way into the thicker spruce and balsam behind the cabin. David and Father Roland followed, the latter explaining more fully why it was necessary to keep the sledge dogs "hard as rocks," and how the trick was done. He was still talking, with the fingers of one hand closed about the little plush box in his pocket, when they came to the first of the fox pens. He was watching David closely, a little anxiously--thrilled by the touch of that box. He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and conflicting forces struggling now for mastery. It was not in the surrender of the box that he had felt David's triumph, but in the voluntary sacrifice of what that box contained. He wanted to rid himself of the picture, and quickly. He was filled with apprehension lest David should weaken again, and ask for its return. The locket meant nothing.

It was a bauble--cold, emotionless, easily forgotten; but the other--the picture of the woman who had almost destroyed him--was a deadly menace, a poison to David's soul and body as long as it remained in his possession, and the Little Missioner's fingers itched to tear it from the velvet casket and destroy it.