The Courage of Marge O'Doone, James Oliver Curwood [smart books to read .txt] 📗

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 shifted, 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 shiver 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 comradeship 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 massaged 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, polishing 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 polishing, 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 succumbed 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 associated 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 sunshine, 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