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

was gleaming where it had fallen, and with an exclamation of relief the Missioner snatched it up.
"I thought I had lost my key," he laughed, a bit nervously; then he added, with a deep breath: "It's snowing to-night. A heavy snow, and there will be good sledging for a few days. God knows I don't want you to leave me, but if it must be--we should take advantage of this snow. It will be the last. Mukoki and I will go with you as far as the Reindeer Lake country, two hundred miles northwest. David--_must_ you go?"
It seemed to David that two tiny fists were pounding against his breast, where the picture lay.
"Yes, I must go," he said. "I have quite made up my mind to that. I must go."


CHAPTER XV
Ten days after that night when he had gone into the mystery-room at the Chateau, David and Father Roland clasped hands in a final farewell at White Porcupine House, on the Cochrane River, 270 miles from God's Lake. It was something more than a hand-shake. The Missioner made no effort to speak in these last moments. His team was ready for the return drive and he had drawn his travelling hood close about his face. In his own heart he believed that David would never return. He would go back to civilization, probably next autumn, and in time he would forget. As he said, on their last day before reaching the Cochrane, David's going was like taking a part of his heart away. He blinked now, as he dropped David's hand--blinked and turned his eyes. And David's voice had an odd break in it. He knew what the Missioner was thinking.
"I'll come back, _mon Pere_," he called after him, as Father Roland broke away and went toward Mukoki and the dogs. "I'll come back next year!"
Father Roland did not look back until they were started. Then he turned and waved a mittened hand. Mukoki heard the sob in his throat. David tried to call a last word to him, but his voice choked. He, too, waved a hand. He had not known that there were friendships like this between men, and as the Missioner trailed steadily away from him, growing smaller and smaller against the dark rim of the distant forest, he felt a sudden fear and a great loneliness--a fear that, in spite of himself, they would not meet again, and the loneliness that comes to a man when he sees a world widening between himself and the one friend he has on earth. His one friend. The man who had saved him from himself, who had pointed out the way for him, who had made him fight. More than a friend; a father. He did not stop the broken sound that came to his lips. A low whine answered it, and he looked down at Baree, huddled in the snow within a yard of his feet. "My god and master," Baree's eyes said, as they looked up at him, "I am here." It was as if David had heard the words. He held out a hand and Baree came to him, his great wolfish body aquiver with joy. After all, he was not alone.
A short distance from him the Indian who was to take him over to Fond du Lac, on Lake Athabasca, was waiting with his dogs and sledge. He was a Sarcee, one of the last of an almost extinct tribe, so old that his hair was of a shaggy white, and he was so thin that he looked like a famine-stricken Hindu. "He has lived so long that no one knows his age," Father Roland had said, "and he is the best trailer between Hudson's Bay and the Peace." His name was Upso-Gee (the Snow Fox), and the Missioner had bargained with him for a hundred dollars to take David from White Porcupine House to Fond du Lac, three hundred miles farther northwest. He cracked his long caribou-gut whip to remind David that he was ready. David had said good-bye to the factor and the clerk at the Company store and there was no longer an excuse to detain him. They struck out across a small lake. Five minutes later he looked back. Father Roland, not much more than a speck on the white plain now, was about to disappear in the forest. It seemed to David that he had stopped, and again he waved his hand, though human eyes could not have seen the movement over that distance.
Not until that night, when David sat alone beside his campfire, did he begin to realize fully the vastness of this adventure into which he had plunged. The Snow Fox was dead asleep and it was horribly lonely. It was a dark night, too, with the shivering wailing of a restless wind in the tree tops; the sort of night that makes loneliness grow until it is like some kind of a monster inside, choking off one's breath. And on Upso-Gee's tepee, with the firelight dancing on it, there was painted in red a grotesque fiend with horns--a medicine man, or devil chaser; and this devil chaser grinned in a bloodthirsty manner at David as he sat near the fire, as if gloating over some dreadful fate that awaited him. It _was_ lonely. Even Baree seemed to sense his master's oppression, for he had laid his head between David's feet, and was as still as if asleep. A long way off David could hear the howling of a wolf and it reminded him shiveringly of the lead-dog's howl that night before Tavish's cabin. It was like the death cry that comes from a dog's throat; and where the forest gloom mingled with the firelight he saw a phantom shadow--in the morning he found that it was a spruce bough, broken and hanging down--that made him think again of Tavish swinging in the moonlight. His thoughts bore upon him deeply and with foreboding. And he asked himself questions--questions which were not new, but which came to him to-night with a new and deeper significance. He believed that Father Roland would have gasped in amazement and that he would have held up his hands in incredulity had he known the truth of this astonishing adventure of his. An astonishing adventure--nothing less. To find a girl. A girl he had never seen, who might be in another part of the world, when he had got to the end of his journey--or married. And if he found her, what would he say? What would he do? Why did he want to find her? "God alone knows," he said aloud, borne down under his gloom, and went to bed.
Small things, as Father Roland had frequently said, decide great events. The next morning came with a glorious sun; the world again was white and wonderful, and David found swift answers to the questions he had asked himself a few hours before. Each day thereafter the sun was warmer, and with its increasing promise of the final "break-up" and slush snows, Upso-Gee's taciturnity and anxiety grew apace. He was little more talkative than the painted devil chaser on the blackened canvas of his tepee, but he gave David to understand that he would have a hard time getting back with his dogs and sledge from Fond du Lac if the thaw came earlier than he had anticipated. David marvelled at the old warrior's endurance, and especially when they crossed the forty miles of ice on Wollaston Lake between dawn and darkness. At high noon the snow was beginning to soften on the sunny slopes even then, and by the time they reached the Porcupine, Snow Fox was chanting his despairing prayer nightly before that grinning thing on his tepee. "Swas-tao (the thaw) she kam dam' queek," he said to David, grimacing his old face to express other things which he could not say in English. And it did. Four days later, when they reached Fond du Lac, there was water underfoot in places, and Upso-Gee turned back on the home trail within an hour.
This was in April, and the Post reminded David of a great hive to which the forest people were swarming like treasure-laden bees. On the last snow they were coming in with their furs from a hundred trap-lines. Luck was with David. On the first day Baree fought with a huge malemute and almost killed it, and David, in separating the dogs, was slightly bitten by the malemute. A friendship sprang up instantly between the two masters. Bouvais was a Frenchman from Horseshoe Bay, fifty miles from Fort Chippewyan, and a hundred and fifty straight west of Fond du Lac. He was a fox hunter. "I bring my furs over here, m'sieu," he explained, "because I had a fight with the factor at Fort Chippewyan and broke out two of his teeth," which was sufficient explanation. He was delighted when he learned that David wanted to go west. They started two days later with a sledge heavily laden with supplies. The runners sank deep in the growing slush, but under them was always the thick ice of Lake Athabasca, and going was not bad, except that David's feet were always wet. He was surprised that he did not take a "cold." "A cold--what is that?" asked Bouvais, who had lived along the Barrens all his life. David described a typical case of sniffles, with running at eyes and nose, and Bouvais laughed. "The only cold we have up here is when the lungs get touched by frost," he said, "and then you die--the following spring. Always then. The lungs slough away." And then he asked: "Why are you going west?"
David found himself face to face with the question, and had to answer. "Just to toughen up a bit," he replied. "Wandering. Nothing else to do." And after all, he thought later, wasn't that pretty near the truth? He tried to convince himself that it was. But his hand touched the picture of the Girl, in his breast pocket. He seemed to feel her throbbing against it. A preposterous imagination! But it was pleasing. It warmed his blood.
For a week David and Baree remained at Horseshoe Bay with the Frenchman. Then they went on around the end of the lake toward Fort Chippewyan. Bouvais accompanied them, out of friendship purely, and they travelled afoot with fifty-pound packs on their shoulders, for in the big, sunlit reaches the ground was already growing bare of snow. Bouvais turned back when they were ten miles from Fort Chippewyan, explaining that it was a nasty matter to have knocked two teeth down a factor's throat, and particularly down the throat of the head factor of the Chippewyan and Athabasca district. "And they went down," assured Bouvais. "He tried to spit them out, but couldn't." A few hours later David met the factor and observed that Bouvais had spoken the truth; at least there were two teeth missing, quite conspicuously. Hatchett was his name. He looked it; tall, thin, sinewy, with bird-like eyes that were shifting this way and that at all times, as though he were constantly on the alert for an ambush, or feared thieves. He was suspicious of David, coming in alone in this No Man's Land with a pack on his back; a white man, too, which made him all the more suspicious. Perhaps a possible free trader looking for a location. Or, worse still, a spy of the Company's hated competitors, the Revilon Brothers. It took some time for Father Roland's letter to convince him that David was harmless. And then, all at once, he warmed up like a birch-bark taking fire, and shook David's hand three times within five minutes, so hungry was he for a white man's companionship--an _honest_ white man's, mind you, and not a scoundrelly competitor's! He opened four cans of lobsters, left