Chapter XII Maxica’s Warning
Mathurin knocked at the door. It was on the latch. He pushed Wilfred inside; but the boy was stubborn.
“No, no, I won’t go in; I’ll stand outside and wait for the others,” he said. “I want my dogs.”
“But the little ’un’s dead beat. You would not have him hurried. I am going back to meet them,” laughed Mathurin, proud of the neat way in which he had slipped out of all explanation of the blow Wilfred had received, which Bowkett might make awkward.
He was in the saddle and off again in a moment, leaving Wilfred standing at the half-open door.
“This is nothing but a dodge to get my dogs away from me,” thought the boy, unwilling to go inside the hut without them.
“I am landed at last,” he sighed, with a grateful sense of relief, as he heard Bowkett’s voice in the pause of the dance. His words were received with bursts of laughter. But what was he saying?
“It all came about through the loss of the boy. There was lamentation and mourning and woe when I went back without him. The auntie would have given her eyes to find him. See my gain by the endeavour. As hope grew beautifully less, it dwindled down to ‘Bring me some certain tidings of his fate, and there is nothing I can refuse you.’ As luck would have it, I came across a Blackfoot wearing the very knife we stuck in the poor boy’s belt before we started. I was not slow in bartering for an exchange; and when I ride next to Acland’s Hut, it is but to change horses and prepare for a longer drive to the nearest church. So, friends, I invite you all to dance at my wedding feast. Less than three days of it won’t content a hunter.”
A cheer went up from the noisy dancers, already calling for the fiddles.
Bowkett paused with the bow upraised. There stood Wilfred, like the skeleton at the feast, in the open doorway before him.
“If you have not found me, I have found you, Mr. Bowkett,” he was saying. “I am the lost boy. I am Wilfred Acland.”
The dark brow of the handsome young hunter contracted with angry dismay.
“Begone!” he exclaimed, with a toss of his head. “You! I know nothing of you! What business have you here?”
Hugh Bowkett turned his back upon Wilfred, and fiddled away more noisily than before. Two or three of his friends who stood nearest to him—men whom it would not have been pleasant to meet alone in the darkness of the night—closed round him as the dance began.
“A coyote in your lamb’s-skin,” laughed one, “on the lookout for a supper.”
A coyote is a little wolfish creature, a most impudent thief, for ever prowling round the winter camps, nibbling at the skins and watching the meat-stage, fought off by the dogs and trapped like a rat by the hunters.
Wilfred looked round for Diomé. He might have recognized him; but no Diomé was there.
Was there not one among the merry fellows tripping before him, not one that had ever seen him before? He knew he was sadly changed. His face was still swollen from the disfiguring blow. Could he wonder if Bowkett did not know him? Should he run back and call the men who had brought him to his assistance? He hated them, every one. He was writhing still under every lash which had fallen on poor Kusky’s sides. Turn to them? no, never! His dogs would be taken as payment for any help that they might give. He would reason it out. He would convince Bowkett he was the same boy.
Three or four Indians entered behind him, and seated themselves on the floor, waiting for something to eat. He knew their silent way of begging for food when they thought that food was plentiful in the camp: the high-piled meat-stage had drawn them. It was such an ordinary thing Wilfred paid no heed to them. He was bent on making Bowkett listen; and yet he was afraid to leave the door, for fear of missing his dogs.
“A word in your ear,” said the most ill-looking of the hunters standing by Bowkett’s fiddle, trusting to the noise of the music to drown his words from every one but him for whom they were intended. “You and I have been over the border together, sharpened up a bit among the Yankee bowie-knives. You are counting Caleb Acland as a dead man. You are expecting, as his sister’s husband, to step into his shoes. Back comes this boy and sweeps the stakes out of your very hand. He’ll stand first.”
“I know it,” retorted Bowkett with a scowl. “But,” he added hurriedly, “it is not he.”
“Oh, it isn’t the boy you lost? Of course not. But take my advice, turn this impudent young coyote out into the snow. One midnight’s frost will save you from any more bother. There are plenty of badger holes where he can rest safe and snug till doomsday.”
Bowkett would not venture a reply. The low aside was unnoticed by the dancers; not the faintest breath could reach Wilfred, vainly endeavouring to pass between the whirling groups to Bowkett’s side; but every syllable was caught by the quick ear of one of the Indians on the floor.
He picked up a tiny splinter of wood from the hearth, near which he was sitting; another was secreted. There were three in the hollow of his hand. Noiselessly and unobtrusively he stole behind the dancers. A gentle pull at Wilfred’s coat made him look up into the half-blind eyes of Maxica the Cree.
Not a word was said. Maxica turned from him and seated himself once more on the ground, in which he deliberately stuck his three pegs.
Wilfred could not make out what he was going to do, but his heart felt lighter at the sight of him; “for,” he thought, “he will confirm my story. He will tell Bowkett how he found me by the banks of the dried-up river.” He dropped on the floor beside the wandering Cree. But the Indian laid a finger on his lips, and one of his pegs was pressed on Wilfred’s palm; another was pointed towards Bowkett. The third, which was a little charred, and therefore blackened, was turned to the door, which Wilfred had left open, to the darkness without, from whence, according to Indian belief, the evil spirits come.
Then Maxica took the three pegs and moved them rapidly about the floor. The black peg and Bowkett’s peg were always close together, rubbing against each other until both were as black as a piece of charcoal. It was clear they were pursuing the other peg—which Wilfred took for himself—from corner to corner. At last it was knocked down under them, driven right into the earthen floor, and the two blackened pegs were left sticking upright over it.
Wilfred laid his hand softly on Maxica’s knee, to show his warning was understood.
But what then?
Maxica got up and glided out of the hut as noiselessly as he had entered it. The black-browed hunter whispering at Bowkett’s elbow made his way through the dancers towards Wilfred with a menacing air.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Waiting to speak to Mr. Bowkett,” replied Wilfred stoutly.
“Then you may wait for him on the snow-bank,” retorted the hunter, seizing Wilfred by the collar and flinging him out of the door.
“What is that for?” asked several of the dancers.
“I’ll vow it is the same young imp who passed us with a party of miners coming from a summer’s work in the Rocky Mountains, who stole my dinner from the spit,” he went on, working himself into the semblance of a passion. “I marked him with a rare black eye before we parted then, and I’ll give him another if he shows his face again where I am.”
“It is false!” cried Wilfred, rising up in the heat of his indignation.
His tormentor came a step or two from the door, and gathering up a great lump of snow, hurled it at him.
Wilfred escaped from the avalanche, and the mocking laughter which accompanied it, to the sheltering darkness. He paused among the sombre shadows thrown by the wall of the opposite hut. Maxica was waiting for him under its pine-bark eaves, surveying the cloudless heavens.
“He speaks with a forked tongue,” said the Cree, pointing to the man in the doorway, and dividing his fingers, to show that thoughts went one way and words another.
The scorn of the savage beside him was balm to Wilfred. The touch of sympathy which makes the whole world kin drew them together. But between him and the hunter swaggering on the snow-bank there was a moral gulf nothing could bridge over. There was a sense—a strange sense—of deliverance. What would it have been to live on with such men, touching their pitch, and feeling himself becoming blackened? That was the uttermost depth from which this fellow’s mistake had saved him.
It was no mistake, as Maxica was quick to show him, but deliberate purpose. Then Wilfred gave up every hope of getting back to his home. All was lost to him—even his dogs were gone.
He tried to persuade Maxica to walk round the huts with him, to find out where they were. But the Cree was resolute to get him away as fast as he could beyond the reach of Bowkett and his companions. He expected that great lump of snow would be followed by a stone; that their steps would be dogged until they reached the open, when—he did not particularize the precise form that when was likeliest to assume. The experiences of his wild, wandering life suggested dangers that could not occur to Wilfred. There must be no boyish footprint in the snow to tell which way they were going. Maxica wrapped his blanket round Wilfred, and threw him over his shoulder as if he had been a heavy pack of skins, and took his way through the noisiest part of the camp, choosing the route a frightened boy would be the last to take. He crossed in front of an outlying hut. Yula was tied by a strip of leather to one of the posts supporting its meat-stage, and Kusky to another. Maxica recognized Yula’s bark before Wilfred did. He muffled the boy’s head in the blanket, and drew it under his arm in such a position that Wilfred could scarcely either speak or hear. Then Maxica turned his course, and left the dogs behind him. But Yula could not be deceived. He bounded forward to the uttermost length of his tether. One sniff at the toe of Wilfred’s boot, scarcely visible beneath the blanket, made him desperate. He hung at his collar; he tore up the earth; he dragged at the post, as if, like another Samson, he would use his unusual strength to pull down this prison-house.
Maxica, with his long, ungainly Indian stride, was quickly out of sight. Then Yula forbore his wailing howl, and set himself to the tough task of biting through the leathern thong which secured him. Fortunately for him, a dog-chain was unattainable in the hunters’ camp. Time and persistency were safe to set him free before the daylight.
“I thought you were going to stifle me outright,” said Wilfred, when Maxica released him.
“I kept you still,” returned the Cree. “There were ears behind every log.”
“Where are we going?” asked Wilfred.
But Maxica had no answer to that question. He was stealing over the snow with no more definite purpose before him than to take the boy away somewhere beyond the hunters’ reach. A long night walk was nothing to him. He could find his way as well in the dark as in the light.
They were miles from the hunters’ camp before he set Wilfred on his feet or paused to rest.
“You have saved me, Maxica,” said Wilfred, in a low, deep voice. “You have saved my life from a greater danger than the snowdrift. I can only pray the Good Spirit to reward you.”
“I was hunger-bitten, and you gave me beaver-skin,” returned Maxica. “Now think; whilst this bad hunter keeps the gate of your house there is no going back for you, and you have neither trap nor bow. I’ll guide you where the hunter will never follow—across the river to the pathless forest; and then—” he looked inquiringly, turning his dim eyes towards the boy.
“Oh, if I were but back in Hungry Hall!” Wilfred broke forth.
Maxica was leading on to where a poplar thicket concealed the entrance to a sheltered hollow scooped on the margin of a frozen stream. The snow had fallen from its shelving sides, and lay in white masses, blocking the entrance from the river. Giving Wilfred his hand, Maxica began to descend the slippery steep. It was one of nature’s hiding-places, which Maxica had frequently visited. He scooped out his circle in the frozen snow at the bottom, fetched down the dead wood from the overhanging trees, and built his fire, as on the first night of their acquaintance. But now the icy walls around them reflected the dancing flames in a thousand varied hues. Between the black rocks, from which the raging winds had swept the recent snow, a cascade turned to ice hung like a drapery of crystal lace suspended in mid-air.
It was the second night they had passed together, with no curtain but the star-lit sky. Now Maxica threw the corner of his blanket over Wilfred’s shoulders, and drew him as closely to his side as if he were his son. The Cree lit his pipe, and abandoned himself to an hour or two of pure Indian enjoyment.
Wilfred nestled by his side, thinking of Jacob on his stony pillow. The rainbow flashes from the frozen fall gleamed before him like stairs of light, by which God’s messengers could come and go. It is at such moments, when we lie powerless in the grasp of a crushing danger, and sudden help appears in undreamed-of ways, that we know a mightier power than man’s is caring for us.
He thought of his father and mother—the love he had missed and mourned; and love was springing up for him again in stranger hearts, born of the pity for his great trouble.
There was a patter on the snow. It was not the step of a man. With a soft and stealthy movement Maxica grasped his bow, and was drawing the arrow from his quiver, when Yula bounded into Wilfred’s arms. There was a piteous whine from the midst of the poplars, where Kusky stood shivering, afraid to follow. To scramble up by the light of the fire and bring him down was the work of a moment.
Yula’s collar was still round his neck, with the torn thong dangling from it; but Kusky had slipped his head out of his, only leaving a little of his abundant hair behind him.
Three hours’ rest sufficed for Maxica. He rose and shook himself.
“That other place,” he said, “where’s that?”
Now his dogs were with him, Wilfred was loath to leave their icy retreat and face the cruel world.
The fireshine and the ice, with all their mysterious beauty, held him spell-bound.
“Maxica,” he whispered, not understanding the Cree’s last question, “they call this the new world; but don’t you think it really is the very old, old world, just as God made it? No one has touched it in all these ages.”
Yes, it was a favourite nook of Maxica’s, beautiful, he thought, as the happy hunting-grounds beyond the sunset—the Indian’s heaven. Could he exchange the free range of his native wilds, with all their majestic beauty, for a settler’s hut? the trap and the bow for the plough and the spade, and tie himself down to one small corner? The earth was free to all. Wilfred had but to take his share, and roam its plains and forests, as the red man roamed.
But Wilfred knew better than to think he could really live their savage life, with its dark alternations of hunger and cold.
“Could I get back to Hungry Hall in time to travel with Mr. De Brunier?” he asked his swarthy friend.
“Yes; that other place,” repeated Maxica, “where is that?”
Wilfred could hardly tell him, he remembered so little of the road.
“Which way did the wind blow and the snow drift past as you stood at the friendly gates?” asked Maxica. “On which cheek did the wind cut keenest when you rode into the hunters’ camp at nightfall?”
Wilfred tried to recollect.
“A two days’ journey,” reflected Maxica, “with the storm-wind in our faces.”
He felt the edge of his hatchet, climbed the steep ascent, and struck a gash in the stem of the nearest poplar. His quick sense of touch told him at which edge of the cut the bark grew thickest. That was the north. He found it with the unerring precision of the mariner’s compass. Although he had no names for the cardinal points, he knew them all.
There was an hour or two yet before daylight. Wilfred found himself a stick, as they passed between the poplars, to help himself along, and caught up Kusky under his other arm; for the poor little fellow was stiff in every limb, and his feet were pricked and bleeding, from the icicles which he had suffered to gather between his toes, not yet knowing any better. But he was too big a dog for Wilfred to carry long. Wilfred carefully broke out the crimsoned spikes as soon as there was light enough to show him what was the matter, and Yula came and washed Kusky’s feet more than once; so they helped him on.
Before the gray of the winter’s dawn La Mission was miles behind them, and breakfast a growing necessity.
Maxica had struck out a new route for himself. He would not follow the track Batiste and his companions had taken. The black pegs might yet pursue the white and trample it down in the snow if they were not wary. Sooner or later an Indian accomplishes his purpose. He attributed the same fierce determination to Bowkett. Wilfred lagged more and more. Food must be had. Maxica left him to contrive a trap in the run of the game through the bushes to their right. So Wilfred took the dogs slowly on. Sitting down in the snow, without first clearing a hole or lighting a fire, was dangerous.
Yula, sharing in the general desire for breakfast, started off on a little hunting expedition of his own. Kusky was limping painfully after him, as he darted between the tall, dark pines which began to chequer the landscape and warn the travellers they were nearing the river.
Wilfred went after his dog to recall him. The sun was glinting through the trees, and the all-pervading stillness was broken by the sound of a hatchet. Had Maxica crossed over unawares? Had Wilfred turned back without knowing it? He drew to the spot. There was Diomé chopping firewood, which Pe-na-Koam was dragging across the snow towards a roughly-built log-hut.
She dropped the boughs on the snow, and drawing her blanket round her, came to meet him.
Diomé, not perceiving Wilfred’s approach, had retreated further among the trees, intent upon his occupation.
Wilfred’s first sensation of joy at the sight of Pe-na-Koam turned to something like fear as he saw her companion, for he had known him only as Bowkett’s man. But retreat was impossible. The old squaw had shuffled up to him and grasped his arm. The sight of Yula bounding over the snow had made her the first to perceive him. She was pouring forth her delight in her Indian tongue, and explaining her appearance in such altered surroundings. Wilfred could not understand a word, but Maxica was not far behind. Kusky and Yula were already in the hut, barking for the wa-wa (the goose) that was roasting before the fire.
When Maxica came up, walking beside Diomé, Wilfred knew escape was out of the question. He must try to make a friend—at least he must meet him as a friend, even if he proved himself to be an enemy. But the work was done already.
“Ah, it is you!” cried Diomé. “I was sure it was. You had dropped a button in the tumble-down hut, and the print of your boot, an English boot, was all over the snow when I got there. You look dazed, my little man; don’t you understand what I’m talking about? That old squaw is my grandmother. You don’t know, of course, who it was sent the Blackfoot Sapoo to dig her out of the snow; but I happen to know. The old man is going from Hungry Hall, and Louison is to be promoted. I’m on the look-out to take his place with the new-comer; so when I met with him, a snow-bird whispered in my ear a thing or two. But where are your guides?”
Wilfred turned for a word with Maxica before he dared reply.
Both felt the only thing before them was to win Diomé to Wilfred’s side.
“Have you parted company with Bowkett?” asked Maxica cautiously.
“Bowkett,” answered Diomé, “is going to marry and turn farmer, and I to try my luck as voyageur to the Company. This is the hunters’ idle month, and I am waiting here until my services are wanted at the fort.—What cheer?” he shouted to his bright-eyed little wife, driving the dogs from the door of the hut.
The wa-wa shortly disappeared before Maxica’s knife, for an Indian likes about ten pounds of meat for a single meal. Wilfred was asleep beside the fire long before it was over; when they tried to rouse him his senses were roaming. The excitement and exertion, following the blow on his head, had taken effect at last.
Pe-na-Koam, with all an Indian woman’s skill in the use of medicinal herbs, and the experience of a long life spent among her warrior tribe, knew well how to take care of him.
“Leave him to me,” she said to Maxica, “and go your ways.”
Diomé too was anxious for the Cree to depart. He was looking forward to taking Wilfred back to Acland’s Hut himself. Caleb Acland’s gratitude would express itself in a tangible form, and he did not intend to divide it with Maxica. His evident desire to get rid of the Cree put the red man on his guard. Long did he sit beside the hunter’s fire in brooding silence, trusting that Wilfred might rise up from his lengthened sleep ready to travel, as an Indian might have done. But his hope was abortive. He drew out of Pe-na-Koam all he wanted to know. Diomé had been long in Bowkett’s employ. When the Cree heard this he shut his lips.
“Watch over the boy,” he said to Pe-na-Koam, “for danger threatens him.”
Then Maxica went out and set his traps in the fir-brake and the marsh, keeping stealthy watch round the hut for fear Bowkett should appear, and often looking in to note Wilfred’s progress.
One day the casual mention of Bowkett’s name threw the poor boy into such a state of agitation, Diomé suspected there had been some passage between the two he was ignorant of. A question now and then, before Wilfred was himself again, convinced him the boy had been to La Mission, and that Bowkett had refused to recognize him. When he spoke of it to Pe-na-Koam, she thought of the danger at which Maxica had hinted. She watched for the Cree. Diomé began to fear Wilfred’s reappearance might involve him in a quarrel with Bowkett.
As Wilfred got better, and found Hungry Hall was shut up, he resolved to go back to Acland’s Hut, if possible, whilst his Aunt Miriam and Bowkett were safe out of the way on their road to the church where they were to be married. Diomé said they would be gone two days. He proposed to take Wilfred with him, when he went to the wedding, on the return of the bride and bridegroom.
“Lend me your snow-shoes,” entreated Wilfred, “and with Maxica for a guide, I can manage the journey alone. Don’t go with me, Diomé, for Bowkett will never forgive the man who takes me back. You have been good and kind to me, why should I bring you into trouble?”