CHAPTER VII
Another Clue
It was fully a fortnight after this before Katherine and Miles found any opportunity for going fishing. Then there came a day when they had to take a load of stores up beyond the second portage, to the house of Astor M'Kree, and they decided to bring a load of fish back with them if possible, as the store which Katherine had bought from Waywassimo was beginning to run low. Their father seemed better that day, and was able to look after the store with the help of Phil.
Katherine too was bright and lively this morning, as if there were no dark shadow of trouble in her life. Sometimes she was fearfully sick at heart with the remembrance of her father's confidence, and a dread of what the summer might bring; but at other times, on days like this, she took comfort in the ice, the snow, and the searching cold. Winter was not nearly over yet, a hundred things might happen before the summer came, and so her high spirits pushed the dark shadow to one side and for a brief space forgot all about it. She was especially blithe of heart to-day, and so had donned a skirt of scarlet blanket cloth, which matched in hue the woollen cloud she wrapped about her head. On other days, when her mood was more sombre, she wore a dark-blue skirt, like the thick, fur-lined coat which was put on every time she left the house.
"How gay you look, Katherine!" exclaimed Mrs. Burton, as her sister came dancing into the kitchen, where she was making bread. "But what a pity to put on that scarlet skirt if you are going to bring fish home!"
"I shan't spoil it, or if I do I will wear it spoiled until it drops into rags," replied Katherine. "I call it my happiness skirt, and I wear it only when I feel happy. To-day the winter has somehow got into my bones or up in my head, and I feel as light-hearted and reckless as if I had been having oxygen pumped into me by a special contrivance; so plainly this is the proper time for my scarlet skirt."
"It is so funny that scarlet suits you so well, for you are certainly not a brunette," Mrs. Burton said, looking at Katherine in warm sisterly admiration. "But indeed you would look charming in anything."
Katherine swept her a curtsy. "Now that is a compliment most flatteringly paid. Really, Nellie, I don't see how you can expect me to be properly humble-minded if you say things of that sort, for you are such a dear, sincere little person that every word you speak carries conviction with it. But Miles is waiting and I must be off. Don't worry if we are rather late back, for we must bring as much fish as we can."
Mrs. Burton left the bread to take care of itself for a while, and, throwing a thick shawl round her shoulders, came out to see the start. There was only one sledge to-day, but that was piled high with stores of various descriptions, from a barrel of flour to a roll of scarlet flannel, and from canned pineapple to a tin of kerosene. This last was the light de luxe in that part of the world, fish oil serving for all ordinary purposes of illumination. Miles looked after the dogs, while Katherine sped on in front, an ice saw and two fish spears carried across her shoulder. It was just the sort of morning when work was absolute joy, and toil became nothing but the zest of endeavour. Fresh snow had fallen during the night, but the sun was so bright and warm that the cold had no chance against it. The winter was advancing, as was evidenced by longer hours of daylight and hotter sunshine; but when night came the frost was more severe than ever, as if loath to loose its grip on the lakes and streams of that wide white land.
Roaring Water Portage had lost all claim to its name for the present. The river which rushed in summer with a roar over the rocks in rapids was absolutely silent now, and the rocks were merely snow-covered hummocks. The river above was frozen, there was no water to run down, and all the resonant echoes were dumb. The silence and the brightness suited Katherine's mood. She hurried on in front, so that even the shouts of Miles to the dogs became faint in the distance. Then her pace decreased as she swung along with a gentle swaying motion, the big frame of her snowshoe never quite lifted from the ground. When the boatbuilder's house came in sight she hesitated, wondering if it would not be pleasanter to remain outside in the pure fresh air until Miles came, instead of sitting in the hot, stuffy kitchen talking to Mrs. M'Kree. Then, remembering how solitary was the life of the poor little woman, shut up from month's end to month's end with her babies, Katherine decided to get on as quickly as she could and give Mrs. M'Kree the benefit of her society.
Mrs. M'Kree received her literally with open arms, and gave her a hug which nearly took her breath away. "Oh, I am glad you've come yourself! If the weather had been bad I should have been quite sure of seeing you; but as it was so fine I was desperately afraid you'd send the boys. But where is the sledge?"
"Miles is coming on with the dogs, but I came forward at a tremendous pace just because the morning was so beautiful, and I wanted to be alone," Katherine answered, subsiding into a rocking-chair and picking up the M'Kree baby which happened to be nearest.
"Wanted to be alone? My dear, that doesn't sound natural in a young girl. Oh, I hope you are not getting melancholy from all the trouble you've had this winter!"
"How can you even think of melancholy and me in the same connection!" protested Katherine with a merry laugh. "Why, I am a most cheerful person always, and Nellie complains that I live in a perfect whirlwind of high spirits."
"So you may. But if you want to go mooning off alone, it is a sure sign that something is wrong, unless indeed you are in love," and Mrs. M'Kree nodded her head in delight at her own shrewdness.
But Katherine only laughed as she asked: "Pray, whom do you think I should be likely to fall in love with? There are so few eligible men in this part of the world."
"How was I to know but what you left your heart in Montreal last winter? At least there are men enough there," Mrs. M'Kree said. Then she asked anxiously: "My dear, what is the matter? You look quite ill."
Katherine had started to her feet with a look of profound amazement on her face, for at that moment the door of the next room had opened, and another small M'Kree appeared, dragging after him a tin bucket, on which he was raining a shower of resounding blows.
"Where did you get that thing?" she asked with a gasp, instantly recognizing the bucket as identical with the two filled with lard which had been stolen.
Mrs. M'Kree appeared slightly confused, and tried to hide her embarrassment by scolding her offspring.
"Jamie, Jamie, why will you make such a fearful riot? Miss Radford will run away and never come back if you are not quiet."
"I don't care if she does," replied the juvenile. He had not yet reached the age when pretty girls become interesting, and the noise he was producing filled him with tremendous satisfaction, so he banged away with renewed ardour.
Katherine crossed the room with a quick step, and, seizing Jamie, swung him up to the window. "See, here comes Miles," she said, "and he has some toffee in the sledge. Run out and ask him to give you some."
One look of beaming satisfaction Jamie flung her, then, wriggling from her grasp, he tore away to the door and was seen no more for some time. Then Katherine turned to Mrs. M'Kree and said imploringly: "Please tell me where you got that bucket from, and how long you have had it?"
"I'll tell you, of course, seeing that you make such a point of it, but I'm not specially proud of the business, I can assure you," Mrs. M'Kree said, with a touch of irritability very unusual with her. "Oily Dave was up here about a week ago, and he said that he had some buckets of rough fat that would do for greasing sledge runners, or to mix with caulking pitch. He told us he bought the stuff from one of the American whalers that were fishing in the bay last summer, and he offered to sell us a bucket at such a ridiculously low price that Astor bought one off-hand."
"What happened then?" demanded Katherine, her lips twitching with amusement; for she knew quite enough of Oily Dave and his methods to be sure that Astor M'Kree had been rather badly duped.
"The stuff was more than half sawdust, but it had been worked in so carefully that you could not tell that until you came to rub the grease on to runners and that sort of thing; then of course it gritted up directly. But the worst of it was that Astor had mixed some of it with a lot of caulking pitch, which of course is quite spoiled, and he was about the maddest man in Keewatin on the day that he found it out."
Katherine was laughing; she really could not help it. But Mrs. M'Kree, not understanding where the joke came in, said in a reproachful tone: "My dear, it was not a laughing matter to me, either then or now; for when one is married what affects one's husband affects one's self also, and that sometimes in a very disagreeable fashion."
"Please forgive me for laughing!" cried Katherine. "But Oily Dave is such a slippery old rogue, and sometimes he overreaches even himself." Then she told Mrs. M'Kree about the disappearance of the lard, and how she had recognized the bucket upon which Jamie had been drumming so vigorously.
"What will you do?" asked Mrs. M'Kree.
"I don't see what we can do, except keep a sharper lookout in future. There is not enough evidence to go and boldly accuse him of having walked off with two buckets of lard for which he had not paid. There may be a hundred buckets like that in the district, every one of which has contained grease of some description, from best dairy butter down to train oil mixed with sawdust," Katherine replied with a laugh, in which the other now joined.
"It is a good thing you can laugh about it; but I am afraid that I shouldn't have felt like laughing if I had been in your case," said Mrs. M'Kree. Then she cried out in protest: "Must you go so soon, really? Why, you have been here no time at all, and there are heaps of things I wanted to say to you."
"Yes, we must go. We are going to Ochre Lake for fish. Miles says there are heaps there to be had for the catching, and the dogs are getting short of food. We have worked them very hard this winter, so they have needed more to eat, I suppose," Katherine replied. Then she went out to help her brother to bring the stores in, and Mrs. M'Kree came to assist also.
"Ochre Lake is a good long way off, so I mustn't keep you if you are going there. A good six miles from here it must be, if you follow the river," said Mrs. M'Kree; then made a grab at the packet of toffee in Jamie's chubby hand, for he was evidently intent on eating it all himself, and so leaving none for the others.
"We shall not follow the river, but take the short cut through the woods; and we shall go fast too, for the dogs will travel light, you see," Katherine said. Then picking up the fish spears and the ice saw she glided on ahead, while Miles and the dogs went racing after her.
At first, when they left the boatbuilder's house behind, it was wilderness without a sign of life, but after they had gone two or three miles, footprints of various sizes appeared on the snow. There were marks of wolf, of wolverine, of fox, with smaller prints which could only have been made by little creatures like the mink, ermine, and such tiny fry, that, clad in fur white like the snow, scurried hither and thither through the silent wastes hunting for food, yet finding in many cases swift death through the skill of the trapper. At length the lake was reached. In summer it was a sheet of muddy yellow water abounding in fish, and many acres in extent. Now it was a wide snowfield, except at one end, where for some unexplained reason it was open water still. This was the part at which they arrived, and Katherine halted on the bank with an exclamation of surprise. "Why, we shan't need the saw at all; it is open water!"
"The ice at the edge is too thin to stand upon, and we mustn't take risks here, for Father says there is a whirlpool at this end, and it is the constant motion of the water that keeps it from freezing," Miles answered; and taking the saw from Katherine he commenced making a hole in the ice a few yards from the open water.
The dogs were lying panting on the bank as if quite exhausted, but their ears were perked up, and their eyes were very wide open, for they quite understood what was going on, and the prospect of fish freshly caught was very welcome after their months of living on the dried article. When a hole had been cut in the ice, Katherine went to stand by it and spear the fish which immediately crowded to the surface as if anxious to be caught. Miles went to a little distance, where he cut another hole for himself, and for the next hour the two worked as hard as they could at spearing fish, then throwing them on the snow, where they quickly froze stiff. The water seemed entirely alive with fish, which could only be accounted for by the fact that the main part of the lake, which was shallow, was frozen solid, so that all the fish had been forced to the end where the moving water did not freeze.
[Illustration: Katherine and Miles spearing for fish.]
"I guess we have got a load now, so we might as well stop," said Katherine, whose arms were beginning to ache, having already had more than enough of slaughter for that day at least.
"You load while I jab at a few more of these big fellows, for they seem as if they are just yearning to be caught," Miles cried excitedly. "I never had such fishing as this; it is prime!"
"It isn't fishing at all; it is nothing but killing. Horrid work, I call it," Katherine cried with a shudder, as, gathering up the frozen fish, she proceeded to stack them on the sledge in much the same fashion as she might have stacked billets of firewood.
The dogs had eaten a good meal, and were in fine feather for work; so, although the load was heavy, they made very good pace, and Katherine, gliding along now by the side of Miles, told him of how she had found Jamie M'Kree banging away on one of their stolen lard buckets. Miles was furiously angry, and wanted to go straight off to Seal Cove, denouncing Oily Dave as a thief; but Katherine would not hear of it.
"By precipitating matters we may do a great deal more harm than good," she said. "We have had to buy our wisdom in rather an expensive school, but it ought to make us wiser in future. So far we have only suspicions to go upon, not facts, and it is very likely that if we accused Oily Dave of stealing our stuff he would be clever enough to turn the tables on us, and have us prosecuted for libel, or something of that sort, which would not be pleasant—nor profitable."
"I can't sit meekly down under things of that sort," retorted the boy, with the sullen look dropping over his face which Katherine hated to see there.
"It isn't easy, I know, but very often it pays best in the long run," she answered earnestly. "Whatever we do, or don't do, we must take especial care that Father isn't worried just now. He must be our chief thought for the present, and if our business pride gets wounded, we must just take the hurt lying down for his sake."
"Katherine, are you afraid that Father is going to die?" Miles asked, turning his head quickly to look at her; and there was the same terrified expression on his face which had been there when he asked the same question a few weeks before.
"I think his recovery will depend very largely on whether we can keep him from anxiety for the next two or three months," she answered; and there was a stab of pain at her heart as she thought of the gnawing apprehension and worry which were secretly sapping his strength.
"Then Oily Dave mustn't be meddled with just now, I suppose," Miles said, with a sigh of renunciation; "but sooner or later he has got to pay for it, or I will know the reason why."