CHAPTER VII
THE MASTER MIND
After the visit of MacNair, Chloe noticed a marked diminution in the anxiety of Lapierre to resume his interrupted journey. True, he drove the Indians mercilessly from daylight till dark in the erection of the buildings, but his air of tense expectancy was gone, and he ceased to dart short, quick glances into the North, and to scan the upper reach of the river.
The Indians, too, had changed. They toiled more stolidly now with apathetic ears for Lapierre's urging, where before they had worked in feverish haste, with their eyes upon the edges of the clearing. It was obviously patent that the canoemen shared Lapierre's fear and hatred of MacNair.
In the late afternoon of the twelfth day after the rolling of the first log into place, Chloe accompanied Lapierre upon a tour of inspection of the completed buildings. The man had done his work well. The school-house and the barracks with the dining-room and kitchen were comfortably and solidly built; entirely sufficient for present needs and requirements. But the girl wondered at the trading-post and its appendant store-house they were fully twice the size she would have considered necessary, and constructed as to withstand a siege. Lapierre had built a fort.
"Excellent buildings; and solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, Miss Elliston," smiled the quarter-breed, as with a wave of his hand he indicated the interior of the trading-room.
"But, they are so big!" exclaimed the girl, as her glance swept the spacious fur lofts, and the ample areas for the storing of supplies. She was concerned only with the size of the buildings. But her wonder would have increased could she have seen the rows of loopholes that pierced the thick walls—loopholes crammed with moss against the cold, and with their openings concealed by cleverly fitted pieces of bark. Lapierre's smile deepened.
"Remember, you told me you intend to sell to all alike, while your goods last. I know what that will mean. It will mean that you will find yourself called upon to furnish the supplies for the inhabitants of several thousand square miles of territory. Indians will travel far to obtain a bargain. They look only at the price—never at the quality of the goods. That fact enables us free-traders to live. We sell cheaper than the H.B.C.; but, frankly, our goods are cheaper. The bargains are much more apparent than real. But, if I understand your position, you intend to sell goods that are up to H.B.C. standard at actual cost?"
Chloe nodded: "Certainly."
"Very well, then you will find that these buildings which look so large and commodious to you now, must be crowded to the ceiling with your goods, while the walls of your fur lofts will fairly bulge with their weight of riches. Fur is the 'cash' of the North, and the trader must make ample provision for its storage. There are no banks in the wilderness; and the fur lofts are the vaults of the traders."
"But, I don't want to deal in fur!" objected the girl. "I—since you have told me of the terrible cruelty of the trappers, I hate fur! I want nothing to do with it. In fact, I shall do everything in my power to discountenance and discourage the trapping." Lapierre cleared his throat sharply—coughed—cleared it again. Discourage trapping—north of sixty! Had he heard aright? He swallowed hard, mumbled an apology anent the inhalation of a gnat, and answered in all seriousness.
"A worthy object, Miss Elliston—a very worthy object; but one that will require time to consummate. At present the taking of fur is the business of the North. I may say, the only business of thousands of savages whose very existence depends upon their skill with the traps. Fur is their one source of livelihood. Therefore, you must accept the condition as it exists. Think, if you refused to accept fur in exchange for your goods, what it would mean—the certain and absolute failure of your school from the moment of its inception. The Indians could not grasp your point of view. You would be shunned for one demented. Your goods would rot upon your shelves; for the simple reason that the natives would have no means of buying them. No, Miss Elliston, you must take their fur until such time as you succeed in devising some other means by which these people may earn their living."
"You are right," agreed Chloe. "Of course, I must deal in fur—for the present. Reform is the result of years of labour. I must be patient. I was thinking only of the cruelty of it."
"They have never been taught," said Lapierre with a touch of sadness in his tone. "And, while we are on the subject, allow me to advise you to retain LeFroy as your chief trader. He is an excellent man, is Louis LeFroy, and has had no little experience."
"Do you think he will stay?" eagerly asked the girl. "I should like to retain, not only LeFroy but a half-dozen others."
"It shall be as you wish. I shall speak to LeFroy and select also the pick of the crew. They will be glad of a steady job. The others I shall take with me. I must gather my fur from its various caches and freight it to the railway."
"You are going to the railway! To civilization?"
"Yes, but it will take me three weeks to make ready my outfit. And in this connection I may be of further service to you. I must depart from here tonight. Instruct LeFroy to make out his list of supplies for the winter. Give him a free hand and tell him to fill the store-rooms. The goods you have brought with you are by no means sufficient. Three weeks from today, if I do not visit you in the meantime, have him meet me at Fort Resolution, and I shall be glad to make your purchases for you, at Athabasca Landing and Edmonton."
"You have been very good to me. How can I ever thank you?" cried the girl, impulsively extending her hand. Lapierre took the hand, bowed over it, and—was it fancy, or did his lips brush her finger-tips? Chloe withdrew the hand, laughing in slight confusion. To her surprise she realized she was not in the least annoyed. "How can I thank you," she repeated, "for—for throwing aside your own work to attend to mine?"
"Do not speak of thanking me." Once more the man's eyes seemed to burn into her soul, "I love you! And one day my work will be your work and your work will be mine. It is I who am indebted to you for bringing a touch of heaven into this drab hell of Northern brutishness. For bringing to me a breath of the bright world I have not known since Montreal—and the student days, long past. And—ah—more than that—something I have never known—love. And, it is you who are bringing a ray of pure light to lighten the darkness of my people."
Chloe was deeply touched. "But I—I thought," she faltered, "when we were discussing the buildings that day, you spoke as if you did not really care for the Indians. And—and you made them work so hard——"
"To learn to work would be their salvation!" exclaimed the man. "And I beg you to forget what I said then. I feared for your safety. When you refused to allow me to build the stockade, I could think only of your being at the mercy of Brute MacNair. I tried to frighten you into allowing me to build it. Even now, if you say the word——"
Chloe interrupted him with a laugh. "No, I am not afraid of MacNair—really I am not. And you have already neglected your own affairs too long."
The man assented. "If I am to get my furs to the railway, do my own trading, and yours, and return before the lake freezes, I must, indeed, be on my way."
"You will wait while I write some letters? And you will post them for me?"
Lapierre bowed. "As many as you wish," he said, and together they walked to the girl's cabin whose quaint, rustic veranda overlooked the river. The veranda was an addition of Lapierre's, and the cabin had five rooms, instead of three.
The quarter-breed waited, whistling softly a light French air, while Chloe wrote her letters. He breathed deeply of the warm spruce-laden breeze, slapped lazily at mosquitoes, and gazed at the setting sun between half-closed lids. Pierre Lapierre was happy.
"Things are coming my way," he muttered. "With a year's stock in that warehouse—and LeFroy to handle it—I guess the Indians won't pick up many bargains—my people!—damn them! How I hate them. And as for MacNair—lucky Vermilion thought of painting his name on that booze—I hated to smash it—but it paid. It was the one thing needed to make me solid with her. And I've got time to run in another batch if I hurry—got to get those rifles into the loft, too. When MacNair hits, he hits hard."
Chloe appeared at the door with her letters. Lapierre took them, and again bowed low over her hand. This time the girl was sure his lips touched her finger-tips. He released the hand and stepped to the ground.
"Good-bye," he said, "I shall try my utmost to pay you a visit before I depart for the southward, but if I fail, remember to send LeFroy to me at Fort Resolution."
"I will remember. Good-bye—bon voyage——"
"Et prompt retour?" The man's lips smiled, and his eyes flashed the question.
"Et prompt retour—certainement!" answered the girl as, with a wide sweep of his hat, the quarter-breed turned and made his way toward the camp of the Indians, which was located in a spruce thicket a short distance above the clearing. As he disappeared in the timber, Chloe felt a sudden sinking of the heart; a strange sense of desertion, of loneliness possessed her as she gazed into the deepening shadows of the wall of the clearing. She fumed impatiently.
"Why should I care?" she muttered, "I never laid eyes on him until two weeks ago, and besides, he's—he's an Indian! And yet—he's a gentleman. He has been very kind to me—very considerate. He is only a quarter-Indian. Many of the very best families have Indian blood in their veins—even boast of it. I—I'm a fool!" she exclaimed, and passed quickly into the house.
Pierre Lapierre was a man, able, shrewd, unscrupulous. The son of a French factor of the Hudson Bay Company and his half-breed wife, he was sent early to school, where he remained to complete his college course; for it was the desire of his father that the son should engage in some profession for which his education fitted him.
But the blood of the North was in his veins. The call of the North lured him into the North, and he returned to the trading-post of his father, where he was given a position as clerk and later appointed trader and assigned to a post of his own far to the northward.
While the wilderness captivated and entranced him, the humdrum life of a trader wearied him. He longed for excitement—action.
During the several years of his service with the great fur company he assiduously studied conditions, storing up in his mind a fund of information that later was to stand him in good stead. He studied the trade, the Indians, the country. He studied the men of the Mounted, and smugglers, and whiskey-runners, and free-traders. And it was in a brush with these latter that he overstepped the bounds which, under the changed conditions, even the agents of the great Company might not go.
Chafing under the loss of trade by reason of an independent post that had been built upon the shore of his lake some ten miles to the southward, his wild Metis blood called for action and, hastily summoning a small band of Indians, he attacked the independents. Incidentally, the free-traders' post was burned, one of the traders killed, and the other captured and sent upon the longue traverse. In some unaccountable manner, after suffering untold hardships, the man won through to civilization and promptly had Pierre Lapierre brought to book.
The Company stood loyally between its trader and the prison bars; but the old order had changed in the Northland. Young Lapierre's action was condemned and he was dismissed from the Company's service with a payment of three years' unearned salary whereupon, he promptly turned free-trader, and his knowledge of the methods of the H.B.C., the Indians, and the country, made largely for success.
The life of the free-trader satisfied his longing for travel and adventure, which his life as a post-trader had not. But it did not satisfy his innate craving for excitement. Therefore, he cast about to enlarge his field of activity. He became a whiskey-runner. His profits increased enormously, and he gradually included smuggling in his répertoire, and even timber thieving, and cattle-rustling upon the ranges along the international boundary.
At the time of his meeting with Chloe Elliston he was at the head of an organized band of criminals whose range of endeavour extended over hundreds of thousands of square miles, and the diversity of whose crimes was limited only by the index of the penal code.
Pierre Lapierre was a Napoleon of organization—a born leader of men. He chose his liegemen shrewdly—outlaws, renegades, Indians, breeds, trappers, canoemen, scowmen, packers, claim-jumpers, gamblers, smugglers, cattle-rustlers, timber thieves—and these he dominated and ruled absolutely.
Without exception, these men feared him—his authority over them was unquestioned. Because they had confidence in his judgment and cunning, and because under his direction they made more money, and made it easier, and at infinitely less risk, than they ever made by playing a lone hand, they accepted his domination cheerfully. And such was his disposition of the men who were the component parts of his system of criminal efficiency, that few, if any, were there among them who could, even if he so desired, have furnished evidence that would have seriously incriminated the leader.
The men who ran whiskey across the line, cached it. Other men, unknown to them, disguised it as innocent freight and delivered it to the scowmen. The scowmen turned it over to others who, for all they knew, were bona fide settlers or free-traders; and from their cache, the canoemen carried it far into the wilderness and either stored it in some inaccessible rendezvous or cached it where still others would come and distribute it among the Indians.
Each division undoubtedly suspected the others, but none but the leader knew. And, as it was with the whiskey-running, so was it with each of his various undertakings. Religiously, Pierre Lapierre followed the scriptural injunction; "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." He confided in no man. And few, indeed, were the defections among his retainers. A few had rebelled, as Vermilion had rebelled—and with like result. The man dismissed from Lapierre's service entered no other.
Moreover, he invariably contrived to implicate one whom he intended to use, in some crime of a graver nature than he would be called upon to commit in the general run of his duties. This crime he would stage in some fastness where its detection by an officer of the Mounted was exceedingly unlikely; and most commonly consisted in the murder of an Indian, whose weighted body would be lowered to the bottom of a convenient lake or river. Lapierre witnesses would appear and the man was irrevocably within the toil. Had he chosen, Pierre Lapierre could have lowered a grappling hook unerringly upon a dozen weighted skeletons.
Over the head of the recruit now hung an easily proven charge of murder. If during his future activities as whiskey-runner, smuggler, or in whatever particular field of endeavour he was assigned, plans should miscarry—an arrest be made—this man would take his prison sentence in silence rather than seek to implicate Lapierre, who with a word could summon the witnesses that would swear the hemp about his neck.
The system worked. Now and again plans did miscarry—arrests were made by the Mounted, men were caught "with the goods," or arrested upon evidence that even Lapierre's intricate alibi scheme could not refute. But, upon conviction, the unlucky prisoner always accepted his sentence—for at his shoulder stalked a spectre, and in his heart was the fear lest the thin lips of Pierre Lapierre would speak.
With such consummate skill and finesse did Lapierre plot, however, and with such Machiavelian cunning and éclat were his plans carried out, that few failed. And those that did were credited by the authorities to individual or sporadic acts, rather than to the work of an intricate organization presided over by a master mind.
The gang numbered, all told, upward of two hundred of the hardest characters upon the frontier. Only Lapierre knew its exact strength, but each member knew that if he did not "run straight"—if he, by word or act or deed, sought to implicate an accomplice—his life would be worth just exactly the price of "the powder to blow him to hell."
A few there were outside the organization who suspected Pierre Lapierre—but only a few: an officer or two of the Mounted and a few factors of the H.B.C. But these could prove nothing. They bided their time. One man knew him for what he was. One, in all the North, as powerful in his way as Lapierre was in his. The one man who had spies in Lapierre's employ, and who did not fear him. The one man Pierre Lapierre feared—Bob MacNair. And he, too, bided his time.