CHAPTER VIII
A SHOT IN THE NIGHT
As Lapierre made his way to the camp of the Indians he pondered deeply. For Lapierre was troubled. The fact that MacNair had twice come upon him unexpectedly within the space of a month caused him grave concern. He did not know that it was entirely by chance that MacNair had found him, an unwelcome sojourner at Fort Rae. Accusations and recriminations had passed between them, with the result that MacNair, rough, bluff, and ready to fight at any time, had pounded the quarter-breed to within an inch of his life, and then, to the undisguised delight of the men of the H.B.C., had dragged him out and pitched him ignominiously into the lake.
Either could have killed the other then and there. But each knew that to have done so, as the result of a personal quarrel, would have been the worst move he could possibly have made. And the forebearance with which MacNair fought and Lapierre suffered was each man's measure of greatness. MacNair went about his business, and to Lapierre came Chenoine with his story of the girl and the plot of Vermilion, and Lapierre, forgetting MacNair for the moment, made a dash for the Slave River.
For years Lapierre and MacNair had been at loggerheads. Each recognized in the other a foe of no mean ability. Each had sworn to drive the other out of the North. And each stood at the head of a powerful organization which could be depended upon to fight to the last gasp when the time came to "lock horns" in the final issue. Both leaders realized that the show-down could not be long delayed—a year, perhaps—two years—it would make no difference. The clash was inevitable. Neither sought to dodge the crisis, nor did either seek to hasten it. But each knew that events were shaping themselves, the stage was set, and the drama of the wilds was wearing to its final scene.
From the moment of his meeting with Chloe Elliston, Lapierre had realized the value of an alliance with her against MacNair. And being a man whose creed it was to turn every possible circumstance to his own account, he set about to win her co-operation. When, during the course of their first conversation, she casually mentioned that she could command millions if she wanted them, his immediate interest in MacNair cooled appreciably—not that MacNair was to be forgotten—merely that his undoing was to be deferred for a season, while he, the Pierre Lapierre once more of student days, played an old game—a game long forgot in the press of sterner life, but one at which he once excelled.
"A game of hearts," the man had smiled to himself—"a game in which the risk is nothing and the stakes—— With millions one may accomplish much in the wilderness, or retire into smug respectability—who knows? Or, losing, if worse comes to worst, a lady who can command millions, held prisoner, should be worth dickering for. Ah, yes, dear lady! By all means, you shall be helped to Christianize the North! To educate the Indians—how did she say it? 'So that they may come and receive that which is theirs of right'—fah! These women!"
While the scows rushed northward his plans had been laid—plans that included a masterstroke against MacNair and the placing of the girl absolutely within his power in one move. And so Pierre Lapierre had accompanied Chloe to the mouth of the Yellow Knife, selected the site for her school, and generously remained upon the ground to direct the erection of her buildings.
Up to that point his plans had carried with but two minor frustrations: he was disappointed in not having been allowed to build a stockade, and he had been forced prematurely to show his hand to MacNair. The first was the mere accident of a woman's whim, and had been offset to a great extent in the construction of the trading-post and store-house.
The second, however, was of graver importance and deeper significance. While the girl's faith in him had, apparently, remained unshaken by her interview with MacNair, MacNair himself would be on his guard. Lapierre ground his teeth with rage at the Scotchman's accurate comprehension of the situation, and he feared that the man's words might raise a suspicion in Chloe's mind; a fear that was in a great measure allayed by her eager acceptance of his offer of assistance in the matter of supplies, and—had he not already sown the seeds of a deeper regard? Once she had become his wife! The black eyes glittered as the man threaded the trail toward the camp, where his own tent showed white amid the smoke-blackened teepees of the Indians.
The thing, however, that caused him the greatest uneasiness was the suspicion that there was a leak in his system. How had MacNair known that he would be at Fort Rae? Why had he come down the Yellow Knife? And why had the two Indian scouts failed to report the man's coming? Only one of the Indians had returned at all, and his report that the other had been killed by one of MacNair's retainers had seemed unconvincing. However, Lapierre had accepted the story, but all through the days of the building he had secretly watched him. The man was one of his trusted Indians—so was the one he reported killed.
Upon the outskirts of the camp Lapierre halted—thinking. LeFroy had also watched—he must see LeFroy. Picking his way among the teepees, he advanced to his own tent. Groups of Indians and half-breeds, hunched about their fires, were eating supper. They eyed him respectfully as he passed, and in response to a signal, LeFroy arose and followed him to the tent.
Once inside, Lapierre fixed his eyes upon the boss canoeman.
"Well—you have watched Apaw—what have you found out?"
"Apaw—I'm t'ink she spik de trut'."
"Speak the truth—hell! Why didn't he get down here ahead of MacNair, then? What have I got spies for—to drag in after MacNair's gone and tell me he's been here?"
LeFroy shrugged. "MacNair Injuns—dey com' pret' near catch Apaw—dey keel Stamix. Apaw, she got 'way by com' roun' by de Black Fox."
Lapierre nodded, scowling. He trusted LeFroy; and having recognized in him one as unscrupulous and nearly as resourceful and penetrating as himself, had placed him in charge of the canoemen, the men who, in the words of the leader, "kept cases on the North," and to whose lot fell the final distribution of the whiskey to the Indians. But so, also, had he trusted the boasting, flaunting Vermilion.
"All right; but keep your eye on him," he said, smiling sardonically, "and you may learn a lesson. Now you listen to me. You are to stay here. Miss Elliston wants you for her chief trader. Make out your list of supplies—fill that storehouse up with stuff. She wants you to undersell the H.B.C.—and you do it. Get the trade in here—see? Keep your prices down to just below Company prices, and then skin 'em on the fur—and—well, I don't need to tell you how. Give 'em plenty of debt and we'll fix the books. Pick put a half-dozen of your best men and keep 'em here. Tell 'em to obey Miss Elliston's orders; and whatever you do, keep cases on MacNair. But don't start anything. Pass the word out and fill up her school. Give her plenty to do, and keep 'em orderly. I'll handle the canoemen and pick up the fur, and then I've got to drop down the river and run in the supplies. I'll run in some rifles, and some of the stuff, too."
LeFroy looked at his chief in surprise.
"Vermilion—she got ten keg on de scow—" he began.
Lapierre laughed.
"Vermilion, eh? Do you know where Vermilion is?"
LeFroy shook his head.
"He's in hell—that's where he is—I dismissed him from my service. He didn't run straight. Some others went along with him—and there are more to follow. Vermilion thought he could double-cross me and get away with it." And again he laughed.
LeFroy shuddered and made no comment. Lapierre continued:
"Make out your list of supplies, and if I don't show up in the mean time, meet me at the mouth of the Slave three weeks from today. I've got to count days if I get back before the freeze-up. And remember this—you are working for Miss Elliston; we've got a big thing if we work it right; we've got MacNair where we want him at last. She thinks he's running in whiskey and raising hell with the Indians north of here. Keep her thinking so; and later, when it comes to a show-down—well, she is not only rich, but she's in good at Ottawa—see?"
LeFroy nodded. He was a man of few words, was LeFroy; dour and taciturn, but a man of brains and one who stood in wholesome fear of his master.
"And now," continued Lapierre, "break camp and load the canoes. I must pull out tonight. Pick out your men and move 'em at once into the barracks. You understand everything now?"
"Oui," answered LeFroy, and stepping from the tent, passed swiftly from fire to fire, issuing commands in low guttural. Lapierre rolled a cigarette, and taking a guitar from its case, seated himself upon his blankets and played with the hand of a master as he sang a love-song of old France. All about him sounded the clatter of lodge-poles, the thud of packs, and the splashing of water as the big canoes were pushed into the river and loaded.
Presently LeFroy's head thrust in at the entrance. He spoke no word; Lapierre sang on, and the head was withdrawn. When the song was finished the sounds from the outside had ceased. Lapierre carefully replaced his guitar in its case, drew a heavy revolver from its holster, threw it open, and twirled the cylinder with his thumb, examining carefully its chambers. His brows drew together and his lips twisted into a diabolical smile.
Lapierre was a man who took no chances. What was one Indian, more or less, beside the absolute integrity of his organization? He stepped outside, and instantly the guy-ropes of the tent were loosened; the canvas slouched to the ground and was folded into a neat pack. The blankets were made into a compact roll, with the precious guitar in the centre and deposited in the head canoe. Lapierre glanced swiftly about him; nothing but the dying fires and the abandoned lodge-poles indicated the existence of the camp. On the shore the canoemen, leaning on their paddles, awaited the word of command.
He stepped to the water's edge, where, Apaw the Indian, stood with the others. For just a moment the baleful eyes of Lapierre fixed the silent figure; then his words cut sharply upon the silence.
"Apaw—Chahco yahkwa!" The Indian advanced, evidently proud of having been singled out by the chief, and stood before him, paddle in hand. Lapierre spoke no word; seconds passed, the silence grew intense. The hand that gripped the paddle shook suddenly; and then, looking straight into the man's eyes, Lapierre drew his revolver and fired. There was a quick spurt of red flame—the sound of the shot rang sharp, and rang again as the opposite bank of the river hurled back the sound. The Indian pitched heavily forward and fell across his paddle, snapping it in two.
Lapierre glanced over the impassive faces of the canoemen.
"This man was a traitor," he said in their own language. "I have dismissed him from my service. Weight him and shove off!"
The quarter-breed stepped into his canoe. The canoemen bound heavy stones to the legs of the dead Indian, laid the body upon the camp equipage amidship, and silently took their places.
During the evening meal, Chloe was unusually silent, answering Miss Penny's observations and queries in short, detached monosyllables. Later she stole out alone to a high, rocky headland that commanded a sweeping view of the river, and sat with her back against the broad trunk of a twisted banskian.
The long Northern twilight hung about her like a pall—seemed enveloping, smothering her. No faintest breath of air stirred the piny needles above her, nor ruffled the surface of the river, whose black waters, far below, flowed broad and deep and silent—smoothly—like a river of oil. Ominously hushed, secretive, it slipped out of the motionless dark. Silently portentous, it faded again into the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between the little stars.
It was not at all the woman who would conquer a wilderness, that huddled in a dejected little heap at the foot of the banskian; but a very miserable and depressed girl, who swallowed hard to keep down the growing lump in her throat, and bit her lip, and stared with wide eyes toward the southward. Hot tears—tears of bitter, heart-sickening loneliness—filled her eyes and trickled unheeded down her cheeks beneath the tightly drawn mosquito-net.
Darkness deepened, imperceptibly, surely, fore-shortening the horizon, and by just so much increasing the distance that separated her from her people.
"Poor fool moose-calf," she murmured, "you weren't satisfied to follow the beaten trails. You had to find a land of your own—a land that——"
The whispered words trailed into silence, and to her mind's eye appeared the face of the man who had spoken those words—the face of Brute MacNair. She saw him as he stood that day and faced her among the freshly chopped stumps of the clearing.
"He is rough and bearlike—boorish," she thought, as she remembered that the man had not removed his hat in her presence. "He called me names. He is uncouth, cynical, egotistical. He thinks he can scare me into leaving his Indians alone." Her lips trembled and tightened. "I am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering, and uncompromising, and skeptical. And yet—" What gave her pause was so intangible, so chaotic, in her own mind as to form itself into no definite idea.
"He is brutish and brutal and bad!" she muttered aloud at the memory of Lapierre's battered face, and immediately fell to comparing the two men.
Each seemed exactly what the other was not. Lapierre was handsome, debonair, easy of speech, and graceful of movement; deferential, earnest, at times even pensive, and the possessor of ideals; generous and accommodating to a fault, if a trifle cynical; maligned, hated, discredited by the men who ruled the North, yet brave and infinitely capable—she remembered the swift fate of Vermilion.
His was nothing of the rugged candour of MacNair—the bluff straightforwardness that overrides opposition; ignores criticism. MacNair fitted the North—the big, brutal, insatiate North—the North of storms, of cold and fighting things; of foaming, roaring white-water and seething, blinding blizzards.
Chloe's glance strayed out over the river, where the farther bank showed only the serried sky-line of a wall of jet.
Lapierre was also of the North—the North as it is tonight; soft air, balmy with the incense of growing things; illusive dark, half concealing, half revealing, blurring distant outlines. A placid North, whose black waters flowed silent, smooth, deep. A benign and harmless North, upon its surface; and yet, withal, portentous of things unknown.
The girl shuddered and arose to her feet, and, as she did so, from up the river—from the direction of the Indian camp—came the sharp, quick sound of a shot. Then silence—a silence that seemed unending to the girl who waited breathlessly, one hand grasping the rough bark of the gnarled tree, and the other shading her eyes as thought to aid them in their effort to pierce the gloom.
A long time she stood thus, peering into the dark, and then, an indistinct form clove the black water of the river, and a long body slipped noiselessly toward her, followed by another, and another.
"The canoes!" she cried, as she watched the sparkling starlight play upon the long Y-shaped ripples that rolled back from their bows.
Once more the sense of loneliness almost overcame her. Pierre Lapierre was going out of the North.
She could see the figures of the paddlers, now—blurred, and indistinct, and unrecognizable—distinguishable more by the spaces that showed between them, than by their own outlines.
They were almost beneath her. Should she call out? One last bon voyage? The sound of a voice floated upward; a hard, rasping voice, unfamiliar, yet strangely familiar. In the leading canoe the Indians ceased paddling. The canoe lost momentum and drifted broadside to the current. The men were lifting something; something long and dark. There was a muffled splash, and the dark object disappeared. The canoemen picked up their paddles, and the canoe swung into its course and disappeared around a point. The other canoes followed; and the river rolled on as before—black—oily—sinister.
A broad cloud, pall-like, threatening, which had mounted unnoticed by the girl, blotted out the light of the stars, as if to hide from alien eyes some unlovely secret of the wilds.
The darkness was real, now; and Chloe, in a sudden panic of terror, dashed wildly for the clearing—stumbling—crashing through the bush as she ran; her way lighted at intervals by flashes of distant lightning. She paused upon the verge of the bank at the point where it entered the clearing; at the point where the wilderness crowded menacingly her little outpost of civilization. Panting, she stood and stared out over the smooth flowing, immutable river.
A lightning flash, nearer and more vivid than any preceding, lighted for an instant the whole landscape. Then, the mighty crash of thunder, and the long, hoarse moan of wind, and in the midst of it, that other sound—the horrible sound that once before had sent her dashing breathless from the night—the demoniacal, mocking laugh of the great loon.
With a low, choking sob, the girl fled toward the little square of light that glowed from the window of her cabin.