A VOW THAT HELD
As a man who gets a knife blade in the ribs Dunvegan settled back in his chair. In spite of his tremendous self control, the pallor crept up through his tan. His eyes widened and remained so, staring glazily. The Factor could not help but notice the change. He gazed a moment above the pages he held.
"What's the matter?" he demanded in genuine surprise. Then recollection coming, he added: "Yes, I remember now. Let that be a lesson to you, Dunvegan. Don't trust a woman out of your sight! I speak from hard experience."
The chief trader pulled his pithless limbs together with an effort.
"There is a mistake somewhere," he began in a quiet, hollow voice. "What you say cannot have happened."
"Why?"
"As you know, Desirée's feeling leaned toward the Nor'westers. She registered a vow that she would never marry a Hudson's Bay man."
"Neither did she!"
"Great God," breathed Dunvegan, "don't fool with riddles! Speak it out!"
"She didn't marry a Hudson's Bay man," Macleod asserted grimly. "That damned traitor of a Glyndon turned Nor'wester and fled. Now do you understand?"
Amid a tumultuous rush of mingling feelings, condemnation, anger, jealousy, despair, Dunvegan understood to the bitter full. For several silent minutes he sat there, fighting his conflicting emotions, getting a grip on himself. The Factor read on at the duplicate sheets with stolid absorption.
"Who married them?" was the question that interrupted. Dunvegan had forced his vocal chords into mechanical action.
"Father Brochet," muttered Macleod, not looking up.
"And where are they, do you know?"
"Not I," snarled the Factor, stopping his study of the report. "Most likely they are now in the Nor'west fort at La Roche."
"With Black Ferguson! Oh my God!" Bruce leaped to his feet and paced and re-paced the council room with long, savage strides. The Factor watched him, smiling cynically, as if at the discovery of some new trait in the man. A dozen times the chief trader tramped the floor. Then he whirled in the middle of a stride.
"This thing was planned," he averred. "The clerk was approached from the outside."
"I know that." Macleod's eyes darkened and narrowed a little.
"By whom?"
"It is obvious."
"The Nor'westers—directly?"
"Undoubtedly." The Factor laid down the report upon the council table. Dunvegan resumed his frantic walk, again pausing uncertainly.
"But the means—the means!" he exclaimed petulantly.
Macleod's teeth snapped shut and opened grudgingly for his speech.
"Ha!" he gritted. "God pity the means—if I discover it! We have had spies sneaking about Oxford House. Sometimes I think they must have been inside the stockades, although that is a wild thought. Be this fact as it may, the truth remains that Glyndon was approached directly by an agent of the Nor'westers. Under the powerful combination of the enemy's inducements and the girl's persuasions his desertion must have been a comparatively easy matter."
"Curse his soft eyes!" cried the chief trader. "We might have known better than trust him. Good Lord, and they sent him away from London temptations in order that the Company might give him a certificate of manhood! How, in heaven's name, could a man be made from a bit of slime, a rotten shell, and a colored rag? Betrayal must have been born in him! Did you order no pursuit?"
The Factor shook his shaggy hair as he gathered up the papers.
"They had twenty hours start and good dogs," he explained. "Besides, they fled while it was snowing and left no trail."
"Where's Brochet?" demanded Dunvegan suddenly and irrelevantly.
"Somewhere down Blazing Pine River on a mission to sick Indians," Malcolm Macleod replied. "He left shortly after it happened."
At the end of this questioning, with the little dream-things he had fashioned scattered to the far compass points as the blizzard outside had scattered the snow flakes, Dunvegan felt the sickening of supreme despair. No visible resource stretched before him. He relapsed into sullen inertia.
"Is this all?" the Factor asked, placing his duplicate sheets in numbered sequence.
"All but one other thing."
"And that?"
Dunvegan hesitated. "When I brought Flora Macleod and Running Wolf here," he commenced awkwardly, "I met a strange canoe on Lake Lemeau. In that canoe with two Indian paddlers were two United States marshals named Granger and Garfield. Their passes were good. Their papers I requested of them."
The chief trader paused to note the effect of his words on Macleod. But there was no effect except that the Factor had squared his bulk in his council chair as if to face an emergency.
"Go on," he urged grimly.
"It seemed they were searching for a man whom they suspected of living in this wilderness under an assumed name. They had his photograph!"
Malcolm Macleod shifted forward in a startled fashion.
"You saw that photograph?"
"I did."
"You knew it?"
"No."
The movement of the Factor's body was swiftly reversed. He breathed deeply with something of relief, a relief that fled at the chief trader's next statement.
"I did not know the original of the picture," Dunvegan asserted, "but I was told who it was."
"By whom?" The question shot like a bullet.
"By Flora Macleod. Privately, you understand! Her information was given me after these two marshals had gone."
"Whose picture was it?" Macleod asked doggedly, with the manner of putting an issue to the test.
"Your own," the chief trader answered, "at the age of thirty."
Expecting a dynamic outburst, Dunvegan was completely surprised at the Factor's stoic composure. The massive limbs never offered to spring from the chair; the face preserved its rigid, inscrutable lines.
"You were satisfied with that information, were you?" Macleod interrogated.
"Yes."
"It satisfies you still?"
"It does."
"You did not mention the circumstance at the time," the Factor went on. "Why refer to it now?"
Dunvegan leaned his arms on the table directly opposite Macleod, meeting unafraid the piercing glances of those electric eyes, the eyes which he could now recognize as belonging to the original of the photograph.
"Because it is now necessary," he answered. "If it were not, I would not have opened the subject. In the space of another day, or two, those deputies will make Oxford House. At this moment they are laid up beyond Kabeke Bluffs, not caring to face the blizzard. We passed them there."
Macleod was half out of his chair, an unspoken question blazing from those magnetic eyes. Dunvegan answered it with hauteur and a little scorn.
"I'm no informer," he declared. "Somehow they've got trace of you at the other forts. These men had official entry to both Hudson's Bay and Nor'west posts, and they must have covered the territory pretty well."
"Why do you tell me this?" demanded Macleod, with sudden asperity.
"Out of a sense of duty."
"You think me a hunted criminal?" The Factor's tone held resentment and bitterness which was probably impersonal.
"I forbear to think," answered Dunvegan. "Your affairs are none of my business."
"Yet you serve me! Why serve a man with a supposed stain upon him? Why not follow, rather, our friend Glyndon's move?"
"I serve the Company," was the chief trader's response. "The moral status of the Company's officers cannot effect that fundamental duty—service."
The Factor looked long at Dunvegan, marveling at his integrity, his lack of low curiosity, his allegiance.
"Bruce," he said—and it was not often he used the Christian name—"you're one of the true, northern breed, the shut-mouthed men! Let me tell you a little phase of American life. Twenty years ago there lived over there in one of the big cities a family by the name of Macfarlane. The family consisted of the husband and wife, a daughter, and a son. There was also an intruding element, and this intruder was named James Funster. You see, Funster had loved Macfarlane's wife before she married, and even after the marriage he could not like an honorable man get over his passion. Do you follow me?"
Dunvegan nodded. He had guessed this much from former hints Macleod had given him.
"Well," continued the Factor, "project your thoughts ahead. Imagine the mad things that come into the brain of the infatuated. Imagine also Macfarlane's horror at what happened. One day he was away with his daughter. On his return he found his wife murdered and the son stolen. Without a doubt it was Funster's work. But notice how Fate acted! Suspicion fell upon the husband, suggesting the motive of jealousy. He fled, and the blot still rests on his name."
"How old were the children?" asked Dunvegan, excitedly.
"They were very young," Macleod answered evasively; "just a year between them. I think I have said enough to show you that I am no criminal. That was twenty years ago, but the false accusation follows me."
"And you," ventured Bruce—"you are Macfarlane!"
"I am Alexander Macfarlane."
"And where is Funster?"
"Ah!" grated Macleod. "Tell me that."
Dunvegan rose up, his own sorrow overshadowed by the portentous resurrection of an old tragedy.
"You are innocent," he cried, "and those men will be here to-morrow or the next day."
"And to-morrow, or the next day I shall be at Fort Dumarge!"
"But they can follow."
"Let them! Or let them await me here! What good will it do? They came in on a long trail, but by Heaven they may go out on a longer one."
Dunvegan stared at the dark, glowering visage and shivered involuntarily.
"What one?" he asked under his breath, although he knew.
"La longue traverse," the Factor decreed.