“This year, if things do not go awry, we stand to clear more than a hundred thousand dollars. And it will be the last. No individual trader can break lances with the Company on its own ground. They are lords of the North beyond gainsaying. At the best we can but take a slice and leave the loaf to them. Next spring sees the last of our trading. This fall there will be fierce work to do, tramping here and there, issuing guns and powder and foodstuffs, bargaining with the hunters for the winter’s take of pelts. A hundred lodges have promised to trade with us this season, and an Indian rarely breaks his word, once given in good faith. We will get others, in spite of the Company runners. But we must be on the alert; we cannot sit in our posts and wait for these things to come about of themselves. And that brings me to the point.
“If I had only the Hudson’s Bay Company to contend with, I would have little fear for the outcome. With them it is largely a question of strategy. If there is any violence it will come from some zealot in their service, and we can hold our own against such. But Montell is an eel. He looms more threatening than the Company. In these three years I have had no accounting with him. I have done the dirty work, while he holed up at the post, or looked after the St. Louis end. I have more than once come near tripping him up in petty tricks. Secretly he hates me, for at bottom he is an arrogant old freebooter. And for all his grovelling last night, he is a dangerous man. By one means and another I know that he has made up his mind to put me in the lurch once this winter’s trade is turned. Without me, he can do little in the way of getting furs. Otherwise, I would be cooling my heels in MacLeod guardhouse yet. You may have guessed that he was the spirit which moved Blackie to pass in the knife and saw.
“But once full arrangements are made, and the pelts begin to come in with spring, why, then—I don’t know what he will do, how he will engineer his plan to eliminate my interest in the profits. He has some card up his sleeve. Half of everything is mine, but I have nothing to show it. There is nothing between us but his word! and that, I have learned at last, is a thing he can twist to suit the occasion. He has begun shaping things to suit himself on this trip. He cut a bit of the ground from under my feet back there in MacLeod. I’ll pay him for that, though; and he knows it. The finishing touch will come this winter, or in the spring. He hates me, just as he hates any man whom he cannot lead by the nose, and he will move like the old fox he is. There’s money in it—for him. And money and power are Simon Montell’s twin gods.
“Between these cross-fires, I will have my hands more than full. I can only be in one place at a time. There is not a man with the bull-train, or among the few that remain in the North, but is under Montell’s thumb. Most of them could not understand if I told them. The thing is too subtle for their simple, direct minds. For that reason, I sought for some one I could trust to keep a clear eye open, and his ears cocked; for whatever Montell does he will do by stealth. That evening we fell in together at the foot of the Sweet Grass I was headed for the Sanders ranch, thinking to get Walt to come North with me. He would have enjoyed this sort of thing. You know how we fared that night. And you can see why, when the Police raid put him beyond my helping, I turned to you. I had you in mind all the while we lay in the guardhouse, but I hesitated to drag you into it, until I learned of the robbery charged to you. Then I went back for you, judging that of the two evils you would choose the one I offered.
“That is the way of it, Bob. If you help me play the game this winter, you accomplish two things with tolerable certitude. You will be safe from the Police and those Benton idiots; and you will get to St. Louis in the spring. Montell himself will see to that, when he learns who you are. He knew your father slightly, and he has all of a guttersnipe’s snobbish adulation of wealth and family. So you are doubly safe. On the other hand, if you are minded to work out your own salvation I will share with you what I have, set you in the right direction, and wish you good luck. Don’t be hasty about deciding. Think the thing over.”
But I had already made up my mind. How much the lure of a strange land and stirring things to be done bore upon my decision I cannot say. How much, at the moment, George Barreau’s personality dominated me I cannot quite compute. Individual psychology has never been a study of mine, but I know that there is no course of reasoning, no mental action, no emotion, that has not its psychic factors. Whatever these were in my case, I lost sight of them. I think that what influenced me most was his way of putting it man to man, so to speak. Unconsciously that restored to me, in a measure, the self-respect I had nearly lost in those brutal days on the Moon, and the skulking and imprisonment which followed. Here was a man before whom I had seen other strong men cringe asking me in a straightforward way for help. I had no wish to refuse; I felt a thrill at the opportunity. For the time I forgot that Montell’s daughter had called him a thief and a murderer, and he had not denied. I took him at his face value, as he took me, and we shook hands on the bargain, and cemented it further with the bottle of port so unwillingly relinquished by Montell.
“I’m with you,” said I, “till the last dog is hung. But if I weaken in a pinch, don’t say you weren’t forewarned.”
He laughed.
“Don’t underestimate yourself. A man doesn’t need to be overloaded with nerve to play a man’s part in this world. In fact, the fellow who hunts trouble for the sake of showing off his nerve, is generally some damned fool with a yellow streak in him that he’s deadly afraid some one may uncover. After all,” he reflected, “there may be nothing more to cope with than the dreary monotony of snowbound days, and nights when the frost bites to the bone. Your part will merely be to keep tab on Mr. Simon Montell when I am not about. He’s afraid of me. If he can’t attain his purpose by underhand methods, he may consider the risk of open hostility too great. But that we cannot foresee. Our problem, now, is to reach the Sicannie River as soon as we can. There we need never fear meeting a scarlet jacket. It stands us in hand to be shy of those gentlemen, for some time to come.”
“Amen to that,” I responded sincerely.