“Suppose—while we’re theorizing,” I ventured, “that Montell had an idea he could get along without you—if he wants to settle your chances of sharing in the profits, as you think—why mightn’t he give the Police a quiet hint, if he gets through?”
“I can very well imagine him doing that,” Barreau responded thoughtfully. “But he can’t make it go without me; at least, not just yet. And I do not think he will get through, for all his determination.”
I kept Barreau’s prophecy in mind. Days of busy outfitting slipped by; I kept no track of the hunters who indebted themselves to the post, but they came and went by scores. The days merged into a week. At the end of it a black ruck of clouds came scudding out of the west. Thick and lowering they gathered over head, and one day at noon, while Barreau and I stood in the doorway of the store, watching a great multitude of damp snowflakes come eddying down through the still air, Montell, his daughter, and the eight men, came plodding afoot to the gate of the stockade.
[CHAPTER XIV—INTEREST ON A DEBT]
They filed past the store, a weary looking squad, Montell’s fat jowl drawn into sullen lines, the men not wholly free of a certain furtive bearing. Observing them I could very well enter into their feelings. My brief experience between Benton and MacLeod had taught me something of the fear that stalks at the elbow of a hunted man. The girl looked up at Barreau and me, and for the first time there was no curl to her lip, no scornful gleam in her eyes. Only a momentary flash of interest. Then the listless, impersonal expression came back to her face. She walked at her father’s elbow like one utterly worn out. The men branched off to the bunkhouse. Montell and his daughter went straight to their cabin.
“I think he is beginning to have a profound respect for the Company,” Barreau told me that night as we sat over our fire. “They have set him thinking. It seems that none of his men could get so much as a glimpse of a moccasin track. Still, their saddle horses and pack-mules were systematically shot down, until they were afoot again. After that they were not molested. He knows that his whole party could as easily have been put out of the way. That seems to have put the fear of God into the lot of them. They can’t understand the object. I don’t, myself, altogether. But I could hazard a close guess, I think.”
All that night and the next day the big snowflakes came gyrating down. The temperature remained the same, just short of freezing, and a dead calm lay over the land. Then it faired gradually. With the clearing sky the feathery snowfall melted and disappeared. Upon its passing the night frosts took on a keener edge. Little vagrant gusts of wind went frolicking through the open spaces in the woods, fluttering the dry, fallen leaves into tiny heaps and scattering them again. Sometimes of a night these same whisperings of the North rattled the bare limbs of the cottonwoods and birch till the miles of forest seemed to voice a protesting murmur. Steadily the cold grew, and the sun rode lower on its diurnal passage. Save the pine and spruce and scattered cedars the great woods shivered in their nakedness, lacking the white robe which the North dons at such season. And presently that came also, with the deep-throated whoop of a north-east gale to herald its coming. In one night the Sicannie froze from bank to bank; at daybreak the wind drove curling streamers of loose snow across its glassy surface, to pile in frosty windows at the foot of the south slope.
During this period we of the post settled into a routine of minor tasks. There were fires to keep against the cold. From dawn to dusk, somewhere within the stockade or on the timbered hill above, the clink of an axeblade on frosty wood rang like a bell. That, and water for cooking, and caring for the stock now housed in the long stable, kept time from hanging heavy on the hands of the men. Barreau and I gravitated between our cabin and the store.
Montell sulked for a week after that last failure to reach the south. Then he emerged from his shell of silence, and became ponderously genial, talkative—a metamorphosis which Barreau regarded with frank contempt. He spoke to Montell no oftener than was necessary, and when he did speak his tongue was barbed. Openly and unequivocally he despised and distrusted his flesh-burdened partner, and he made no effort to hide the fact. For the most part Montell took his sneering unmoved, or grinned pacifically, but there were times when his red face went purple and his puffy eyelids would droop till the pupils glinted through mere slits, like a cat about to pounce. Then it would be Barreau’s turn to smile, in his slow ironic way.
Of the girl, who kept close to the cabin she and her father shared, no word ever passed between the two. Nor did she meet Barreau or myself face to face for a matter of three weeks. Our sight of each was from a distance, and from that distance, with a blanket coat to her heels and a fur cap pulled over her ears, it was hard to distinguish her from one of the few half-breed women who had followed their men into the North. In what way Montell accounted for our presence, I did not know, nor how he explained Barreau’s assured position about the post. It may be that she did not notice this incongruity on the part of a supposed fugitive; it may be that Montell was a plausible liar. At any rate, upon the few occasions when we three came near enough to recognize each other, she appeared calmly indifferent. Barreau and I ate in the big cookhouse with the rest of the men. Montell and his daughter had their meals served in the cabin. So we—at least I will speak for myself, for Barreau maintained a stony front and absolute silence on the subject—were saved the embarrassment of meeting three times daily.