“You must eat,” Barreau broke in harshly upon my fruitless coaxing. “Food means strength. You can’t walk out of these woods on an empty stomach, and we can’t carry you.”
A swarm of angry words surged to my tongue’s end—and died unspoken. Right willingly would I have voiced a blunt opinion of his brutal directness—to a grief-stricken girl, at such a time—but she flashed him a queer half-pleading look, and meekly accepted the plate I held before her. He had gained my point for me, but the hard, domineering tone grated. I felt a sudden, keen resentment against him. To protect and shield her from everything had at once become a task in which I desired no other man’s aid.
“Now let us see how much of the truth is in the Black Factor,” Barreau began, when we had cleaned our plates and laid them in the grub-box.
He turned down the canvas with which I had covered Montell, and opened the front of the buckskin shirt. Jessie stirred uneasily. She seemed about to protest, then settled back and stared blankly into the fire. Deliberately, methodically, Barreau went through the dead man’s pockets. These proved empty. Feeling carefully he at last found that which he sought, pinned securely to Montell’s undershirt, beneath one arm. He brought the package to our side of the fire, considered a moment and opened it. Flat, the breadth of one’s hand, little over six inches in length, it revealed bills laid smoothly together like a deck of cards. Barreau counted them slowly. One—two—three—four—on up to sixty; each a thousand-dollar Bank of Montreal note. He snapped the rubber band back over them and slid the sheaf back into its heavy envelope.
“Le Noir did not draw such a long bow, after all,” he observed, to no one in particular. “Yet this is more than they offered me. Well, I dare say they felt that it would not be long——” He broke off, with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he put the package away in a pocket under his parka. Jessie watched him closely, but said nothing. A puzzled look replaced her former apathy.
That night we slept with the dogs tied inside our tent, and the toboggan drawn up beside our bed. I did not ask Barreau his reason for this. I could hazard a fair guess. Whosoever had deprived Montell of his dogs, might now be awaiting a chance to do a like favor for us. I would have talked to him of this but there was a restraint between us that had never arisen before. And so I held my peace.
I fell asleep at last, for all the silent guest that lay by the foot of our bed. What time I wakened I cannot say. The moon-glare fell on the canvas and cast a hazy light over the tent interior. And as I lay there, half-minded to get up and build a fire Barreau stirred beside me, and spoke.
“Last night was Christmas Eve,” he muttered. “To-day—Peace on earth, good-will to men! Merry Christmas. What a game—what a game!”
He turned over. We lay quite still for a long time. Then in that dead hush a husky whined, and Barreau sat up with a whispered oath, his voice trembling, and struck savagely at the dog. The sudden spasm of rage subtly communicated itself to me. I lay quivering in the blankets. If I had moved it would have been to turn and strike him as he had struck the dog. It passed presently, and left me wondering. I got up then and dressed. So did Barreau. We built a fire and sat by it, thawing meat, melting snow for tea, cooking bannock; all in silence, like folk who involuntarily lower their voices in a great empty church, the depths of a mine, or the presence of death. Afraid to speak? I laughed at the fancy, and looked up at the raucous sound of my own voice, to find Barreau scowling blackly—at the sound, I thought.
Before long Jessie came shivering to the fire. The rigors of the North breed a wolfish hunger. We ate huge quantities of bannock and moose-meat. That done we laid Montell’s body at the base of a spruce, and piled upon it a great heap of brush. Jessie viewed the abandonment calmly enough—she knew the necessity. Then we packed and put the dogs to the toboggan, increasing the load of food from Montell’s supply and leaving behind our tent and some few things we could not haul. Barreau went ahead, bearing straight south, setting his snowshoes down heel to toe, beating a path for the straining dogs. Fierce work it was, that trail-breaking. My turn at it came in due course. Thus we forged ahead, the black surrounding forest and the white floor of it irradiated by the moonbeams. Away behind us the Aurora flashed across the Polar horizon, a weird blazon of light, silky, shimmering, vari-colored, dying one moment to a pin-point leaping the next like sheet lightning to the height of the North Star. This died at the dawn. Over the frost-gleaming tree-tops the sun rose and bleared at us through the frost-haze. “And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die——” The Tentmaker’s rhyme came to me and droned over and over in my brain. The “Bowl” arched over us, a faded blue, coldly beautiful.