When the commissary had left him, Charley Seguis's brow clouded with annoyance as he saw a bent, wizened female figure approaching him. The only woman In the camp, old Maria, had not fallen into obscurity for a moment. She always wanted something, and haggled and nagged until she got it. Seguis, the sterling white blood ascendant in him, could not always find the pride for her in his heart that a mother might wish of her son. Now, she fawned upon him and whined.
“Are you a man or a stick,” she complained, “that you let the blood of your brother go unavenged? It's nearly three weeks since some coward shot him, and you haven't made a move to find the guilty man.”
“Nor will I, until the business here is settled,” Seguis retorted, in a tone of finality. “Do you expect me to leave this camp when the traders are expected, and go on some wild-goose chase out of personal revenge? For my part, I think Tom would have been sorrowed over a little more if he hadn't been such a fool. Why he went gunning for McTavish out of pure spite, I don't see. We need every man we can get in this camp.”
Seguis was a remarkably fine-looking half-breed. He had the proud carriage and graceful movements of the Indian, combined with the bright eyes and more attractively shaped head of a Caucasian. His hair was smooth and black, but lacked the coarseness of his mother's race, while his brain and method of thinking were wholly that of his father. With this endowment there had come to him, early in life, an aspiration to rise above his own sort, a desire to be a thorough white man. And in this he had always been supported by his mother, who, knowing her past, carried in her heart bitterness fully the equal of Angus Fitzpatrick's. It was only when her elder son had reached manhood, and bore easily, as by right, the manners of the superior race that the idea of carrying him upward ruthlessly had come to her.
Catherine de' Medici placed three successive sons on the throne of France. Old Maria was less ambitious, but none the less unscrupulous, and her methods revealed an uncanny natural knowledge of diplomacy and statecraft. Her whole life was bound up in the achievements of Charley Seguis, and she rarely, if ever, considered the question of personal perquisites should her schemes result successfully. She was content to be the background of his operations; and the background of a picture, although it be subordinate to the main object, rarely goes absolutely unnoticed.
The strangest part of her plan lay in the fact that as yet Seguis was totally unaware of his parentage. In the cunning scheme she had evolved, it was her intention to remove Donald McTavish completely, though unostentatiously; then could come the great revelation and the noise of conquest. Reasoning thus, she had taken her story to Angus Fitzpatrick, anxious, hesitant, and fearful. But in him, to her great joy, she had found an arrogant and eager, ally. This had been during the summer. It was now the first of March, and time was flying. The work must be completed before the spring thaws. The loss of Tom was not the grief to her that she made pretense it was. Her references to it this morning had a deeper purpose. She continued the conversation, despite Seguis's tone of annoyance.
“Tom may have been a fool,” she croaked, “but you're hardly the person to say so. Perhaps you'd have changed your song, if he'd put that dog, McTavish, out of the way—curse his charmed life!”
Seguis laughed harshly.
“You did your best, and Tom did his; I suppose it is up to me next. But why do you imagine I would be so glad if the captain was disposed of? I've nothing against him.”
“No? What's the matter with you? You're as soft as a rotten tree! What were you hanging around Fort Severn for all last summer, without a look for the Indian girls? Why were you singing love-songs under the trees of nights? Why did you cease to eat, and carry around a face as long as a sick fox's, eh? Ah, you are angry, and you shift! And, yet, you ask me what you have against this McTavish! With him out of the way, there's no reason why you shouldn't—”