THE DEAD MAN TELLS HIS TALE
When, late in May, the snow had left the open places reached by the sun and the ice cleared the rivers, Marcel was ready to make his first trip to the camp on the Ghost. Poor Antoine would have to lie content in a shallow grave among the boulders of the river shore, for the frost was still in the ground. Before the weather softened Jean had smoked the remainder of his meat and now he faced a ten-mile portage with his outfit. Before the trails went bad he could have freighted on the sled sufficient food for his journey home but had preferred to face the "break-up" in his own camp near a fish-lake and relay his meat over on his back in May. The memories of the winter aroused by the camp on the Ghost were too grim to attract him to the comfortable shack.
One morning at sunrise, after lashing a pack on Fleur's broad back, he threw his tump-line over a bag of smoked meat and swinging it to his shoulders, started over the trail. In the middle of the forenoon he walked into the clearing on the Ghost and pushing off the head strap of his line, dropped his load.
Glancing at the cache where he had left the body of Antoine Beaulieu lashed in canvas with the fur-packs and rifles of the dead men, Marcel muttered in surprise:
"By Gar! Dat ees strange t'ing!"
The scaffold was empty; the body of Antoine had been removed and not a vestige remained of the fur-packs and outfits of Jean's partners. Neither wolverines, lynxes nor bears, had they been able to overcome the fish-hook barriers guarding the uprights, would have stripped the platform in such fashion. Searching the soft earth, he found the faint tracks of moccasins which the recent rain had not obliterated. But down on the river shore the mud told the story. A canoe had landed there within a week, for in spite of the rain the deep impress of the feet of men carrying heavy loads still marked the beach. Since the ice went out someone who knew that the three men were wintering there, had travelled up the Ghost from the Whale, but why? They could not have been starving, for fish could then be had on the Whale for the setting of a net. Evidently they had buried Antoine and taken the fur-packs, rifles, and outfits of the two men to Whale River. Marcel searched for a message, in the phonetic writing employed throughout the north, burned into a blazed tree, or on a scrap of birch-bark, left in the shack, but found nothing. The cabin was as he had last seen it. They had thought him, also, dead somewhere in the "bush" and had left no word, or——Then the situation opened to him from the angle of view of the Cree visitors.
A camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him; also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had them in his possession. Of the third man, who was to winter with them, no trace at the camp. Two dead and the third, possibly alive, if he had not starved out. And that third man was Jean Marcel.
That was the grim tale which was travelling down the river ahead of him to the spring trade. Who killed Antoine Beaulieu, and where is Piquet? This was the question he would have to answer. This the factor and the kinsmen of his partners would demand of the third man, if he survived to reach the post. Yes, Whale River would anxiously await the return of Jean Marcel that spring, but would Whale River believe his story? Of the people of the post he had no doubt. Julie, Père Breton, the factor, Angus, Jules, he could count on. They knew him—were his friends. But the Crees, and half-breds; would they believe that Joe Piquet had been the evil genius of the tragedy on the Ghost, Joe Piquet, now dead and helpless to speak in his own defense? Would they believe in the innocence of the man who alone of the three partners had fought free of the long famine? Marcel's knowledge of the Indians' mental make-up told him that since the visit of the Crees to the camp his case was hopeless.
They would readily believe that he had killed his partners for the remaining food, and, not anticipating the coming of a canoe in the spring to the camp, had gone after caribou, planning to secrete the body of Antoine, with its evidence of violence, on his return.
Of those who had peopled the canoes starting for the up-river summer camps in July, many a face would now be absent when the Crees returned for this year's trade. Famine surely had come to more than one camp of the red hunters that winter; and doubtless, swift death in the night, also, among some of those, who, when caught by the rabbit plague and the absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet, went mad with hunger. Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepee in the silent places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January winds.