“Vell, most a h’our, now, I tink, and dem’s Kerrigan’s horses, as is five year olds an’ stronk lak’ de devil. Dey run good on de five-mile flat, dey do, sure, an’ odder places vhere snow is pack nice.”
This time Stefan didn’t answer. He shouted at his team, that started on the run, but Zeb Foraker’s St. Bernard, who could lick any dog in Carcajou singly, chanced to leap over the garden fence and come at them. In a moment a half dozen dogs were piled up in a fight. Stefan stepped into the snarl. A moment later he had the biggest animal, that was supposed to weigh close to two hundred, by the tail. With a wonderful heave he lifted it up and swung it over his master’s fence into a leafless copper beach that graced the plot, whence the animal fell to the ground, looking dazed. It took several minutes to straighten out the tangled traces and the leader was hopelessly lame. He had to be taken out and left at home. All the time Stefan’s language brought scared faces to the windows of neighboring shacks. It was a good thing, probably, that few people in Carcajou understood Swedish. Still, from the sound of it they judged that it must be something pretty bad. Finally he was off again, lacking the smartest animal in his team. The others, however, probably 217 considered that this was no occasion for further bad behavior and old Jennie, mother of three of the bunch, led it without making any serious mistakes.
For the life of him Stefan couldn’t conceive why anyone should want to bother Hugo or the pretty lady. It was the very strangeness and mystery of the thing that aroused him. He never entertained the idea that Papineau was mistaken. The Frenchman was a fine smart fellow, one who loved Hugo, and a man not given to idle notions or to exaggeration. If he thought there was something wrong this must be the case.
On a long upgrade he ran at the side of his dogs, his great chest heaving at the tremendous effort. On the level he rode, urging the animals on and keeping his eyes on the tracks of the horses and sleigh, while his strong stern face seemed immovably frozen into an expression of grim determination. Anyone who touched his friend Hugo would have to reckon with him, indeed. The man was one of the few beings he cared for, like his wife or the young ones. Such a friendship was a possession, something he owned, a treasure he would not be robbed of and was prepared to defend, as he would have defended his little hoard of money, the home he had built, with 218 the berserker fury of his ancestors. He was conscious of his might, conscious that there were few men on earth who could stand up against him in the rough and tumble fighting current in the far wilderness. He knew that he could go through such a crowd as was threatening his friend like a devastating cyclone through a cornfield.
“If dey’s qviet un’ reasonable I don’t ’urt nobotty but yoost tell ’em git out of here, tarn qvick,” he projected. “But if dem mens is up to anything rough I hope dey says dere prayers alretty, because I yoost bust ’em all up, you bet.”
The team was pulling hard, the breaths coming out in swift little puffs from their nostrils. Sometimes they walked, with tongues hanging out, while again they trotted easily, or, down the hills, galloped with the long easy lope of their wolfish ancestors. And Stefan calculated the speed the horses could have made here, and again over there. By the tracks he saw where they had trotted along good ground, or toiled more slowly over rough places. The man grinned when he came to spots where they must have proceeded very slowly with the heavy sleigh, and his brows corrugated when he saw that they had speeded up again.
“Dey drive tern horses fast,” he reflected. “Dey don’t vant trafel dis road back in dark, sure ting, to break dere necks. Dey vant make qvick vork. But I ban goin’ some, too, you bet.”
He was taking man’s eternal pleasure in swift motion, yet the anxiety remained with him that he might not catch up with them before they arrived. He knew that nothing could take place if he were there a minute before them. But if he was a minute late, what then? When this idea recurred, his face would take on its grim expression, the look wherewith Vikings once struck terror among their enemies. He hoped for the sake of that crowd that he might not be late, as well as for the good of his friend, for he would crush them, the men at any rate, and send the women trudging home, wishing they had never been born.
In him the two individualities that make up nearly every human being swung and seesawed. The kind-hearted, helpful, considerate man kept on surging upward, in the trust that his arrival would avert all trouble. Then this phase of his being would pass off and the great primal creature would take its place and come uppermost, with lustful ideas of vengeance, visions in which everything was 220 tinged with red, and then his great voice would ring out in the still woods and the dogs would pull desperately, with never a pause, and the toboggan would slither and slide and groan, and the crunching snow seemed to complain, and the masses of snow suspended to great hemlocks and firs dropped down suddenly, with thuds that were like the echoes of great smiting clubs.