“What’s that ye say, Parfaite?” said Shon—“a sun dog?”
Sir Duke Lawless, puzzled, listened eagerly for the reply.
The half-breed in delight ran before them, cracking his whip and jingling the bells at his knees. “Ah, that’s it! It is a name we have for some. You do not know? It is easy. In the high-up country”—pointing north”—you see sometimes many suns. But it is not many after all; it is only one; and the rest are the same as your face in looking-glasses—one, two, three, plenty. You see?”
“Yes,” said Sir Duke, “reflections of the real sun.” Parfaite tapped him on the arm. “So: you have the thing. Well, this man is not himself—he have left himself where he seen his bad times. It makes your flesh creep sometimes when you see the sun dogs in the sky—this man did the same. You shall see him tonight.”
Sir Duke looked at the little half-breed, and wondered that the product of so crude a civilisation should be so little crude in his imagination. “What happened?” he asked.
“Nothing happened. But the man could not sleep. He sit before the fire, his eyes moving here and there, and sometimes he shiver. Well, I watch him. In the morning we leave him there, and he has been there ever since—the only man at the Fort. The Indians do not go; they fear him; but there is no harm in him. He is old now. In an hour we’ll be there.”
The sun was hanging, with one shoulder up like a great red peering dwarf, on the far side of a long hillock of stunted pines, when the three arrived at the Fort. The yard was still as Parfaite had described it—full of rank grass, through which one path trailed to the open door. On the stockade walls grass grew, as though where men will not live like men Nature labours to smother. The shutters of the window were not open; light only entered through narrow openings in them, made for the needs of possible attacks by Indians in the far past. One would have sworn that anyone dwelling there was more like the dead than the living. Yet it had, too, something of the peace of the lonely graveyard. There was no one in the Fort; but there were signs of life—skins piled here and there, a few utensils, a bench, a hammock for food swung from the rafters, a low fire burning in the chimney, and a rude spear stretched on the wall.
“Sure, the place gives you shivers!” said Shon. “Open go these windows. Put wood on the fire, Parfaite; cook the meat that we’ve brought, and no other, me boy; and whin we’re filled wid a meal and the love o’ God, bring in your Lost Man, or Sun Dog, or whativer’s he by name or nature.”
While Parfaite and Shon busied themselves, Lawless wandered out with his gun, and, drawn on by the clear joyous air of the evening, walked along a path made by the same feet that had travelled the yard of the Fort. He followed it almost unconsciously at first, thinking of the strange histories that the far north hoards in its fastnesses, wondering what singular fate had driven the host of this secluded tavern—farthest from the pleasant south country, nearest to the Pole—to stand, as it were, a sentinel at the raw outposts of the world. He looked down at the trail where he was walking with a kind of awe, which even his cheerful common sense could not dismiss.
He came to the top of a ridge on which were a handful of meagre trees. Leaning on his gun, he looked straight away into the farthest distance. On the left was a blurred edge of pines, with tops like ungainly tendrils feeling for the sky. On the right was a long bare stretch of hills veiled in the thin smoke of the evening, and between, straight before him, was a wide lane of unknown country, billowing away to where it froze into the vast archipelago that closes with the summit of the world. He experienced now that weird charm which has drawn so many into Arctic wilds and gathered the eyes of millions longingly. Wife, child, London, civilisation, were forgotten for the moment. He was under a spell which, once felt, lingers in your veins always.