A week's rest had freshened the blacks so much that, if given their heads, they would have covered half the distance to Winnipeg that day. But he took a vicious pleasure in balking their inclination. Jerking the bits, which hinged on a cruel curb, he pulled them down to a nervous, teetering walk.
For a while the trail paralleled the right of way, then swung on a wide arc around a morass, and for an hour thereafter ran alternately among sloughs, sand-hills, muskegs, through a country indescribably desolate and which teemed with savage life. Myriad frogs set his ears singing with dismal, persistent croaking; a pole-cat scuttled across the trail, poisoning the dank air. From brazen skies a hawk shrieked a malediction upon his head; his horses threw up their heads, snorting, as a lynx screamed a long way off. Here, too, dark woods shut off errant breezes and he fell a prey to a curse of sand-flies that stung and envenomed his flesh. There was no escape. They settled, by hundreds, on the hands that wiped them off his face; stung his face as he slapped his hands.
Coming back, mad with pain and rage, from this détour, his eyes drew to a trestle—longest, highest, most expensive of Carter's works—and, reining in, he allowed his glance to wander lustfully over the stout timbers which his fancy wrapped in flame. A single match—but reason urged that the embers would undoubtedly furnish red lights for his hanging, and he drove on, hotter, madder for the restraint. He was ripe for any mischief that offered a running chance of escape, when, midway of the afternoon, he came on wheel-tracks that swung at right angles from the trail into a chain of sloughs.
"Red River cart," he muttered, noticing the wide gauge; then, furiously slapping his thigh, "Carter's Cree, by G—!"
He meant the Indian who had brought in the venison which formed the tidbit at Dorothy Chester's first meal in camp. All through the summer he had come in with deer-meat twice or thrice a week, but though Michigan and other teamsters had searched for his tepee during the idle days of the strike, no one had penetrated to the woodland lake where his squaw—a young girl, handsome, as Indian women go—was free from rude glances, safe from insult or worse. Now the trail lay, plain as a pike-road, under Michigan's nose; and, leaping down, he tied his team to a tree and followed it along the sloughs.
Through a gully, patch of woodland, the tracks led into a second long slough, and presently debouched on the strand of a small lake, one of the thousands that gem that black wilderness. Bird-haunted in spring, lonesomeness now lay thick upon it. Uttering its weird cry, a loon rose on swift wing, angling in its flight over the tepee, whose bull's hide, raw, smoke-blacked, harmonized with that savage setting.
Just then Michigan was in fettle to exact a vicarious revenge. Early in summer Carter had nipped a disposition on the part of his men to joke and make free with the Indian, giving strict orders that he was to be unmolested, coming or going. This girl who lived in his protecting shadow would have fared ill at Michigan's hands. But the tepee flaps were thrown wide, and though he strained his eyes from a covert of tall reeds, he saw no sign of her, without or within. Save the lipping of waters, sough of a rising wind, no sound broke the solitude that guarded this, the lair of primitive man. Only those who have experienced its frightful loneliness can know how terrible a northern solitude can be; how awesome, oppressive. Some note of it caused the teamster to speak aloud, heartening himself with sound of his voice.
"They'll be back to-night, sure, for the ashes is banked over the embers."
Gaining back to his team, he drove on a scant quarter-mile, then turned into a slough parallel to those he had just left, and which had its end in a wooded dell. Here high banks would have effectually screened a fire, yet he endured mosquitoes till dusk smothered his smudge. Then tying his team in the thick of its reek, he cut across the intervening bush and followed, as before, along the slough chain till he saw a dim cloud quivering on the blackness ahead.
Beneath this, smoke from the Cree's fire, presently appeared a rich incandescence, and after worming the last yards on the flat of his belly, Michigan peered from thick sedge out at the Cree woman, who sat and suckled her child by the fire that enriched the bronze of her bosom with a blush from its glow. A free, wild thing, her deep eyes now caressed her child, again searched the fire's red mystery, giving back its flame as forest pools reflect a hunter's flare; sombre and silent, eons of savagery flickered in her glance.