A Gentleman of Courage: A Novel of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

His first night in Five Fingers would always remain an unchangeable page in the history of Peter McRae. Time would not dim nor obliterate it but would only mellow the memory of its loneliness and its torture. In the hours when it seemed to him his world had come to an end, years pressed their weight of experience and understanding upon his shoulders, and for a little while pain and the poignancy of fears made him old, and he ceased to be a boy of fourteen.

Simon McQuarrie had left a candle burning in the loft of his cabin. By its light he had made Peter's bed, and had hugged the boy to him for a moment before saying good night; and in going, with his head and shoulders above the trap in the floor, he had paused for a moment to say: "Don't worry, Peter. They won't get your father. And you must sleep, because Mona will be looking for you early in the morning."

Then he had gone.

And now, two hours later, Peter was alone and still awake. The candle had burned out, but the moon was coming up over the eastern forests. It was a splendid spring moon, big and round and full of golden fire, and its glow came in a flood through the open window of the loft.

At the window sat Peter, huddled and quiet. He knew Simon was sound asleep. All of Five Fingers was asleep. From the window he counted six or seven of the dozen log homes which made up the little settlement, and their windows were dark. They were floating in a great, yellow sea of moonlight. He could make out the dark walls of the forest and the silvery sheen of Middle Finger Inlet.

From beyond that sheen came the low murmur of Lake Superior beating against the rocks half a mile away. In springtime there was always this moaning of the big lake at Five Fingers, even on still nights when there was no wind.

And tonight it was so quiet Peter could hear his own heart beating. At times it hurt him. It rose up in him somewhere and choked him. Once or twice, if Simon had been awake, he could have heard the boy sobbing.

But Peter was beyond that now. His pale, thin face looking at the moon over the tree-tops had grown tense and set in its understanding and grief. Out under that moon his father was being hunted. Men were after him—men who would kill him or hang him if they caught him. He was no longer puzzled. His father was gone forever, just as his mother was gone, only she was dead.

He gulped hard, and his fingers clutched at the rough wood of the windowsill. He could not remember his mother except as a beautiful dream. She had come to him sometimes that way, and he had felt the soft warmth of her hands and the sweet breath of her kisses in his sleep. In his brain he treasured a picture of her, but it was only a picture, while his father had been very real. Since the first day he could remember, it was his father who had made up his world, his father who had been pal, comrade and mother to him all his life, and who now—out under the light of the wonderful moon—was being hunted by men with guns, just as they had so often hunted the big white rabbits in the swamps.

Again and again as he sat alone at the window his mind went over the events which had passed so swiftly since the day before yesterday, when his father galloped in from the railroad settlement with the officers of the law at his heels, and together they ran into the safety of the woods, leaving the little cabin in the clearing which had been their home. After that had come the longer flight, two days and nights of exhaustion and hunger, and the final parting when they heard the axes of the men at Five Fingers. It was when he came to that point his heart rose up and choked him, and he wanted to cry out in the stillness of the night. If only his father had put greater faith in his strength and years, and had let him go along! He could run, and hide, and live without anything to eat for a long time, and he could sleep on the naked ground, and swim streams, and he wasn't afraid. But his father had sent him on alone to this strange settlement of Five Fingers, where he had met Mona, and Aleck Curry, and Simon McQuarrie....