Our fathers—come!
Come from out of the valley.
Guide us—for to-day we fight,
And the winds whisper of death!
And those who heard did not laugh. Father George crossed himself, and muttered something that might have been a prayer. For in this hour Kaskisoon's God was very near.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Many years before, Thoreau had named his aerie stronghold the Eagle's Nest. The brown-faced people of the trails had changed it to Devil's Nest. It was not built like the posts, on level ground and easy of access. Its northern wall rose sheer up with the wall of Eagle Chasm, with a torrent two hundred feet below that rumbled and roared like distant thunder when the spring floods came. John Adare knew that this chasm worked its purpose. Somewhere in it were the liquor caches which the police never found when they came that way on their occasional patrols. On the east and south sides of the Nest was an open, rough and rocky, filled with jagged outcrops of boulders and patches of bush; behind it the thick forest grew up to the very walls.
The forest people were three quarters of a mile from this open when they came upon the trail of the lone caribou hunter. Where he had stood and looked up at them the snow was beaten down; from that spot his back-trail began first in a cautious, crouching retreat that changed swiftly into the long running steps of a man in haste. Like a dog, Kaskisoon hovered over the warm trail. His eyes glittered, and he held out his hands, palms downward, and looked at Adare.
"The snow still crumbles in the footmarks," he said in Cree. "They are expecting us."
Adare turned to the men behind him.
"You who have brought axes cut logs with which to batter in the doors," he said. "We will not ask them to surrender. We must make them fight, so that we may have an excuse to kill them. Two logs for eight men each. And you others fill your pockets with birch bark and spruce pitch-knots. Let no man touch fire to a log until we have Josephine. Then, burn! And you, Kaskisoon, go ahead and watch what is happening!"
He was calmer now. As the men turned to obey his commands he laid a hand on Philip's shoulder.