MacVeigh interrupted him.
“No, it’s not,” he said, softly. “She loved him— as much as the girl down there will ever love you, Pelly, and when I tell her what has happened— her heart will break. That can’t bring happiness— for me!”
The hours of that day bore leaden weights for Billy. The two men made their plans. A number of the Eskimos agreed to accompany Pelliter as far as Eskimo Point, whence he would make his way alone to Churchill. Billy would strike south to the Little Beaver in search of Couchée’s cabin and Isobel. He was glad when night came. It was late when he went to the door, opened it, and looked out.
In the edge of the timber-line it was black, black not only with the gloom of night, but with the concentrated darkness of spruce and balsam and a sky so low and thick that one could almost hear the wailing swish of it overhead like the steady sobbing of surf on a seashore. It was black, save for the small circles of light made by the Eskimo fires, about which half a hundred of the little brown men sat or crouched. The masters of the camp were all awake, but twice as many dogs, exhausted and footsore, lay curled in heaps, as inanimate as if dead. There was present a strange silence and a strange and unnatural gloom that was not of the night alone, a silence broken only by the low moaning of the wind out on the Barren, the restlessness in the air above the tree-tops, and the crackling of the fires. The Eskimos were as motionless as so many dead men. Their round, expressionless eyes were wide open. They sat or crouched with their backs to the Barren, their faces turned into the still deeper blackness of the forest. Some distance away, like a star, there gleamed the small and steady light in the cabin window. For two hours the eyes of those about the fires had been fixed on that light. And at intervals there had risen from among the stony-faced watchers the little chief, whose clacking voice joined for a few moments each time the wailing of the wind, the swish of the low-hanging sky, and the crackling of the fires. But there was sound of no other voice or movement. He alone moved and spoke, for to the others the clacking sounds he made was speech, words spoken each time for the man who lay dead in the cabin.
A dozen times Pelliter and MacVeigh had looked out to the fires, and looked each time at the hour. This time Billy said:
“They’re moving, Pelly! They’re jumping to their feet and coming this way!” He looked at his watch again. “They’re mighty good guessers. It’s a quarter after twelve. When a chief or a big man dies they bury him in the first hour of the new day. They’re coming after Deane.”
He opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pelliter joined him. The Eskimos advanced without a sound and stopped in a shadowy group twenty paces from the cabin. Five of these little fur-clad men detached themselves from the others and filed into the cabin, with the chief man at their head. As they bent over Deane they began to chant a low monotone which awakened little Isobel, who sat up and stared sleepily at the strange scene. Billy went to her and gathered her close in his arms. She was sleeping again when he put her down among the blankets. The Eskimos were gone with their burden. He could hear the low chanting of the tribe.
“I found her, and I thought she was mine,” said Pelliter’s low voice at his side. “But she ain’t, Billy. She’s yours.”
MacVeigh broke in on him as though he had not heard.
“You better get to bed, Pelly,” he warned. “That arm needs rest. I’m going out to see where they bury him.”