Croisset reached the post forty-eight hours after he had encountered
Jan.
"The red flag is everywhere!" he cried, catching sight of the signal over Mukee's cabin. "It is to the east and west of the Hasabala as thick as jays in springtime!"
The Cree from the Gray Otter drove in on his way north.
"Six wigwams with dead in them," he reported in his own language to Williams. "A company man, with a one-eyed leader and four trailers, left the Gray Otter to burn them."
Williams took down his birch-bark moose-horn and bellowed a weird signal to Cummins, who opened a crack of his door to listen, with Mélisse close beside him.
"Thoreau is in the thick of it to the south," he called. "There's too much of it for him, and I'm going down with the dogs. Croisset will stay in the store for a few days."
Mélisse heard the words, and her eyes were big with fear when her father turned from closing and bolting the door. In more than a childish way, she knew that Jan had gone forth to face a great danger. The grim laws of the savage world in which she lived had already begun to fix their influence upon her, quickening her instinct and reason, just as they hastened the lives of Indian children into the responsibilities of men and women before they had reached fifteen.
She knew what the red flag over Mukee's cabin meant. She knew that the air of this world of hers had become filled with peril to those who breathed it, and that people were dying out in the forests; that all about them there was a terrible, unseen thing which her father called the plague, and that Jan had gone forth to fight it, to breathe it, and, perhaps, to die in it. Their own door was locked and bolted against it. She dared not even thrust her head from the window which was opened for a short time each day; and until Cummins assured her that there was no danger in the sunshine, she shunned the few pale rays that shot through the cabin-window at midday.
Unconsciously, Cummins added to her fears in more ways than one, and as he answered her questions truthfully, her knowledge increased day by day. She thought more and more of Jan. She watched for him through the two windows of her home. Every sound from outside brought her to them with eager hope; and always, her heart sank with disappointment, and the tears would come very near to her eyes, when she saw nothing but the terrible red flag clinging to the pole over Mukee's cabin.
In the little Bible which her mother had left there was written, on the ragged fly-leaf, a simple prayer. Each night, as she knelt beside her cot and repeated this prayer, she paused at the end, and added: