It was in the doorway of one of the shanties that the lean figure of Peter Loby was lounging. He was only partly dressed. He had been suddenly roused from his blankets, with only sufficient time to haul on a pair of earth-stained, moleskin trousers. His first keen resentment at the breaking of his night’s rest had passed. He had completed the reading of the brief note which had promptly been thrust into his hands; but his manner still remained short enough.
“What in hell made you push this at me now, Sasa?” he protested. “We can’t start down that darn river till daylight, anyway. We need all the light if we’re to get through the muskeg bottom right. What’s keeping McLagan down there? Seems to me it’s dead waste me going down to the coast only to make back again.”
His resentful gaze took in the sturdy figure of the half-breed. But his words were rather an angry expression of his feelings than an invitation to the messenger to attempt explanation. Sasa Mannik, however, took the white man literally.
“I do as boss McLagan say,” he replied, in his halting fashion. “He say, ‘I mak this brief. You give it boss Loby right away; then you bring him right down quick. Early to-morrow.’ We mak him trip right now? Then you speak boss McLagan early to-morrow. The muskeg nothing. Not nothing. I know dis thing sure. You mak fix all thing now? Yes?”
The half-breed’s urgency was something more than his orders suggested. His eyes were wider than their wont. Altogether the man seemed to Peter to be disturbed.
“What is it, Sasa?” Peter’s manner was less irritated. Something he saw in the coloured man’s eyes left him curious. “Has anything happened that your boss hasn’t set in this letter?”
The half-breed looked away behind him in the direction of the faintly outlined hill behind which lay the river where his treasured kyak was securely cached. It was a native mannerism of unease.
“I not know the thing that ‘brief’ say,” he said evasively, after a moment’s thought. “Oh, no. You tell me, then I know. I not read the thing boss McLagan mak. I know all thing I see. I know all thing white man do. Oh, yes. The boss say I bring you down quick. I mak that. It good, too, yes?”
“What d’you mean?”
Peter was studying the dark face intently.