Complete weird tales of.., p.1261
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1261
“You’ll hang if you do!” bawled the sheriff. “Then tell that nigger Indian to git back! Tell him quick! I see him — I—”
Sebato’s rifle cracked, and the shot was repeated by Hale, wading out on the shoal. Then a forked flame flashed from the wing-darn, there came a crash and crackle of dry twigs, and the Indian pitched heavily over the bank into the swirling river.
The echoes of the shots died out among the trees; for a minute the gurgle of the river ripple alone troubled the stillness. A kingfisher wheeled up stream, the sun flashing on his blue wings; a fish soused in a calm pool below the dam. Presently the changed voice of the sheriff broke the silence: “Jim Skeene, God help you, you’ll swing for this.” Skeene’s pale face appeared above the dam, but nobody shot at him.
“You drove me to it,” said Skeene. He spoke huskily. “I told him to git back, — I warned him to quit sneakin’ up on me.”
“Come down off’n that wing-dam,” commanded Hale.
“Not for you, Josh Hale,” replied Skeene, “nor not for any man o’ ye! An’ I won’t be took neither. I’m goin’ away to live quiet if they let me.”
He crouched and watched them as they pushed their canoes out into the main channel. The sheriff and Hale advanced to the pool where Sebato lay.
A slender fillet of blood, a mere thread hung in the water just below the surface, and stretched out, following the current, floating like a red string.
“Bring them settin’-poles,” said the sheriff soberly, “paddles won’t stand the heft, an’ he’s hefty.” Hale suddenly turned, snarling at the wing-dam; “Jim Skeene, you sneakin’muskrat!—” he said; but Skeene was gone when Hale’s bullet stung the rock above.
II.
They gave Skeene little peace for two months. Week after week a string of canoes passed the swift water under the first and second wing-dams, poled to the point-trail, and, disembarking a file of riflemen, poled on again to the discharge at Red Lake. Week after week the distant flash of a paddle startled the deer at sunrise among the lily-pads. At evening, too, silent canoes stealing through the sedge-grass, roused the great blue herons from their heavenward contemplation and sent the sheldrake scuttling and splashing across shoal water with a noise like a churning twinscrew.
But they did not catch Skeene.
Once they saw him for a moment standing in the stern of his canoe. The canoe lay at the mouth of the Little Misery, that dead stretch of water and dead-fall, winding through the bog to the southward. They gave chase, trailing Skeene’s canoe by the wake bubbles until they ran plump into quick water.
But the Little Misery is a strange stream draining a strange land, and there, in that maze of cuts and channels, of “logans” and quick water, of swamp, shoal, sedge, and spectral ranks of dead trees, towering above swale and deadwood, they stood no more chance of flushing Skeene than a caribou has of raising three fawns in a season.
What he did with his canoe nobody might know. Certainly he left the main channel. Did he himself hide in the bog or dead-falls? Where do young sandpipers vanish on a shingle beach? Oh there were sounds in the swamp as the sheriff’s posse steered through the even with silent paddle, — sounds that stir only in lonely places, faint splashes, a sound of a swirl in still water, the breeze in the swale-grass.
And so they hunted Skeene at twilight, at dusk of morning, at high noon, from the Northeast Carry to the Northwest Carry, from the West-Branch to Seboomook, from Portage to Lily Bay, and through a hundred miles of lake and stream, up and down, up and down. But Moose River bore no tales on its placid breast, and the wing-dams towered silent as twin Sphinxes, and the sounds that startled the silence where the Little Misery coils through the strange country, are mysteries even to those who interpret them.
It was in May that the ice went out, in company with Skeene; it was in July that they felt the bite of his bullets below the wing-dam; it was in August that they gave up the chase.
That evening, Skeene stood on a wind-fall in the depths of the Little Misery and watched three canoes file out of the discharge and glide into the swift water of Moose River. The next morning he started a lean-to on the ridge back of the Little Misery, and the sharp crack and thwack of his axe rang out over Red Lake. At sunrise a moose-cow heard it and ploughed hastily shoreward through the lily-pads with an ouf! woof! ouf! as she struck the pebbles on the beach. One by one the great blue herons flapped up from the dead pines, circled, sailed, and turned over to pitch head downwards into the sedge with dull cries.
At noon the echoes of axe-strokes died away and the hut was thatched with balsam, blue side skyward. By three o’clock a spike buck, a yearling, lay across a log on the ridge, and at four o’clock Skeene had satisfied his hunger.
He sat on the shore under the ridge, pensively picking his white teeth with the enjoyment of the abandoned. Across the lake the mountains turned to sapphire and ashes; a pale sky deepened into flame colour; the sun hung a globe of crimson in gilded mist.
One by one the last sunbeams reddened the trunks of the trees to the eastward, the foliage burned, the shore line glimmered. Like changing hues on a bubble, the colours deepened, and played over the placid lake. A single snowy bank of cloud, piled up in the east, glowed where the sun stained its edges. The midges danced above the sedge; the lake-wash rocked the swales, to and fro, to and fro.
A trout broke in shallow water, flapped up and splashed again, and the red sky crimsoned the widening rings, spreading slowly shoreward.
In the days that followed, Skeene learned to talk to himself. When he did this he forgot that he had killed Sebato; after a while he forgot it altogether.
When the August afternoons were ablaze with brazen sunlight and the lake glistened like a sheet of steel, Skeene sprawled on a log in the shade and watched the great blue herons. When they “drove stakes” he mocked them with the same note until they answered “Ke-whack! Ke-whack! Ke-whack!” The red squirrel’s thin treble he imitated; he called the chipmunks with a tsip! tsip! and laughed until his white teeth glistened when a carrion-jay alighted on his knee for a shin-joint half hacked. The great belted-kingfishers knew him, the sheldrake, stringing along the creek at evening, turned their bright eyes to his, the osprey who lived above the ledge, wheeled above him for hours, knowing that he also was a savage thing and hunted when hungry.
He was hungry several times between sunrise and sunset. The swift water of the Little Misery gave him a trout to every set-line; the deeper pools by the sedge gave him pleasure.
On the Little Misery deer swarm at evening, and he had meat for the price of a cartridge.
The white nights of August brought that vague unrest that all forest creatures feel. The deer girdled the roots of the ash-trees and the spike bucks grew bolder; the great blue herons danced their contre-dance, evening after evening, at first solemnly, advancing, retreating in stately quadrilles, lifting their slim shins high in the sedge; but, as the month ended, the contre-dance lost dignity and gained in abandon, until the lone loon out on the lake shook the silence with his demon’s laughter. As the moon waned, the forest world stirred; its attitude was expectant; it waited. The cow-moose began to cast evil oblique glances on her calves, now turned darker; and the little bull moose-calf, frisked until his tiny bell swung like the wattle on a turkey.
An impatience, almost a sadness fell upon Skeene. And with sadness came fear. He covered his lean-to and built a smoke-hole through which blue haze rose in the calm morning air. But, like wild things in winter, he was wary, and the steam-hole of a beaver’s house might be more easily located than the chimney of Skeene’s hut.
When September came a hush fell over the forest; and and water were silent; the trout no longer broke,vater or leaped full length in the after glow; the deer picked a silent path along the shore; the herons stood all day, heads stretched heavenward; the loon’s maniac laughter was stilled. Silent and more silent the woods grew as the new moon, a faint tracery above the hills, rose in the evening sky. At its first quarter the silence deepened, at its half, the stillness was intense. Then one black night the Full Moon of September flashed in the sky, and before the last shore ripple had caught its glitter, a gigantic black shadow waded out into the lake and a roar shook the hills.
The first bull-moose had bellowed, and the rutting season had begun.
Instantly the forest, the lake, the shore, the stream were alive; the meat-birds cried from every cedar; the deer barked from the sedge; a lynx howled and miauled in the second growth. Everywhere plumage and fur were growing glossy and gay. Even Skeene sewed porcupine quills into his boot-moccasins, and sang fragments of a song he had heard in Quebec.
III.
Now there is a season for all things; in the fall the black moose grows blacker and sleeker; in the fall the red buck rubs the tattered velvet from every prong; in the spring the mewing cat-bird whistles dreamily as a spotted thrush; in the spring the snowbird changes its feathers, chameleon like, as the snow drifts or melts; and the dry chirring of the red squirrel grows sweeter.
“Each after its kind,” says the quaint Book, and so the spruce-grouse drums in the long summer days, and the crested wood-duck ruffles its rainbow plumes, and the painted trout hang over the gravel beds in September, and the antlered moose barks at the September moon.
As for Skeene, he sewed porcupine quills in a semicircle over the instep of his moccasins, laced a string of scarlet trout-flies across his slouch hat, and listened to the bull-moose, bellowing out on the moonlit ridge.
At times he sang his Quebec song, at times he sighed. Twice he spared a yearling buck, — he could not tell why. He caught a big red sable, bigger than the coon-cat at the Carry House. It scratched and bit him, but he was very good to it. A lazy beaver, driven from the colony by his industrious relatives, bored a hole in the bank under Skeene’s shanty. Beaver-tail and hindquarters are good, cold boiled, but Skeene let him live in peace and even piled enough poplar saplings at his door to last any lazy beaver a year. And all this time he was sorry he killed Sebato at the wing-dam; he wished he had shot him a year before in the bog-country, — it was a good chance and nobody would have been the wiser.
When the September moon waxed full and the water lapped softly along the lake ledge, Skeene’s heart grew full, and the blood in his neck and cheeks ebbed and surged like moon-tides. So, on the second night, he took his rifle and dragged the canoe to the beach. But his heart failed him and he feared the Carry House, and he went back to his camp and rolled and grunted through a sleepless night. On the third evening he started on foot, but he hesitated when the lamp in the Carry House broke out, a red beam in the night. He stood, wretched, wistful, undecided, fingering his rifle butt, and his heart beat to suffocation. Something near him stirred and moaned among the rocks, — a miserable gluttonous fisher-cat, its head bristling with porcupine quills. And Skeene, sick with self-compassion, trailed the wounded creature to the water’s edge and killed it, — pitying it as he pitied himself. Then, worn out with the fever in his veins, he slept openly where he lay, wondering if he should wake on Red Lake shore or on the shores of a redder lake.
On the fourth night of the full of the moon, he went swiftly across the ridge, unarmed, and the miles of woodland and shore sped away like mist, so eagerly he ran. On that night he heard the moose-cows calling the barking bull, and the whoof! of the dun doe in the sedge. Far on the shore the red beam of the Carry lamp signalled him and his blood flamed the answer in his face. And, as he strode up to the house, he saw a woman on the shore looking out into the night across the spectral lake. It was Lois, servant at South Carry. He had danced with her two years ago at Foxcroft Landing, he had sent her six otter pelts a month before he shot Sebato.
She was the girl he had come for.
Is it possible she expected him? The restlessness of September had drawn her to the lake and something had led him to her.
The moon, a silver lamp, traced a shining trail across the shadowy waters; his canoe grated softly on the shoal, a string of bubbles followed the paddle sweep, the foam whispered secrets to the clustered sedge-grass.
* * * * * *
And so, together, they glided away on a trail of silver water to the strange country, drained by strange streams, stirred by strange winds. The red spark of the Carry lamp died out in the night, the little grey stars twinkled over the dead waters, pale sparks from phantom nuptial torches flaring in the north.
At dawn the sky crimsoned the Little Misery. They slept. At sunrise a moose roared a salute to the coming day.
They awoke and kissed each other.
IV.
When the public-spirited citizens of Foxcroft offered $500 reward for the capture of Skeene, Placide L’Hommedieu scratched his greasy chin, licked his lips, and went out to buy cartridges. Placide had trapped in the Province and thought he could trap as well in Maine.
“Monsieur L’Hommedieu what will you do with $500?” asked the Mayor of Foxcroft.
“Le Hommydoo won’t need it,” observed a grizzled portage guide who had once shot a match with Skeene. And he was right for they found L’Hommedieu a week later peacefully floating down Moose River in his canoe, with a bullet in his brain.
When Skeene paddled away with Lois, there was trouble in Foxcroft. Hale left sluice, drain, and chain, and wired the Sheriff at the Landing to meet him at Moosehead Inn. The Mayor went also, and next morning the reward was doubled for “James Skeene, Murderer, dead or alive.”
Hale had never forgiven the blow at the cut-off, but a busy man would scarcely have left his sluice to hunt another man to death for that alone. No, Hale had other reasons, and they concerned neither Billy Sebato nor Placide L’Hommedieu. They concerned Lois, servant at South Carry; for when she left with Jim Skeene she took Hale’s betrothal ring with her.
After Skeene had set Placide L’Hommedieu afloat, with mud on his face and a bullet in his skull, he shoved the canoe into swift water at Moose River, broke both paddles, splintered the setting-pole, and solemnly watched the canoe out of sight.
Lois, waiting for him when he poled into the Little Misery, looked at his knife in the scolloped leather sheath, then at his rifle, and finally into his sombre eyes.
“I heard, — only one shot. Was it a deer?”
He nodded muttering that he had missed; but that night she caressed him, taking his curly head into her arms, and wept over him till daybreak crimsoned the world.
After that they were almost gay. He notched logs and built a hut and rammed moss into the cracks. Lois brought clay from the sweet water, and cut balsam until her little hands were stained to the palm. Twice he passed the three carrys to the C. P. R. and hung to a freight as far as Sainte Croix. They knew nothing and cared less in the Dominion, and he bought salt and pork and flour and cartridges with the proceeds of Hale’s ring. The third trip he walked on the C. P. fearing the train, and he got his price for ten pelts, including musk-rat.
They knew that happiness that is bred in haunting fear, that fierce, that intense love whose roots are imbedded in terror. Lois had been to school and these were the things she knew; — that two and two make four, that Moose calves are born in May, that bark peels best in June, that Moose-calves are weaned in September. She knew also how to use Skeene’s knife, and when he found beaver above swift water and told her so in the evening, she cut saplings and whittled trip-sticks and notched chokers while he hewed out the bed-pieces for the traps, and sharpened enough young ash to build the fences for winter traps. Mink traps, too, were no mystery to Lois, and they talked long and wisely concerning standards and cubbies and spindles while the embers died under the simmering tins and the deer whistled on the windy ridge.
Snow came, a phantom flurry through the pale sunshine, and Skeene lugged more deer hides into his hut. A hot week followed, sending the trout to the bottom-sands and the deer to the shallows; then came the ice; at first a brittle, glittering skin, encasing stem and reed, and wrinkling hidden stagnant pools. The wind in the grasses grew harsher, the reeds rattled at evening; vast flocks of little birds circled high in the sky for the winds of the South called them, and the geese were drifting overhead.
One day the snow came again, and at evening it had not ceased falling. A week later the lake froze and Skeene dragged his canoe into the hut and daubed it with white-lead, while Lois crept close to his side and strung snowshoes. At times she sang. He listened, lying beside the canoe. When she had sung the same song until evening he taught her the song he had learned in Quebec;
“Mossieu Meenoose
Mossieu Meenoose
Mon dieu que tu as
Un villain chat la.”
And she sang it and sewed scarlet braid across her moccasins.
During these weeks Hale was busy in Foxcroft. When the smaller lakes froze he leered sideways at the Sheriff and ordered a dozen pairs of snowshoes. Once or twice he went back to his sluice and cursed, but the River Drivers regarded him with evil eyes, and the sluicers drove their props sullenly until he went away leaving a string of oaths in his wake. There were men of the stamp he wanted on the Province side of the C. P. R.; there was Achille Verdier, one-eyed and idle; there was greasy little Armand Fleury, dirtier for his fox-skin cap, dingier for the red braid on the tail. There also resided Wyombo, pigeon-toed, furtive, aboriginal. Much could be done with these gentlemen and $1000.
The value of Hale’s ring was $150, therefore the people of Foxcroft gossiped.
Snow fell on the frozen lake; the Little Misery was mantled, the carrys choked. All day long the meat-birds whined in the fir-trees and at night the sleet pelted the frozen snow. The deer yarded on the ridge, the moose on the slope above; the black bear buried his feeble nose in his stomach and dreamed, and the otters frisked over their slide. As for Lois, she was learning things; she learned that the fur on the belly of a young panther is wavy, she learned that men are brutes, and that Skeene was all the world to her; she learned that she also had her value, for she saw him swim the swift water of the Little Misery when she screamed affrighted by an impudent lynx. She learned that he sometimes preferred solitude to company, that he sometimes preferred sleep to caresses. She learned that he went hungry that she might eat, that he shivered while she slept under skin and blanket.
