CHAPTER XIX.
Day by day the ebb tide brought in the canoes of returning Crees. Gradually tepees filled the post clearing. And with the coming of the hunters from the three winds was heard many a tale of famine in far valleys, of families blotted out.
Tragedy there had been, as in every winter of famine; but however sinister were the secrets which many a mute valley held locked in its green forests, no rumors of such except the tale of the murders on the Ghost had reached Whale River. Pitiless desertion of the aged and the helpless, death by violence, doubtless the starving moon had shone upon; but none had lived to tell the tale except those who had profited with their lives, and their lips were forever sealed. And so, as Marcel had foreseen, to the gathering families of Crees who themselves had but lately escaped the maw of the winter, the tale of the Lelacs, expanding as it traveled, found ready acceptance.
As yet Jean, chafing under the odium of his position at the post, had not faced his accusers. The plan of his defense which had been decided on after a conference with Gillies and Père Breton, depended for its success on the trading of their fur by the Lelacs, and the uncle and cousins of Joe Piquet for some reason had traded no fur.
Many of those who, the spring previous, had lauded Jean’s daring in entering the land of the Windigo and voyaging to the coast by the Big Salmon, now exchanged significant glances at his appearance, avoiding the steady eyes of the man they had condemned without a hearing. Shawled women and girls, who formerly, at the trade, had cast approving glances at the wide shouldered youth with the clean-cut features, whispered pointedly as he passed and children often shrank from him in terror, as from one defiled. But Marcel had been prepared for the effect of the tale of the Lelacs upon the mercurial red men.
Since his return he had not once met the Lelacs face to face. Always they had hastily avoided him when he appeared on the way to his canoe or the trade house. Jean had been strictly ordered by Gillies under no circumstances to seek trouble with his accusers or their friends, so he ignored them. Their disinclination to encounter the son of the famous André Marcel, however, had not gone unmarked by the keen eyes of more than one old hunter. Many a red man and half-breed, friends of the father who respected the son, had frankly expressed to him their disbelief in the charges of the Lelacs, accepting his story which Gillies had published to the Crees, that Beaulieu had been stabbed by Joe Piquet while Marcel was absent and that Piquet was killed later by the dog. Strongly they had urged him to make the Lelacs eat their lies, promising their support; but Jean had explained that it was necessary to wait.
Occasionally when Marcel crossed the post clearing, pulsing with the varied life of the spring trade, to descend the cliff trail to his canoe, there marched by his side one whose name also was anathema with many of the Crees. That comrade was Fleur. The story of Piquet’s death as told by Jean at the trade house, though scouted by the Lelacs, had nevertheless left a deep impression; and the great dog, now called the “man killer,” who towered above the scrub huskies of the Indians as a mastiff over a poodle, was given a wide berth. But to avoid trouble with the Cree dogs, Jean kept Fleur for the most part in the mission stockade. There Gillies and McCain and Jules had come to admire the bulk and bone of the husky they had last seen as a lumbering puppy. There Crees, still friendly to Jean, lingered to gossip of the winter’s hardships and stare in admiration at the dog. There, too, Julie romped with Fleur, though Fleur had grown somewhat dignified with the gravity of her approaching responsibilities. For to the delight of Jean, Fleur was soon to present him with the dog team of his dreams.
When the umiaks of the Eskimos began to arrive from the coast, packed with tousle-headed children and the priceless sled dogs, Jean, taking Fleur, sought out his old friend Kovik of the Big Salmon. As he approached the skin lodge on the beach, beside which the kin of Fleur were made fast to prevent promiscuous fighting with strange dogs, she answered their surly greeting with so stiff a mane, so fierce a show of fangs, that Jean pulled her away by her rawhide leash, lest her reputation suffer further by adding fratricide to her crimes.
Playmates of her puppyhood, the mother who suckled her, she had forgotten utterly; vanished was all memory of her kin. She held but one allegiance, one love; the love approaching idolatry, which she bore the young master who had taken her in that far country from the strange men who beat her with clubs; who had brought her north again through wintry seas; who had companioned her through the long snows, and in the dread days of the famine had shared With her his last meat. The center and sum of her existence was Jean Marcel. All other living things were as nothing.
“Kekway!” cried the squat pair of Eskimos, delighted at the appearance of the man who had given them back their first born. “Kekway!” chuckled a half dozen round-faced children, shaking Jean’s' hand in turn.
“Huh!” grunted the father, his eyes wide with wonder at the sight of Fleur, ears flat, muttering dire threats at her yelping brethren straining at their stakes. “Dat good dog!”
“Yes, she good dog,” agreed Jean. “Soon I have dog team lak’ Husky!”
Shifting a critical eye from Fleur to his own dogs, Kovik nodded.
“Ha! Ha! You ketch boy in water. You get bes’ dog.”
The Eskimo, had not erred in his judgment of puppies. He had indeed given the man who had cheated the Big Salmon of his son, the best of the litter. At sixteen months, Fleur stood inches higher at the shoulder and weighed twenty pounds more than her brothers. Truly, with the speed and stamina of their sire, the timber wolf, coupled with Fleur’s courage and power, these puppies whose advent Jean awaited should make a dog team unrivaled on the east coast.
“Cree up dere,” continued Kovik, pointing toward the post clearing, “say de dog keel man.”
Marcel nodded gravely. “Man try keel me, she keel heem.”
“Huh! De ol’ dog keel bad Husky, on Kogaluk one tam.”
Fleur indeed had come from a fighting strain—dogs that would battle to the death or toil in the traces until they crumpled on the snow for those they loved or to whom they owed allegiance.
Marcel, not long after this, was walking on the high river shore above the post with Julie Breton and Fleur. Like a floor below them the surface of the Great Whale moved without ripple in the still June afternoon. Out over the bay the sun hung in a veil of haze. Back at the post even the huskies were quiet, lured into sleep by the softness of the air. It was such a day as Jean Marcel had dreamed of, more than a year before, back in the barrens in January. He was again with Julie on the cliffs, but there was no joy in his heart.
“The Lelacs have traded their fur,” he said, breaking a long silence. “The hearing will take place soon, now.”
“Yes, I know, you were with Monsieur Gillies and Henri very late last night,” she replied.
“We had some work to do. The Lelacs will not like what we have to tell them. We shall prove them liars and thieves; but, Julie, the stain on the name of Jean Marcel will remain. The Crees will not believe my story.”
“Nonsense, Jean,” she burst out. “You must make them believe you!”
“Julie,” he said, ignoring her words, “since my return I have wanted to tell you—that I wish you all happiness” He swallowed hard at the lump in his throat. “I have heard that you leave Whale River soon.”
At the words the girl flushed, but turned a level gaze on the man who looked at the dim, blue shapes of the White Bear Hills far on the southern horizon.
“You have not heard the truth,” she said. “Monsieur Wallace has done me the honor to ask me to marry him, but Monsieur Wallace is still a Protestant.”
The words from Julie’s own lips stung Marcel like the lash of a whip, but his face masked his emotion.
Then she went on:
“I wanted to talk to you last summer, for you are my dear friend, but you were here for so short a while and we had but a word when you left.” Then the girl burst out impulsively: “Ah, Jean; don’t look that way! Won’t you ever forgive me? I am—so sorry, Jean. But—you are a boy. It could never be that way.”
Marcel’s eyes still rested on the silhouetted hills to the south. He made no answer.
“Won’t you forget, Jean, and remain—a friend?”
He turned his deep-set eyes to the girl.
“Yes, I shall always be your friend, Julie,” he said. “But I shall always love you—I can’t help that. And there is nothing to forgive. I hoped—once—that you might—love Jean Marcel. But now it is over. God bless you, Julie!”
As he finished Julie Breton’s eyes were wet. Again Marcel gazed long into the south, but with unseeing eyes.
The girl was the first to break the silence.
“Jean,” she said, returning to the charges of the Lelacs, “you must not brood over what the Crees are saying. If the truth were known, some of them have eaten their own flesh and blood in starvation camps! You are a brave man, Jean Marcel. Show your courage at Whale River as you have shown it elsewhere!”
Marcel shook his head. “They will speak of me now, from Fort George to Mistassini, as the man who killed his partners.”
They had turned and were approaching the post when the practiced eye of Marcel caught the far flash of paddles toward the river mouth. He watched the rhythmic gleams of light from dripping blades leaving the water in unison, which alone marked the approaching canoe on the flat river. Then he said:
“There are four or six paddles. It must be a big company boat from Fort George. I wonder what they come for during the trade?”
As Jean and Julie Breton entered the post clearing the great red flag of the company, carrying the white letters H. B. C., was broken out at the flagpole in honor of the approaching visitors. The canoe, now but a short way below the post, was receiving the undivided attention of Eskimos, Crees, and howling huskies crowding the shore. The boat was not a freighter, for she rode high. No one but an officer of the company traveled light with six paddles. It was an event at Whale River, and Indians and white men awaited the arrival of the big Peterborough canoe with unconcealed interest.
“It must be Inspector Wallace,” said Jean.
With a face radiant with joy in the unexpected arrival of Wallace, Julie Breton hastened to the high shore. Marcel turned slowly back to the mission stockade where his dog awaited him at the gate.
As the canoe neared the beach the swart voyageurs conscious of their Cree and Eskimo audience, put on a brave burst of speed. At each lunge of the narrow Cree blades, swung in unison with a straight arm, the craft buried its nose, pushing out a wide ripple. On they came, spurred by the shouts from the shore, then at the order of the man in the bow the crew raised their paddles and bow and stern men deftly swung the boat in to the Whale River landing amid the cheers of the Indians.
“How are you, Gillies?” said Wallace, stepping from the canoe. And looking past the factor to a woman’s figure on the high shore, he waved his cap.
“Well, well, Mr. Wallace; we hardly expected to see you at Whale River so early,” answered Gillies dryly, smiling at the eagerness of Wallace. “Anything happened to the steamer?”
“Oh, no! The steamer is all right. She’ll be here on time. I thought I’d run up the coast during the trade this year.”
Gillies winked surreptitiously at McCain. It was most unusual for the inspector of the east coast to arrive before the accounts of the spring trade were made up.
“How has the famine affected the fur with you, Gillies?” asked Wallace, as they proceeded up the cliff trail to the post clearing. “The Fort George and East Main people were hit pretty hard—a number of families wiped out.”
“I expected as much,” said Gillies. “A few of our people were starved out or died of disease. It was a tough winter with both the rabbits and the caribou gone. We have done only fairly well with the trade, considering.”
“What’s this I hear about a murder by one of your Frenchmen?” Wallace suddenly demanded. “We met a canoe at the mouth of the river and heard that you have the man here now?”
“That’s pure Indian talk, Mr. Wallace,” Gillies protested. “I’ll give you the details later. A half-breed killed one of his partners and attempted to kill the other, Jean Marcel, the son of André Marcel; André, who was our old head man. And you saw Jean here last summer. He is one of our best men. In fact, I’m going to take him on here at the post, although he’s only a boy. He’s too valuable to keep in the bush.”
“Oh, yes! I remember him; friend of Father Breton. But we’ve got to put a stop to this promiscuous murder, Gillies. There’s too much of this thing on the bay—this killing and desertion in famine years, and no one punished for lack of evidence.”
“But this was no murder, Mr. Wallace,” Gillies answered hotly. “You’ll hear the story to-night from Marcel’s lips if you like. We have some pretty strong evidence against his accusers, also. This is a tale started by the relatives of one of the men to cover their own thieving.”
“Well, Gillies, your man may be innocent, but I want to catch one of these hunters who came in to the posts with tale of starvation as excuse for the disappearance of their partners or family. When the grub goes they desert, or do away with, their people, and get off on their own story. I’d like to get some evidence against one of them. The government has sent pretty stiff orders to Moose for us to investigate these cases, and where we have proof, to send the accused ‘outside’ for trial.”
“When you’ve talked to him, Mr. Wallace, I think you’ll agree that he tells a straight story and that these Lelacs are lying.”
“I hope so,” answered Wallace, and started for the mission where Julie Breton awaited the great man of the east coast.