CHAPTER I.
THE LAND OF ROMANCE.
IF it were not for Peggy I should not write this story at all. Peggy is my niece, and I am very fond of her and she knows it. So when she got the idea in her glossy young head we both knew very well what would happen, although I objected that there was no woman in the story except that other Peggy who, being my sister, did not count, and the klootchman Lucille, who was most certainly not a heroine. But Peggy overrode me grandly by saying she was tired of wilderness heroines who crop up where no white man would think of taking a woman. There was something in that. But I protested further that though I had told the yarn often enough it was quite a different matter to write it.
"Bosh!" said Peggy. "Write it just the way you tell it."
So I was up against the iron there, too. I do not know just how to make a proper literary start; but, as with most other work, perhaps the main thing is to get started somehow.
My name is Robert Cory. I do not remember my mother. My father, who taught history in a college which is not necessary to name, died when I was a little shaver, and when his friends came to dig into his affairs they found that he had very little money and no insurance and only one relative on earth so far as they could ascertain, a brother who lived in the wilderness that fringed the Carcajou. And so my sister Peggy and I, two forlorn little waifs, were packed off to him, and no doubt everybody was glad to be rid of us.
Now our Uncle Fred, though college bred like my father, had been a rolling stone. But finally he had taken up land on the Carcajou, in the belief that it would some day be valuable, and, of course, as everybody knows now, he was right. But at that time he was land poor. He had several thousand acres of farm and timber lands on which he was hard pressed to make even the small payments required by the government, but often he had not enough money to buy flour.
He worked a scant thirty acres with the help of one man, a slow-moving, lanky, one-eyed Scandinavian named Gus Swanson. This gave him subsistence. And for more he waited till the march of settlement west and north should strike him; and the slow years never shook his faith, which has since been amply justified.
Peggy was his favorite, and from the first she could twist him around her finger, just as the other Peggy now twists me, and to me he was more like an elder brother than an uncle.
And so, you see, as a boy my life was bounded by the Carcajou. I had only faint recollections of anything different. Its waters and bordering forests made up my world, with which I was very, well content. In summer, when old enough, I helped in the garden and fields, and fished and gathered wild berries in season for Peggy to do down against the winter. And in winter I fished through the ice, and set my small line of snares and traps for rabbit and muskrat and mink and fox; and even for the great, silver-gray, soft-footed, tuft-eared lynx.
And yet it must not be supposed that Peggy and I grew up like young savages. We had our schoolbooks and our regular hours for study, and our uncle taught us, having been no doubt at much pains to brush up his rudiments.
Close neighbors, in those early days, were few. Here and there a hopeful pioneer had settled and built himself a habitation, but in the main the land lay as in the beginning. We had our supplies from Neepaw, a struggling border outpost three days up the Carcajou by canoe, and twice that by a bad pack-trail. And a hundred miles to the north was Carcajou House, a post of the fur company, to me in the Land of Romance.
Of Indians we saw plenty, Crees and Ojibways and Chippewyans mostly, who used the river by canoe in summer and by dog and snowshoe in winter. They were dirty, but friendly, and most of them were honest; at any rate, they never stole from us.
After a while, as settlement spread upward from the south, there were more people passing on the river. Winter and summer they drifted up and down—hard, gaunt men for the most part, with seldom a woman or child—prospectors, trappers, lumberjacks, surveyors—the light foam of humanity that ever tips and heralds the advancing wave of settlement in the new lands.
Many of them, seeing a house and clearing where nothing but brush and beaver meadow should have been—and hearing the brave challenge of a rooster and the busy cackle of hens—halted and broke their journey upon us. Always they were ravenous for eggs, which Peggy sold at wonderful prices. In the main they were quiet and civil, and in the presence of Peggy, when she was almost a woman, abashed and tongue-tied, a thing which is so of most men whose companionship is principally masculine. To that rule, however, one day there was a notable exception.
On this day my uncle and Gus were absent. About noon two men landed from a canoe and came up to the house, and though they were hard-looking customers, I asked them to eat with us, following my uncle's custom. One of them, the younger of the two, was a big, black-haired fellow, not bad looking in a rakish sort of way, and as Peggy passed close beside him setting the table he threw his arm around her, drew her to him, and kissed her.
She struck him in the face, and as I jumped for my rifle, which stood in the corner, the other man caught me by the collar. I do not know what would have happened, except that if I had got my gun I would certainly have shot the fellow who had kissed Peg. But at the moment when I was kicking my man's shins, and, I am afraid, calling him names which I had no business to know, and while Peg was thrusting the other fellow back and striking at him with all her strength, there came an unexpected interruption.
"What's up here?" said a voice from the door.
At that Peg's assailant let her go very suddenly, and I twisted loose from the grip that held me. Two strangers stood in the doorway. One was a short, small, oldish man with a short, gray beard and very blue, childlike eyes. The other was a man of about thirty, I should think, with a lean, hard face and red hair. His eyes, too, were blue, but there was nothing childlike in their expression. They put me in mind of fresh-cut ice, and his red brows were drawn down over them and his chin thrust out.
"He kissed Peg!" I cried.
"So that's it," said the red-haired man. "Nootka Charlie and Siwash George! Squaw men! Pah!" He made a face of disgust. "That stuff may go with the klootchmen, Nootka, but not with white girls—not while I'm around. Don't make no move for a gun now. What'll we do with 'm, Ike?"
"Well," said he of the childlike eyes, "you know I've allus said it'd come to a show-down one of these days."
"Let her come, then," said the black-haired man. "I dunno what you're talkin' about. Me and George never lifted that winter cache of yours, if that's what's stickin' in your crop."
"Never mind about the cache, Nootka," the red-haired man returned. "We can settle that—and some other things—later. But just now I'm goin' to give you a father of a lickin'—or you'll give me one. Come outside!"
They fought down by the landing, and in the end Nootka Charlie took a bad trimming. His partner helped him into their canoe, and paddled off, while the red-haired man grinned after them from the bank. He himself was badly battered, but very cheerful. He washed himself in the river, and afterward came up to the house and eat the meal Peggy had prepared. His name, he told us, was Dinny Pack, and his partner's was Ike Toft. Peg made a fuss over his bruises, and I think that stampeded him, for as soon as the meal was over he said they must be going, and hurried away from her thanks.
Shortly after this episode, which I lived over and over, having conceived a vast admiration for red-haired Dinny Pack, we had two new neighbors who built a cabin on the river some four miles away. These were partners, named Tom Ballou and Louis Beef. Of course the latter's name was really "Lebœuf," but nobody called him that. He was a tremendously thickset man, but not fat. His chest arched out like the belly of a wind-hardened sail, and it was covered with a veritable undergrowth of black hair, plainly visible, for he wore his shirt open save in the coldest weather. He had a big head covered with curling black hair like the front of a bull, and big, fierce, terrifying, black eyes. He must have been nearly fifty years old, but in spite of that and his fierce eyes he was as playful and mischievous as a bear cub. Also he was very strong and active.
Tom Ballou was some years older than Louis. Beef—a tall man with a great, hooky nose and a gray beard which reached nearly to his waist. He reminded me of the pictures of the old prophets in our big Bible; only he chewed tobacco, which rather spoiled the likeness.
The land they took up was very good, but they made scarcely any attempt to cultivate it, and were often absent for months at a time, prospecting or trapping, or guiding some outfit. We got to be very good friends. Sometimes I stayed at their shack overnight, listening to Louis Beef spin yarns in his queer patois—tales of the great wastes of the Arctic Sea, of the barrens where the musk ox ranged, of mountain ranges and unknown streams where the gold lay thick in the sands, and of the hard men who invaded these fastnesses.
One fall there came to Ballou and Louis an Eastern sportsman named Fothergill, who brought with him a vast outfit of weapons and complicated and burdensome camping devices. He was a tall, stout, red-faced man with prominent blue eyes and a loud voice. Of all things he desired to be considered—as he considered himself—a great hunter and an expert woodsman, and Tom and Louis indulged him in this belief.
"But dat Foddergeel," said Louis to me, "he's more troub' in de woods dan leetle baby. For why? For because baby can't walk, an' so you jus' pack heem on your back an' you know where he be. But dat Foddergeel, he's turn round once an' he's lost!"
But Mr. Fothergill came for two seasons, and enjoyed himself hugely, never suspecting that he was considered a joke. He had plenty of money, and paid them liberally. And I thought him very generous, for, having a rifle of the same caliber as mine, he gave me his entire stock of ammunition for it, a most precious gift to a boy accustomed to pay for his cartridges with skins of small value.
Such, then, were our early friends and surroundings, which you may perhaps think very commonplace and circumscribed; and you may think I have dwelt upon them unduly. But if I have done so, it is because if I am to tell this story at all clearly I must throw off the burden of the intervening years and see men and things as I saw them then; so that, perhaps, I may make others see them clearly, too.