CHAPTER VIII.
AHTIKAMAG.
"We'd better take Ballou into our confidence now," said Mr. Fothergill, when we were as nearly as we could tell within a couple of days' journey of the Burntwood Lakes. "We'll have to do it, anyway, to find this Ahtikamag Lake, and we may as well do it now."
"Yes, I suppose so," Dunleath admitted. "Ask him to come down here for a minute, Bob,"
So I went and got Ballou from an early camp we had made, and brought him to them where they sat on the river bank. Mr. Fothergill explained at length what we were after, and Ballou listened in silence, smoking thoughtfully.
"Well," he said, when Mr. Fothergill had finished, "I may as well tell you straight I'd have liked it better if you had told me this at the start."
"That's what I told you, Jim," said Fothergill.
"So you did," Dunleath admitted. "It wasn't that I didn't trust you, Ballou, but I simply wasn't going to take any chances. I'd do the same thing again, and I'm not going to apologize for it. The fewer men who know a secret the safer it is."
"Yes, that's so," said Ballou. "That's right enough. Of course, if the company got to know of these furs, they'd be right after 'em. I s'pose you're going to keep 'em?"
"We're going to get them first," Dunleath replied. "If the company wants them it can pay a good fat salvage."
"The company," said Ballou, "never paid for anything it could take. I'd like to see that letter you are going on."
Dunleath handed it to him, and he read slowly, his lips moving soundlessly with the words.
"No use talking," he said, with a sort of admiration, "Nitche was cunnin' as an old dog fox. There wasn't another man in the outfit with the brains to do what he done. It took some nerve, too. He fooled 'em all. But he died like a sick wolf. Well, serve him right. He tried to double cross his own tillikums."
"He thought they tried to double cross him."
"Well, it don't matter much now. He's dead, and likely most of them are, too." He shook his head thoughtfully. "So it was Nitche you meant when you asked me if I knew any McNabs?"
"Yes, it's strange you never heard of him."
"Oh, I'd heard of him all right, but it never struck me at the time. It's years since I'd heard of him, and then I never knew him to be called anything but 'Nitche.' When you said his name was Angus I guess that put me off. Same way with the others, I guess."
"Then what McClintock says is apt to be correct, I suppose?"
"More'n apt to be. He'd know. Did he say who was with Nitche on this raid—give the names of any of his gang?"
"No. He said there were a dozen or more. I guess they were a hard lot."
"A man needed to be hard to travel with Nitche. McClintock didn't tell you who the two men was that was caught, nor what happened to 'em?"
"No. I understood that they were forced to tell what they knew. McClintock mentioned no names, and I don't think I asked for them."
"A fire and a hot iron," said Ballou, "will make most men talk."
"Oh, nonsense!" said Mr. Fothergill. "There wouldn't be anything like that, Tom."
"You can bet," said Ballou, "that when they started in to make them boys confidential they weren't too polite about it."
"Well," said Mr. Fothergill, "I suppose there won't be any trouble in finding this cache, Tom. The directions seem explicit enough."
"A lot of things can happen in twenty years," Ballou replied, shaking his head. "Trees blow down and others grow up. Twenty years will green a burned country till you won't know it. And a fire will fix a timber country till you won't know that. Rocks move with slides. You can't tell."
"But you can find this Lake Ahtikamag, can't you?"
Ballou reflected for a moment. "Yes," he replied, "I know that when I come to it."
"Then that's the main thing," said Mr. Fothergill optimistically. "We'll find this cache without any trouble. We'll go home loaded with furs."
"Natural products of the country," Ballou commented dryly, by which it was evident that Mr. Fothergill's descriptive phrase had stuck in his memory.
"Huh—what's that?" said the latter, somewhat embarrassed. "Well, they are, you know, Tom. That was the exact truth."
"So it was," Ballou admitted. "I'm not kickin'."
After supper, as usual, the men lay around the fire, their pipes going. Fothergill and Dunleath sat apart, talking in low tones. Old Hayes was spinning one of his interminable yarns. But Tom Ballou sat by himself, his elbows on his knees, both hands cupped around the bowl of his pipe, and had nothing to say to any one.
I helped Louis clean up, and afterward I strolled away with him to the river bank, where he sat down and filled his pipe and opened the last button of his shirt, exposing his great, hairy chest to the cool of the night air drafting along the river.
"Sacré!" said Louis feelingly. "Dat cookin' she's no job for man. I roas' myself for mak' dat pork an' bean an' bannock. An' dat bonch she's eat heem up lak wolf, an' nevaire tell me no t'anks!"
"Somebody has to cook," I said, with little sympathy, I am afraid, and Louis snorted.
"Yas! Well, mebbe if some of dose feller try it heemself he don't find heem some snap, I bet my life. Batême! I don' know for why I evair learn to cook, me."
But I paid no attention to his grumbling, for just then my eye was caught by some curious old wounds in the bark of a poplar. They looked like initials cut in the bark of a young tree and overgrown.
"What are these, Louis?" I asked.
"Mebbe bear claw heem," Louis suggested after casual inspection.
"No, they aren't claw marks. It looks to me as if somebody had cut his name there a long time ago."
"Hey?" Louis ejaculated. "Cut hees name." He rose and looked at the old marks. "Well, by dam!" he exclaimed, and scratched his curls, looking around in a puzzled sort of way as if he were trying to remember something.
"I can't make it out, can you?"
"Non!" Louis replied. "Pas du toute. I guess she don' mean not'ing, dat."
"It's a name or initials," I stated positively. "I wonder who cut it there. I wonder if it was Nitche McNab."
I mentioned the name thoughtlessly, but Louis fairly jumped.
"Nitche McNab!" he cried. "What you know 'bout heem, hey?"
"Just what I've heard. He used to be up this way, didn't he?"
"How I know?" growled Louis. "He's bad man, dat, an' dead since long tam"
"But I thought you didn't know him. When we asked you if you knew him— you and Tom and Hayes—you had never heard of him."
"You ain't hax 'bout Nitche McNab when I'm dere."
Neither we had. Like Ballou, he had not identified Nitche by his given name. He asked me numerous questions, and, since Ballou had been told our object, and as everybody would know in a couple of days or so, I saw no reason why I should not enlighten Louis.
"Ba gosh!" he cried. "Is dat for why we come here?"
"Yes. But don't tell any one just yet. Tom knows."
"By gar," he cried fiercely, "he's lie to me!"
"He didn't know till an hour ago."
"You know where dat cache is at?"
"I know where it is said to be. I can't tell you just now. I guess maybe I shouldn't have said anything to you until we got there."
"Dat's all right, mon vieux," he replied. "I don' say not'ing, me."
As it turned out we were nearer the chain of the Burntwood Lakes than we had thought, for the next afternoon we opened the first of them. It lay beneath the slope of the afternoon sun, a watery gem, dotted here and there with small, rocky islands and shored with fir and spruce and cottonwood. As we went on, the islands became more numerous and the shores deeply indented with bays and receding channels, so that at times it was hard to tell just which way the lake itself trended.
We were glad of still water, after the current we had fought for so long. And we made camp that night in a sheltered bay inhabited by a brood of half-grown fish ducks which flapped away in fright. Here we came upon the spot of an old camp fire, but the rain had washed the ashes over the charred sticks. Mr. Fothergill was positive that it had been an Indian camp, and nobody disputed him.
"What's the name of this lake, Tom?" he asked.
"The Injuns call it 'Saguhegun menesansun.' Good name, ain't it?"
"Very appropriate," Mr. Fothergill agreed.
"What does it mean?" Dunleath asked. And Mr. Fothergill hesitated and stuttered:
"It means—er—well, it's a little hard to put it in English. But a free translation—a very free one—would be—let me see"
"It means 'Lake of many little islands,’" I said to help him out, and I could see a laugh in Jim Dunleath's eyes.
"Yes, I suppose that would be a fairly correct translation," said Mr. Fothergill. "It doesn't convey the precise idea, but it will serve." And he asked Ballou about Ahtikamag, which, in the Ojibway tongue, means "white fish."
"It's the last one," Ballou replied. "They lie sorter north and south. We go through this and two more, and then we come to Ahtikamag."
"Ba gosh," Louis Beef put in, "I t'ink dat Whitefish Lac, she's"
"We come to Ahtikamag like I said," Ballou repeated. "It's the last lake, and then there's river again. We can't go wrong."
Louis opened his mouth and shut it again without saying anything. Old Hayes cut off a chew of tobacco and licked his knife blade as a dog cleans a plate.
"Ahtikamag!" he said. "We keep straight ahead for it, Tom, hey?"
"Sure," said Ballou. "Unless you think you know better."
"Me?" said Hayes. "No, of course not. This country's plumb strange to me. Funny thing, too, ain't it? I been around quite a lot, but I ain't never seen these lakes. If you asked me to take you to this Whitefish Lake I'd be as apt as not to git balled up and take you another way that'd be dead wrong."
"Well, I'm not askin' you," Ballou told him shortly.
He seemed put out about something, for I had never heard him use that tone to Hayes before. However, later the two of them and Louis went down to the beach and smoked together most amicably.
Mr. Fothergill and Dunleath spread their blankets beneath a big spruce and turned in. So did Ballou. I did the same, nearer the fire, and I lay there comfortably, listening to old Hayes talking to the younger men, grumbling at creation in general, as is the custom of many old men, who, whether by their own fault or not, have not had what they consider their deserts.
Then he began a long-winded yarn about some placer, and in the middle of it I dropped to sleep under my bush.
In the morning we encountered a heavy wind, which tore the lake into choppy waves. It was too stiff to paddle against, and so we put ashore to wait till it dropped. But it blew that day and all night and most of the next day, so that we could do nothing.
Lake Ahtikamag, when we opened it, was the largest we had seen, being about twenty miles in length by about three in breadth. It had several islands, and one of these was of a most peculiar formation, having high walls of rock, so that a landing could be made only in one place, and in the middle of the island there was a huge sink hole, like the mouth of a giant well, the sides dropping straight down. This hole Dunleath and I discovered later, and we sounded it with a line, but could get no bottom; nor did there appear to be any water in it, though we let our line down far below the lake level.
We ran down the lake rapidly about sunset, with a rising stern wind and a following sea which made the canoes leap and surge and yaw, and finally Ballou's canoe, which was in the lead, turned into a bay into which a good-sized creek emptied.
"Here we are," he said as we beached beside him. "I guess this is your creek."
"The letter says the creek is near the upper end of the lake," said Dunleath. "This is only about halfway."
"This is the only creek," Ballou replied, "so far as I know, but it's easy enough to find out. Anyway, this is a good place to camp, and in the morning we can see."
After supper Mr. Fothergill took the men into his confidence, a thing he had been aching to do for weeks, telling them that we had come to find a lost fur cache and that we were now on the very ground. It did not create any sensation. Conover asked if it was Nitche McNab's old cache, and Mr. Fothergill admitted it, at which I saw Dunleath frown, though I could not see what difference it made, since Ballou knew and I had admitted it to Louis. No doubt, all knew about it. Mr. Fothergill went on to say that if we found what we had been led to expect he would double every man's wages. He waited for applause, but got none. They took the announcement impassively. For a moment I thought I saw the ghost of a sardonic grin flicker around old Hayes' mouth. But I must have been mistaken, for he backed up Ballou when the latter expressed his thanks.
That night for a long time I was too excited to sleep. Dunleath, too, was restless, and finally he rose on his elbow, filled his pipe, and lit it. By the light of the match he saw my eyes.
"I thought you were asleep," he said.
"No, I keep thinking of the cache."
"So do I. It means a lot to me."
"We'll find it," I prophesied. "This must be the right place unless there's another creek, and that's easy to find out."
"Yes, that's so. Of course it's a gamble—the worth of whatever we do find." We talked in whispers, though there was little danger of waking Mr. Fothergill, who was snoring. "Listen to him!" Dunleath went on. "That's what it is to have money. An assured income beats an easy conscience as a soporific. Money may bring some cares, but it gets rid of a lot of others. There are times in a man's life when it is nearly indispensable as a means to an end. Good night, old boy!"
But I lay awake long after he had tapped out his pipe and gone to sleep. My boyish imagination was busy. I could see the great, swarthy Nitche McNab and his henchman, Joe Barbe, stooping beneath the bales of furs, trotting in feverish haste inland from their canoe, laboring like demons lest they should be interrupted at their task. And when I slept I dreamed that I was working with them, caching the priceless spoil of the northern tip of a continent, while the animals which had worn it as their garments ran nakedly beside us, ghastly and ghostly carrion, mocking our efforts with mews and growls.